Community is much more than belonging to something. It's about doing something together that makes belonging matter.
Brian Solis.
Warning. 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 Lynn.
And welcome back to the Unpopular Playground. This is Jen Lynn. And today's topics we're going to be talking about.
A little bit about current events, what's going on, some of the additions that we have, exciting additions and empowering young people through community.
We're going to go over the history of a league, another league of young people who were raised and prepared for excellence.
And also, we're going to finish off with a league of our own and what that description looks like and what it's going to be called because it is ready for you.
It is ready for you to occupy this space that we've created and we're excited to share it with you so that we can all grow together solving the problems that we bring up and that other young people have brought up to us to be able to help you
rock your lives by the time you're 30 and get over those speed bumps and have it be a little less bumpy. So go get your favorite drink, beverage, snack, whatever it is that you do or if you are driving, prepare.
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. Well, first of all, I have to say that it's been very nice to be able to scale back, plan and adequately provide all that we need in a timely fashion, but also in a very measured way to where we're not sacrificing quality.
So it's been a month since, well, pretty close to a month since we've dropped our last episode and we said in the last episode that we're going to go monthly and have that distributed out everywhere, but we will be having, we do plan on having a lot of extra episodes on YouTube.
So if you're not listening on YouTube, you'll definitely want to go over to YouTube and subscribe to Unpopular Playground 1791 so that you don't miss out on anything.
We do have an addition to our team that we're excited about. Roman is coming back on and he was originally with us in September or at the beginning of the season and I had mentioned in one of the previous episodes,
the series of unfortunate events that we've had up until this point with technology and all of us just having just going through something and it was all at the same time, but we are back.
And if you want until then, until next month when we introduce Roman and he comes on to introduce himself, you can go to Podbean and put on the Q3 show, look for that and you'll get a good idea of who he is because we both work together on that podcast as well.
And he is a great addition to have. I'm just so happy and you all will be equally delighted, I believe.
Moving forward, that is our current event, so you'll definitely want to get on board and march with that episode and getting into empowering young people through community.
So any smart person, if you're going to talk about anything that could have multiple meanings, you want to get a good grasp of the terms and how they're defined, how you're defining them,
and you want to make sure that you have the other person define what they mean by it because making assumptions on words that can mean two different things or several different things have several different meanings.
If you don't get that cleared up from the beginning, you can both walk away believing something different. And then when you discover that it's not the way that you thought that it was because you didn't clarify terms,
they can come back at you and say, well, you agreed to this, we specifically said this, they are not lying because they did use that word, but they were very deceitful about the context and boys and girls, things, everything.
Everything depends on the context. So you must define the term. So in our effort to be completely transparent when we go over things and we define a problem or we're talking about an issue,
we're always going to include the context in which we're speaking so that there is no mistake. Nobody can implicate us with and use little sound bites on, oh, this is what they said, and then take it out of context.
A lot of that's done in TV and social media, mass media, and even in your IRL lives. I just learned what that was in real life, apparently.
So you definitely want to make sure that you are grasping the context of that conversation by defining terms. And you'll also, when you see clips of this and that, you can't get context in 30 to 60 second clips.
You're going to want to research a little bit more on that. And that's another way you can be empowered. And then you don't want to do things in a vacuum where it's just you.
It's so much more beneficial to be able to have those conversations and see what other people think and what they've discovered.
If an accident happens, you want to get all sides of the view. Some people might have seen it from the top. Some people see it in all different directions and they see different things.
And to get all of those different points of view helps put those things that are a little bit confusing into context so that you can understand, see for yourself, and draw your own conclusions without having just certain sides put to you as gospel without having a 3D understanding of it.
Very often it's just a one or two dimensional thing. We will always give you the 3D or more of the situations, the topics and problems, concerns that we discuss here on the unpopular playground.
So I hope that's helpful. So defining terms for us in today's episode is going to be community. So what is a community?
Webster's dictionary defines it as a group of individuals who share common interests, values, characteristics, and they interact with one another for a specific thing.
A lot of times it can be in a location or social setting. And then I mentioned league for the second part of our conversation.
A league, what is a league? Gathering for a common purpose, but it's just a little bit different. It's often related to a competitive thing for sports usually or activities that operate under a set of rules and regulations.
And usually what comes to mind is baseball. That's a league.
And thinking on that, on those two things, I kept wondering when I was thinking just of community, how could we best describe our community?
And I wanted it to be the most concise version of our community that we could embrace because life is a competition and it's not so much of a competition with each other, but more so the battles first with yourself and overcoming your shortcomings.
Because if you can conquer yourself, you're automatically going to put yourself above the life competition.
People who are only focused on comparing themselves to other people, that kind of obsession, I can tell you, will get you nowhere because you're not starting with the problems that you can fix.
