The Blog of John P Morgan Jr

Learn to defend myself.

I’ve trained different forms of fighting and self defense arts since I was twelve years old. Most of my training was in Kenpo, which I attained a black belt in. During college I tried some Capoiera and Ju Jitsu and more recently I’ve been training an art called Vee-Arnis-Jitsu.

I’m not invincible and there are probably a ton of situations that if I got into, I would be in some serious trouble. However, for the most part, I’m comfortable with my ability to defend myself against the average attack. Whatever that is.

The more comfortable I become with my ability to defend myself, the easier it is to walk away from confrontation. I see fighting as a product of fear and insecurity. Today I train only to defend myself against an unwanted and unwarranted attack.

Hopefully I never need to defend myself, but in an uncertain world, knowing how at least makes me feel a little better.

I guess it’s kinda like wearing a helmet

Go to college.

“Will you ever use your degree?” I get asked that a lot when I tell people I have a BS in Physics. Investing in real estate and starting businesses doesn’t exactly necessitate an understanding of advanced calculus or quantum theory. Actually, it has no direct benefit.

College is not about the direct things.

For me it had nothing to do with getting a degree. Come to think of it, I don’t even know where my degree is. I put it in a box somewhere shortly after receiving it in the mail. Getting the degree was important to me, but having it wasn’t. Physics was interesting to me, but I had no plans of working in research or going to grad school.

College is about the indirect things.

For me it had everything to do with all the challenges I faced, all the skills I gained, all the stresses and failures I learned to deal with. It was about learning to bullshit my way to an A, learning how to speak to crowds of people, learning how to fit 100 hours of work into 75 hours of time. Physics taught me ways, and made me determined, to solve problems. Lots of problems. Hard problems. And not just physical problems. All kinds of problems.

The list is endless, which makes going to college worth so much. I know a lot of people who feel they wasted time going to college. Maybe it’s true, but I say it’s their fault. Struggling through college, with eyes fixed on a degree, will assure that everything of value passes by in the periphery.

In fact, without a wide view and a glass half full, anything that takes effort is a waste.

Live in a tent.

The summer after college, I filled a big duffel bag with books, music and clothes and shipped myself to the middle of Oregon. I was working at an adventure camp for teens (another experience which will appear in my Top 100). When I found my new home, an old tent sitting on dirt patch in a lightly wooded area next to a farm, I was pretty uncomfortable with it.

I had never even been camping before this. At first I tried desperately to keep my things clean. Everything man made was to stay inside the tightly zipped tent. Clean quickly dissipated as even a remote possibility, for sand and dust was constantly blowing around over everything. Oregon is dry, and that summer it was the driest. It was the summer they had all those forest fires. I got so dirty that summer, dirtier than I had ever been. My finger nails were black. I was always barefoot, so my feet were actually stained from the dirt. I was a true hippy.

It was hard to sleep at first, but I adapted. A week in, my one inch thick pad and purple sleeping bag was as exciting to get into as the full motion water bed I left behind was.

Waking up to the sounds of strange animals in the night was intimidating at first, but after awhile it just brought me a sense of peacefulness.

Having everything I owned and needed right inside my tent, made it feel like home pretty quickly too.

When I returned home at the end of the summer, it was nice to be clean and comfortable again. I realized cleanliness is largely a relative term. When I was living in the tent, everyone around me was dirty. Everyone had dirty hands and dirty clothes. Even now, when I go camping I don’t mind being covered in filth…But when I’m home in a modern clean environment, I’m Mr Hygiene.

It was also nice to have more space and stuff when I came back, but I can’t say that I was any happier. The peacefulness that came with the simplicity of living in a tent, challenges the happiness that modern options and comfort brings. I guess I am sold on the modern lifestyle, but the alternative is pretty sweet too.

Run realy far.

I haven’t run a marathon yet, but I’ve run about half of one. For me, around the 6th or 7th mile is when it starts to feel different. The “runners high” is such a pure and natural euphoric feeling. It’s one of the best ways I’ve found to clear my head. Nothing makes me feel healthier and more in shape than running really far.

Read the Bible.

I’m pretty much as far from religious as you can get these days. Ironically, reading the Bible, helped me get to this point. I read it in 1999 with no outside influences. No church or doomsdayer attempting to tell me what it meant.

The first and biggest reward was that I found the stories to be priceless lessons in living a happy and peaceful life. For a short while, I thought that since it was such a powerful book, that there must be one of these religions which had it right. Eventually I felt there existed none. As I read more, the things I found turned me away from organized religion entirely. I found endless contradictions between the things taught under steeples and the things preached in the book.

Their reasoning became rationale and my faiths became fairytales.

My fear of the unknown maintains my belief in the existence of higher power. However, after reading the Bible, I find it impossible to seek immortality through the words of mortals.

I recommend reading the Bible, not because I hope everyone finds the same things as I did, but because I found something at all.