The measure of intelligence is the ability to change Albert Einstein.
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You have just wandered into the unpopular playground arena, a unique space specifically designed for young adults,
and those soon becoming where curiosity meets unconventional learning and dialogue with brutal honesty.
If you're a bold and daring rebel who wants more options on your life journey than you have now,
keep listening.
Welcome Jen Lin.
Okay, welcome back.
This is Jen Lin.
Welcome back to the unpopular playground.
And a few things have occurred, one namely getting back to work.
And that has involved a lot on my part, a lot of time taken away from the podcast
because of a great many of things and I'm going to go into detail about that in this episode
and having to pivot the reality check, what's working, what's not working, and how we'll be
moving forward.
So again, I apologize for having to do this and having it seem all about most of the episodes
for the season, having to lay out the platform of what these changes in the podcast have been
overall, but it doesn't make any sense at all to continue moving forward without a solid foundation
of what we're all about, what we're doing, and also being able to fulfill the commitments that we
say that we're going to do. And so there is a need to explain, to be transparent before
our audience, so that you know exactly what's going on, why we're pivoting the need for that,
so that we can be better, so that we can deliver better products, better everything.
So in short, it's going to be better for you and it'll enable us to fulfill our personal
obligations as well and to increase the consistency until that we can reach a point to be able to
give you more. And after some reflection, we've been able to see clearly how we can do that
and we're going to share those things with you in this episode. If you're enjoying the
unpopular playground, don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
We'd love to hear your thoughts, so leave a comment right now to join the conversation.
If you know another curious friend who would resonate with our discussions,
share the podcast and spread the word. Together, let's create a community where every young voice
is heard. Okay, getting into it. After some reflection and being frustrated the last three
weeks of trying to put out a weekly episode, thinking that, well, yeah, recording a 10 to
15 minute segment for even 30 minutes should be easy to do, right? After all, it's just
recording and uploading. You would think. But there's a lot that goes into it, especially when
you want to put out a good podcast with useful information of things that are meaningful to you
or listeners. Some people just put out things just to hear themselves talk and it's not meaningful.
It's all about them. They make it all about themselves and if it doesn't have anything to
do with you or if it's helpful to you, then I'm wasting my time. My very small team of two,
my partner Debbie and anybody else in Ronda, anybody else that is working with us, we're
always in our time if this has no meaning to you. It's all about you and helping you and
bringing these points out, the hard discussions, being able to have discussions. And right now,
we're all geographically separated. So it takes time to do research. It takes time to do writing
and the recording takes a lot of time to edit and make sure that it's correct and then posting it
and then putting it out there to market, which I've not even had a chance to do yet. If you're
listening for the first time on this episode, we've already had seven or six other episodes for
the season and we also have two seasons that have been put out every other year because of hiccups
like this and not having a focus. So now we have a better focus. We have our target market. Of course,
if you're not in high school and if you're not a young adult under 30, you can still get
information out of this too. I invite you to listen to the earlier episodes of this season three
if you want more introduction on this. But we are so laser focused in doing what we're doing
and our passion to, and I don't say that lightly, we've with everything that we've done in our
careers and everything that we've experienced, I know myself personally. I am so dissatisfied
with a lot of the things and circumstances that have occurred in my life because of
feeling ill-prepared and just having to eat it out and figure it out all by myself. I don't want
that to happen to you. I've been on all sides of the coin as a parent, as a student, and as a
teacher. So I have many different aspects of this and I've also been involved in the medical
complex, also in my high school jobs I've been in the food industry. All of these things that have
contributed to much of the disaster that you are experiencing now. And I've also made a lot of
changes in my life personally that have been successful and I would like to share a lot of
these things with you that have worked and that have been proven to work. So first of all, the
reality check. I've gone over that with that it does take a lot of time to produce a podcast
and to build and nurture a community. That is where we want to focus is nurturing a community
with to be able to have real engagement with virtual and live meetups and to be able to design
courses and other types of knowledge to get that down either through videos, courses, books, things
to be able to help you, tools to have on hand practical that you can tangibly touch, use,
apply to make your lives better. And the most important thing, one of the most important things
is to be consistent with our output of our main podcast. And in doing this, we have seen
just this month of January, which has seen a very long time. January sometimes feels like a whole
century. It's always the longest month to get through. And that is when we had started. It is
now February 1st. And in the month of January, we did produce six episodes. Half of the month,
I wasn't working. And ever since I started back to work, it's been a struggle to keep up with
weekly moving into our second point. After some reflection, I had to reevaluate what is going good
and what is not what is clearly not working and to decide where we want our focus and momentum to
be and what the purpose is in each thing that we're doing. And what is not working is at least
that present moment with all of the time, all of the commuting, etc. is keeping up weekly.
