Wanzology

 IfYoureNotLivingInTheSolution

Yada. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Wanz here welcoming you to another episode of WANZOLOGY! Yup, and if you're in Seattle right now, or in the greater Pacific Northwest area, it's hot. So, if I all of a sudden stop talking, it's because I melted.

Anyway, uh, let’s see what else is going on. Um, I still am waiting for someone to email me about blogs. So if you're familiar with how to put together a blog, uh, email me at info@thewanz.com , info at T H E W A N Z. com. I'd greatly appreciate it.

So, we are again, digging into a chapter. This is your chapter of #THEBOOKOFWANZ. Today's chapter is: IF YOU'RE NOT LIVING IN THE SOLUTION THEN YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM

We can be our own worst enemies sometimes we tell ourselves things that just aren't true based on the expectation that we're supposed to know everything. So, when we get into situations and become confused by them, sometimes we freeze, caught like a deer in the headlights. We wonder, WTF to do? I used to spend so much time talking about what the problem was, why it was, and how it felt that I forgot that I had to actually DO something before anything would or could change.

Action is the creator of change. To do nothing keeps one in the problem. To make excuses only delays moving towards the solution. The solution is all we seek. But, we get so caught up in the pain and discomfort of the problem, it’s like we get used to feeling bad and choose to stay in the pain.

Every journey begins with that first step. Finding the faith and courage to move towards a solution isn't always easy but, it is usually necessary. Trust yourself. You know more than you tell yourself. If you're not sure, ask someone you trust who will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. Honest information is crucial to making a good decision. Don't stay in the problem, move towards the solution, no matter how fearful you are about it.

Man, living in the problem, those are usually marked by, “I can't”, “I don't understand why it happened”, and “why do people do this to me”, and “the world sucks”, and “I can't afford this”, and “they don't like me”, and “why would somebody talk about me behind my back?” It's like, dude, dudette, just because it's your life. Doesn't always mean everything is about you. Just because it's your life doesn't mean that everything is about you. A lot of things are because it is your life, but, there are things that happen outside of your life. And the power you have is how you're gonna deal with what those things are.

How you gonna live with it? You see that it's raining outside, so what are you gonna do? Go out without a jacket? Without an umbrella? Without a hat? I don't think so. You just gonna stand out in the rain? Or stand undercover while you wait for the bus or whatever transport you're using to get wherever you're trying to go?

You have to do something. Life is a participatory, a participatory sport. And in order to play, you have to participate, and if you don't participate, there's no chance that you can win and you'll probably lose. I've been known to say many, many, many, many, many times, you’re going to miss a hundred percent of the opportunities that you don't seem
so you need to put yourself in a position where it's possible one will come trouncing by you. Say, you come to work one morning, and when you get to your desk or wherever you are, and you can't log into the system. Password's right, everything looks right, but you still can't get in. You go to your inbox, and there's an email from your boss. “Come see me immediately when you get this.” Great. And when you go in, the door is closed behind you, and you sit and talk about all sorts of things, but the bottom line is, you're getting let go. Great. So you go back to your desk, and you get all your stuff, tell everybody else what's going on. Of course, they already knew, and you take all your stuff to the car and then you go somewhere. What do you do? What do you do?

This happened to me as a response to COVID, I was working from home, and I couldn't log in. I didn't understand why I couldn't log in. So, of course, being the test engineer that I am, I started from the simplest and worked my way back to the most complex, well, no actually I did it the opposite way. I started at the most complex possibility and then it was just simple. I checked email and that's where I found out I had been let go. Great. And there were directions, you know, instructions, what I was supposed to do, and so I did that and that was a year and a half ago. It was like 19 months ago and it still bothers me. I've never been let go from a job before, and I've never been out of work for as long as I've been out of work between 2023 and 2024. And at 62 years old, let me tell you, it is no cake walk because your options are somewhat limited, close enough to retirement, but not quite there yet. You have savings, you have 401k, you have stocks. But that's supposed to be the nest egg that you build your retirement on. So now what do you do? Well, I thought I would just learn a new skill and get back into the game. Five months, I studied every day, learning how to, how to code because In my profession as a software test engineer, the switch had already been made from manual testing going to automated testing, but I didn't know how to code, and I didn't have a position that would teach me how to code.

