When I originally heard about this competition (Aug. 10th) the #1 school had less than 30,000 votes. Divide that figure by 5 because each person can vote 5 times per school and that’s only 6,000 people voting. That number actually shocked me. Facebook supposedly has 150 million active users in the US (see Facebook Stats). The competition had already been running for about a month (it started Jul. 7th) and THAT was all the votes #1 had? 6,000 people out of 150 million? For $500,000?! The numbers, in my humble opinion, didn’t stack up.

I expressed interest to St. Marcus about wanting to help, brainstormed a little bit throughout the week and “officially” started working on the project the following Monday (August 16th).

The Idea

The first thing I noticed was that there were two schools from Milwaukee in the top 50. I figured the best way to get people to vote would be making it about Milwaukee and not the individual schools. What came to mind was making a landing page with information about the competition, buttons to share the page, and instructions on how to vote. It was also important to stress the idea of keeping $1 million in the region (the Kohl’s company headquarters is right next to Milwaukee).

I juggled a bunch of different domain names in my mind, but nothing seemed good enough. Later that night (Wednesday, Aug. 11th) POOF! It comes to me. 1mil4mil.com! It was perfect! (At least I thought so at the time .) I grabbed my notebook and scribbled this:

Late Night Scribbles

I initially thought 1mil4mil.com was awesome. It didn’t feel so awesome when I woke up (felt a little cheesy). That was OK though. The idea was there.

Things Get Translated

I started working on things the following week. Tuesday (Aug. 17th) I stopped by Translator’s lab hours to brain storm the whole vote getting thing. As a side note, I HIGHLY enjoyed my experience at “the lab.” I love brainstorming and it’s cool that their agency opens their doors twice a week to let weird guys like me stop by and babble (and listen to babble).

The majority of that morning was spent brainstorming around the Kohl’s competition. I was impressed with the amount and quality of good ideas thrown around the room that day. I want to give “The Brew” honorable mention for essentially saying what I jotted down last week (make it about Milwaukee, not the schools, great minds think alike ). I also really liked the Twibbon (a viral spreading badge) idea from Mark, but I wasn’t very familiar with the service and didn’t know if people would actually use it (do people actually use it? )

When I finally (sheepishly) brought up the name I came up with for a landing page (1mil4mil.com) it got bounced around the room a bit and Sara G. eventually says “How about 1mil4mke.com?” I loved it. Bought.

I also loved the Translator Lab and decided to make it a part of my weekly routine (after I was done with the competition). Now that I had the name, it was time to get to work.

And Then There Was One…

I had a bunch of ideas coursing through my mind about what to do with 1mil4mke. The main landing page was obvious, but I wanted to do some other things. Things that came to mind were:

• “Custom” landing pages for traffic from Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. (with videos and content specifically for that traffic)
• A recruitment landing page (I actually made it but… I didn’t have the time/energy to move it forward)
• A page explaining other ways to help (with copy for email lists, banners/badges for blogs/websites, etc.)

I eventually had to buckle down and just focus on getting the one landing page up. Time was (well, as I’m writing this IS) a MAJOR hurdle and although I understood the importance of having a “social media army” I wasn’t sure if one could be assembled in a timely enough fashion. Henry (the superintendent of St. Marcus) needed the landing page finished for a talk he was giving one evening, so I cranked out a really basic one (Thursday, Aug. 19 some time before 5PM).

1mil4mke Basic Site

After that, it was my girlfriend’s birthday weekend and her best friend was in town, but I managed to get a couple more things done. One was adding a video and Facebook like button to the page.

1mil4mke 2.0

Intelligence Gathering And Strategizing

I started working out of St. Marcus the following Tuesday (August 23rd). I knew I needed to get a lot of eyeballs on the website, but I wasn’t sure how to go about doing it. The top thing on my mind was leveraging people who already had a following (in the form of a blog, email list, twitter account, YouTube channel, Facebook Fan Page/Friends, etc.) and get them involved with vote getting. But that would have been doing the “army building” thing that… I didn’t seem to have time to do. And I knew one tweet, blog, status update, email or video wasn’t going to be enough (even from people with a large following). They would need to be “on board.”

“Going viral” was a plan but… Going viral really isn’t a plan. I’m confident in my abilities to come up with a “viral campaign”, but not one that would have generated the strength and speed in the time that it needed to happen (it ends tomorrow, Sep. 3rd).

Then I decided to investigate what the other top schools were doing or had done to get where they were. A few schools had contests (giving away iPads and the like), but I don’t think that’s as effective as people make it out to be. The main trend I saw for the top schools was a lot of hustle (volunteers out signing people up at various locations), a compelling story with media/blog coverage (the high school hit by a tornado for example) and/or a strong network to leverage (love’em or hate’em, the Jewish community “kept their pimphand strong” in this contest).

