Josh and Melodie's visit to Rexburg

It was so fun to have Josh and Melodie and kids for the weekend!  The kids all decided that they need to learn to eat with chopsticks.  Here is Joshie doing his best with some Ramen noodles! 

The Key to Learning a Foreign Language

In this post I discussed some common mistakes people make when they learn a foreign language.  I received several emails from people who were not able to comment because they didn't have accounts with blogspot, and so I am working on setting up a different platform that will be more user friendly.  In part because of the response I got to that entry, I want to spend some time explaining in greater detail why the right attitude, expectations, and processes are so important.  More often than not approaching a new language with the wrong mindset will only lead to wasted time, wasted energy, and wasted finances.  Working hard and not seeing any benefit is frustrating for anyone.

hint: your brain is King Kong, your will power is the woman, Ann Darrow could never possibly defeat the ape.  You want to be partners with your brain, because just like Ann could not overpower King Kong, you will never wear your subconscious down and master what your brain considers unimportant.

Fortunately, human minds are created very efficiently to filter through an overwhelming amount of information to find and keep only what is useful.  If your brain believes that the language you are learning is useful to you, then you and your brain can be partners in the learning process.  If your brain believes that what you are "studying" is superfluous or worthless, then your will-power will constantly grind against your brain in a battle that will only end when you burn out.
Often the harder you work to remember things, the quicker your mind wants to forget what you are focusing on! I think of the brain as a great storage facility.  Your brain only keeps things that are 1: interesting to you, or 2: important to you.  Anything that does not fit those criteria is promptly flushed out of your memory.  That helps to explain why two people can witness the same event and yet still have dramatically different memories regarding what happened.  In language learning, as soon as the stress of the next test is gone, FLUSH! The brain flushes away that entire vocabulary list, because those words were never interesting to you, and now the brain has decided that they are not important to you either.

true story

double your salary? good motivation to learn a language

I have two friends who, years ago, both decided to learn Japanese at roughly the same time.  One of them was employed by a company that was expanding rapidly in Japan, and offered to double this person’s salary if he became proficient in Japanese.  We’ll call him John.  The other friend loves video games, especially Japanese-made video games.  My video-game loving friend, we’ll call him Jake, had no other motivation to learn Japanese other than the fact that he LOVED these games, and on a regular basis Japanese writing would appear on the screen, and random voices would periodically shout instructions out at him in Japanese. 

Knowing how much important motivation is in language learning, I would have guessed, at the beginning, that John would completely annihilate Jake as they both set out to master a very difficult language.  I left for China.  Didn’t see either of them for about two years.  At the end of that two years, only one of them was fluent in Japanese.  Shockingly, it was Jake.  After only two years, with FUN as his major motivator, Jake had become FLUENT in Japanese.  He was reading, writing, and conversing in Japanese.  John, on the other hand, had suffered through two years of a grueling daily study schedule.  He studied so hard that at times that his frustration would boil over.  At times he HATED the Japanese language.  At best he would feel good when he could look at an article and be able to read it. 

Lets look more closely at what each of my friends did on their quest to learn a difficult foreign language.  Why is it that Jake seemed to play his way towards becoming fluent, and John seemed to work his tail off with little to show for it. 

First, lets look at John.  See if you can see yourself in this example:

John REALLY wanted to succeed.  He would double his income, JUST by learning Japanese.  Because he was so committed to learning the language, he did a number of great things.  He set goals, and wrote them down, he made lists of vocabulary words that he wanted to memorize.  He had his own private tutor, who held him accountable, gave him homework, as well as necessary feedback.  At first, he woke up early to study, but after a couple months he started sleeping through his “study” sessions.  He changed to lunch-time studying, and later to late nights.  Each time he changed his study time was due to his frustration with the language.  He felt like changing the time of day he studied might make the studying itself a better experience. 

After a few months, John noticed that his studying was really starting to slack.  He wasn’t enjoying Japanese, and started to dread that hour/day.  But he had committed himself to aggressive goals, and with few exceptions, he met his goals.  When he didn’t want to study, he forced himself to at least sit with a language book in front of him. 

