This is the final segment of the three things that changed my life for the better. If you would like to start from the beginning, click HERE
If you want part 2, click HERE

I don't believe that who we are was developed over night, but I think sometimes is sure can appear to look that way. Even though the people we become is a process that takes our entire life up until that moment, there are defiantly times that we can reflect back on that we knew changed the way we thought, and therefore, how we turned out.

In the first post, I discussed how the woman I would one day marry helped me grow out of my bad habits the most when she left me. In the second post, I discussed how the loss of my mother caused me to change the direction I was headed and forced me to treat my actions with more seriousness. Both of these times were and example of how a terrible pain ended up causing an incredible growth inside of me. Both of those events showed a new path inspired from suffering but led to inner peace and new refreshing understanding about life. This story is, in a way, similar to these first two, but luckily, didn't cause me to have to go through extreme periods of darkness. There was suffering, but nothing near like it was the first two times. Still, The main thing that I have noticed on the path to success, is that you often don't encounter you're biggest breakthrough until after you have had a break down. But, without further ado...

What Doesn't Kill You...

A lobster doesn't grow like the rest of us. As their body continues to grow, the hard carapace around them that gives them protection starts to become very cramped for their body. As the discomfort grows, the lobster has to eventually relinquish his old shell so that his body can grow another one that is more appropriate for his new size. When it first looses his shell, however, it's important that it gets to shelter, because it's essentially defenseless until the shell grows back and hardens once more. As it keeps growing, the shell keeps falling off and the lobster gets bigger and stronger. It's never comfortable having to outgrow it's shell and it can be especially frightening when there isn't a shell to talk about, but for it to grow, it ultimately needs to go through a period of discomfort.

Just like a lobster, we need to go through a period of discomfort before we can fully grow. Whether it's the pain of working out your muscles or the social anxiety of learning something for the first time, You suffer, then learn, then grow. Unfortunately for us, unlike the lobster, we can get away from the discomfort by sedating our emotions and numbing the pain with food, drugs, or electronic addictions. If we wanted to, we could consciously choose to not grow and just spend our whole lives feeling small cramped and always looking out for danger. However, if you want to grow, you need to be willing to shed your old shell for a better one and be willing to have the fear of uncertainty while your new one is growing back. You can't get anywhere without first experiencing the pain of the transition into your new self. Your old self must first die before you can become the new you and the pain you feel is dependent on your unwillingness to adapt to the new circumstances. Pain is not the problem, the unwillingness to experience it is.

People are always saying that they don't want any problems in their life, but they are missing the bigger point. Problems are a good thing, they mean that you are doing something that actually matters and you have some kind of hope at achieving it. It you don't give a shit about life, you could easily just coast through it. When you don't have any kind of expectations, it doesn't matter what happens because any result is fine. When you actually care though, that means that you aren't going to just let life make you the victim. It means that you are willing to try for something more and the problems you encounter along the way are indications that you are doing something right. I've learned to love my problems because I now know that this is the case. This event that I'm about to describe was about when I came to that realization.

Building The Future One Squirrel Cage At A Time

Shortly after my mother died, my wife and I found our first house. We had been wanting a place to call our own for sometime and my wife was afraid that we would have been forever doomed to rent for the rest of our lives. The apartment life was defiantly not one for her. Let's just say that the music being played at full blast in the middle of the night from the unit above us and the small over-populated, underground cellar that we called our own was a big cramp to our life style. It was direct contradiction to the kind of environment that we would have ever pictured for being our life story, but it was the absolute, unfortunate reality. We were not doing ourselves any favors by staying there and every year that passed by made my wife that much more depressed.

Aside from the small size, the loud neighbors, the silly children peaking through our windows, and the smell of pot wafting in our front door every time the hallway was exposed, there was one little detail that made living in such a tiny quarters, unbearable; the animals.... several upon several little furry creatures that shared that tiny space with us. It wasn't by mistake that at one point we had over one hundred animals living with us at a time. That kind of thing happens either deliberately, or through and infestation. Luckily, this story isn't that disgusting, but it wasn't too far from it. See, we were animal breeders that had a small hobby breeding business and with all of the animals giving birth, it wasn't unheard of to have anywhere from eighty to a hundred animals in the apartment at a time. they wouldn't stay there forever, but until they were old enough to be sold, they ate, pooped, and rummaged around all night and day.