If we were (are!) going to have any chance of winning this, we needed to come up with some kind of combination of all three.

The Stunt

Henry decided it was necessary that we came up with some sort of “publicity stunt” to capture attention and then get the community to rally behind cause. That week was an interesting week (August 23rd-27th). It was interesting because in the span of that week I watched the team go from contemplating quitting to coming up with an “epic” idea. The idea came from Henry himself. The idea was that he and administrators from the other 2 schools would camp out on the roof until they were all in the top 20 or until the competition was over.

It seemed like something that could work marvelously (media coverage, lots of votes, etc.) or fail terrible (they end up on a roof and no one cares). Lucky for us, people cared.

That Friday, the plan was set, the people were ready to go and the news agencies had been contacted. Now “all” I had to do was take the new design Kate hooked up for me and apply it to the website.

Internet. Serious Business.

I should have spent the weekend working on getting the new and improved 1mil4mke website put together. Instead I was working on the Xbox giveaway thing, hoping something magical would blossom from that. Hindsight. It be 20/20. I didn’t get the website done, the Xbox giveaway didn’t blossom and when I turned the corner into the parking lot Monday morning (August 30th, 3 days ago) I see this:

Oh Shi...

All I could think to myself was “Oh shi…” There was also a news van there. Doulbe shi… Then I find out 3 news stations (FOX6, WISN12, CBS58) had been there or were coming! Tripple shi..!

Now my crappy website and crappy video was on the news! Aaaaaah! Things weren’t terrible though. It appeared that the site was working as people were Facebook sharing the page, Facebook liking the page and voting. But that new site needed to get up!

BrennanMKE To The Rescue!

My days all are fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure Brennan rolled in Monday afternoon. He went digital ninja style on the website design and left us with a much awesomer looking page:

1mil4mke 3.0

The Reality

It’s crazy what happened in the span of a few weeks. What began as some late night scribbles turned into a right sexy looking page (thanks to Kate and Brennan!) The idea didn’t just sit on the web either. It’s on T-Shirts, news casts and thanks to a generous donation of resources from Lamar, it’s even on a billboard!

1mil4mke Billboard

I’ve long been interested in this “idea to reality” thing. It’s VERY VERY interesting to me. It boggles my mind the things that ideas can do. Scribble on a piece of paper -> digital billboards across the city in 3 weeks! That’s interesting. What’s REALLY interesting is that the bulk of things happened in less than a week!

One More Day

There’s one more day to vote and help get votes. If you read this whole post and STILL haven’t voted, go do it!

[1mil4mke.com]

I’ve learned a ton of stuff, got to meet some pretty cool people and feel like I was a part of something that was pretty epic. Those are the things I’ll share in the next post (with pictures and video to boot!)

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I meant to make a video/blog about this earlier in the week, but… Things have been pretty crazy. Let me give you the back story… Oh! And Chinese lessons will start up again the week after the competition is over (September 8th).

The Project

Last week I heard about a contest that the company Kohl’s is having. They’re giving away ten million dollars ($10,000,000) to 20 different schools. Every school in the country is competing to win five-hundred thousand dollars ($500,000). The money is going to go to the 20 schools that get the most votes during their campaign. There’s an awesome school here in Milwaukee (St. Marcus) that was already in the top 50 schools and they want to use the money to help with expansion.

I got all excited because it was an “epic” project to work on (you know how I love epic projects). So ever since last week I’ve been brainstorming ways for them to win, and all of this week I’ve been putting videos and webpages together. (One page being a contest to win an Xbox 360 Slim, go vote and sign up if you haven’t yet!)

The Money

Now… You know me (or you should!) I was prepared to go into bipolar-epic-manic-LETS-DO-THIS mode without the incentive of money (although I do need to start making some of that stuff ). The school being AWESOME is reason enough for me! BUT the superintendent of the school wanted to compensate me for my time, so he said he’d write up a contract. He told me the hourly would be low, but that he’d make it performance based. So if they win… a bonus!

Yesterday he hands me the contract and the hourly was… I guess it was “low” in terms of what people charge, but it was a lot higher than what I’m currently getting ($0/hour playing Xbox and eating sardines lol). So I’m already happy with the hourly and BOOM! A $5,000 bonus if they win.

Now I suppose I could have moved forward as planned and tried to keep the $5,000 for myself but… It doesn’t feel right. There are going to be a bunch of other people helping out, plus I had a goal for how much money I wanted to make this month. That goal was $500 (and I was stressing about it at the beginning of the month! lol). The hourly gets me to my goal and some. So… We might as well do something cool with the $5,000 right?