Jake, on the other hand, didn’t set any goals at the beginning.  For him, it was just cool that he might be able to understand more of what was happening in the video games.  Within a couple of weeks of trying to figure out his language materials on his own, he realized that he could progress much faster with his own private tutor, and so he hired one.  Since John and Jake lived relatively close to each other, it wasn’t too surprising that Jake found John’s tutor, and so the two of them were taught by the same personal tutor.  (Although John had a pretty hefty head start...)

video games were fun for Jake

Jake started mimicking the sounds he heard during the games he played.  He played so often that the sounds were very familiar to him.  It was easy to copy them.  Almost as soon as he hired his tutor, he asked the tutor to begin by teaching him what was being said in the video game.  As soon as he figured out what they were saying, it was a snap to review those new vocabulary words. 

Within a few weeks he had completely mastered everything in the video games.  His tutor introduced him to Japanese aname.  He LOVED it!  Soon (within a matter of months, anyway) he was watching Japanese TV shows and getting by without English subtitles. 

Understanding the television felt INCREDIBLE!!  Jake couldn’t get enough of it!  During “class time” (individual time with the tutor) he would learn new grammar and expand his vocabulary, and after class, whenever he had a free minute, he would watch more Japanese television.  When he heard or saw something he didn’t understand, he would write it down so that the next day he could ask his tutor. 

Clearly, Jake enjoyed his language learning experience much, much more than John.  John “worked” much, much harder than Jake.  So which is more useful in learning a language, enjoying the process, or working hard?  For Jake and John, the proof was in the pudding.  After two years, Jake was already completely fluent in all aspects of Japanese.  He could read and write, and it made him feel great to be able to do that.  John, on the other hand, could say some memorized phrases, he still remembered most of the two essays that he memorized earlier, he could spell out words and could tell you how to translate over a thousand words from English to Japanese.  What John accomplished in two years was no small feat, but he was far from fluent.  There was no question that Jake had progressed far, far beyond the level that John achieved.  They both studied for about the same amount of time, and even worked with the same tutor.  They both had set schedules for studying.  The similarities, however, stopped there.


In a future post I want to go into greater detail on why Jake's experience was so much more enjoyable and effective than John's.  For now, I feel like it would be impossible to understate the importance of learning your material in a way that excites you, so that the brain believes the material you are working with is both interesting and important.  
until next time...

Chinese New Year Video

Every New Year in America people create their new year's resolutions, perhaps watch Times Square on TV, maybe enjoy some fireworks (also on TV), wish friends and family a happy new year, and then probably go to bed. 
Chinese New Year is far more intense.  This is a video from the 23rd floor of an apartment complex on the outskirts of Beijing (outside the 5th ring road).  This video could have lasted 12 hours and it would feel the same the whole time, but a few minutes is long enough to get a feeling for what Chinese New Year feels like in Beijing.
Hope you like it.

About me

I've only contributed one "note" to my facebook page.  It was the "25 random things about me" thing that was popular a few years ago.  I want to share that list with you because I think that it will be a good springboard to other posts.  If you want to here the full story on any of these points, let me know in the comments section and I'll get started with it.

My list:
1. Until recently I had little to no desire to keep a blog-- it felt like a lot of work that would pretty much just be wasted anyway...*
2. I can catch flies with my bare hands-- right hand, left hand, it doesn't matter. I have caught flies out of mid-air while teaching English in Beijing and while sitting down in Church in Romania. The most flies I have ever caught in one hand at the same time: right hand 5, left hand 3. It is hard to catch more than one fly in your hand, because when you open your hand to catch the second fly, the first one flies out. Its harder than it sounds.
3. I love pizza--much more than is reasonable. In high School Tim Robbins and I ate Little Caesars Pizza EVERY SCHOOL DAY for 2 years. I still eat pizza about 4-5 times/week. Crazy.

