In the spirit of all things fishy, I was tagged by a good friend but I failed to release myself. Sound odd? This just means that I was too lazy/pre-occupied/marginally busy to be courteous enough to pass on the tag to someone else.

The small problem here is that besides several friends (including my taggee) I don’t know anyone else who blogs. So I guess my brain stalled on this quandary for a few days.

The best thing I can do is to follow the rules, by highlighting the rules for tagging, and then hope that someone stumbles blindly onto my blog and takes some kind of pity on me.

If you are reading this now, and you can afford me a morsel of pity, please participate in the bloggers “tag and release” program and follow the following rules. Your help (by virtue of your interest) is already much appreciated!

Back to the very brief rules; Once you’re tagged, you need to mention 5 things about yourself that others don’t know. Then you need to tag up to 5 others (I don’t think I can actually tag anyone else as mentioned as I don’t know other bloggers).

Remember this isn’t a chain letter, but an “entrepreneur insight provider”, so don’t be self conscious, just let yourself go and have some fun whilst sharing yourself with some strangers! They may not be so estranged once you share your secrets.

Now back to me. What are my 5 secrets/little known facts?

1. I will be retired by the age of 45. Whilst this fact is known by a few of my closer (or nosier) friends, many people don’t know this. This thought is firmly linked in a previous entry called “Blogging in the Matrix”.

Essentially I don’t want to be living other people’s dreams in 8 years time. Retirement for me refers to doing whatever job I chose to regardless of pay. Pure freedom to make my own choices, Monday to Friday, sounds good don’t you think?

2. This one is a whole lot less esoteric. When I was about 6 or 7 my brother and I were convinced that if we ate a handful of bird seed then when would be able to fly. We tried this out numerous times by jumping from the top of the chook pens.

Luckily the chook house was obscured from the view of the kitchen window so mum couldn’t see our crazy behaviour. Speaking of mum this also leads me to my third and even weirder secret.

3. Also whilst quite young (around the same age as above), mum convinced my brother and I that we didn’t need Peanut butter and margarine on our bread.

Now I know we did it tough in those early years but mum come on. Do you really think that it was humane to make us believe that if we imagined opening an invisible jar that we could spread “Footy Paste” on our bread. OK I concede that it made David and I play much better football, but just a little bit of peanut butter that’s all we needed. No wonder we crave it so much now!

4. I am secretly waiting for someone to leave me untold sums in their will. It would really help if I had a long lost aunt or uncle. It would also help me greatly if:

a) they knew who I was,

b) Regretted not having seen me for so many years

c) actually had some reasonable amounts of cash or property (preferably mortgage free) and

d) had no one else left to bequeath the said assets to. All of this happens and I could actually make number one above happen a whole lot quicker. 

5. I like to think of myself as something of a fit person. However very recently I have been diagnosed with Sleep Apnoea. I had always thought that this is what those people on the biggest loser got. Not me. Not the guy who exercises 5-6 times most weeks.

I knew I had a problem when I started to wake most days feeling more tired than before I went to bed. A trip to a sleep school helped to confirm that I have a moderate dose of apnoea.

Treatment includes either being hooked up to the Darth Vader machine at night (good bye sex life!) or I can get a dental splint made. The splint I wear each night to ensure good airways so it is lot more user friendly in the bedroom.

Seeing as though number 4 is only semi-serious, and given that you are still reading (thanks for that charity) here is a bonus secret for you. Let’s call it number 4 part b.

4b. I am also waiting for something else besides the secret inheritance. I think I am patiently waiting for both my mother and brother to pass away.

Don’t worry this isn’t related to the desire for financial freedom, neither has the surplus funds to allow me to book any long term vacations. Rather both have their illnesses or demons (or actually a mix of both) that will cut their lives prematurely short.

My Mum has severe heart issues that have caused numerous heart attacks/strokes of varying degrees of severity. On top of this she also continues to smoke. She would rather have it this way in lieu of losing her “friends” (that is what she refers to her cigarettes as)!

David has a different problem. I am not sure if it is the least of his problems, but he is an alcoholic. Possibly now in some level of recovery, or maybe now he is just much more adept in hiding it from his family. I think this is a skill that alcoholics develop. A little game of cloak and dagger when family is around to reduce the level of fuss and possible intervention.

David’s other little health issue is the brain cancer that appears to be on some kind of hiatus. Three years ago he was diagnosed as having less than 6 months to live. A very aggressive form of brain cancer had to be cut out of his brain.

David decided not to undergo Chemo therapy, although he did do the radio therapy. Apparently Chemo makes the patient feel really sick, and David figured that he would rather enjoy what time he had left fishing and smoking (yes another one) rather than throwing up. Makes perfect sense to me.

Unfortunately his drinking also escalated, again driven by a low carefactor given the whole cancer thing. Well the drinking seems to have helped in the short term because David’s cancer has gone into remission. No one can tell for how long, it may be days or years before it kick starts again. In the mean time bring on the fish, the rugby, the cricket, and the alcohol! 

OK Stevie, my bit is done. Sorry for the delay and the feigned embarrassment! Cheers to everyone else, and thanks for the interest!

Two things strike me as funny about bloggers.

Firstly, we now live in a world that compels us to publicly want to share our rants and raves. It’s not enough just to share them with your partner or friends on a one-to-one basis. Things are so extreme and mixed up that the only way we can get satisfaction is to go online and post our truest inner thoughts & feelings.

Secondly, once we post our therapeutic rants, we all suddenly get shy. We want to hush up what we have done, so no one knows what we have written! To quote a colleague (Dan, 2006), “That’s just weird”! 

However I fully understand. Whilst we are were we are, and doing what we do, we are obliged to tow the line. We can’t be seen to be “laughing outside the square” (Hoggie, 2006), we need to conform to what is expected of us.

Until we have the “freedom” (Stevie, 2006) to choose how we make a living, we need to be viewed as a well behaving cog in the wheel of conformitism! Otherwise we don’t have the financial security or the means to do anything else. That surely sucks, in a way that many people don’t even realise. Why don’t they realise it?

Many people are living a life that is ordinary. They just exist, getting by from pay to pay, from holiday to holiday! Does this sound familiar? My friend (Bill, 2006) will know exactly who I am talking about. People who have grand ideas (aka the elevator marketing guru), but prefer to maintain their not so grand careers working for the cow people.

Very few people have the insights or mental fortitude to do it any other way. Or maybe even circumstance has worked against them, leaving them without opportunity. Either way, they are trapped in a matrix that will (if left as is) last for most of their working lives.

This leads me to the reason behind this site. It’s OK to feel trapped. It’s OK to feel like a mouse in a wheel. A mouse that is chasing other people’s cheese! But when you wake up one day and realise that it’s not your cheese, then it’s time to act. It’s time to develop a plan to escape the matrix.

You don’t have to leave the matrix tomorrow or even next year. But you had better start to develop a plan that will enable you to escape at some point. If you don’t, then one day you will wake and realise that it is too late to do so.

When it’s time to take control, the first step is to realise that only one person can make this happen. That is you.