How Should We Spend The $5,000?

OK, this is the part of the blog where you tell me how we should spend this money. I see this money as is another resource to use to make sure St. Marcus wins the $500,000. I want St. Marcus to win the $500,000 more than I want the $5,000, so I’m putting my money where my mouth is!

I see the money working 3 ways:

• We use it to setup some kind of competition
• We use it to “bribe” an “A List” blogger to join our squad (I’ll give an example below)
• Or… The MilTownKlan combines forces of awesomeness, makes sure the school(s) win(s), and then we decide how to use the money for… MORE awesomeness!

The contest is pretty straight forward. We use either cash or prizes to get people to hustle and get votes.

The “A List” blogger thing could be cool. One idea I had was trying to contact Tim Ferriss (for example), letting him know about the competition (he’s hardcore about education reform too) and getting him to feature St. Marcus and some other schools of his choosing in a blog post about the contest. The $5,000 gets used inspire his readers, or… We could buy like 250 copies of his new book when it comes out!

The MilTownKlan option is… Pretty freaking cool. Basically we all come together and work on this in hardcore mode for the next 2 weeks THEN, after we win, we have $5,000 to… Donate, use to setup the MilTownKlan into a real legal asskicking entity, apply towards another epic project (epic projects are FUN), etc… Anyhow, I need your feedback and ideas. The idea would be that we came together as one, VOLTRON style, and turned into an epic Level 5 Tribe “Delivering Win” the way Zappos is “Delivering Happiness.”

The Poll

Let me know what you think. I’ll post the results on Sunday night.

A Video For My Mom

My mom said she liked the TEDTalk videos in my blog posts, so I’m going to try to be regular about doing that. Here’s a good talk about “Tribal Leadership” that I watched the other week. He’ll go into further detail about the “Level 5″ reference I made earlier. You can also listen to the “Tribal Leadership” audio book FOR FREE. [Follow this link for that.]

Livemocha: @miltownkid thanks! we are happy to fix any errors. can you identify the course/unit/lesson number?

I could try to express myself in 140 characters on Twitter, but I thought this could be useful information for them and anyone following my Chinese lessons because I plan on having you use Livemocha in the future (for pronunciation practice).

The two problems I have with the speaking exercises are:

• The pinyin spacing
• No traditional Characters (although I should learn simplified )

The Pinyin Spacing

The first problem is the pinyin spacing. I’m going to use the Grocery Shopping reading as an example:

Jīn wǎn wǒ yào qù shāng diàn mǎi xiē píng guǒ hé shēng cài。Gòu wù lán tài chén le yú shì wǒ huàn chéng yī liàng gòu wù chē。Diàn yuán zhèng zài wèi gù kè chēng xiāng jiāo。 Míng tiān qǐng bāng wǒ cóng shāng diàn mǎi liǎng hé níu nǎi ba。 Wǒ bǎ yī hé jī dàn hé yī hú níu nǎi dǎ fān dào dì shàng le。 Diàn yuán bāng wǒ shōu shi gān jìng bìng bāng wǒ ná le xīn dě。

Another problem I noticed after previewing my post is that the pinyin must be in some funky encoding. I retyped it up all sexy. (Unicode FTW!) (Note: I got a few tones wrong but it’s late and it’s for illustrative purposes only. )

Jīn wǎn wǒ yào qù shāng diàn mǎi xiě píng guǒ hé shēng cāi . Guò wù lán tài chén le yú shì wǒ huàn chéng yī liàng guò wù chē . Diàn yuán zhèng zài wèi gù kè chēng xiāng jiāo . Míng tiān qǐng bāng wǒ cóng shāng diàn mǎi liǎng hé niú nǎi ba. Wo bǎ yī hé jī dàn hé yī hú niú nǎi dǎ fān dào dì shàng le. Diàn yuán bāng wǒ shōu shi gān jìng bìng bāng wǒ ná le xīn de.

The problem with listing it like that is (in my opinion) it makes it unnecessarily harder to read. With each and every sound spaced like that your mind has to figure out where the words are. Removing the spaces makes it SO much easier to read. Like this:

Jīnwǎn wǒ yào qù shāngdiàn mǎi xiě píngguǒ hé shēngcāi . Guòwùlán tài chénle yúshì wǒ huànchéng yī liàng guòwùchē . Diànyuán zhèngzài wèi gùkè chēng xiāngjiāo . Míngtiān qǐng bāng wǒ cóng shāngdiàn mǎi liǎng hé niúnǎi ba. Wo bǎ yī hé jīdàn hé yī hú niúnǎi dǎfān dào dìshàngle. Diànyuán bāng wǒ shōushi gānjìng bìng bāng wǒ nále xīnde.

