تفسیر درس

Best Times - VIP Commentary

Hello this is AJ, welcome to the commentary for this month’s VIP Lesson Set. So, let’s get started. Once again, in the commentaries I just talk about the topic some more. You know a little extra input, maybe a different way of looking at it and also in the commentaries I tend to give you a kind of homework. Don’t worry, this isn’t like school.

It’s not serious homework. It’s just some thought about actions you can take in your own life related to the topic.

You don’t have to. Obviously, I can’t force you to and I don’t want to force you to, but I would like you to think about these topics each month and just try them, try taking some actions. Some months the topic will be very powerful for you and some months it will be less powerful, it just depends on your personality, your life, your goals, all of that. No matter, I would still like you each month to at least try some of these ideas and activities in your life. You might find that oh, wow, something is very helpful for you and if it’s not helpful then you’ve still gotten out of your comfort zone. You’ve pushed yourself a little bit and that’s great.

I do the same thing in my own life. I am not a master of every single topic we discuss each month, but I’ve tried them all. I’ve tried some little activity in these topics related to these topics. So when I’m giving you your kind of assignment or your homework or your action steps, they’re almost always things that I have done myself. In fact, I think always they are that I’ve always at least tried them myself. Sometimes I have mastered them and sometimes I have not done them well at all, but, you know, I still try. It’s a process of learning and growing and pushing yourself to expand a little bit more.

So this month’s topic is kind of interesting, a little bit different topic this month. It was called the best of times and the worst of times, which is sort of the beginning of that novel which I can’t remember the name of at the moment. It doesn’t matter. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. So, apparently, people have felt that way for a long time, this idea that things are horrible and terrible. Oh, the world is horrible and terrible and then at the same time oh, my God, the world is wonderful and incredible.

I think it’s been possible for most of human history to feel that way, because I think simultaneously in our societies, our cultures, we have had really terrible things and really great things happening at the same time. So it’s normal, maybe it’s more accelerated now. ‘Accelerated’ means speeding up, going faster, so it’s almost more intense now. The worst things, the bad things, are in some ways getting worse and worse and worse.

Like our environment, the global environment in the world, the toxins, the poisons, the chemicals, that’s getting worse and worse and worse, worse than it’s ever been, but on the other hand many of our opportunities are also getting better and better and better than they’ve ever been before. And I discuss both of those in the video and we’ll talk more about that today.

So there are two things we can do. We can focus on either of these or we can ignore it all, it’s our choice. If we focus on the worst things, that’s okay because those things need to be solved and improved. So it’s great to, for example, focus on the environment, on ecology and on improving that, but if you only focus on that you will quickly get depressed and overwhelmed.

This has happened to me many times in my own life. In fact, using this exact example, I have worked with some environmental groups, some ecological groups. As I mentioned, I’ve gone out and I’ve tried to raise money for them or help them and on one hand I felt very good about doing that, but on the other hand I found myself getting more and more upset and angry and depressed because the situation is so terrible. If I just focused on that all the time it really didn’t make me very happy and if I wasn’t happy, if I was depressed and angry, then I really wasn’t even helping to improve the situation at all.

You have to have balance, so it’s important to also focus on the great things and I think that takes a little more effort and we need to think about that side of it more. It’s easy to focus on the bad stuff because we hear about the bad stuff all the time. Especially if you watch TV you’re definitely getting it all the time, but even if you’re just online you’re going to read about all these terrible things that are happening in the world and it becomes overwhelming.

It’s less common to hear about all the positive, great, amazing, wonderful things. We have to think about those a little more and we have to kind of dig in and find them a little more. So that’s what I’m going to encourage you to do this month. We’re going to focus on the best part, the great things that are happening in the world now and how that might apply to your own life.

So one of the great things that is happening, yeah, one of the great things that’s happening, see, I have to think about grammar sometimes. One of the great things that’s happening right now in the world is this whole Internet revolution and explosion.

