Survival

There is more to life than just survival. If you look historically at people who viewed survival as the end all and be all of life you often see people who died from age 30 to age 50. So, though there are times all of us have to just find a way to survive and to take any job to have food to eat and a place to live that is not an ideal or desirable life for very long. There has to be quality to life to want to live it very long and finding what brings Quality to your life is the key to even wanting to live a long time or even become immortal as in "2045" of Ray Kurzweil's predictions. (Ray Kurzweil predicted the internet coming into being 20 years before it happened and Bill Gates thinks he is very technologically prescient).

Finding a reason and even fun in life helping yourself and others is what will give you true survival and bring you into true prosperity both internally and externally. When I started working after school and weekends I was 10 years old and started with a paper route. Though I had fun delivering the newspapers I did like to do it 7 days a week. (Especially when I had to get up about 3:30 AM or 4:00 AM on Sundays to deliver the Sunday paper to all my clients). But over time I realized I was being ripped off by the way things were set up within newspaper businesses then. If there was any loss(people who didn't pay me when I went to their door to collect at the end of every month) I took the hit not the newspaper. I had to pay for my newspapers whether my clients paid me or not. So every time a client said, "Come Back tomorrow" and wasn't there the next day or wouldn't answer their door I got ripped off not the newspaper. This was a very good lesson for me, "I learned that just because you do a good job doesn't mean that you will ever be rewarded for it by life." This was very important to learn as a 10 year old and showed me the full cruelty of life right then.

I don't think schools do anyone a favor by making everyone win. In real life there are those who survive and those who don't and it has more to do with who you know rather than what you know. For example, one of my sons best friends when to college for 5 years to become a Pixar type of Cartoonist because he is an incredible artist. He got his degree but couldn't get hired because he didn't know the right people. Then he worked in a comic book store. Then he got married and almost died from an allergic infection. But he survived his life because he married the right girl who was very successful and married him and stayed with him. So, in life you never know what is going to work and what won't until it does. All you can do is to keep trying things until something works or you die trying. That is what life is really like.

So, trying to give everyone awards in school and trying to make children think that everyone wins is a lie. And it is only going to give children psychological problems when the actually have to face the dog eat dog world of the real world out there where often nice people finish last or not at all. Unless you are willing to do whatever it takes to survive you might not. That is how difficult life really can be.

And the funny thing is that out of hundreds of decisions that you have to make ongoing to survive, even if you only make 1 or 2 decisions that actually work in your whole life, often that is enough to be happy. So remember that and keep making those decisions until you find the 1 or 2 that work so you can live to become maybe an immortal and maybe you will even want to write stuff like I do to encourage people to keep trying and to go on living to help others survive long enough until they figure it all out. Have a Great Day! Have a Wonderful Life!