That’s WAY easier to read AND it makes it easier to look up unfamiliar words (like guowulan, I didn’t know that one!)

Traditional Characters

Why not have them? Google will the work for you. Watch.

今晚我要去商店买些苹果和生菜。购物篮太沉了于是我换成一辆购物车。店员正在为顾客称香蕉。明天请帮我从商店买两盒牛奶吧。我把一盒鸡蛋和一壶牛奶打翻到地上了。店员帮我收拾干净并给我拿了新的。

BLAM!

今晚我要去商店買些蘋果和生菜。購物籃太沉了於是我換成一輛購物車。店員正在為顧客稱香蕉。明天請幫我從商店買兩盒牛奶吧。我把一盒雞蛋和一壺牛奶打翻到地上了。店員幫我收拾乾淨並給我拿了新的。

Took me like 37.8 seconds.

Why Can’t We Make Our Own Readings?

You know what would be really sweet? If I could just make my own readings! Then it would be in the encoding that I wanted, with no spaces the way I like it and… Yeah, that would be sweet. I also didn’t see any “simple” reading for beginners. Like (again, in my opinion) there should be a reading of just the initials and finals for pinyin (or some basic combination of them). Also, there should be some readings that focus on tone practice (I think).

That’s it. I’ll take a look at your flashcard system, but it’s going to have to be PRETTY sexy to pull me away from Anki (or anything else that uses a spaced repetition algorithm.)

[Combinations of initials and finals from Pinyin.info]

Alright. In today’s (laid back on the couch) lesson I went into more depth on pinyin initials. Most sounds in Mandarin are made up of initials and finals (but you know this already as we covered it last week when I introduced initials and finals. )

I’ll quickly cover everything I covered in the video in this blog post.

Listening to and Pronouncing All of the Initials

You can listen to all of the initials on the Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin Speakers website. Just click “Initials” on the left hand side.

Listen to a row, then do your best to pronounce the row. Rinse and repeat as many times as you can stand (5 or more?). Spend some time on that each day until next week and you should be golden for the next lesson.

“Easy” Initials

Here is a list of the initials that I’ll call “easy.” The reason I’m calling them easy is because the pronunciation of these initials are (in my opinion) practically identical to their English counterpart. As I said in the video Wikipedia has a detailed explanation of the pronunciation of initials, but don’t worry too much about the ones below:

• b
• p
• m
• f
• d
• t
• n
• l
• g
• k
• h
• z
• s
• ch
• sh

You already know more than half of the initials without even studying! Yes, there may be some slight variation between how we say (some of) those and a native speaker of Chinese does but that’s something you can correct as you increase your fluency. Don’t worry about that now. Besides, chicks dig dudes with accents anyway right?

The Tricky Initials

Here are the initials you want to spend a little time on. Some are tricky because of how they’re spelled (and other than that they’re easy) and some are tricky because of the pronunciation. Actually… In my opinion there’s only one that is tricky because of the pronunciation and that’s the “c.” To us, it sounds like a combination of the “ts” sound.

So something in pinyin spelled: ca, is spoken like tsa. Just listen to it and practice. We’ll tighten it up later.

Note on the other tricky ones are:

• zh – It’s spelled funny, but sounds pretty much like the j sound.
• r – Looks like r, sounds like r (at first), but it’s a little different. I actually pronounced this wrong for a long time and never had a problem communicating with people. Just listen and try to spot the difference.
• y – Sounds pretty much like y in yes.
• j – Again, pretty similar to a regular English j sound.
• q – Spelled funny be sounds pretty much like the “ch” sound (pinyin or English).
• x – Spelled funny buts sounds pretty much like the “sh” sound (pinyin or English).

One note about the j, q and x is that they’re only used with finals beginning with “i” or “u” (really the ü).

Looking at the Wikipedia explanation of initials makes me think I’m crazy to simplify them so much but… Wikipedia is full of nerds. What I’m telling you is “good enough.” If you want to get nerdly about it one day, great, but this will get you on the fast track to being able to communicate in Chinese (ie. order food, ask for directions, mack chicks, etc.) Get the basics down first, fine tune them later (like I did with the “r” sound and like I’m still doing with the ü sound ).

Practice Makes Perfect But Testing Proves It

So after you’ve spent some time listening to and pronouncing the initials, you’ll need to test yourself. Here are the links to the two places I mentioned in the video to self test:
Hanyu Pinyin Practice for Mandarin Speakers – Just click “Exercises” under “Initials” and it will take you to two options. They’re both good exercises, but the second one will be more useful to you at this stage because we haven’t combined initials and finals yet. Click on “Missing Links” and test away! When you’re done filling everything in, just click on show answers.

