Wanzology

 Odie, o. Welcome to another Wednesday, and if it's Wednesday, you know it's time for WANZOLOGY, Baby. Uh huh. How’you doing? You made it this far. I think you can go farther. If you don't, we may have to talk. I'm saying. Hey, uh, we're getting into the nitty gritty middle of hashtag THE BOOK OF WANZ, and this chapter is another truth that was discovered, uh, when I was touring with Macklemore: WITHOUT DREAMS, WE ONLY EXIST. WE NEVER REALLY LIVE.

Some folks live their dreams, some can never remember them. Some believe every single thing in their dreams will come true, some don't. Replace dreams with “aspirations”. Does it feel the same? And if ‘it’ feels different, ‘how’ does it feel different?

As a kid, I dreamed of being a famous singer. I sang anytime I could, wherever I was, no matter who was there. In line at the grocery, on my bicycle, in my car, or at my job, it didn't matter. Then came a period of my life where I felt I had to let that dream go. I believed that the opportunity to be famous had passed me by, and I needed to concentrate on being a better father, a better employee, and friend. I needed to be a better human, and by my example, hope that others would become more content with not reaching their dreams. Then I ran into a guy in his early forties who had no aspirations, no motivations, no dreams. I'd never heard of such a thing. He wanted many things. To be successful, support his family, get off dope, and booze. But he had no real belief he ever would. He was very hopeless. I never encountered such a person. I thought everybody had some idea of who they wanted to be and had a path to walk to become that. But here was a full-grown man who, because there was no path, had no dream. He just existed. He was like we are when we want something from the grocery store, but as soon as we walk in We have no idea what that is, and we wander the aisles looking for something, but have no idea what.

Have you ever seen a garden path? Traditional ones are made up of either stones or a walkway of some sort. Its purpose is to lead you through the garden from beginning to end. What if we had the power to create our own path? Lay our own stones? What if it were up to us how we got through the garden? Life is a garden of sorts with different things to see and paths to take. What do you have to know in order to lay your path? You already have the knowledge. Like me, you may sometimes lack gumption, but you have an idea. For me, the question was always, “do I have the courage to do this or that?”, or, “What happens next?”, or, “Is this the right or wrong thing for me?”

The answers to these questions became the bricks I lay and the directions I lay them in. Can you identify your dreams, build the bricks, and lay them to set your path? Tis an interesting question. Do you have the power and the privilege to set your own path? That is the question. Wherever you are right now, you didn't get there by luck, did you? You didn't get there completely by skill, did you? I don't think so. I think you got there simply because you kept trying. You kept moving forward, especially when it seemed like you were doomed and you were never going to get ‘there’. You kept going. Maybe you went a little sideways and bided your time. Maybe you just stopped and tread water, so to speak, for a little while, just for a little while, so you could gather some strength, some sense of, “what the hell am I doing?” It happens to a lot of us. It happens, to all of us.

So where do you think you want to go? Remember when you were a kid? When you were a kid, it was like, “oh, I wanna be a fireman.”, “I wanna be a doctor!”, “I wanna be… fill in the blank. But as you got older, whatever it is that you wanted to be changed, right? Different things became attractive for different reasons. Right? Now that you're older, how many of those things still exist? How many of those things do you still want to be? And if you changed, what changed? And why? Hopefully it wasn't because you just gave up. Oh, I'll never be ‘fill in the blank’. Hopefully, you said this looks better. I'm going to try because I think I can do that; and ‘that’ is like better than ‘this’. Your journey is your journey, right? I mean, I left college because I didn't have any money to keep going. So, when I got to Seattle, within two weeks I had my first job. I was a record store clerk. Tower Records in the U-District in Seattle. I loved the job because it had to do with music. The people that I met were in the music business here in Seattle. So after work, where did I go? I went to wherever they went. Where the music was. Hung out. Made friends. Found people to join a band with, and kept going. Because the dream was to be a famous singer.

In 89, I left the record store job to be a delivery driver for a hair products distributor. Doesn't sound like much, but it was paying more than the record gig was. And I got to go everywhere because I was driving five days a week, eight hours a day, at least, visiting hair salons and dropping off product, collecting payment and going back to the warehouse. Hmm. Wait, you want to pay me to visit hair salons, which are mainly owned by women, you want to pay me to visit women all day. Alright, no problem! But even that had to change. Because as I got older, I had picked up a family, I mean, I had shacked up with a person who had kids, and kids are expensive. No doubt.