The good part about having a small exotic animal breeding business is that you can make a little bit of extra money while getting to play with a bunch of fuzzy animals. We had sugar gliders, short-tailed opossums, hedgehogs, prairie dogs, crested geckos, ball pythons, Siberian chipmunks, spiny mice... you name it! The negative side, however, is that they stunk to high hell and when they got out, they caused havoc....like thousands of dollars of havoc. The prairie dogs would nibble on the walls, the hedgehogs would often attract flies with their wet turds, the sugar gliders just smelled bad because of their scent glands, and the squirrel, would destroy the cabinets and door to our bedroom. Wait, did I just say squirrel? Yep, and she is actually the reason behind this whole story.

See, most people don't realize that squirrels and humans can coincide ...inside, but they can. Pandora, our squirrel, in this case was an unofficial rescue that heavily relied on us to take care of her. She never really had the chance to adapt outside, because she was saved at a young age and never rehabilitated before we got her. She was nice, but... well squirrely. Let's just say that man didn't exactly domesticate the squirrel like he did the dog, so there were a couple things that her instincts led her to do that were controversial... like peeing and pooping wherever she wanted to, gnawing on any wooden surface she could, and just being plain destructive in general. Once we discovered that we were actually able to move into a real home, those monkey shines were going to have to cease....So enters our story....

When we won the bid on the house and there was no more speculation on what was going to happen, a decision needed to be made...er...Perhaps an ultimatum even. Old Doodles (my wife...obviously her real name...) said that she was sick of living in filth (and I don't blame her,) and said that if we didn't cage the squirrel, than she wasn't coming with us. This obviously wasn't a real possibility, because she wasn't able to live on her own in the wild and now, instead of hanging out in our bedroom closet, she needed some kind of enclosure. The problem? Shit, what wasn't the problem? I couldn't build a damn thing if I had tried and I wasn't going to keep her in a cat crate. I needed a damn huge cage if she was going to be trapped somewhere and those kind of cages aren't easily available on the open market. Trust me, I tried asking people for help, trying to buy something online or in stores, and thinking of alternatives, but the hard truth was that the only way that I could do what I needed to do was build it myself.

Now, I'm sure you're probably thinking "Hey, it couldn't be all that hard, throw some wood together and call it a day." Sure, that sounds alright, but we weren't talking about building a little bird house... we were talking about building something that an arboreal animal could jump around in. I mean... think about it for a second, squirrels climb sometimes fifty feet into the air and jump from tree to tree looking for nuts and what-not. Throwing that same animal into a little kitty crate and washing my hands of it would beyond what someone could call cruel. I wasn't going to do that. Of course, I didn't' need to build a forest in my living room, but it needed to be somewhat reasonable. Further more, the bigger the cage, the more supportive structure it needs..because.. you know..physics and stuff.. Plus, if you think about it, how the hell would the walls work? If they are solid wood....like a giant wooden box, I would have successfully made a squirrel solitary confinement. If I had a mesh material for the sides so she could, like, not be in complete darkness, I would have successfully made a giant chew toy for her. It needed to be big, strong and well built....None of which I was currently capable of making it based around my expertise. I was in a pickle

"Well, Adam, all you need to do is get your shit together and figure out how to build that cage... blue prints..wood, and some elbow grease is all you need," says anyone not in my predicament... Yeah, I'm not saying that I was going to accomplish the impossible by making this thing, as if, being the builder that held as much prestige as that of the art of Michelangelo, but it wasn't going to be a walk in the park either. Of course I could build the damn thing, but so could a three-foot man build a cathedral. The point that needed to be addressed was that I was going from building not a damn thing, to building a eight-foot long by four-foot tall thing that needed to keep the squirrel in one place without being a prison. I challenge anyone to that...it was a bit of a dozy....but I still did it. Like the lobster, I convinced myself to throw off that old shell of an Adam Rounisto I was, for the new one that I became. I had to kill myself and the funeral took around 14 hour a day for more than a week straight. I would get into the details, but it was a shit show....Now to the point...