There are maybe some negative parts about it, but there are also some incredible positive things about it. And a few of the positive things, which I have mentioned in the video and I’ll mention again, number one, is this kind of global connectivity.

It is now possible to really truly maintain global friendships, global connections, with people anywhere else in the world. I mean I now have good friends in Thailand, for example. I lived in Thailand for a couple years. Now in the past, if I had lived in Thailand let’s say 50 years ago and then I returned to the United States, well in the past it would have been quite difficult for me to keep those connections. I could have written letters and mailed them, but it would take a very long time for them to arrive in Thailand and they would have gotten lost a lot of the time. It would have been more difficult.

Now with email, for example, I can email my friends in Thailand any time and with Facebook. I have Facebook friends in Thailand and I can put a picture about a recent trip I made or a picture from Hawaii and then my Thailand friends can comment on that and my Japanese students can comment on that and then our VIP members in Europe can comment on that. So I can have all these connections in all these different countries and it’s really fantastic. I really enjoy that. It’s allowed me to expand my social world and my world view.

So I don’t think of myself just as an American anymore, right? I’ve lived in other countries and I have these connections with people in all these other countries, students and friends and family. In fact, my wife is Japanese so I have family now in Japan. So it’s really expanded my life and enriched my life, improved my life and given me a wider view of the world and a deeper understanding of things.

Those are very positive things and they’re much more common and much more available now thanks to the Internet especially. With the Internet you can chat, you can talk to someone in any country for free or at least very cheaply, just for the cost of your normal Internet connection each month. Of course, you can use Skype, which is an Internet phone service which is free. I think Google has got one, Apple has one. There are lots of different phone chat programs that are free for Internet and for computers.

You can choose whichever one you like and whichever one your friends want to use.

So this has a lot of great possibilities. For you as an English learner, this is an amazing opportunity. Because now, even if you live in let’s say the Czech Republic in Europe, you live in the Czech Republic and let’s say you’re in a small town in the Czech Republic and there are no Americans there, no British people there that you know, it doesn’t matter. You can find and connect with British people, American people, Canadians, Australians.

You can do this all online and you can get conversation partners online. Maybe you pay them or maybe they’re free it depends, but it’s possible for you to talk to native speakers who are actually living in the United States and it doesn’t matter where you live. Even if you live in the Czech Republic, even if you live in Thailand, even if you live in Japan, even if you live in a small town, as long as you have an Internet connection you can have English-speaking conversation partners.

In our own VIP Program you can connect with other quite advanced English speakers who are from Europe or Asia or other countries. You can make all of these international friends. So even if you’re living in a tiny town in Northern Japan, for example, you can have good friends in Europe, in the United States, in South America, in Thailand. You can talk to them on the Internet phone once a week or more if you want to. You can practice your English with them. You can learn about their countries, their cultures, they can learn about yours. And the really cool thing is that you can, eventually meet them face to face if you want to.

Several of our European VIP members have done this, they have taken trips together.

They first met in our social website then they started to talk to each other using Skype or other phone programs and they did this regularly, consistently. Then they became friends and then they decided to take a trip together and they all went to Ireland together. They all met together and spent a few days together.

My wife and I did this ourselves. Tamoa and I, we flew to Barcelona and we met several of our European VIP members, several of them in Barcelona and a few had traveled from other countries, from France, from Italy and that was fantastic. I loved it. What a great opportunity. It’s amazing. So as a language learner you have so many opportunities now.

Of course, even our program is an amazing opportunity for you. You have much more choice now. You know 50 years ago maybe there were only a few boring textbooks and you had limited choice. Now there are so many, you know, English lessons, English programs, extra audios, audio books, texts, blogs, websites. All of this is available to you. You can even watch CNN, whatever. There’s so much real English material out there. You don’t need to use boring textbooks anymore and you can mix all of these.