PinyinPractice.com – Just listen and choose the correct initial. Pretty simple eh?

More Tools And Websites

I mentioned a couple of new tools I’m playing with at the end of the video. The first one was a website called LiveMocha. To play around there, just create an account and… Start playing around! They have their own help section! If you want to add me as a friend, here’s my profile. You can check out the reading I did there under “Submissions.” Actually… For you lazy folk, here’s the link to it.

Anki – Cramming vocabulary with flashcards is going to be a MAJOR part of my teaching system, so you might as well check that out now. I’ve been looking for a good flashcard system to use and I’m pretty sold on this one from what I’ve seen so far. Download it, play around with it. I’m going to start learning another language soon (probably Japanese) and Anki will play a major role. You can also use it to memorize ANYTHING! I’d also like to mention Supermemo, really quickly as they were the first flashcard manage system I fell in love with. Too bad they don’t have more up-to-date version (spread across multiple OSes).

I Need Feedback!

I don’t care if there’s only ONE person actually following along to any of this as long as I hear from you! I need to know if I’m moving too fast, too slow, if there’s something you have a question about, something you need to know more about, something you need more tools for, etc. Let me know!

This is your one and only chance to get free weekly Chinese lessons online (from me anyway).

He also recommended getting help from friends/family/coworkers/(subscribers? ) to identify what they thought were limiting habits.

Once you make this list of bad habits, the goal is to replace them with good habits. Pretty simple right? Not so simple.

Changing Too Many Habits A Once Is A Bad Habit

The last thing Mr. Canfield mentioned was working on 4 new habits a year. Yep, work on one new habit every 3 months. That seems like way too few right? Like you should be adding a new habit every couple weeks or so. Well… It never seems to work out that way (for me anyway). I recently decided to start doing a bunch of things on a daily basis and track how well I kept up with it. The list was:

• Take my medication
• Brush, Floss and Rinse Teeth (Yeah… This should have been a habit already. )
• Meditate
• Track My Expenses
• Practice Taichi
• Read
• Run/Practice BJJ
• Eat Breakfast
• Write

I only kept a good track record with four of the things. Taking my medication (perfect!), tracking my money, brushing my teeth (missed a day) and writing. I also did pretty good with reading, but only recently. What’s interesting about all of these habits is that they’re habits that I’ve already formed in the past and I’m just bringing them back to the surface… Well, except for brushing my teeth EVERY day. THAT is a new habit in the process (yay!)

So I think Jack is on to something when he mentions focusing on one habit at a time.

21 Days Is A Myth

So you decide to work on one, maybe 2 new habits at a time. How long does it take? Ever hear the line about it taking 21 days? Well according to a post on the PsyBlog (citing this study) it takes a lot longer than 21 days (on average). It actually takes 66 days (on average) to develop a new habit, and the range is anywhere from 18 days to 254 days. There also appears to be a subgroup of people who have a harder time developing a habit than others do.

Looks like Jack might not be too far off again with saying 90 days vs the usual 21-30. So now we get into the meat and potatoes of it.

Note: Missing a day isn’t a big deal like some people think.

How Do You Change Bad Habits?

Well… I can give you the Cliff’s Notes of what Jack C. said:

• List your bad habits and find a “success habit” to replace them with
• Work on one at a time for 90 days at a time
• Put up reminders all over the place so you don’t forget (have friends remind you, setup email/phone alerts, etc.)
• Apply the 100% policy to it (do it NO MATTER WHAT!)

I’m going to take the all of the above information and modify it for myself. The goal is to turn things into a habit. Something that you do pretty much automatically and it feels funny when you don’t do it (it was last night that I didn’t brush my teeth and I felt… gross for not doing it. ).

First I’m going to get into the habit of tracking my habits. I’m currently using JoesGoals.com to track my habits, but anything would work (pen and paper, another website, etc.)

I’m going to use reminders for the habits I’m actively working on (post-it notes, email reminders, etc.)

I’m going to experiment with working on more than one habit at a time. Perhaps I’ll have one “minor” and one “major” habit. Like running every would be a major habit and perhaps eating breakfast everyday would be a minor one.

Then finally I’ll determine when something is a habit based on “feeling” instead of an arbitrary number like 21 or 90. If something takes 200 days to set it, then it takes 200 days. If something only takes 20, great.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, it looks like creating new habits isn’t as simple as people are fooled into believing it is. This probably makes it even HARDER to form new habits since you start with an unrealistic view of the amount of work that will be required to create a new habit.

I’m going to skip my weekly “Pwning Life” update this week and pick it up next week. I still keep an offline journal though. I think I’m going to move all of the pwning life updates to a separate blog and bring the focus of this one back to random thoughts over the next few weeks.