4. Basketball brings me true joy. Really. Ask Paul Rogers, he knows.

5. I eat very little processed sugar.
6. I have been attacked by dogs twice-- the first time by several packs of street dogs in Bucharest (no that is not an exaggeration, in 2000 there were tens of thousands of stray dogs on the streets in Bucharest, and once I took a wrong turn into a dead-end alley. There were well over a hundred dogs organized in packs of about 15). I won that battle by kicking the lead dog of the most aggressive pack squarely in the nose, he retreated, and the rest of the dogs followed suit. I lost the second battle-- to a trained attack dog in Chicago. score as of now; Steve:1, dogs:1
7. My cousin Josh Law lived in ChengDu, China last year. While I was visiting him, the washing machine spontaneously combusted. 15 inch flames came out of the top of the washing machine, and it spewed extremely thick, dark, very toxic smoke out of random cracks. We used a very high-pressure fire hose to extinguish the fire. I never would have imagined that a washing machine could be a fire hazard.
8. I have streaked on the Great Wall of China

There were not this many people on the wall when I performed task #8

9. I have para sailed and fed sting rays in the Caribbean.

me, feeding a stingray in the Caribbean

para sailing-- pretty fun

10. I love to work--hard. Weird, I know, but as long as I know why I'm working and believe in what I'm doing, I really enjoy hard work. I think this came from 3 things; basketball, debate, and yard work when I was younger.
11. Although I quit medical school, I still might become a doctor eventually. I really love almost everything about medicine.
12. When I was younger I never imagined I would stay single this long. Now (after falling in love with Alina) I think it was worth the wait.

Alina and I were married almost 2 years ago

13. I once accidentally stole a new car-- long story.

14. I am debt free and have begun investing for retirement, even though my job does not offer any assistance with retirement investment.**
15. I acted in a Chinese movie. I even said two lines in Chinese. haha funny.
16. I don't like drinking milk.
17. I used to be able to eat insane amounts of food. When I was younger I participated in multiple eating contests and never lost. I can't eat nearly as much food any more.
18. I don't remember birthdays very well. In elementary school I tried to use my older brother Josh's season pass to sneak into Lagoon. When they asked me my birthday to confirm my identity I told them I didn't know. Josh's pass was confiscated.
19. Beautiful piano music is my favorite thing to listen to, which is really amazing considering when I was younger I would cringe when I heard the piano.
20. I love debate, but ONLY in a structured setting with rules and judges. I really don't like "debating" outside of those circumstances, especially about things like politics, because inevitably opinions and arguments will hinge on incomplete information, and worse, the incomplete information will be tainted by personal biases. If I'm not debating for the sport of it, I don't like it and will try to change the subject or leave.
21. I LOVE tall buildings. I have really enjoyed living in Beijing and Shanghai, and visiting Hong Kong, in part because I love to see all the beautiful buildings. I love the mountains and oceans and country too, but huge buildings completely amaze me.

Hong Kong

fun building in Hong Kong

22. Speaking of things that amaze me, even though I technically understand the physics behind what makes airplanes get off the ground, I still can't really understand. Cell phones-- same thing. There are just some technologies that I will have to accept that I don't truly understand.
23. I love to talk about life goals and dreams. Somehow that subject never gets old for me. I'm happy that I'm almost 30 and I still love to talk about this.
24. I think I would love hunting, but I've never done it. I do love fishing.
25. I can listen to good Christmas music at any time of the year, but if I listen to it during Christmas Season, then it makes me miss America/Christmas in America.

*I changed the first thing because the old comment was not relevant anymore.
** not anymore, we bought a house two weeks ago (YEAH!) and are in debt again

3 essential foundations for learning Chinese (or any foreign language)

To me, language is really beautiful.  I think language is what makes us human.  Without language, we would not be able to share our thoughts with others.  Without language we could have no thoughts, only instincts.  Learning a second, third, fourth, or 25th language not only enriches you through exposure to different ways of thinking, but it also helps you understand your own language more succinctly and completely.  The better you can use language (your native language or any other,) the more complete and whole your thoughts can be developed.  With that development comes a deeper, richer, more enlightened life.