The Ripple Effect

The cage was the catalyst, but the result of making it caused more than an opportunity to play builder for a couple of days. What it did was phenomenal...but it took about a week after being done before much was obvious. See, that whole time of self doubt, temporary self loathing, and fear of not getting done within in my timeline, I missed what was really happening to me. I threw off my shell out of necessity, not realizing that I was squishy and weak at the time, but after I looked at what I built, it dawned on me.... I did it.. I mean, I guess I knew that I would eventually get it done, but there was something about actually seeing it that had such an impact on me. I literally went from regular guy into builder in less than two weeks, and all I did was try to do something until I got it right... That made me wonder.

I pondered for a good two weeks after my builder's fatigue. I thought about how I wasn't sure about the whole thing and how I wasn't able to get someone else to do it. I couldn't make cats or dogs out of it. I kept staring at the cage and just thought to myself "I did that." It wasn't out of pride, it was out of shock. I was genuinely surprised that I was able to pull through and do what I needed to do to make it all work out. What really messed with me though, was the fact of how easily I could have cheated myself out of that experience if I had managed to found someone else to bear that responsibility. Wow. This raised and interesting question and a feeling that would haunt me since. If I managed to pull through on this thing because of having no other option, how many things did I not bother with simply because I didn't think I could? My life changed in that very moment of realization.

What we do, is directly related to what we feel that we're capable of doing. Whenever we don't think that we are capable, we try to put the burden of responsibility onto someone else we think will do a better job than we will. The shitty part of it though, is that it likely isn't going to be the case. Do you really think that all of the so-called professionals always know what the hell they are doing? No, we live in a world full of bullshitters because if you told people that you didn't know your dick from your tits, you would never get the job. When a professional doesn't know what the hell they are doing, they guess...just like I did. They try a bunch of stuff until they get it right because, like in my scenario, they don't have the luxury of calling it quits. Just imagine if you did what they did and learned the new skill instead. You begin to grow exponentially.

The Lesson I Never Forget

After my little squirrely escapades, I started doing a lot more stuff that maybe I would not have normally done. I told myself that since I wanted to always write a book, I would... so I did. The wife wanted to travel around the world a bit so we did. Not too much so far since money didn't come out of my ears yet, but we went to Peru and Australia for starters. In Peru I even climbed up Rainbow Mountain without any walking sticks... just raw strength... that was pretty cool. I told my self that everything that I ever wanted to do, I would systematically do regardless to if I knew how to or not. I started demystifying financial investing and started learning how to buy stocks and putting safe money into a Roth Ira. I uploaded all of my music to YouTube Like I wanted, I started my first official company that focuses on board games, and I started being more active in communities such as this one. I never planned on being on steemit because I never knew about crypto currencies or de-centralized networks, but since I went looking, I found it.

The key thing to get from all of this is that you have no idea what the hell is out there if you are never willing to go looking around blindly until you find something. Heros aren't born, they are made over time... You could say I'm a hero in training. Not because I 'm special, but because I'm not afraid of throwing out my old shell and killing the old me for the sake of growth. I've learned to love my problems because I'm willing to take whatever it takes to get where I plan on going. Where am I going to head ultimately? well, I'll talk about that another time. As for now, just know that I have no doubts about the infinite future and mark my words, I am going to make incredible changes that nobody will see coming...not even things that I can imagine as my current self. As long as I'm willing to grow, these stories are only the beginning.

Well.....damn.... that's a really long post eh? oh well. I imagine that perhaps one day someone will come by and read the whole thing. As for now, let it be a stamp in time for where I am right now and where things are heading. As for you, I highly suggest you toss out that old shell of yours and learn to love the squishy, unprotected person you become as you dive into the unknown. There is no doubt in my mind that you will gain more than you can lose.. Don't believe it? well, shove off, go try it before you complain. Even an idiot with the willingness to try, will outdo the lazy intellectual. Be like that of the lobster.

Thank you for reading this really long post and take care until next time!

Who Is @Thegreatlife ?

Hello, my name is Adam Rounisto and I am a music composer, author, and educator. My goal is ultimately is to teach things as I understand them, or at very least, entertain if I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I don't mind if my stuff isn't perfect, because perfection prevents progress, so, I present to you even some of my rawest stuff in spite of being done or not.

If you enjoy what I'm doing feel free to check out my YouTube Channel HERE

If you are interested in checking out my music and projects that I'm involved with, click HERE

To check out my board game website, click HERE

I'm always looking for other highly motivated people to work with so if you would like to work on a project with me, feel free to reach out to me here on Steemit or through YouTube!