Also, because of this, because what's really gotten in the way is funding. I'm self-funding
everything. My partner and I, Debbie, and I are self-funding this podcast right now. And
I'm having to work to fulfill my personal obligations and everything else has gone into
this podcast. So we are very limited right now on what we can do. But we hope that's going to
change really soon. It costs time, gas, to go to work, and to go over to Nevada to be able to produce
more episodes on top of our personal obligations. So my intent isn't to complain about this,
but to open your eyes to let you know that it's just not a matter of recording this and
putting it out there. It takes a lot of work because we want it to be good and we want to be
consistent. And so that brings us to our last point, readjustment and pivoting. There is an
art to pivoting if it's going to be better, if you're going to be stronger, and if you're going
to remove the things that aren't working, keep the things that are working so that we can be
consistent and focus on what we need to be focusing on. And what we want to focus on is
community building and live engagement. Yes, we'll do virtual, but we want a great majority of our
engagement to be in person and have it be real. The podcast we had originally intended, because
everybody's working, all of the team members that were going to be that we were going to have last
summer, were all working. And then by September, I had explained in previous episodes that it was
just too hard to expect to do more than one episode a month. And then I had to go on medical leave,
so I thought, well, maybe I could do more. And there were some complications with that,
that just still put things behind a little bit. Number one was my ability to even be able to
speak. And that wasn't able to happen until closer to the beginning of the year, because that's what
was affected. So the podcast, here's the way that it that it's intended to farm all down.
The podcast to be able to highlight the issues, have the hard discussions that young people are
facing and also that are overlooked and swept under the rug as you continue to struggle and choke
on life to get by. And as students are launching to life unprepared, we want to highlight that
stuff. But to just keep talking about the problem isn't going to solve problems. So most of our
time and talents want to be spent building our league of youth members, nurturing you and guiding
you through these challenging times with solid options and helping you to become strong, critical
thinkers who can and will be tomorrow's problem solvers for society and that you'll feel competent
to take action. We want to turn the tide and give you the art of pivoting to be able to stop and
reflect every now and then what's working and what's not. We should be doing this daily at night.
Did I accomplish my goals? What do I need to do tomorrow? And every night, how can I become better?
Where did I go wrong? If everybody's doing this every day, there's no way that you will not get
better. It will be impossible for you to not become better than you were the day before. But the
point is not a lot of people do this and not a lot of people have the guts to pivot. Not a lot of
people have the art of pivoting, being able to stop and willing to open up to new information
that is working, that could work. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. And if you
have the courage to stop and reflect and open yourself up to new options, just imagine
how your life could change for the better. We want you to move forward stronger on more solid
ground so that you can actually achieve the things that you are seeking. So for this podcast,
what we're going to do is scale back to our original plan of once a month. That's going to
be our commitment. Now we may produce more podcasts and if we do, they're going to be on YouTube.
All of the extras are going to be in our private community, which will be where we're going to
start building in our Bamiya coffee community, which more information will come out on that
next month. At the end of February for last Wednesday in February, that information will come
out. We will probably do a bonus episode on community. We will have that coming out.
As a matter of fact, I already have the next two episodes already completed that just need to be
recorded for February, end of this month and end of next month. But we will have the information,
the show notes of how you can join our league community and the Bamiya coffee platform.
And also how you can donate if you care to support us for that. So yes, we're going to scale back
to once a month. We're going to keep it from September to June, 10 months and it'll be on the
last Wednesday of the month that you can look forward to our podcasts. But we will most likely
have extra episodes. So if you're listening on another major platform like Spotify, iHeart,
Pandora, Apple Podcasts or any other podcasts, there's quite a few that
we're distributing to. We highly encourage you to subscribe, follow on this platform,
because it will allow us to be put ahead on the algorithm as well as go over to YouTube,
like, share, subscribe, comment. That's going to put us higher as well and enable us to qualify
for additional funding. But that's where all of our extra episodes are going to be. And then we'll
be able to produce more viable solutions for you. Courses that can be tested and tweaked accordingly
by our league members. And eventually get us the point of justifying me, myself and Debbie,
to be able to work on this full time. With the once a month, we can get ahead on our podcast.
We can commit to these discussions, which actually have more fruitful discussions. We plan to have
a lot of young guests to be able to have these conversations so that you're not just hearing
it from me. You're hearing it from your own people, people in your age demographic, talking about
these things. This way we can get ahead and focus on community and other engagement and events.
We can raise, do some fundraising and build this league into a global movement of young people
determined to make their lives better. And if you're, if you're strong, I have a saying,
strong self, strong nation. And hopefully we can move away from the archaic mindless drone syndrome
of people who can't think for themselves or really who don't think at all. You just turn on the TV
and believe everything that they're told. You should be able to ask questions. When people
get mad at you asking questions, questioning things and they can't answer, that should be a red flag.
Because if you can't question, can you can't get viable answers? It's just usually from people who
don't want to lose control. Think about that one kids. So that brings me to the end of this episode.
And that is why I was not able to put out last Wednesday because I have a grueling schedule
now of work which involves commuting. I work at night because it lessens the commute, but also
somewhere in there I have to do my normal living duties because I'm a real person just like you.
I have to do laundry, cook, run errands, pay my bills and do all of the same things that you do.
If you're in school, in high school, maybe you might have a little bit of a bite, but
this is what's coming for you, life. And you're having to do all of these things on your own.
And wouldn't it be nice to be able to do something that you enjoy doing and that you can actually
make a living and maybe have a little leftover to have some fun instead of feeling like a financial
slave? And that's what most people in society have been reduced to. And if you live in California,
it's much worse. If you don't live in California, just be happy that you're not paying over $4 or gas.
So, we will see you in the next episode. Stay curious. Thanks for listening.
And we hope that you will seriously think about joining our league when we drop it.
Take care, kids. Bye. For now.
Join us for our next podcast on the last Wednesday of next month
on all podcast platforms or make sure to join us on YouTube for additional bonus episodes.
And, as always, stay curious. There's so much more to explore.