My life mentor
Okay, I know this post is gonna be long, it has to do with how I became a programmer and my mentor in life and how it wasn't a mentor to teach me exploits, but teach me about life which is how I've gotten where I am, and how he has shaped my mind to become fairly wealthy for my age, heading towards great success etc and everything that I am now. He is dying and it's more of a crap story that just gists over how he's helped me and how he's allowed me to help myself and my alias which derived from his teachings. Just a warning in case you don't wish to read :p.
edit: paragraphs didn't format in so I'll just do a line break.
SleepControl. SlpCtrl has been my alias for many many years and is how I'm known in the programming community. But getting the sleep and the control down hasn't been easy.
Let's rewind back 2 years. I was working a dead end job in construction. I hated it, there was nothing more than I dreaded than to get up and go to work…every day for 2 years. When I say every day, I worked every day for up to 10 hours. I only got a few days off during that 2 years, but the lessons and the people I met I'll never forget.
My best friend, business partner and better mentor than I could have ever dreamed for worked with me. I met him there; he was always the happiest person I had ever met in my life and that's what originally attracted me to him. I had yet to be aquainted with his 'aquaintences' or what he did, I mostly hung around him because he sold the best coke money could buy(around here), he always had crack weed and coke. He was far from an addict though, he had been through that stage of his life already and wasted thousands and thousands of dollars. He sniffed small amounts to get him going, mixed the crack in his weed and smoked primos and was really responsible with it. One day I went over to his place and saw that he did websites. Really really shitty websites for really really rich people. He wasn't making any real money at the time, he might charge 500 bucks for a site but that'd be all he would get for a while; he wouldn't have still been doing construction if he were making any real money. This was where I came in; I had been designing and coding my ass off for the last 2 years after one of the scariest things in my life had happened.
Back in my teen years, I was nothing more than an unmotivated fat hippie. I did every psychedelic under the sun, smoked until my lungs turned black; tried to get as intoxicated as I could every day all day. I had no real motivation in life to do much of shit. One day I was chilling with a friend, early in the day. We had been smoking crack and doing lots and lots of PCP. We were fucking ripped to the edge. He couldn't take me back home and at the time I had no car, so I was forced to stay with him and his girlfriend in a run down 'shack' of a house where literally there were no street lights. I went to sleep at 4 AM and I'll never forget waking up that morning. I woke up in the hospital, with literally no face. My lower lip had been ripped from my face, 4 bottom teeth broken out, neck nearly broken, face bloodied from forehead to chin. The previous night, little had I known at the time, took place the worse beating you could imagine. While sleeping, I had been beaten, nearly to death, with a lead pipe. The paramedics told me I was walking around spitting blood on them, all over the walls, on the TVs, on the ceiling, EVERYWHERE. I had condemned their house in my blood and the house had been declared unfit to live in, forcing them to move out. My family and friends told me the house was straight out of a movie...they could barely believe it. The kid went into hiding and I've never seen him even years after it had happened. If I did I would probably kill him. However, despite all the sadness, the dark place I was in, because of my appearance I couldn't be seen by anyone. For the next 2 years I wouldn't eat, I certainly was terrified of falling asleep, but I programmed hard and forced myself to do nothing but design and programming.
In the early stage of my and Clyde's friendship, all we did really was get fucked up. I had no idea the lessons he was about to teach me, the money he was about to make me and the person he was about to mold me in. It was far more than anything I had ever done. His first lesson was take care of yourself, control your persona in full and never hold back and nobody else can hold you back either. This took me a good long while to actually do, it’s so much easier said than done. It started by me doing small shit, going outside to smoke and using an ashtray and not throwing cigarettes in my yard, instead of sitting at the computer pounding out code feverishly with a cigarette in my mouth, take a break; go outside and smoke and relax. It was the small shit that I had to start doing to get my persona straight and not allow myself to hold back at all. After I got this down, the control and the ability to control myself and by extension everything around me by being more aggressive and actively pursuing what I wanted to do, I had to control my sleep.
By sleep, I don’t mean rest. Although I still to this day sleep very very little, that’s not the sleep represented in my alias. My philosophy is a sleeper only gets a dream, but you can be asleep and fully conscious. A sleeper is someone who instead of making conscious, aggressive efforts to move my life where I want it to go, a sleeper lets subconscious take over and does what is easy. Sinning is the easy part in life, but it’s hard to sin when you never want to make any efforts to give you the means to do so.
Now, after all the money we’ve made in our business (which isn’t too terribly much really, between the both of us we might have $50k saved in the bank not including our equity and business assets) I’ve been hit with the most devastating news of my life; he is dying. He is a 65-year-old black guy who grew up in New York in the most oppressive state, learned so much over his life and passed it down to me. I’m sure I’ll go on to make more money than he’s ever seen in his lifetime probably which is quite crushing, but the main point of this is to pass down some of the lessons he’s taught me down to everyone else so that, in the long term, you can have anything you want. Money will never be a problem, and anything you want you’ve got. You as a person deserves it, most of you have the talents there but find it easier to sin and be lazy than to actually go out and actively find what you want. Here are a run down of the main things he’s ever taught me in my lifetime:
A sleeper gets nothing but a dream
If you can control this(your persona) you can control everything around you by extension
Be aggressive in pursuing what you want in life and never hold back; holding back is caused by fear, and if you’re afraid to be aggressive in finding the things you want, you will never have them.
Nothing comes easy, to get what you want you have to work hard
Taking care of yourself is the first step to success. This means cleanliness and working out.
I know this is probably crap, and I’ll add some more stuff in later probably I just figured I’d type out that seeing as I have just recently learned of his degrading health and am really shaken up by it. He considered himself a writer, although honestly he couldn’t write for shit he would always write and put it out there, so I did the same for probably the first time in my life :p . In the mean time, me and 3 business associates are meeting here at my farm to discuss some new contract work that they need done…and they’re all extremely wealthy business men. I hope they like my work…maybe a mixdrank or 10 will get them in the spirits. Anybody need a mixdrank?? B) Until later, peace out and may you live for 10 more years Clyde…I can only hope for you to see the wealth I hope to see.