All right, welcome to Season 5 of Inside My Canoehead. This is a Canadian podcast that's all about the integration of leading an incredible awesome life, individual responsibility, individual emergency preparedness, and how do we navigate life's incredible, wild disruptions that we see among us. Sit back, grab a beverage, and enjoy the episodes. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa Studios of Inside My Canoehead.
This week, we're talking about how to rock an awesome life. It's in the tagline of the introduction. It's online at InsideMyCanoehead.ca. So what does rocking an awesome life mean?
Well, today, we're going to talk about your responsibility to be a high-value human, right? What do you need to do to rock it and succeed in today's chaotic and too much of its time? All right, sit back, grab a beverage, and let's get at it. All right, listen, I do live in a construction zone right now, and the studios of Inside My Canoehead are located next to a lot of work that's being done.
So in the background, if you hear some smash, bang, boom, et cetera, welcome to living in renovations. All right, so this week, we want to talk about the high-value human, which means the idea that you are here for a good time, not a long time. We've heard versions of that, right? I've said this before, and I'll say it again on today's episode, that I really think the best five-word phrase that describes the purpose of life is, simply put, enjoying the passage of time.
And with that, though, we have some other responsibilities, right? We talk about the importance of community, social capital, and the people around you, and how much they're going to be useful and helpful, and you can do the same for them in times of strife and chaos. You know, I've said this over and over again, when I consult with municipalities on my business side, and I talk to them about what's the first steps they can take in emergency preparedness, it's always, the conversation is always focused on building community centers, building social capital within your community, strengthening the bond between your residents is far more important than getting everybody 72-hour kits or something ridiculous like that. So, you know, human capital is more important.
So you, as a really incredible human being that's rocking through this life, you have certain responsibilities, I will argue, towards your greater community, right? So, I think Robin Williams put it that we have three important things to do in life, which is be a good human, which simply means treat people fairly, contribute to our society, which means you have found something to give back to society, and most of us do that through our profession of sorts, that we give back to society and help generate a better, you know, global place for all of us. And the last one is to chase your dreams and live your life you want. You know, and there was a great YouTube video, and I forget the guy, it was an individual who had done a science research project on respite care.
And he sat back and he had talked to, over a period of 10 years, he had talked to thousands of people on their deathbed and asked them what their number one regret is. And the number one regret, by far, outpacing everything else was that they didn't have the guts to choose to live the life they wanted, they chose to live the life that society, quote unquote, designed for them, or that they were pressured to by their parents, their spouse, their significant other, whatever it may be. So, to sum up, Robin Williams' advice for life is to be a good person, give back to your society, and live the life you want, not a step towards what everybody else thinks you should, or somebody's telling you is the right and appropriate path. So, with that today, I want to talk about the idea of a high-value human.
How can you live this rockin' incredible life and be top-notch value to the society around you? And, of course, in doing the research for today's podcast, I looked at both the content we have at InsideMikeNewhead.ca or over at TheBusinessSideOfPreparednessLabs.ca, and as well, I looked at a couple of YouTube motivational channels that I follow. I looked at some great quotes for people like Robin Williams at Al that you'll hear today. And then there's one YouTube channel called Artistic Motivation, and I'll give them credit for a lot of the content today.
It's just really much drawn from a lot of the great words that they have there. I would suggest you go over, give them a shout-out, and subscribe. The first thing is, they've got a lot of content about being a high-value man, about a male's role in society. I like to refer to it as a high-value human.
You take away the gender assignment, and then you look at how you can best contribute to this world around you, and how do you become an incredible individual. And you'll see a lot of overlap when I talk about the blanket of preparedness, the four quadrants of blanket of preparedness that we try to get you to knit here, and InsideMikeNewhead, your mental health, your physical health, your financial independence, and your animalistic requirements. When you have those four sorted, you can take on the freaking world with nothing holding you back and chase your dreams. Your dreams might become to become this incredible painter.
It might be dreams to become the next CEO of Amazon. Or it might be just you want to open a pop-up coffee shop and watch people smile on their way to work, drinking your awesome, incredible brew. Whatever it is, the first thing that you should be able to do is listen to others. The art of shutting your mouth, surround yourself with high-value people.