Don’t worry. I won’t be offended. You won’t hurt my feelings if you add other things to the VIP Program, to Effortless English; in fact, I want you to. You know use the lessons each day or each month as your kind of core, basic building block, your core basic fundamentals, but also add audio books or podcasts if you enjoy those or anything. Just collect English audio and reading material that is interesting to you and in this way you can really improve and you don’t need to go to the United States. You don’t need to go to Canada. You can if you want to it’s fun, but you don’t have to. You can bring all of this into your own home and in that sense it is the best of times to be an English learner, certainly.

Not just as an English learner, you have access to so much incredible learning now. You have access to motivational speakers, people who will teach you about success psychology and all these amazing psychological methods and tricks to help yourself feel happier and more energized and to achieve your goals more quickly. You have access to financial experts and financial websites where you can learn much more about economics and investing and finances than ever before.

You can learn much more on your own by yourself in this way than by going to a university and taking a bunch of kind of boring classes. All you need though is just the initiative, the motivation to do this yourself. If you have that there’s so much out there for you. It doesn’t matter what the topic is. I’ll give you another example.

My young cousin, he’s in high school, he’s a baseball player. Well, I recently found a Facebook page that is focused on helping baseball players. Baseball is a popular sport in the United States and in some other countries, some Caribbean countries, Central and South American countries, Japan, Taiwan. I think those are the main baseball countries. Baseball players now can go online and they can find a lot of great teaching about how to improve as a player.

So, you know, maybe a baseball player is in a small town and they have only one coach and there’s only one team and maybe the coach is not very good. Well, in the past there’s nothing much they could do. Now, however, they can train themselves. They can get online, they can find so much information and they can improve themselves even if they’re local coach is not very good and this is true for any popular sport. It’s true for any skill. You can teach yourself computer programming online through online courses.

It’s amazing. There’s so much available out there.

Now, I get excited about this myself. There’s so much sometimes I get overwhelmed by it because there’s so much out there. Amazon, for example, is one of my favorite websites. HYPERLINK “http://www.Amazon.com” www.Amazon.com, huge online bookstore. In the past there was no physical bookstore that could hold all of those books. In the past you would wander into a bookstore, you’d go into a bookstore and you’d just see what’s available. Now you can just search on Amazon and you have access to hundreds and thousands more books. There’s so much more out there.

Very, very, cool, very exciting. This is an exciting topic for me. So what I want you to do this month is to really get excited about this yourself, to realize that there’s so much opportunity. In the business world there’s a huge opportunity out there online. Of course, I created my own business, which is mostly focused online and I’ve met so many cool entrepreneurs. So ‘cool’ means great or awesome and ‘entrepreneur’ is someone who starts their own business.

I’ve met these great entrepreneurs who are doing fantastic, interesting businesses, all different kinds, and they have used the Internet and different online tools to build their business more quickly and more easily than they could have in the past. It’s much easier to do it now. That’s true if you have a local business. If you have a local business you can promote yourself online and there are so many online tools where you can really build a local business and it’s cheaper, easier and simpler to do than in the past.

You just have to learn how to do it. You have to get in there and try it.

With some businesses you can have a global international business and you’re just working from your bedroom or your living room, right? You could do so many things. You can teach things. You can sell actual physical products. There are so many things you can do and then you can get online and you can create your website and through different kinds of marketing online you can reach people in countries all over the world.

It’s absolutely amazing.

This was very, very difficult to do in the past, you know 50 years ago to do that, I won’t impossible, but super difficult and it required a good amount of money, a lot of money and you would really have to travel around and make tons of contracts. Not easy at all, much easier now. So that’s exciting too.

So what should you do this month? What are the more focused activities I want you to take? Let’s be more concrete. Let’s be more focused. So what I want you to do this month is to really just brainstorm. ‘To brainstorm’ just means to think freely about ideas.

Don’t edit them. Don’t judge them. Just let all the ideas come out and think about in the area of learning how you can use these great opportunities, how you can be more creative about finding these opportunities.