When I was in Beijing, it was normal for people to arrive and ask "what is the best way to learn Chinese?"  Perhaps because I learned my Chinese in classrooms and in my interactions with Chinese friends (as opposed to intense military training courses or religious missionary service), most of these people were referred to me.  In the future, I'm simply going to point people to my blog when they ask how I learned Chinese, or what I recommend they do to learn the language.  As I build my blog, I hope that it can be a useful tool for anyone who visits China.  I want to pack this blog with as much information as possible to help people get along well in visits to China.  In this entry, I'll focus on the basics of language acquisition.

Laying a good foundation for learning another language

firm foundation

I think there are really three things that lay the foundation for successful language acquisition: attitude, expectations, and  approach. 

1) Attitude:  The right attitude will rescue you time and time again throughout the language acquisition process.  There will be times when you feel REALLY stupid.  You have to decide to find the humor in the situation and agree that it's okay to make a fool of yourself.  Decide now that it is worth the humiliation to be able to eventually master Chinese (or whatever language you are focusing on).  One thing to keep in mind, is that all the extra attention you receive because you made a silly mistake in front of others will make it far easier to remember this mistake and avoid it in the future.
I think most of the time people freeze up and stunt their own growth it is usually because of one word: insecurity.  Learning a language is no different.  I'll talk about insecurity in greater detail in a future post, but if you feel like you can never win, or that everyone else seems to be having an easier time figuring things out than you, those are good clues that you might be insecure (in your second language).
*Decide to be willing to be put in vulnerable positions in life and laugh at yourself
*Open yourself up to the possibility that you can be successful, imagine how you will feel when you are beyond your current stage.
*Reward yourself for small successes and breakthroughs in bravery.  When you do something that is outside of your comfort zone, stop afterwards to reflect on how you successfully faced your fears and came out okay.  Focus on how good it feels when you look back and can see the growth in yourself.  

2) Expectations:  A necessary aspect of the right attitude is to adjust your expectations.  Adjust your impression of mistakes.  I make lots of mistakes!  Your Chinese teacher probably makes loads of mistakes.  In fact, you probably constantly make mistakes when you speak English!  If you ever want to be fluent in Chinese, you will first have to make tens of thousands of mistakes.  
The key is to come into your language experience expecting to make mistakes, and decide ahead of time that mistakes are normal, healthy, funny, and wonderful.  Decide to be okay with that.
If you expect to have fun, expect to make mistakes, and expect to succeed, you will.  You will succeed and you will have a riot all along the way.

3) Approach: first, it is important to realize what language acquisition is not.
*learning a language is not memorizing a list of vocabulary words
*not working out grammar like you would a math equation

*not passing quizzes and tests in school
*not perfection.

a very very poor foundation

I believe it is often counterproductive to try to learn a language through vocabulary lists.  Especially if you are learning your second language, (as apposed to having already learned a second language) because it might be difficult to keep in mind that many words in English have several different meanings.  One of the fun bonuses of learning a second and third language is you begin to be more aware of the multiple meanings of a single word.  There are thousands of examples of words that, if you change the context involved, you also change the meaning.  Usually each different meaning has a different translation in a foreign language.  Also, remember that the words in the foreign language often also have multiple meanings and can only be accurately interpreted in context.  More often than not, only one of those meanings is going to correspond accurately with its English counterpart.  Basing language acquisition on a list of comparable vocabulary lists leads to using "strength" when you mean "courage" or "cold" when you mean "angry."  The list of possible mistakes is endless.  So if you are going to memorize something, do not memorize lists of words, at least memorize phrases that are in context and express an entire thought. 

Language is communicating thoughts, understanding someone else who shares their thoughts, giving and taking directions, etc.  
I will share other posts about more specific things that you can do to learn a new language or reinforce a language that you worry is slipping away from you.  For now, decide that you love your target language, and begin studying the people and culture that use the target language.  Use what you know as much as possible.  You don't have to speak to native speakers to be able to use your language skills.  www.italki.com is a fun website that allows you to meet native speakers from any language around the world, and you should be able to find dozens of other ways to keep up on your target language, if you are committed to it.

I will need to fill in the gaps with a lot of the advice on this post with more complete posts in the future, but really the focus here is that for you to truly succeed in learning a foreign language, your mindset needs to be aligned with success. 