And there's a great phrase that says, speak useful words or be silent. So imagine that. You know, the good Lord of nature, whatever you believe, gave you two ears and one mouth, and that's the order in which you should use them, right? So you, a lot of us don't, right?
You know, they'll joke that if you find yourself the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. Surround yourself by people who are chasing dreams similar to you, after what you want, or after the dreams that you are pursuing. And the reason for that is, is that you'll be able to learn, right? We always want to learn.
Never, ever step on your curiosity. And there's a great phrase, and it's going to be tattooed on my arm, that says, live like you're going to die tomorrow, but learn like you're going to live forever. So you need to learn. We all need to learn from each other.
So make sure you surround yourself by people who are chasing dreams. Then the number one, second thing that I would suggest is, as I said this before, as part of your animalistic requirements for security, you need to be able to defend yourself, right? So whenever I say that, you need to be able to defend yourself. Everybody purposely thinks, and initially thinks, against physical violence.
And that's very important, and I think every human being should have a reasonable capacity to defend themselves against the threat of, or the actual application of physical violence. It's just something you need to be able to do as an animal in this environment, right? It's like Jordan Peterson says, you should be a monster, but under control. The point I'm speaking to here is your mind.
Be a monster of the mind. Be able to defend yourself. Be able to articulate your opinions and thoughts in a very clearful manner. To be able to listen to people's counterpoints, and to be able to defend yourself in an oral tradition.
If you ever want to know what the word debate really means, if you look at some of the old English debates that are still held today in some European-based and some American institutions, where people get to stand up, and they get asked a question, and they're given a period of time to answer it uninterrupted. It's not like a Donald Trump campaign rally. It's uninterrupted ability to defend yourself, and your ability to be observant to the world around you, and to present your cause, right? I'm here trying to persuade you that adopting a preparedness lifestyle is useful, right?
It's helpful, and it's a great way to rock an incredible life, and be able to chase your dreams by ensuring that should disruptions happen, and they will, that you have this blanket of preparedness wrapped around you to insulate you from those coming disruptions, and that you navigate them to their conclusion, and you return to a state of rest in the most rapid time frame possible, right? I'm trying to persuade you to do that. Am I successful? I don't know.
You're still here listening to this, so at least I must be mildly amusing, if not mildly persuasive. So based upon that, you need to know how to listen. Listen acutely. Listen to learn, not to respond, and that's a huge deal, right?
So when you sit down and you're listening to somebody who's explaining something, something about they're knowledgeable about, because that's the type of people you surround yourself with, and they're passionate about. Again, that's the type of people you surround yourself with. So you have somebody articulating their point based upon the data and research as they understand it. You should be listening to learn something new, not to formulate your response in your head, right?
Because that's not allowing you to learn everything. You're in a situation where you just think you're smarter than them, and you have to put them down, which means you're not the smartest one in the room. The other one is, this fits greatly into the blanket of preparedness as well. You need to achieve financial maturity as a human being.
It is your responsibility to take care of the people for whom you're responsible, to be able to provide for yourself, and to provide those animalistic needs that sit on the blanket of preparedness. Your shelter, your food, your water, your safety, your health, and your security are all your responsibility to provide that, and you do that by maintaining financial independence. I've got an episode coming up in a week or so where I'm going to outline how you can retire a millionaire and lead an incredible life in today's inflationary period as a person making minimum wage at 40 hours a week. You can do it.
You just have to choose to live the lifestyle that fits, but you gain financial maturity. You must be secure, and you must be absolutely independent. That is one of your responsibilities to be a high-value human to this world, because if you are a dependent, it doesn't matter whether it's a child tax credit, a GSD credit, anything like that, all those are forms of government welfare. Now, if they're available, I'd take them.
I'd take every darn penny from the federal government or provincial government you can, but those are welfare payments, making you a dependent of the state. If you require those to get through your day, and it's not just extra free money, then you are a dependent on the state, and you are not financially independent. It doesn't mean those are bad things. It just means you have not reached financial independence.