So, here I was trying to learn how to code, and I'd spend a couple hours going through, What seemed like a zillion job descriptions and applied for ones that matched what I had just been doing. And after about two months, three months, I was like, “I've never gotten a phone call. I've never gotten anything that told me I had a shot at a job.”

And I went back and looked over the applications that I put in the day before, read through them slowly, and got to the requirements. And usually the first, second, or third item was ‘X’ amount of years with ‘Y’ programming language…’years’ with programming language. I'd been studying for four and a half, five months. So, why would they hire someone who didn't have at least one year of programming under their belt? That took a lot of wind out of my sails. So, I spent about two weeks really trying to keep myself from spinning off the planet, reminding myself that everything's gonna be okay, I'm not gonna be out on the street, reminding myself that answers will come,
I just have to remember, be looking for them. But the hard part was, it was very difficult to keep myself from looking at my position, my, my, my, my circumstance. I didn't have an answer and I stressed out. You know, you do weird things when you stress out. I started spending money, didn’t know what I was going to do.

Kind of pulled things back. And you know, a couple of people were very, very supportive and said, don't worry, it'll be okay. It'll be okay. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, how? It's fine. The suggestions were all the same. Why don't you do ‘X’, ‘Y’, or ‘Z’? And I'm like, “if I would've been able to, I would've already. Don't you think?” “Oh yeah, yeah. Well, you could always go on The Masked Singer.” Yeah. Nobody's gonna put me on The Masked Singer, because no one on The Masked Singer knows anything about me, nor would they care. It would stump everybody. Yeah, who's the guy in the unicorn costume? Oh, it's Wanz, the guy who sings “Thrift Shop”. And everybody will just turn and look at each other and go, “Who?” …exactly. Plus, I watched a lot of those reality shows when they were first beginning. Realizing they're run by producers, and those producers go over all the applicants and decide how they're going to structure the show to get to a certain point where people who watch the show can actually call in and vote, right? So basically, it's a rigged game. The Voice or American Idol, to a certain extent, they're all rigged by the record companies. To find out who the next superstar artist could be. It's marketing.

So yeah, that's why I don't do those things. I figure I'm a well-rounded individual. I've got a good shot. I've spent now a month looking at transferable skills and I still haven't even found a title that interests me by now. It's like July of 2023. My unemployment runs out in October, that's when things will start to get serious because I won't have any income. So what do I do? Talk to a lot of friends, got a lot of input, and the popular topic was, why don't you go into public speaking? You're really good in front of people.
And you like talking to kids. Well, there was an idea that I'd been hearing about for four or five years, but just never took seriously. And as it turns out, I had a friend who was involved in the professional speaker’s community. So I had lunch with him and he actually helped me lay out a plan and I got started, and by the end of 23, I was ready to start launching myself. By the end of January of ‘23, I had no idea how to launch myself and that the opportunities and places I thought I could go had already picked whatever speaker they were going to have. And it was getting to be the end of the year. So, that was discouraging, but I kept going, working on music, teaching myself how to play guitar, again, trying very hard every day when I woke up not to think about what had come the day before. That's living in the problem. To just rehash where you are, or what you've done, is living in the problem, and it doesn't really change anything. It never changes, until, based on where you are, you start figuring out where you want to be, where you want to go.