So by the time the late 90s came around, and I was still doing music, by the way, by the time the late 90s came around, I had to make more money because the kids were getting older and things were more expensive. Well, I had this interest in music, and I was beginning to become a little fascinated with computers. So by a strange twist of events, in 2000, I got my first software test engineering job, which led to 10 years of working contracts at Microsoft, on various teams, testing various things, but learning how to test software. Now, Microsoft at the time was through its heyday, in the early 2000s, but I found a spot, because they You know, the team I got onto was testing music components. Sound cards, um, keyboards, and, and whatnot. Applications. I remember being on a team for two years that tested digital cameras, which were at the time, a new thing. Some of them were on phones. Your BlackBerry. Some of them were on little Casio devices like pens. It was very strange. But I learned how to test and make sure that what was required had actually been fulfilled by developers. I still do the test thing, even though in 2023, I got laid off. I've never not had a job before. 2023 was a challenging year for me. I didn't know what I wanted to be, I just thought of what I could be. I spent the first third of the year studying how to code. Because my dream was still to be a software test engineer, but the requirements to be one had changed. Thrift Shop was long gone. Musically, I still wanted to write, I still wanted to perform, but I had to get an income. I'd never, I'd never tried to be more as a musician without having a day job. So the priority was get another day job. And since all my experience was in software, I needed to like improve my credentials.

Well, after about four months, I started realizing I had never gotten a call back on any job I had applied for. Why was that? My mind was telling me that I was defective, and you know, I just wasn't quote unquote ‘good enough’. I soon came to realize it was because the job requirements were calling for years of experience coding. I only had months. What was I to do? What was I to do? At 62 years old, I'm unemployed, and have no real idea of what my income's gonna be. Know what I did? I looked back on my career as a person because I've been a human for a long time and as a person, I figured it out. People have been telling me for a long time, “You should really think about public speaking”, “Have you ever thought about public speaking?”, “Hey Wanz! Man, you'd make a great public speaker!”. I just never believed them before. Well now I, I had to. I didn't have to learn how to do it, I'd been doing it all along. I just never realized that it would be a path that I could actually walk. So, after talking to a few friends, I joined a speaker's agency and learned that, yeah, there is a place for me out there. I'm just not sure where it is. I also believed what I was told when, “Man, you ever thought about doing a podcast?”, well now, here we are, in the umpteenth episode of WANZOLOGY. I never dreamed of having a podcast, but here I am with a podcast.

Hmm, I go back to that person that I, that I knew, he didn't seem to have any hope. Now that changed after he came to the realization that he could be whatever he wanted to be. He just had to figure out what the destination for him was and start laying the bricks of his own path to get there. I think everyone is like that. I think everyone goes through a period of time when they're not sure if the path that they're on is the path they're supposed to be on. I think it's natural. But what do you do when you're definitely not sure who you are and what you're supposed to be doing? Hmm. From my experience, what you do is you remember the things that you like to do. What are the things that make you happy? What did I learn from two and a half years of touring with, with Macklemore? Living out the very dream that I had had since I was in single digits. My experience was, if you do something that makes you happy, and especially if it makes someone else happy, never, ever, ever stop doing it because you just never know where it could take you. I never stopped singing, and when the opportunity came, I sang for somebody and it turned into Thrift Shop, which led to every single dream I'd ever had coming true.

My dreams have changed. What do I dream of? I dream of being able to share my story with people, have them hear it, and have it move them in a direction that's best for them. I dream of My story showing others how they already have the stones to lay their own path in their own garden. I dream of being of service to others in a way that works out best for them. I dream of being happy because I could make someone else happy. Which is the difference between just kind of sitting around wishing and being.

Remember in the first Matrix movie, Neo, he pulls Trinity up and all three of them stand together in disbelief. Morpheus said, “Neo, soon you're going to realize the same as I did. There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” My friends, you can walk your own path. You already do. Every single day. And as long as you wake up and draw breath, you have an opportunity to extend your path from wherever you were. You can still dream. You can dream about being a fireman or a policeman or a doctor like you did when you were a kid or whatever. How are you going to get there? It's just another destination in our journey of life. How are you going to get there? The answer, any way you choose. The power and the choice is, and always has been, and always will be yours. Never give up on your dreams. Never. You just never know what's going to happen next.

So be ready to make the next choice. Right on. Thanks for sticking with me today. I hope, I hope, I hope you're digging this.

You can find #THEBOOKOFWANZ on Amazon. Hashtag T H E W A N Z O F W A N Z, all one word. Hashtag The Book of Wanz, and grab your own copy. Like me, you're probably going to go back over it more than a few times to realize things that you already knew, but really didn't believe. Well, believe it.

You got this far? Let's go further. Have a great day. I'll see ya.
Peace and hair grease.