You can't fix other people, but you can fix yourself and you can focus on yourself and what you can do. That's what you have power and control over is yourself.
And when you're in a community, you're not competing with other people, you're being able to network so that you can get assistance and those other points of view within a league that's going to help you to rise together.
And that's the set of rules and regulations and being able to speak to one another respectfully, being able to connect and be excited about what you want to do, what you want to accomplish in life and that it's truly yours and you're owning it.
And you're not living out what somebody else wants you to do. Only you know what's really best. People can guide you a lot of times your parents and I think other school officials and things like that.
There's a lot of really good people out there that want to help you, but they're not you. They don't know your dreams and your desires and a lot of times they're preoccupied with themselves and with other things that they've got going on.
And you have to be your own advocate. The types of communities we have social with nation. There's cultural communities usually often involved with church or maybe from where you came from, maybe a continent.
I mean, we do it all the time. There's Taco Tuesday, October fast, St. Patrick's Day. All of these type of holidays are cultural holidays, cultural celebrations.
Those would be a couple of examples on lying communities, Facebook groups, discord, and then you have your local live communities. Maybe you go to a Toastmasters meeting or the local fish fry, those type of things.
So those are what communities are. Some benefits of community. You get enhanced understanding. You also are able to enhance your critical thinking and what is critical thinking. You're analyzing, you're evaluating, inferencing, which is on the lines of interpretation, you're interpreting and problem solving.
You have increased motivation when you have people on you, you know, you feel better on your team. When you're on a baseball team, you're all rooting for your group because you're all pushing towards the same direction to raise skills.
All of you are individual. Everybody has their different positions and you're using them, your specialties to be able to rise together for a common goal and yours will be to better yourselves, improved communication skills, diverse perspectives, social connections.
You can make friends and be able to help one another with, you might be good at one thing. Another person might be very good at something else.
A good example on that would be if somebody's raising cucumbers and somebody's raising potatoes, you share your potatoes and cucumbers with one another and you can barter.
And you can also do that with skills. You can encourage one another, again, problem solving, your learnings enhance. You get feedback so they are not in an echo chamber with yourself.
You can get that support, competence building, shared experiences. You can promote growth and, like I said before, you build those relationships.
And when I talked about that league, historical league, that moves us into our second part. I think a lot of people have heard of that movie.
It came out in 2006, a Sparta 300, I think something like that. But it was based off of a real battle. It was the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC.
It was King Leonidas in Sparta. He had only 300 Spartans versus King Xerxes, who was a Persian army and had thousands of people.
And the Spartans won. Spoiler alert, I probably should have done that. But you might want to go check it out. I've not seen that movie yet.
I definitely want to see it. But I remember learning about this story as well in my college studies.
But the Spartans were known for their bravery, sacrifice, and honor in the midst of overwhelming odds. So that's the short story.
But how could 300 Spartans win over thousands of Persians? Well, these Spartans were well prepared from youth. They had a great preparation.
They were a strong community and they were prepared.
They had a special name for this youth and it was called a Goghid.
They were typically male and they had a formal education training program from about seven years of age through 20.
And they had an obedience to authority. They were loyalty to the state above oneself. Training. They were trained in combat skills.
Endurance. They had survival tactics. They had social camaraderie. They shared barracks. They had strong bonds as a result of that.
In their education, they were well-rounded in music, poetry, and also the Spartan law and in their culture.
They had a military focus and they had ultimate preparation for military service. They had cultural values, which included a stewardy.
They were very austere, courageous. They were resilient and they had an impact. They had formidable powers in ancient Greece.
They had civic duty, a strong sense of duty, of loyalty to the state. They had all of these things and all of that in relation to unpopular playground,
our mission is nearly identical. Ours is the battle of life. A brief overview. I mentioned it before. Our age group is between 14 and 29 years old.
Our group, our league can be older or anybody who wants gap skills, knowledge, but the minimum age is going to be strictly enforced.
We have to be at least 14 years old or in high school, so 14 years or above, not younger.
And we do have an obedience to law because people should be law abiding citizens and be able to think critically.
And when you think about it recently in so many years, authority, legitimate authority, those in legitimate authority positions, they have abused their positions to include parents, teachers.
Nobody's exempt to corruption and just know that you will be held accountable for your actions and you can't rely on, well, I was told to do it, so I have no implications.
You can't implicate me because I was told to do it. If you know better kids that something is wrong, if you know better that something is wrong
and you're going to get taken down with the ship, those people that told you what to do, they're going to bring you down with them.
You might be the unpopular person in the midst of it, but are they worth going to jail for? Are they worth getting punishment for?
For something that you know is wrong? That's what I'm talking about.
It's okay to question things if you know that something is wrong, you know that something is illegal, you are not obligated to follow that.
You should be able to think for yourself, to be able to research and use your gut feeling that if something is wrong, it probably is.