50 things to do before I die

1) fly an airplane

2) act in another movie (my first movie was a Chinese movie and I only said two lines... in Chinese)

3) give a water buffalo away to a family in South East Asia
4) make 100 free throws in a row (best to date-86 consecutive free throws)
5) go skydiving
6) learn to speak Korean fluently
7) learn to speak Spanish fluently

pretty exciting marathon- on the Great Wall!

8) run a marathon
9) become an effective humanitarian
10) attend NCAA March Madness live
11) meet John Stockton-- hopefully take pictures with him and get his autograph
12) scuba dive in the Galapagos Islands
13) take Alina on a cruise
14) see the pyramids in Egypt
15) start and manage successful businesses
16) write and publish a book about language aquisition
17) sell at least 100,000 copies of at least one of my books

hopefully this book, but 100,000 sales of any book will be great!

18) bowl a 200 or higher
19) go on an African safari

20) genuinely surprise my wife at least once per year
21) run a successful basketball camp
22) see Le Miserable
23) go to Alina's graduation ceremony in America
24) donate money to BYU-Idaho
25) watch hot lava flow from an island volcano directly into the ocean at night
26) catch a 50 pound fish
27) hike to Machu Picchu
28) play basketball with an NBA player
29) shower in a waterfall

La Tomatina festival in Spain

30) participate in the La Tomatina festival
31) Take Alina to Hawaii, Alaska, and New York City
32) go hang gliding
33) take my family back to China (already hosted Alina's family in America for 3 months)
34) perform in front of at least 10,000 people live
35) have my own greenhouse
36) gaze off the top of the statue of liberty

37) spend the night in a snow cave that I build
38) skinny dip in the Ocean
39) learn to throw a boomerang

Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights

40) see the Northern Lights
41) be interviewed on TV in America (already been interviewed on TV in Romania and China)
42) learn sign language
43) organize my own "amazing race"

Mount Fuji during Cherry Blossom season

44) capture a photograph and sell it for at least $500
45) pay cash for our dream home
46) be paid to review travel destinations
47) dive in a submarine
48) spend a week with Alina in Bora Bora
49) visit Mecca
50) watch cherry blossoms in Japan

Illustrations for my book "Your Superpowers"

I wanted to get a shout out to Josh Keele, who was my illustrator.  He did a fantastic job on all 26 illustrations in the book.  His blog is http://joshsimagination.blogspot.com/       Here is a sample of what he did for me:

A boy versus the Tian He-1, the world's fastest supercomputer

The basic premise of the book is that a teenage boy or girl has latent superpowers including the power to be creative, and to attract.  At the beginning of the book I make the case that a human brain is even more impressive than the world's most impressive supercomputer.

scientist studying the brain

Kim Peek memorized over 12,000 books in his life, including phone books

Among other things, Your Superpowers points out that there is still more that scientists don't know about the brain than what they do.  Even the most sophisticated computers are duplicate-able.




















Kim Peek is one example of someone whose brain is simply amazing.





























A teenager's superpowers do not end with his or her mind.  Each person is connected to a greater force.  With our energy, we can all tap into this force, if we learn how to do that.  There are 5 steps to accessing that greater power and using it to create exactly the life we want.

attracting great things

following those simple steps can pull a young person out of a state of victimhood and frustration and into a state of empowerment.

bad day at school

you can take a terrible situation at school, at home, with friends, or any other circumstance, and create what you want.

much better day at school

I've loved every minute of creating this book, I look forward to sharing with everyone who is ready and willing to listen!

discovering his superpowers

success!

Best Ways to Enjoy the Great Wall of China 长城

The Great Wall at Ba Da Ling, near Beijing

When I was 17 years old I put something on my bucket list that I honestly thought was impossible: walk on the Great Wall of China.  I have since walked, run, camped, danced, played guitar and much more on my many trips to the Great Wall.
The Great Wall is certainly a fantastic place to visit.  What you may not realize is that your experience on the Great Wall will change dramatically depending on which part of the wall you visit.