What I forgot to mention in the video!

OK. This is important. After you make your two columns (one for initials and one for finals) you’ll need something to listen to so you know that you’re saying it right. The initials are all pretty easy, except for c, zh, r, q and x. Just don’t worry about those for now.

As for the finals, you can actually listen to those on the listening guide I have listed below. The only problem is that the spelling will be a little different. For example, “uan” is spelled as “wan.” Look at the right side of the table on Pinyin.info for a complete list of final spelling (when they’re standing alone). Then you can look them up on the listening guide.

In this weeks lesson I focused introducing pinyin and the concept of initials and finals. Pinyin is a mandatory building block for learning any level of Chinese. Whether you just want to do basic things like take taxis and order food, or you plan on doing serious business negotiation it’s vital that you master listening to, pronouncing, reading and writing pinyin.

Getting Your Pronunciation Corrected

It’s going to be important that you eventually get your pronunciation corrected by a native speaker (or someone with native speaking abilities). We will tackle that problem in the future. For now, focus on getting the basics of the initials and finals down as well as you can working by yourself.

If you have access to native speakers, ask them for help! If you diligently practice on your own and work with a native speaker once or twice a week, you’ll make really good progress. Even if you don’t have a native speaker close to you, you have the internet (I know you do because you’re reading this ). We’ll cover ways to establish relationships with language partners in the future, but don’t feel like you have to wait for me. Hit up Google and start looking if you’re ambitious.

Pinyin Learning Resources

[Pinyin.info Chart] – Go here to get an overview of all of the initials and finals.

New Concept Mandarin Listening Guide – Use this guide to see what the combination of initials and finals sounds like. Just focus on doing everything using the first tone for now (if you’re new).

[PracticePinyin.com Initials and Finals Test] – After you’ve drilled the list of initials and finals into your head and have spent a lot of time using the listening guide, try testing yourself.

Keep Things Fun!

Don’t work too hard guys! Always keep things fun while your practicing and if you go hardcore (like I used to) remember to take breaks/power naps. If you have any questions or problems let me know in the comments!

Another week another website launch.

Black Horse Taichi

BlackHorseTaichi.org is going to be the place where I discuss the things I’ve learned in martial arts (kung fu, taichi, push hands, brazilian jujitsu), review books, discuss Daoism (Taoism), post videos which I find interesting (and explain what I find interesting about them) and all that sort of thing.

The name Black Horse Taichi was given to me by my Taichi teacher Master Henry Wang when I attended his Taichi Camp last year. I asked him if I could start teaching, he said yes and gave me a name. BOOM!

If you haven’t already check out the the header on BlackHorseTaichi.org (it’s freaking SWEET). It was made by AimlessAnger for free, check him out on his YouTube Channel to enjoy music and design video’s.

Current Blogging Projects

If you been closely or loosely following my videos/blog posts for any amount of time, you’ll know that I tend to get a little “out of control” when it comes to the number of things I attempt to do at once. I believe it’s partly to do with just how and am AND… I guess because I’m bipolar. I’m currently trying to be extremely careful about how many things I commit myself to so I can actually get some things done and make (more efficient) progress in life.

Here are the projects and websites I’ve committed myself to:

• miltownkid.com – One blog and vlog that’s a general update, adventure or something fun posted randomly during the week… or not.
• miltownkid.com – One Chinese “lesson” in a blog and a video posted on Wednesdays.
• miltownkid.com – A personal Pwning Life recapping and goal setting post for the week posted on Sundays.
• PwningLife.com – One blog post and video posted on Sunday interacting with the community, answering questions and sharing tools/tips/tricks.
• BlackHorseTaichi.org – One video and blog post per week discussing an element of martial arts, answering a question or showing stuff from class posted on Tuesdays.

Those are the only blogging projects I’m going to work on right now. I’m going to focus my efforts on maintaining that schedule for at least 2 to 3 months before I add something else (the Chinese lessons are only going to last 2 to three months).

The most likely next candidate for a blog/video hook up is MyDeadXbox.com, my gaming blog. Now that I’m making videos again I’ve had a few people leave comments asking me whether I’m going to start posting videos to that YouTube account again. The answer is yes I will. It will most likely happen in the winter when I’m comfortable with my current schedule, I’m working (making the monies) again and I’m setup for gaming again (I haven’t played ANYTHING since getting back to Milwaukee).

