Writing a book, month 4

Are successful people just robots? Am I a robot, but just a very simple one, like a Roomba. If I’m a Roomba would Bill Gates be a super computer? Ferrari? Tesla? My brother has called me a robot at times. I’ve heard Asperger's is what Bill Gates has. I`m sure Elon Musk is similar. Are we all just robots of varying degrees? Or just those that are more successful. Is there a robot gene?

Robots are robotic. They have a task and they complete it. Really that’s the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful or not as accomplished. Robots finish their tasks. Lots of us have ideas. In fact I believe lots of us have the same brilliant ideas. But very few put them to action. I was walking in the early morning hours with a buddy once and we had a good distance to go AND had been drinking...and I invented the taxi. “Do you know what we need something where you contact them and they pick you up.” Reminder I had been drinking! Although maybe I invented Uber (this was definitely before smart phones however). See, brilliant but way before my time! An idea not put into action...if I even remembered it the next day!

Very few go beyond just the idea. Very few put a plan together and even fewer execute that plan. Why is that? Initiative gene? Risk gene? Smart gene? Do you have the balls gene? I do have some of those tendencies. When presented with a problem or an idea and I have an interest, that’s key, I try to put my interest into action.

I recall reading that to complete a project, and project managers out there will know better than I but you must start with one step, literally the smallest incremental step you can take. So if you want to write a book the first step is simply to decide where to write it. Step one. Open Chromebook, Step two, open google docs. Step three, start a new document. Step four, start typing. Step 5, do the same thing every day. I don’t even know what step 6 and beyond is yet but it will likely get harder and require work, investigation, effort...boredom gene kicks in.

I do have one motivating factor. I’ve told the extended family I’m doing it. That’s another lesson I learned. Don’t tell people that will shoot you down. Only tell those that will support you OR tell those that will shoot you down in order to motivate yourself. But tell someone and if you have the ego gene, it will assist you in getting it done.

I was a Raw Vegan for 2 ½ years a few years ago. I was tired a lot yet eating very well but just didn’t feel great. Turns out I was probably stressed and my activity level just combined to make me tired! Oh and I just needed more sleep. Stress is a whole other chapter! But it’s 98% mental 99% of the time!

Anyways my holistic nutritionist spouse says ‘well the next step would be to try going raw vegan’. She thought I’d do it for a day or a week-end. Then 1 month, 6 months, 1 year. And it did work, I did feel better but there was a point where I had thought okay, well done, you can stop now. But I didn’t want to disappoint people? No. Remember RULE X, no one really cares about you. I didn’t want to look like a quitter. Which is ridiculous as I was a Raw Vegan for 2 ½ years! What’s strange is I quit because I got shingles. I was 50, healthy, a raw vegan no less and I got shingles. I was a tad upset about it. But the doctor looked at me with a bit of a knowing smile or was it a smirk, saying it's not about health, it's about stress!

Apparently the chickenpox virus is similar or the same, so the shingles virus lies dormant and waiting in your nerves. Most people I know who’ve had it or those I’ve heard about are generally stressed individuals or they get it in longer term stressful situations. Mine was when my dad was in the initial stages of dementia and I was managing his care. I didn’t realize it was stressful at the time, is stress the one that’s called the silent killer? But apparently it was there eating away at me. So it was December 2018 and I’m in the midst of weeks of shingles induced pain. We had also agreed to go away with some hockey friends and my wife Carolyn found a great deal in Mexico so we went with two other hockey families.

About 2 - 3 days in, Carolyn and I are walking through the massive buffet and I stop and say ‘What am I doing?’ The shingles are killing me, I'm getting 2 hours of sleep a night because of the pain. The actual sleeping process was to go to bed, wake up an hour later in pain (my left shoulder and arm were the areas it attacked, as apparently a bunch of nerves go through the shoulder) walk around which would settle the shoulder, go sit on the couch and try and fall back asleep, eventually lie down and basically somehow get another hour in. So anyways, in the buffet, I’m like screw raw vegan, Let’s eat some carbs! It culminated a few days later with Carolyn and I enjoying some freshly made donuts for breakfast! Best trip ever!

So being a raw vegan worked and I highly recommend giving it a try. But it doesn’t prevent shingles! And I believe the reason it worked was because I was giving my body a break. If you put something in your body that it doesn’t like it has to take resources to deal with that. So every day we are putting things in our body that our body should just not be exposed to. Alcohol. Smoking. Fats. Sugar. Even stress. Not to mention external stimuli like allergies and pollution.

By going raw you simply put in unadulterated good food. Or as I like to call it Pure Goodness. Fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. When you do this the body now has excess resources because it's no longer fighting anything. So what does it do? It focuses on other areas of the body that require healing. I had some sort of polyp or something on my eyelid. 6 months in it was gone. I’ll never know what it healed inside my body. Could it clean up early stage cancer growth? I’ve heard cancer takes 20 years to develop. I honestly believe this supports the theory if you have something wrong with you to clean up your diet, at least short term to allow your body to heal itself. Food is medicine. The right food.

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Hippocrates said this a few thousand years ago. Yet how many of us put this into action? Most people eat like a 12 year old whose parents are away for the week-end.

But once again, maybe I have the robot gene.

Problem.

Solution.

Go.

Activate.

Process.

Challenge completed.

Next challenge.

But once again I’m just a Roomba. Think about Gates. Musk. Jack Dorsey.

HUGE projects that started with one idea, and a first, basic, simple step.