About the Great Wall
The Great Wall really should be called the Great Walls.  In fact there are sometimes huge gaps between sections of the wall, because in those areas mother nature provided a sufficient barrier.   The wall stretches from Shan Hai Guan in the east all the way to Lop Nur in the west.  For those of you who are still new to Chinese geography that is roughly 5,500 miles.  Over 200 miles of that is the "gaps" in the wall consisting of steep cliffs.  To put that in perspective, mapquest says that driving from Miami Florida to Anchorage, Alaska is just under 5,000 miles and would take 90 hours to get there.

Miami Beach to Anchorage, Alaska: 4,941 miles

There must have been a lot of war during the time labeled in Chinese history books as "the waring states period" (战国时代) from about the 5th century BC to about 220 BC.  All of the different dynasties during that time took turns building walls for protection, but it wasn't until Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇) took control of greater China and started the Qin dynasty that the various sections of the wall were connected in a way that protected against invasion from the north.

So different parts of the wall were built by different people sometimes hundreds of years apart.  The sections near Beijing were built to protect the capitol, and were huge (the North Pass is 25 feet high and 16 feet wide) and have been well restored.  Meanwhile other parts of the wall have already completely disintegrated into dirt and are lost.

Great Wall Myths
Two myths that I grew up believing are that the Great Wall is visible from space, and that the workers who died while building the wall were just buried inside the wall.  Both of these are obviously not true.  The Great Wall is barely taller than the trees that surround it, and looks kindof like regular soil.  According to Norberto López-Gil, who wrote an article in the Journal of Optometry entitled "Is it really possible to see the Great Wall from space with the naked eye?," in order to see the Great Wall from space one would have to have vision about 17,000 times better than 20/20 vision.  It is the equivalent of being able to see a single hair from a distance of over two miles.  Also, surely no one was intentionally buried in the Great Wall, because the decaying body would obviously weaken the stuctural integrity of the wall and it would break down very quickly if there were a million dead bodies in it (it is estimated that a total of about a million people died while laboring to put all of the pieces of the wall together).


How to Enjoy the Great Wall
Because of the great differences found in different parts of the wall, it goes without saying that you are going to have a different experience when you go to various different parts of the wall.  I recommend, whenever possible, visiting at least two separate parts of the wall to get a feel for the variety.  My five favorite Great Wall experiences, in no particular order are:

Nathaniel on the Great Wall

1) Ba Da Ling:  Ba Da Ling is located just outside of Beijing.  If you've only been to the Great Wall once, or you went with a tour guide, you probably went to Ba Da Ling.  This part of the wall contains the North Pass, which is very impressive, and of all the places I have been to, this is the best restored.  This is the best location to go and really imagine how great the Great Wall really was.

North Pass at Ba Da Ling

Getting to Ba Da Ling is also extremely simple, obviously a tour guide will take you there, usually for less than $15 USD, or you can even take the bus all the way there from Dongzhimen station.

Mutianyu

2) Mu Tian Yu: Mutianyu is older than Badaling, but after restoration it becomes difficult to tell.  Mutianyu is a little further away at about 70km from Beijing.  Two fun things here, there are far more watch towers in this area, and there is a cable car to take you to the top if you are not into hiking.  When I say hiking, I mean walking up thousands of stairs- outdoors.

Camping with friends at Huanghuacheng

3) Huanghuacheng: This is my favorite part of the wall, as evidence by the many return trips.  This area of the wall has not yet been completely restored, and is currently run by local residents.  It is fun because you can see a striking contrast between the restored section, and the rest.  You can literally be walking on bricks and a sturdy foundation and then it just stops and you have to be careful when it turns into crumbling mounds of old rock and dirt.  Generally you can plan on paying 3 yuan per person for passage, and you can stay there and hike as long as you'd like.  The local residents have used the bricks from the wall to build their houses, and you just get the feeling that this is more real, because it has not been restored as much.

4) Si Ma Tai: This is the part of the wall I went to for the first time.  It has not been restored (or at least hadn't when I went in 2003) and there were literally trees and bushes growing up out of the wall.  The mountains are steep in this area and it was gorgeous, but I certainly did not feel the grandeur of the wall.  I would recommend this place for people who want to see what happens to a very well built structure if it is left unattended for at least 400 years.