If there are people at minimum wage who are incredibly financially independent, and they'll take their free money, but they don't need it to make their ends meet. They certainly run out of money before they run out of money, which the opposite is far too often in too many households. We have to learn self-reliance, right? This goes to a good friend of mine who's coming up as a guest later next week by the time we do the editing of the episode to talk about learning about preparedness and how people like to consume information.
She is a huge proponent of learning skills, right, to do it yourself, and it's incredible value in all of us to learn how to do something. Now, I'll give you a prime example. I've had two floods in my house. What does that mean?
I've seen the damaged water can do in the house, so we're just finishing up a bathroom renovation today, and I paid a plumber to install all the last final pieces and to move the plumbing around to where it needed to be. I could probably watch a YouTube video, but for somebody who has suffered floods in the basement, I don't mess around with water. So I've learned the skills how to replace a faucet. I've learned the skills how to clean clog drains, and none of them are fun, but I've learned the skills how to do that.
But when it comes time to doing fairly significant plumbing work, I pay a plumber. I could probably learn how to do it, and I could probably figure it out. But for this job alone, I paid near $1,000 for a plumber, but let's be clear, okay? When you relocate plumbing in a house, if you get that wrong, all of that work is behind closed walls.
So if I did it wrong and had to go to repair it, I got to smash a bunch of tile, take it, you know what I'm saying? So I don't mess around with water. But you learn skills. So she's a huge proponent of that, and you'll look forward to next week's episode if I get the editing done in time about that.
But really important to learn skills to do it yourself, basically all your activities. I will tell you that on a bushcrafting side, and a lot of people love bushcraft, so do I. I practice it fairly regularly when I get out and about. Look at your animalistic requirements.
If you're wondering what skill sets you need to know how to do, look at your six animalistic requirements that exist. Shelter, food, water, health, aka first aid, safety, community knowledge, situational awareness, getting information, and security, self-defense. You need to learn all those skills. You need to have the skill sets to have taken on board that you, if necessary, are able to garden.
Garden is the number one. Now, a lot of us try to garden, and you'll make a lot of mistakes. Gardening in Canada is my favorite YouTube channel about that, but there's tons of YouTube channels out there. Learning the skill to garden means, in the unfortunate situation, you'll be able to augment your food production, and that seems to be pretty important in some significant times.
But it's just a skill set, right? And there's a great friend of this podcast. She's been on it before, Lynn Gattar, who runs Bucket List Homestead on YouTube. She did something called the One Seed Challenge, and I thought it was really, really interesting.
Not just because it's kind of neat, can you grow one seed? But the idea behind the challenge is, I don't care if you live in a basement apartment, right? You've got sunlight coming in some window. The photosynthesis can happen on a plant.
So you take the time with one seed, one pot, and you grow a beanstalk or one tomato plant. What you're learning is the skill. Right now, you're not supplementing really a significant portion of your diet, but you're learning the skill that will serve when necessary to be able to do that. Learning to garden when your very survival relies upon your ability to produce produce is not a smart idea.
So you've got to learn skill set. The next one is understand the importance of your life. What is your value structure? What matters to you?
And surround yourself by people with similar values. Now, I used to be an ethics instructor years ago, decades ago in the Army, and ethics is always this really slippery slope and a big tent platform to try to discuss with a bunch of people. But in simplistic forms, this is how I look at a value system, right? Beliefs are something that you believe to be true, right?
It's a very simple translation. So I believe all humans are good until proven otherwise. I believe that the sun gets up in the morning, right? I believe in telling the truth.
Those are beliefs, right? Values are something that matter to you from other people. So for values for me would be honesty. I value honesty.
I value integrity. I value courage. I value intestinal fortitude. I value those type of things in myself and in other people that surround me.
So I surround myself with people who look at life with a positive attitude. I surround myself with people who do their best to take care of themselves, who are out for the better good, who are honest and forthright. And a lot of times when you don't want to hear honesty, these people will tell it to you. People who believe in intestinal fortitude, they don't give up when they're faced with a situation they fight through.
Morals, which people hear about all the time, are collective, right? So I as an individual don't have morals. Morals are a collective thing. So for example, a society operates as a group.
The old days, the tribes used to be about 120, 140 people. And so basically what you would have is a set of morals is how you work together, right? So in Canada, we have a code that tells us proper behavior. It's called a criminal code.
