درسنامه اصلی

##DIY – Coaching Lesson

Hi, I’m AJ Hoge and welcome to this month’s coaching lesson. Do it yourself, this is a favorite topic of mine. Do it yourself. Do it yourself, for me, has this idea of self-reliance. Self-reliance meaning relying on yourself, being not exactly independent but having skills of your own, not always expecting other people to do things for you.

You see, I think in the modern world, in our modern civilization, we have lost our connection to much of life. What do I mean by that? Lost our connection to much of life. I mean we’ve lost our connection to the very basics of life. For thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, millions of years, human beings have been closely connected, super aware of the basics of life.

Food. If we think about it through the history of humanity for most of it, human beings were focused every single day on their food. They knew exactly where their food came from, right? They were hunting their food. In the traditional cultures the men, especially, were out hunting food. They had to do it almost every day.

So they had this, this incredible awareness and connection to the environment, to the animals they were hunting, of course, and the whole natural environment, to the weather, to all of that. They had to. It was necessary for them to find and track and kill their food. So they had a very, very, very close connection and awareness of the realities of life, the basics of their life.

The same for the clothing, right? They made their own clothes. Maybe they made their clothes from leather. Maybe they had to…think about what it required to make clothes before all of our machines, right? I mean either you killed an animal and used it’s skin, you didn’t just use it, you had to like, it was a long process. You had to take off the skin. You had to do this kind of treatment of the skin. You had to wait then you had to sew it, all of that.

Or if they were making clothes from some kind of plant fiber, they had to get the plant fiber and then they had to, y’know, rub it or something and somehow creating long strings. They had to make the strings first themselves. Then they had to take all those little strings, those threads, and weave them together to make a cloth. And then they had to take that cloth and hand-sew it into a piece of clothing.

And if they wanted any colors, they had to dye it using plant colors, dyes. Or animals, some dyes are made from animals. But again, an intimate connection with the clothes on their bodies because they made them. They did it themselves from the first step to the last. All of the tools, they had to make their tools first. They didn’t just go down to a store and buy a hammer. They had to make it.And so I think this creates, I know in my own experience when I’ve done things for myself, made things myself, I don’t know, it creates a different mindset. Like I say, it’s more of a feeling of being connected to your life and indeed to the environment and to the world. Because we’re kind of alienated from the world.

Alienated means this feeling of separation. We have this feeling of separation.

Think about our food, right? How many of us really think about where that food comes from? It doesn’t matter if it’s plants or animals. It doesn’t matter. If it’s a hamburger, let’s say. You go down to the store.

For most of us, hamburger is just this thing in a package. It’s just this red stuff, this kind of red chopped up meat in a package. There’s no connection to the animal that used to be, the living animal that that was.

Or even a plant, right? I mean anything in a box. It doesn’t even resemble something alive any more.

But even the vegetables, let’s say a carrot. You just go, oh, and there’s just a pile of carrots at the grocery store. There’s no connection to this thing that, y’know, leaves and it was in the ground in the dirt and it took, y’know, weeks and months to grow and sunlight and water and the right kinds of, y’know, nutrients and all of that.

We have no connection of, awareness of or thinking about any of that. We’re just consumers. We consume, meaning we buy. We just go down and buy it. Oh, buy a bag of carrots. Buy some apples.

Buy some meat. Buy some fish. Buy some clothes. Same with the clothes that we wear. How many of us make our own clothes? None. We don’t think about it. We don’t think about all of the different steps involved, where all this stuff comes from.

And therefore, we’ve lost connection with the roots, with the reality, the deeper reality of life, of all the things we use and have in our lives. And that’s why I think many people feel this feeling of separation in their lives. It’s not just a loneliness or a separation from other people. That’s part of it, for sure, that many people feel. But I think all of us have also a feeling of separation from the environment, from the world, from life in general, and I think it comes from a lack of do it yourself. Too much being a consumer.

So that’s the negative side. That’s the sort of the bad effects of not doing it yourself. But if we flip that and we start to do things ourselves, doesn’t mean we have to make everything we have from the beginning, right? Build your own computer, build your camera, make all your own food. No, no, it doesn’t mean that but it just means at least in some areas of life to do it yourself even though you don’t have to.

Even though you could go down and buy it.There’s a value in doing it yourself. The value I’d say comes in three different ways. One, I would say is a kind of spiritual value and that is that, again, that feeling of connection you get when you do it yourself, especially when you create or make something yourself. And I think especially for things that are very basic, like food and clothing, tools, things like that. Because we’re so used to just buying those things now and yet those things are so basic and important for our lives, still and always, they’re our basic necessities.

So I think it’s spiritually satisfying to occasionally grow your own food, maybe with a garden, or you can go out and become a hunter. Y’know, buy a gun, kill your own food if you eat meat. Maybe it’s an experience to have that would give you connection to what you’re eating, and a reverence, which is kind of like a deep respect for the animals you’re eating.

Or on the plant side of things, you get the same effect from gardening where, really, you gain a connection to the earth and soil and the sunlight and the rain and the weather and all of that, and the little bugs that try to eat your plants, all of those things. It gives you a deep connection. It’s very satisfying at a level that’s hard to describe.

And the other benefit, I think, the big benefit of doing it yourself is just learning. Learning, learning something new and learning something fundamentally human also has a value. It brings a great deal of happiness. You have to try it to experience it, right? Now you just have to accept that what I’m saying is possibly try and then go try it and see if it’s true for you. But I know that I have found this to be the case.

