I know I'm all over the map with my very first two steemit posts but hey, that's just me. Let me know what you think about my first SKWealthAcademy vlog, and if you want me to produce more philosophical videos about how we are being manipulated into a more divisive society and being diivided across race, religion and socioeconomic status by false divisions, when indeed, we should be uniting. As a kid, I remember hanging out with every single socio-economic status across every single race, with latinos, blacks, whites, and other asians, in what seemed to be much more harmonious times than today. I remember being really apprehensive about starting my work with at-risk kids in Philly and later, gang members in LA , as a fresh-faced kid straight out of university for fear they would reject me because I wouldn't be able to understand what they were going through or went through.
But even though our socio-economic lives were completely different, in Philly, I opened up on day one to my "kids" and told them about all the emotional struggles, fears and doubts I had dealt with as a kid, and that not having to worry about money does not mean that you will avoid a lot of other struggles in life. By no means was I ever considered rich, as I remember weeks when I was literally down to my last $12 in the bank in college, but still my financial position could never compare to their financial struggles.
I also told them that every single person in my life that was fam to me had gone through great struggles in their lives, and that they could use their struggles not as obstacles, but as building blocks to learn lessons and acquire knowledge that would enable them to conquer future struggles in their lives that other people would view as mountains, but that they would see as molehills, due to the collective wisdom they had acquired from their massive struggles in life. I told them in martial arts, we have a saying that a sword that has not gone through fire will crumble in battle, but that a sword that has been hardened and tempered with fire, will endure.
I told all of them they were swords tempered with more fire than people three times their age, and that they could use their abilities to walk through fire and survive as a tool to succeed in life. One of my Philly kids, Wilbur, told me that just as I was mentoring him at age 16 though I was only 21 back then, that he wanted to start a similar mentoring program as a 16-year old for 8 and 9 year-olds to help them avoid the mistakes he had made by the time he was 16, and I was blown away by his maturity. I told him, "See, the fire you've gone through is already going to save some lives. This is how you flip tragedy and turn it into life. You understand this already at 16. I work with some people in their 40s that still don't understand that."
In LA, I took a different approach, as I had never known a gang member before. Some of my Philly kids told me horrible stories about witnessing some of their friends being shot and dying right in front of them, but even under these horrible circumstances, about half of them still had at least one parent that cared about them at home. When I discovered that most of the gang members I worked with in LA had no adult in their life that cared about them, which is often the missing ingredient in life that drives kids into gangs, I decided to take a different approach. For the first few weeks I met with my LA kids, all I did was sit and listen to whatever it was they wanted to tell me, without every injecting any advice.
The first week, I literally received nothing, not a single peep, and just hard cold stares, so I spent that first day just telling them that I was there to learn and listen to each one of them. And week by week, their walls came down and they started to open up to me. And that experience was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life in which I was supposed to be mentoring them, but one in which I learned just as much about life from them as they did from me. So here is kind of a rambling stream of consciousness vlog about these divisive times we live in today below, because part of my mission of SKWealthAcademy is to help spread truth that will squash these artificially manufactured beefs many of us seem to have with each other today.
Bless up!