And you might want to research or slow it down and back away from that decision. That's how so many innocent, well-meaning people get caught up into situations.
I would venture to say that half of the people that are in prison or jail are probably there because they could not say no.
And they were just implicated in that whole situation by association alone, which is really sad.
So you need to choose your friends and your community wisely.
Obedience to law and then training.
We want you to be strong, agile, resilient and have those survival tactics to be able to make it in life.
We want to help prepare you in the ways that maybe you're not being prepared at home or in school.
So those concerns that you have that you don't know about, because ignorance isn't a virtue.
Not knowing something in this age of information is no excuse.
You need to know how to research and do credible research.
Before you make those big decisions especially, and having a strong community of like-minded people who want better for you, who want to better themselves and be successful.
That's what I'm talking about.
Education.
Being able to communicate, be able to express yourself, your personal likes, dislikes, advocate.
To be creative in it, usually often through arts and literature, self-care, and being able to adequately network with other people to increase the likelihood of getting things that you need.
Resources, people, things, a lot better than by just trying to do it all on your own.
The most successful people have a team.
Remember that.
Impact, purpose.
You want to have a reason for getting up, and you want to impact others.
And you want to have a military mindset in the battle of life, in that you have daily habits, morning, noon, and night, of things that you do, a way of doing things so that every moment, every breath is another stepping stone to your success.
You want to train as you fight, because then those habits will become automatic that you don't even need to think of it.
You just get up and you do it.
And if everybody's doing those things together and able to do all of these things together, you're going to grow together, and you're going to be successful together.
And then you will be productive, courageous, resilient members of society.
We're in the United States, so we're primarily talking about United States citizens, but no matter where you're from, where you're listening, you can be that for your country as well, for your nation as well.
And that brings us to our third point, in a league of our own.
So we've created already our community and the Buy Me a Coffee platform.
We have the beta, omega-lead.
So why?
Well, initially, again, we're defining terms.
What is beta?
What is a beta?
What is a beta test?
Well, initially, the word beta is usually a phase in software development to test the functionality of something to ID the bugs and gather feedback.
So that's what beta tests are, to kind of like a pre-test, to maybe work out all of the things that aren't working, tweak it before they put something to market.
And it's also, so that is one aspect of why we're having this league, because we have courses and other things that we're going to create to better prepare the young in our league to be able to be more prepared for life through these courses before we put them out to market for other young people.
So that they too can rock their lives by the time they're 30.
And also, our league, our beta, omega-lead is going to be like a warehouse model concept.
And that is very much like SAMS or Costco, where there's a small membership fee for access to discounted products and services.
Now I look this up, I look up the warehouse model, and that's what we are closer aligned to.
And to my knowledge, not a lot of people are doing this for their courses.
They say that there's beta tests and things like that.
But ours is a little bit different, and that we're trying to make it affordable for young people.
So much is they demand a lot of the courses that are out there for beta testing.
It's one big lump sum fee, and it's usually more than $1,000.
Sometimes you'll get maybe 400.
You can get as low as 400 that I've seen beta tests for tests for computers.
Oh, I lost my thought there.
But usually for computer courses, and what I mean by that is that you would take self-driven courses through Teachable,
or Udemy, or Coursera.
And sometimes they're hybrid courses, but they demand bigger fees.
Or some of them might have where you pay a membership fee to have access to various things,
but the difference is that with us is that we're intimately connected to you.
We're a community of learners in which we get to actually know you, and it's not so impersonal.
The other ones are impersonal, and we're going to be different this way.
So we're not the same.
So getting back to the warehouse model, you have custom content that focuses on the mission and preparing you for life.
Streamline to reduce the time and headache of searching on your own.
So we're going to curate content, and we're also going to create content for you so that you can come to our platform,
to this community platform, to be able to get curated content just for you.
And it's going to be organic, which is mean not the weird kind of vegan organic, like in the grocery store.
But what I'm talking about is the organic in that every listener, every member of the league is going to be an individual
and we can contribute ideas and feedback to this so that we can customize our content to your concerns.
Our idea is to have minimal marketing and that our reviews and feedback for initial courses and workshops
prior to marketing that you will provide when you test these courses out.
All of this, your feedback and reviews will have you'll do feedback and we will be able to have all of these to do as testimony
and proof that these courses have been tested multiple times and tweaked and improved to increase the value.
But your feedback and reviews, your benefit is that the costs are lower to you.
So for the gift of your feedback, we're able to reduce the costs that we would normally put out at market price, at full market value
to other people. For our league members, it's going to be most beneficial to you and very affordable.
We'll have private label products like Costco has Kirkland.
We're going to have our own content with a focus of implementation, assistance and small group settings
and in addition to promoting other courses that we don't offer.