Nobody leaves the house without a destination. Nobody just leaves the house and walks randomly one direction or the other, or just gets in their car and just sits there. Or goes and sits at a bus stop and takes the wrong bus just to go somewhere different. That rarely, rarely ever happens. If you need to go to the store and get milk, you probably have a good idea of what store you're going to get to, how you're going to get there, how long it's going to take you to get there, where the milk is in the store, and how long it's going to take you to get back. It's all planned out before you even start the car. Life is kind of the same way. Life really doesn't make sense if you have no idea. That's a problem. A big ass ship having no rudder, not having any money, but needing to pay to use the stall in the bathroom. That's a problem. And humans get really good at identifying a problem. Car doesn't work. Job sucks. Relationship sucks. Kids won't listen. Grandkids never come to visit. It's always something. Oh, this isn't working right. Oh, I tried to make this recipe and it doesn't taste very good. It's always something. The question is, do you ever look at it objectively? Meaning, can you get outside of yourself and look at what the problem really is? And this, for me, was a problem. My biggest challenge was being able to see a problem from outside. Because I was really good at blaming it on everybody and everything. It was ‘so and so's’ fault. If it would have happened three hours later, this wouldn't have happened. Oh, if I would have just done this, or that.

I was told a little story about a recovery speaker named Sandy B. Sandy B had a little saying. It goes something like this, I'm paraphrasing. “Once something has happened, you can't change it. You can only decide how you're going to react to what has happened.”

I, being Mr. I Think I'm Smart Guy, I had to like, make things really, really, really, really simple. The sun comes up. I don't have anything to do with it. When I wake up, the sun is up. Or it's going to come up. Now what? Not like I can stop the sun, but the challenge now becomes What am I going to do?, and it's that doing part that people tend to shy away from. Don't you know that you have to do something in order for ‘some-thing’ to happen? You have to. You can make all the choices in the world, but if you never act on any of those choices, what really are you doing? My pops would say, “Make sure you know the difference between wasting time and treading water.” What that means is, if you're treading water, that's where you see how far you've come, get your bearings on where you're going, and decide when to start going that direction.

But if you just keep swimming and you don't really look at anything, you're wasting time. You can sit on the couch and do nothing. But if you're sitting on the couch doing nothing and that nothing includes, doing Google searches on synonyms for skills that you have or qualities that you have so that you can put the job that you'd like, plus the synonym to search for jobs, which I did and I applied, but never got a call back for an interview. So the speaking thing was kind of dead in the water and lo and behold in one of my email boxes was a email from the local community college that had a voiceover class.

Well, it has been said that I have a nice voice and I should do voice work okay, so I went to the class and I couldn't stop smiling through the two hour class because everything that was being talked about and covered was I was capable of. I went in wondering and I came out chomping at the bit because I didn't have to wonder anymore. I knew this was a path for me to take. So now, a couple of weeks after that class, I'm waiting for the program to actually start so that I can learn from professionals, how to do voiceover work, how to produce it, how to pitch it, how to put myself in a position where I can get listened to, um, and if I get offered a gig, how to negotiate that gig, how to market myself, all the things that I'll need to give me a fighting chance of landing voiceover work. I'm in process now, but I had to do something and I had to be paying attention or else I never would have seen the ad for that class. So the lesson here is, it's great to understand what the problem is, but always remember, the problem will not be solved until you and only you do something. They say “faith without works is dead”, and life without action is worthless. That's not life. That's, that's like being a carpet or something.

Remember, IF YOU'RE NOT LIVING IN THE SOLUTION, THEN YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM. Also keep this in mind, if you don't fail, how are you going to learn anything? I mean, I was scared to try things, right? Until I started figuring out what I had learned when I didn't succeed. You have to try. Yoda's logic is flawed. Yoda says “do or do not. There is no try”, but if you don't try, you'll never find out whether you do or do not. It's the result of a try. And my pop said all the time, “Nothing beats a try, but a fail”. Seems simple to a lot of people was not simple to me. Took me years to figure that out, years. And some days, I still don't get it! But I never stopped trying. I never stopped trying. Remember? Answered a phone call, got out of bed, went and recorded for a guy and it blew up to be the key to all my dreams coming true? Remember that?

You never know. Which is why you try. You try to find out. So go find your own answers. Plot your course. Make sure you have enough supplies and try. If you fail, you’re closer to the solution than you are the problem.

Hey, if you have any feedback or something like that, or you would to like discuss this further, hit me up. info@thewanz.com.

Thanks again for tuning in on this week's episode of WANZOLOGY and I will see you next week.

Bye.