Think about things you’ve wanted to learn in the past, you know any kind of skill at all, and then get online and look for online courses, books, DVDs, audios, whatever, member sites, that are focused on that skill. It might be a hobby. It might be something for your career. It might be something related to a business, maybe something just more personal. It doesn’t matter what it is. It could be meditation. It could be some kind of art.

It could be learning how to edit videos. Up to you, but I guarantee there’s some cool stuff out there.

You can do Google searches. You can do Yahoo searches, Bing searches. Don’t just look on the first page, look on page two, three, four. Do searches on Facebook and just keep looking. Keep clicking links and you’ll start to find a whole lot of interesting information.

So that’s what I want you to do. Pick just one skill, one hobby, one thing you’ve always wanted to learn and actually get online this month and find a lot of information about it, lots of courses and skills and websites, etc.

The second thing I want you to do is to focus specifically on your career or business. So if you want to start your own business, great. Start thinking about how you can do that online and start doing searches online for online business, online marketing. There are so many books about this topic now, so many websites. It’s unbelievable how much there is, probably too much, but just do that and really start learning about it.

Sometimes people are intimidated by this, they’re fearful of this, but there’s no need.

Just get in there and learn about it. So do some searches and start learning about online business. Even if you don’t want to start your own business if you just want to be an employee, I still encourage you to do this because even as an employee it’s important to use the power that’s available online because we all know that job security does not exist anymore.

You know it’s always possible to lose your job. Now that can feel scary, but on the other hand you don’t need to be afraid of that. You don’t need to be scared of that. You can use a lot of online tools to stay connected with a lot of employers, so if you ever need a new job or want a new job you’ll be ready. You won’t need to be afraid. You won’t need to panic.

People use LinkedIn for this. LinkedIn is a common one. I don’t really personally use that one very much, but a lot of people do. You can get on there, you make a profile on LinkedIn and then you start joining different groups on LinkedIn. You don’t just promote yourself, that’s not the purpose. You don’t want to just talk about yourself all the time, nobody likes that. Instead, you just want to learn and connect with people as a normal human being, but as you do so you can start making connections with people who in the future could possibly help you get a job or maybe you could help them get a job. It’s just building a nice network outside of your own company. It’s important to do.

I used to do this back when I was still just teaching, doing teaching jobs. I always knew that I needed to be ready to have a new job for two reasons. Number one is I like to travel a lot, so I would get bored at one job and I would be ready to go somewhere else and the other reason too is that I was always trying weird, strange things and I knew that sometimes some of my bosses wouldn’t like that and that could also cause me to need to leave.

So because of that I started a blog. I had an online resume. I had a podcast and I started to write to and connect with people at different schools, with English teachers in different parts of the world, and I, over time, over several months, built a lot of connections with this and that gave me a lot of security because I knew that if I needed a job I could contact these people, these other teachers and I knew that some of them would know of job openings, maybe in their own school or maybe at another school.

I knew that they would give me a good word. It means say something good about me to their bosses. So I knew I could quite easily get a new job if I needed to and you can build that same kind of network over time, professionally if you need to. So I recommend doing that as well.

So one is personal, personal, just find something cool, interesting, fun that you want to learn and find all the courses and information about it you can online and the second one is professional and that’s start joining things like LinkedIn, maybe making a blog, you know maybe making a Facebook page, maybe even a separate page just for your professional life. So you might have a personal Facebook page, but you can also make what’s called a Fan page and you could do that just for your professional life and you could, again, connect with people in your industry.

There’s a lot you can do, so what I want you to do is just focus on two things, personal life and professional life and then get online. Please, this month I want you to share this information on our social site. Share what you found. Share all the cool interesting things you’re learning. Share the cool websites that you found. Let us know what you’re doing because we can all learn together and help each other.

All right, I will see you on our social site. Have a great month. Talk to you later, bye-bye.