So if there's specialties that or concerns that you have that we feel that somebody else could provide that better for you
we're going to refer you to other people that can provide top notch quality skills for you.
We'll partner with them on that and there will be a lot of freebies.
Sorry, I'm looking at my notes. I admit it.
But there'll be a lot of freebies that will be available to you.
And the concepts of the Gogi Sparta preparedness, that's kind of what our focus is.
We want to prepare you to be formidable opponents to anybody that's trying to take advantage of you.
You'll have community benefits for engagements.
We'll facilitate meet and greets as the community builds and we're going to do that in groups of 15 to 20 at a time.
We're going to have an actual onboarding process for everybody that comes on into the group.
So you'll get to have an approximately 30 to 45 minute Q&A session that we can get to know you and you can get to know us.
You'll have early access to new things as we improve and streamline from the things that we catch, but especially from your feedback.
You're going to have real engagement, a text interaction group, polls, surveys, questionnaires will be available.
And then we're going to have, like I said before, courses that you'll test out for feedback and reviews so that we can tweak and improve them.
And then we can use, we'll use your reviews and let your astounding, impressive reviews speak for it.
It'll speak for itself.
So why do we call them ABC courses?
It's because the first level will be free and that'll have about 50 people.
And then the second round will be up to 30 people and that'll run $25.
And then the third round will be a very small group because each time it's going to improve and we're going to tweak and make improvements.
So that'll be just at $50 for 15 people.
And then it'll be the same if we, once we do our final pre-market beta test.
And then one idea that we have that we're milling around that we're going to do is for all of the feedback and reviews that you give, you'll be able to be put into a drawing for another free session, for additional free sessions.
So the more reviews that you do and the more feedback that you give, you'll get credit, you'll be get credit to be put into a drawing for a free session.
And then personally, individually for a session, every session that you complete, you'll be able to earn free sessions for yourself.
That'll be guaranteed.
But we haven't determined that number yet.
But all of this is still in the development phase. We do have one course actually ready as well.
Once we start getting members in, once we get up to 15 members, we'll be able to test that first course out already.
And we're going to limit it.
There will be a limit to 5,000 people.
Now you think of all the people in the world, all the people even in one state, 5,000 people isn't that much.
Isn't that many people?
You look on Instagram and all of the social media accounts, a lot of people require, a lot of those platforms require 10,000 people before you can even do anything or have sponsors for you.
You'll be able to do these things.
So 5,000 people isn't very much.
And some features will be added and deleted as we go along.
And we do have a future Sigma A300, a Furugogi A300 League that we are working on that will have more exclusive prestigious, more immense value and first access to everything.
With increased engagement and that's going to be limited to 300 people.
And then the, all of the prices are subject to change.
We've not worked out the specifics of that.
But there's a lot of things in store, but we are looking to start getting people on the waiting list for that.
For the Sigma A300 League and anybody now can join the Beta Omega League.
And we're going to pull from that Sigma A300 League.
Only people that are in the Beta Omega League will be able to apply for, get on the waiting list to apply for that Sigma A300 League.
And then all of this is going to be able to help pay our expenses so that we can do, facilitate other things for you.
To be able to get guest speakers, to be able to upgrade our equipment, to be able to get the resources that we need and the assistance that we need to increase our production so that we can assist you even more.
All of these things we're excited to bring to you.
We hope that you will go over as soon as you're done here and go become a League member.
It's $35 a month, which is about the price of a coffee, one coffee once a week.
Which is affordable for any high schooler or young adult that wants to better themselves, to invest in themselves.
To be able to have all of these things for that and it will also enable us to get the resources that we need and to pay the bills.
We're all working full-time jobs at present moment.
And we would love to be able to devote more time to be able to work on the podcast and increase our episodes and our engagements with you.
And we can do that with your support from the League and then be able to put these things out to full market so that we can increase our production schedule and our podcast.
And we won't have to do our podcast once a month.
We'll be able to increase that production tremendously.
And if you're listening and maybe you're older and that's not something that would be for you, but you just want to support our League,
you can also make one-time donations on the platform, on the Buy Me a Coffee platform.
And we might create another section just for people who want to support, perhaps on a monthly basis.
So looking into creating that too, if there's enough demand that's coming to us, then we'll know.
We're also, we just recently invested, we're all investing our own money at this time because we believe in it.
We believe that you're worth it and we know that if we create these spaces for you that you will come and you won't have to feel alone anymore.
We can't wait to have you.
We're also, we also have a book where we're going to physically write your name, your information, and you will be seen and heard and acknowledged.
You will not be alone anymore and we're excited about that for you.
So on that note, we're going to have all of this information in the show notes for you and we can't wait to see you in the next episode.
We're excited to go video next season and make sure to come back next month so you can meet Ramon and Debbie will be with us too, of course.
So thank you for joining us. Thank you for listening and stay curious.
Stay curious.