The nook

This past Friday I walked into Barnes and Noble and noticed the new price on the nook ($150). I’ve been wanting to buy an eBook reader FOREVER! Since Sony released the first one about 4 or 5 years ago. I researched it all weekend and decided to pick one up on Sunday. I’m happy with it so far. I’ve loaded up some downloaded PDF books and they work flawlessly. Plus there are TONS of free classics available for reading. I love reading. Let me know if you want a video review of the nook.

The Biploars

I get quite a lot of “silent” commentary about being bipolar (in emails and YouTube messages). I think a lot of people want me to talk about my experience with it some more. That’s cool with me. Just let me know what exactly you’d like to hear about my experience with it and I’ll get to yappin’.

If you feel strange talking about God (or too God ) use something else. A genie, a wealthy benefactor that’s going to make sure what you do is successful, whatever.

miltownkid’s Conversation with God

So God rolls into my house and is all like “WHATEVER YOU DO, YOU’LL BE SUCCESSFUL! TELL ME WHAT THAT SHALL BE YOUNG LAD!”

After changing my pants from being freaked out by the floating head of God that busted through my door, I’d start talking.

Me: I want to be a “Taichi Master” with my own school!

God: That’s easy. Get started. Keep practicing, find some students and look for a location. BOOM!

Me: No no. That’s just the beginning. I eventually want to have locations throughout the US and the world. I also want to hold annual push hands competitions inviting players from around the world. I’d also like to hold an annual summer camp.

God: Anything else?

Me: Yeah. My taichi teacher wants to start a “taichi farm” (a year round place for practicing taichi). I want to help him do that. I think that’s about it with the taichi stuff.

God: Word. What’s next?

Me: I had this VISION a couple years ago. About a movement called “Pwning Life.” I want to share the feeling I had with as many people as I can. First through blogs and videos, then through eBooks, eventually a real book and then seminars. I want this feeling to reach as many people as possible. Even if they don’t like my version of “pwning life” I hope I can at least help them find a version that’s good for them (like material from Anthony Robbins, Jack Canfield or Tim Ferriss). I believe that if everyone was pwining life and doing everything they could to help others work on pwning life then… things would be pretty sweet.

God: Sounds pretty sweet to me too. What’s next on the list.

Me: I guess the last thing on today’s list is teaching Chinese. I want to share what I know about learning Chinese through offering classes online, offering classes in person and creating digital products and tools for learning Chinese. I think those three things are a good start for now. Can I ask you a question?

God: Sure.

Me: What would you do if you knew you’d be successful at whatever you did?

God: Well, I’d float into people’s houses and…

Me: Ah yes. I see. Well… Thanks for listening God. Catch ya later!

God: Peace out!

Recap of Last Week

From this point forward I’m going to do my weekly recap and goal setting on Sunday’s. Here are the things I wanted get done this past week:

• I’m going to get Black Horse Taichi site up and running by next week.
• I’m going to continue running everyday.
• I’m going to write and do Taichi everyday.
• I’m going to release the Chinese lesson on Wednesday and do a blog post to go along with it.
• I’m going to finish my Elance profile and submit a proposal to at least 2 projects.
• I’m going to come up with 7 different ways that I can make money.

I did a pretty good job this past week. I have a few comments to make on some of my goals. The first is on running everyday. Originally I was doing distance running, about 3 to 5 miles a day. One day this week I decided to do a little research and I found out that sprinting is better than running/jogging (for fat loss, human growth hormone production, muscle building, etc.), so I’m toying with a new running system. I’ve also allowed myself an “off day” when I practice BJJ (Brazilian Jijutsu).

As far as doing Taichi everyday I just TOTALLY failed at that. The first day (Monday) I didn’t practice (I was busy trying to get all the blog posts and videos up). I think it will be important for me to do my Taichi first thing in the morning (after I meditate ).

The last thing I’ve noticed is the importance of being extremely clear with the goals you set. “Write everyday,” isn’t as clear as “Write one blog post everyday,” which is what I changed it to. But now I want to change it to “Write for at least one hour every day.” That could be a blog post, a chapter in my autobiography, whatever.

I also completed all of the steps for getting my eLance profile completed, but it hasn’t gotten approved yet, so I’m waiting on that.

Goals for Next Week

My goals for next week are:

• Keep the daily habits that I haven’t broken thus far (meditate, brush/floss/rinse teeth, take “vitamins”, run/BJJ, eat breakfast, write (for an hour), update Your Money or Your Life (will explain that later)
• Maintain my blogging schedule (I’ll talk about that in tomorrow’s post)
• Add email list building to the Pwning Life and Black Horse Taichi websites
• Create an action plan for the 7 ways to make money

What up guys! Based on popular demand I’m going to start doing weekly (or so) Chinese lessons. I’m going to do things a little different from what I see around the internet when it comes to Chinese learning. Instead of trying to teach you Chinese, I’m going to teach you HOW TO LEARN Chinese. A subtle but very important difference. Let me start with my history of language learning, instruction and study of Chinese.