So as a society, we get together and we decide what is good and bad behavior, and then we codify laws against the bad behavior. Those are expression of our morals and our collective sense. So what matters to you? The beliefs that you have, and then your values that you embrace and believe in and choose to live yourself, you surround yourself with people like that, right?
These are your responsibilities to rock an honest life, rock an incredible life, to take on the world, to pursue your dreams, to go after everything that you want. You need to be a high-valued human in today's world. And the last part is, and I think this is some of the most important, is just accept who you are. There's no joke.
You know, love yourself, flaws and all, right? We are what we are. I've lied. I've done stupid things.
So guess what? Tell me another thing that I know there haven't been videos lately. I'm on a fitness challenge because I'm fat, right? I'm not comfortably overweight.
I'm just a little bit bigger because I'm 50. No, I'm fat. So I need to get rid of all this excess fat that's on me because it's unhealthy. I have a metabolic age.
I had it done professionally of 58. I'm 51. That's not good news, right? My body is about seven years older than my chronological age, which ticking timeline, if you know what I mean.
So accept yourself for who you are, love yourself for who you are, but that means you take the necessary steps to bring yourself back to where you should be. So the idea of today's episode was simply to talk about that idea of you being a high value human, right? So you want to rock an incredible life. What do you need to do?
We talked about understanding your importance, your ability to listen and learn, surround yourself with people who think like you, be able to defend yourself in an oral tradition, be able to have a strong and intense discussion with other human beings without losing your proverbial marbles and calling them names, et cetera. And there was a great quote today that, you know, this gentleman came on to a TikTok, I think a TikToker, YouTube, I can't remember. And he said, the definition of racism in 2022 is if you believe in anything that the democratic party disagrees with, then you're gotta be a racist in the U S right. So I mean, be the incredible high value human being, be self-reliant, make yourself financially independent, take care of yourself, learn all those skills that you need to learn to provide yourself those animalistic requirements.
And then when you sit there and you look at your calendar, right? You look at your, like I build all of my appointments in my calendar. It's my productivity. I use a calendar right here on my iMac.
And if I have to do 10 tasks today, they're all signed as a one hour task and they're put in my calendar. And I only task myself between certain hours. There's 12 hours a day that I allow tasks to go in there and that's it. If it can't be done, then it can't be done.
I get switched to another day. The point being is that when you look at your calendar, everything in your calendar should be either feeding your animalistic requirements, building your physical or mental health, securing financial independence, like chasing, working more, inventing a new product, starting a side hustle, everything that you have needs to fit exactly what you're after, right? This is what you need to be doing full time is that working towards improving yourself as a high value human and make yourself useful to society, build that social capital, and then wrap yourself in that blanket of preparedness. And just think, if you do these things to become a high value human, you've got that blanket of preparedness wrapped around you.
Seriously, you are ready to take on the world, right? It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. It doesn't matter what God you believe in.
None of that matters. If you are a high value contributing individual to your society that you've chosen to live in and that you take care of yourself and you've met your blanket of preparedness requirements and you're continually improving on those with your one priority, because remember the word priority cannot be pluralized. Whatever that priority may be, it's clearly stated and it's the number one thing in your daily calendar. So thank you very much for joining us this week's episode of Inside My Canoe Head.
We're recording later this week at a very important conversation with a good friend of the podcast. We're going to talk about preparedness and learning preparedness and how do people adapt their preparedness goals and their preparedness lessons to life and world events. Hopefully we'll have that up for you next week. We're going to be switching around between the three main efforts of this podcast, individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life, and chasing your dreams.
Because listen, listen, you do not want to be that person laying in a hospital with a life full of regrets. You want to slide in with a broken and beaten body with a smile on yourself saying, what a ride. All right. Thank you very much to everyone listening to the podcast.
Go over to my website, www.insidemycanoehead.ca. Drop us a like. Tell us what you think. Drop me an email at jeffatpreparednesslabs.ca.
Buy me a coffee. I'm enjoying a wonderful coffee right now from dark, zero dark coffee. Tutu Bravo, medium roast. It's wonderful.
All right. Take care. Stay safe.