Jia Yu Guan

5) Jia Yu Guan:  This is the only part on this list that I have not yet been to.  This part was built in 1372 and was the east gate.  I think it looks beautiful and the fact that it consists of an outer wall, an inner wall, and a mote makes it pretty cool to me.

Original foreword for "Your Superpowers"

 I'm hoping that I can get most of the story of how Your Superpowers came to be out in bits and pieces.  This is the first foreword that I wrote, which I eventually swapped out for another foreword that was more targeted to the reader.  

Like most of humanity, I didn't discover until long after the fact that Junior High and High School "growing up" does not have to be all pain and no gain.

            Teaching High School and working as a summer councilor for 12-18 year-old's helped me remember the reality of this stage after many of my friends and peers had long forgotten.

            Like countless others who spend time with and care about the youth, I've been able to help several individuals make real changes, but never really created a system that could be duplicated by anyone and everyone. 

            When one of my nephews tuned 13, I felt a strong desire to help him avoid the terrible struggles that I've seen so many before him experience.  So many of the boys and girls at this age feel trapped in their lost self-esteem, and truly don't know where to turn for hope and peace.  Many of them question life and everything that used to give them stability.  This often results in struggles with parents, life-long friendships breaking up, and feeling like a big loser.

            As I thought about some of the young people I care about, I felt lost as well.  How could I help them see that all of the struggle is a mirage?  How could I help them see that if they choose not to, they don't have to play the game and feel like they have to fight their way through the maturation process? 

            About three weeks later I woke up with the impression that I needed to write a book for my nephew.  I put pen to paper and began writing.  In a burst of inspiration, I found myself writing faster and faster, and just barely kept up with the words as they came to my mind.  It was amazing.  It was a gift from God.  Six hours later, completely exhausted, I finally put my pen down and allowed myself to eat as I massaged my right wrist.  I had finished my first book. 

            It wasn't until much later that I realized the actual creation of this book occurred only because I followed each and every step outlined inside.  Today my gratitude and excitement overwhelm me as I realize this gift from God was for my nephew, and for every teen and pre-teen in the world that doesn't want to be a victim.  I'm grateful that I was able to be a part of this teaching process.  The creation of the book itself is proof that the words and messages taught inside are inspired.  As with all truth, these principles can and will inspire you and the youth you care about, as soon as you are ready to receive them.

            Get ready to expect miracles,

                                   

Steve Gardner

"Your Superpowers" is off the press! (kindof)

My first book, "Your Superpowers"

So it's still missing the the subtitle (needs one), I only printed it as a paperback book (will be a hardback when the final copy is printed), has no ISBN number (needs one), and there are still a few things that need to be corrected, but it is REALLY exciting to have a physical copy of Your Superpowers.  It cost a lot less than I anticipated to print 25 copies of the book, and I just picked up the first copies on Thursday.  Friday I attended a "Freedom Fast Track" seminar hosted by Garrett Gunderson (author of Killing Sacred Cows) where I was able to meet a book agent who has been able to put 68 consecutive authors on a best-sellers list.   More on that later.
Last night I was able to present the book to my nephew, Joseph, for whom the book was written.

Joseph interpreting one of the illustrations

Becka and Sarah joining in the fun

reading the back cover

Joseph and his book

It was a fantastic experience and I look forward to getting this book out to millions of other teenagers and pre-teens.
I realize that this is just the beginning, there is much to do, but it is the beginning of something special.

Our Home in Rexburg

Since so many of you have not yet been able to come up to Rexburg yet, Alina and I wanted to share a few photos of our home with you.  This is the view from the outside.

I didn't realize that I needed to change the settings on our camera from "RAW" to "JPEG," which is why it has taken so long for these pictures to come up.
When Nathaniel and the BYU Men's Chorus came up to Rexburg for a couple of concerts, Caitie and Jeff and Mom and Dad all came up to see him!  It was fun to host everyone, these are a few of the pictures we took while they were here.

Catie, Jeff, and Alina in the guest room

our kitchen

full living room

Nathaniel reading his birthday card

Caitie and Alina

It was great to have so many people share our new house, we can't wait to host Josh and Melodie and family in two weeks!