My Language Learning/Instructing Background

The reason I’m going to give you this background if for a few reasons. Most importantly it’s to let you know I’m somewhat of an “expert” when it comes to language learning and acquisition. I also want to show you that learning a language is an ongoing project that will require a lot of work. You might hear stories of people who have learned such-and-such a language in 6 months but I guarantee you that they either have a crappy grasp of the language, they worked REALLY hard OR they have a system they used which they learned form learning another language.

Hola! Coma Estas? Me LLamo Casey.
Before we even get into Chinese I want to talk about my experience with Spanish. My first experience with a foreign language was in grade school. I went to a Spanish immersion school, so I had all of my subjects in Spanish. This is important because I believe it trained my brain to think and communicate in a language other than my “mother tongue.” This made my process for learning Chinese easier and perhaps different than what you may encounter if it’s the first language your attempting to learn. That’s not a problem. I’m going to be teaching you HOW to learn, not how I learned. The problem with most classes and systems is that they only address one learning style, I’ll be showing you how to find yours. OK… Back on topic…

Nǐ Hǎo!
I had my first Chinese class back in 1998. My first semester of college. I LOVED it. It actually ended up being the only class I got any credit in that first semester and the only class that I went to the second semester (I don’t recommend taking this approach to college ). This is where I learned the basics of pronunciation and how to read pinyin. Pronunciation and pinyin is the MOST important things to master in the beginning of your quest to mastering Chinese. In college, besides learning pinyin and pronunciation, I learned some basic vocabulary and grammar. Not NEARLY enough to be useful in a real Chinese speaking situation which I learned really soon…

A Journey to the East
In 2002 I traveled to Taiwan and quickly found out how useless my years of study were. So I embarked on some EPIC studying. It was also in Taiwan that I started teaching English and began learning the complexities of teaching a foreign language (now my language was foreign!) I was on a mission to figure out the most efficient way to learn Chinese and I believe I found it (for me anyway). It was in a program called [Supermemo]. I won’t go too far into the details, but Supermemo is a flashcard management program that allows you to memorize a lot of stuff in a short amount of time. So I spent 4-6 hours a day creating databases and memorizing flashcards for like 8 months… Epic.

After that I spent about a year taking classes at various Universities and language schools. Classes suck (to me anyway). They’re good for keeping you on point about studying, and it’s nice having other people studying with you but… classes suck. If you want to know the schools I went to, here they are in order:

1. Shida
2. GuoyuRibao
3. TLI

After all of my EPIC studying and classes I ended up teaching at a school where my coworkers had pretty terrible English. I (thought I had) pretty terrible Chinese so I had them use their English. I would often times mess with the kids using my terrible Chinese and one of the coworkers caught me and was like “Hey! You speak Chinese!” from that point on, everyone spoke to me in Chinese. It was hard catching everything at first, but then… It got easier and easier. And then… I was a badass!

What Does The Scouter Say About His Power Level?
Now that my speaking was pretty good, I needed to improve my reading. Reading is pretty tricky in Chinese because it’s hard to find stuff that’s at your level. Even kids stuff can be really hard. When I first arrived in Taiwan (2002), I bought the first book to Dragon Ball and I was like “Yeah. I’m gonna read this!” It was SOOOO hard. After epic studying, classes and being forced to speak, I decided to try Dragon Ball again (2006). It was still pretty hard, but not nearly as hard as it was before. SO I decided to muscle through it (since I mostly knew the story) and… I did it. I read the whole Dragon Ball saga in Chinese. Now I felt even more badass.

Where I Am Now
I moved back to the US in 2007 and… I haven’t really done any studying and only a little bit a teaching BUT because of how well I absorbed the language while I was studying, I’m still able to hold a conversation and read basic stuff. I think I’m going to pick up some books and find some things to listen to on YouTube to keep things fresh for when I return to Asia.

Homework

I’m going to give you guys some basic homework to do every week. This week’s homework is pretty simple. Just let me know in the comments here (or on the video):

Why do you want to learn Chinese?

I wanted to learn Chinese because I was going to move to China and be a Shaolin monk.

What is your experience with Chinese language (any classes you’ve taken, etc.)?

You just read mine.

How much time a week (or day) can you dedicate to practice?

Everyone wants to learn Chinese, but how much are you willing to put into it? You’re not going to learn JACK SHIT watching my video once a week (or any videos once a week). You’re going to have to do a lot of self-study and practice outside of the videos (I can help you figure out what the best way to spend your time is).

Comment below and see you next week.

Zàijiàn (Bye!)