Offthebookshelf.com
Jerry Johnson
Jerry Johnson lives in the small town of Groesbeck, Texas. Although he was born about twenty miles from Groesbeck, the recent return to Texas was the conclusion of a long journey. His work took him over much of the country. As a result of his Father's work, Jerry grew up in central Wyoming on an oil tank farm a short distance from the banks of the North Platte River. With the snow drifting and the cold wind blowing, winter temperatures sometimes dropped to as much as fifty below zero. Being a young man in Wyoming in the fifties and sixties had the rare advantage of giving one an enduring sense of the frontier spirit. Although the range wars and colorful characters like Cattle Kate, "Big Nose" George and Tom Horn had long since faded into history, It was an especially glorious time and place to be young. The wild west was gone, but the pioneering aura lingered on. The expanding war in Vietnam, and the cultural revolution of the sixties had a minimum influence in Wyoming. Growing up in Wyoming was a unique privilege that gave support to traditional values and attitudes.
Johnson completed a B. A. Degree at the University of Wyoming and earned an M. S. Degree from the University of Tennessee. With a sense of adventure and a strong desire for new challenges, Jerry returned to graduate school at age fifty-three; a time when most regular people are looking forward to retirement. Johnson believes that everyone should continue to learn throughout life. The experiences of mid and late life learning closes many gaps in the understanding that may have seemed puzzling at a younger age. In many respects, learning to tackle new ideas is easier and more fulfilling. Unraveling new ideas is a beneficial tonic that has the perceived effect of slowing the aging process.
Developing a supreme self confidence, and an experiential edge in terms of accumulated knowledge may be two of the most astounding benefits of middle and late life learning. Most of Johnson's working career was spent in the restaurant industry, primarily in operations management and training. Jerry's writing background was polished and perfected in a corporate environment, where he was heavily involved in developing and revising written training materials.
Writing is an art, regardless of the reasons for it, or the environment in which it takes place. Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the giants of western philosophy, accomplished much of his most profound thinking in the trenches of World War One. He also wrote his most important work at the same time shells were exploding nearby and machine gun fire rattled in the distance. This great philosopher should be an example to all of us. We can reach astonishing levels of achievement irrespective of where we live or work. Fear and the worry resulting from anticipated hapless events should never be an excuse to quit or give up. We should only give up fifteen minutes before taking our sojourn to the funeral parlor.
Time is the substance that every life is made from. Making the best use of time requires careful thought and planning at an early age. That is what determines lifetime success or failure. Making the best of existence is not year by year, month by month, or even week by week. It is really the consequential awareness of moment to moment. It is a cultivated astuteness that guides us to take advantage of every opportunity. Opportunities that pass us by unnoticed are antithetical to what could be. That tugging awareness that leads us to claim our personal enlightenment is unusual and fleeting. More often than not, these encounters with favorable elements of fate happen only once. Recognize them quickly and grab on.
All Books By This Author:
- Unsolicited Advice---And What Not To Do: A Guide for Avoiding Pitfalls that will ruin Your Life and Future
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Unsolicited Advice is a guide for young adults caught up in decision making about education, career, marriage, credit, saving money, and so on---. The basic idea is to inspire the creation of a workable life plan. Hopefully, readers will be stimulated to think and make their own viable choices. Two things in life are mostly irreversible, namely, the aimless passage of time and continual and reoccurring illogical errors in the thought processes. Long-term mistaken thinking leads to bad choices that in turn causes the loss of valuable time. An important methodology followed in Unsolicited Advice is to draw from a lifetime of experiences in order to illustrate how easy it is to slip into time-consuming chaos and crisis.
The probability of avoiding ultimate failure is greatly enhanced by drawing up a flexible life plan. The "advice" ranges all the way from caring for your parents to the hazards of nightlife. Most importantly, the reader is cautioned to be especially careful in the choice of a marriage partner. To avoid a serious loss of cumulative time, your spouse must be your partner in success or failure. Choosing a spouse that will judge you as incompetent or undesirable based on day to day failure is likely to bring on divorce. Some amount of failure in everyday life is to be expected. However, jumping the gun and running for divorce court will call out the greatest enemy of all, namely, the loss of a major portion of time.
The real tragedy of chaos and crisis is usually not the precipitating event itself. Rather, it is the loss of time that such events take away from an otherwise productive life. Some additional examples of events that can disrupt life and cause a serious loss of time are an illness, changing careers or the loss of a job. Lost time cannot be regained. It is gone forever. Not all loss of time can be prevented, but making the correct choices can cut losses to a minimum. Illnesses and the consequential loss of time can be greatly reduced by choosing a healthy lifestyle and not falling into bad habits that lead to disease and suffering. Changing careers should be for good cause only, such as the technological elimination of your previous work. The normal threat of job loss can be controlled by researching and selectively choosing an employer, and by self-discipline in the performance of work-related duties. The major point here is simply that our human exercise of choice controls our destiny in most instances.
As human beings, we are each allotted only so much time on earth in which to complete our chosen missions in life. The loss of time can be equated to the loss of life. Life is time, and time is life. The two are interchangeable. Based on the average life span, we can count on about fifty-seven years in which to complete our chosen missions after reaching early adulthood. It can be assumed that “early adulthood” begins around eighteen or twenty years of age. Depending upon the choice of a career, the opportunity to accumulate wealth may begin shortly after becoming an adult, or it may not commence until ten or fifteen years later.
The master plan should be in writing and for the owner's eyes-only. It should be completed as early as possible at the beginning of early adulthood. The plan is not written in stone. It can be changed. However, with frequent changes, the plan itself can become a hindrance to avoiding the unnecessary loss of time. For that reason, the plan is only worthwhile if it is carefully considered in the beginning. The master Plan, in order to be effective, must be taken seriously and with as few changes as possible.
Some other advice in the book includes buying a house in your early twenties, planning to be old while you are still young, avoiding dead end jobs, starting your own business, and numerous other questions or problems the young adult is likely to encounter. Unsolicited Advice is a mix of the practical and the philosophical. Through a thoughtful analysis of your abilities, desires and interests, you can create a master plan suited for you.
- Genres: Finance, General, Motivation, Philosophy, Politics, Relationships, Self-Improvement, Spirituality, Educational