So I’ll give you some examples of things I’ve done myself. I actually brewed my own beer for a while.

Now what’s very funny about this, especially to my friends, is that I really don’t even drink beer. I don’t even really like it. I don’t drink alcohol much. I mean, maybe in a year I might drink alcohol once or twice.

Don’t really like it. Don’t like the taste of it. Just don’t like it. Don’t like the way it makes me feel, my stomach.

But anyway, for some reason, I met this guy, he was brewing beer. And it just fascinated me. Because I had no idea, like where does beer come from actually? Right, it’s at the store. Everybody’s out there buying it. Lots and lots of people drinking it. But I thought and I realized, well, I don’t even know what it is exactly. How is beer made?

So for me it was just like a learning process that was fascinating. And so I brewed my own beer and I learned like, y’know, what are the basic ingredients, y’know, hops and barley and the right kind of yeast, and you’ve got to get the right temperature and the right mix and the yeast eats the kind of sugars, andferments. And it creates that bubbling in the alcohol. It was really a fascinating and interesting process.

And I made the beer. It tasted okay, I guess. My friends told me it tasted okay. I didn’t even hardly drink it. But it was still super interesting, super interesting.

I made mead one time which is like, kind of like beer but made from honey. Again, just very fascinating and interesting experience. These are things, y’know, that humans have consumed, drank, for thousands of years so it’s kind of interesting to learn like, oh, what is this exactly? How do you actually make it?

And then actually do it. It’s very satisfying.

I tried gardening for a while. I was pretty bad at it, pretty bad. A lot of my plants died. But still, I found it to be a very fascinating project and experience and I got a much deeper feeling and understanding for where my food came from, at least the plant side of the food.

And, y’know, the struggles of getting the right amount of sun, not too much, not too little. The right amount of water, not too much, not too little. The right kind of soil for the different plants. The problems with all the bugs trying to eat them. Y’know, and these are the problems that big farmers also deal with.

So it gave me a little more awareness and respect for my food and the process of growing food.

Now, another area of life where do it yourself can have very practical advantages, so these advantages I’m discussing now are kind of emotional, intellectual, spiritual, depending on how you want to think about it. But there is a very practical area where do it yourself will help you in a very practical way and by that, I mean money.

And that’s in the area of your job, career or business. Because in the economic world, in our economy, our global economy and in your local economy, an economy of any kind, there are two kinds of people, my friend…producers and consumers. There are essentially two kinds of people, those who produce and those who consume.

I’ve discussed this idea in the past in terms of, y’know, finances and jobs and working and making money.

Now, the producers are the ones who make money and the consumers are the ones who spend money.

Now, if you think about it, we are encouraged in the media to be consumers, right? It’s non-stop advertising. Even movies and television constantly programming us to be consumers, buy, buy, buy, buy, consume, consume, consume, consume, consume.

Don’t be a producer, be a consumer. Who does that benefit? The producers, the people who are making things, services or products, the people who own businesses. They’re the producers and they profit fromconsumers. Now, if they’re good businesspeople and decent businesspeople and decent businesses, they are providing a useful service and a useful product. So it’s not all evil, okay. Not at all.

But still, I believe that we all really need a balance of both. So yes, in our modern economy, you’re going to be a consumer. I can’t make everything. I don’t want to make every single thing that I use. Make my own camera, make my own lights, build my own apartment, make all of my own clothes. I mean, there’s…I don’t have time for that and I have other things I want to focus on. So, no, I don’t want to make everything. I don’t want to produce every single thing in my life.

But if we become too unbalanced, if we’re only consumers, if we’re just buying, buying, buying, buying but not producing much, well, then financially usually we’re more poor. Or we have more financial stress because we’re not balanced financially. We’re not balanced economically.

So my last example from my own life is my own company, Effortless English, and also Learn Real English, I’m part-owner of Learn Real English. In those companies, I’m a producer, right? I’m creating.

I’m producing. I’m selling. And this has given me a great economic financial benefit. And so while I’m a consumer of other companies’ products and services, I’m also a producer.

And the more you become a producer in your life, the more you will get benefits. Intellectual and emotional benefits and also, possibly, financial benefits, right? The people who become rich are the people who own or create their own companies, who are independent. Very few employees become rich.

It’s mostly entrepreneurs, business owners, business starters.

And sometimes people who are self-employed. They’re not exactly business owners, but they work for themselves. Doctors fall in this category, lawyers. Most of the kind of expensive, well-paid professions that you think about. They’re independent, right? They’re producing a service, usually a service, doctors, lawyers, accountants, those folks. They are usually producing or providing a service. But they’re producers, they’re on the producer side, right? They’re creating or producing something and they’re quite independent.

So this month what are you going to do? You’re going to be a producer. You’ve got to do it yourself.

Now you can choose any area of life. If you’re a business, money-focused person, well, then you can kind of continue on from last month’s lesson and continue focusing on a stream of income, being a producer.If that’s not so important to you, that’s not your focus, well, then you can just do something interesting.

Something more like a craft, y’know, like making your own clothes or brewing your own beer, making your own wine. Doing a garden, gardening. Becoming a hunter, going out and hunting for your own food.

Maybe birds or deer, whatever.

Or maybe you’re more like someone who likes to work with wood and you like to build things. You could build some furniture or you could build a house. You could build a room. You can do something inside your own house or apartment. Just do something yourself and see the satisfaction. I’m curious to hear from you, your feedback of the positive benefits you get from doing it yourself in some area of your life.

Tell me about it on Twitter, ajhoge. Alright, see you next month. Bye for now.