No, this isn’t the typical post about the trials and successes I have when working from home. A lot of people struggle when working from home. I’m not one of them. My wife is fabulous, she let’s me work, and I’m pretty self motivated…except when it’s a nice golfing day.
This is about Oprah.
Yeah, that’s right. Sometimes I watch Oprah.
Now, before you say “Oh, that show is soooo stupid”, or “I hate Oprah”, in your Napoleon Dynamite voice, let me ask you a question:
Have you ever seen Oprah?
If you have, Have you ever watched her show on a somewhat regular basis?
Yeah, unless you’re a stay at home mom (or dad), I doubt it.
I have. Working from home I have a TV in my office/kids room which for a long time had to be on the same channel as the TV in the main room. Often I would have it on from watching SportsCenter in the morning, and just hadn’t turned it off in the afternoon when my wife had taken over the TV.
I actually enjoy watching most of the Oprah shows on TV. She does a LOT of good. Yes, I know you say “Sure, she has a ton of money, she better do some good with it” in your Napoleon Dynamite voice again, but that’s totally beside the point. There are a lot of people who have lots of money who don’t do squat with it.
Well…the other day I was working and my wife called me into the front room because she wanted me to see what Oprah was talking about that day.
She was talking about poor people.
Not college student poor.
Like, backwoods Tennessee where their trailer just burned down and they don’t have insurance or anywhere to live or clothes or shoes for their kids poor.
Like, ghetto Detroit where they didn’t eat dinner last night because they didn’t have food poor.
Like, single mom with 2 kids working 16 hour days to keep them fed poor.
It broke my heart just watching it.
The thing is that I’ve been sooooo ridiculously blessed in life that I’ve never had to deal with anything like that. I’ve never really had any hard times in life. My dad always told us we were poor growing up but that was because we lived in a ridiculously rich neighborhood (Manhattan Beach, CA) in the smallest house in the city. We were not poor.
Even in college I never really struggled. I mean, I had one semester where I didn’t know how I was going to eat, but I had a girl friend (later fiancée and wife) who fed me that semester.
Because of the blessings I’ve had in life, I’ve always known that I needed to help other people. I’ve always known that part of my responsibility here on this earth was to help and teach others who are less fortunate than me.
The problem with that has always been HOW?
How do you help people who are struggling financially. How do you help people who don’t have any skills and don’t have any way to acquire those skills and who have to put all their time and effort into just living right now?
I never knew, until 4 weeks ago. At 4:15 in the morning.
I woke up and realized that I had a lot of knowledge about how to make money online and that I could share that knowledge with others, without having to teach them the whole process. I could teach them by providing a system they could use and learn how to do some marketing and how to make money online over time.
I could provide a system where people, anyone (read – ANYONE), could write articles (blog entries) and I could use my marketing knowledge to make them money.
Thus, WritingUp.com was born.
The domain hopefully means – Writing Up in Life.
That’s the goal at least. To provide anyone who is struggling financially in life, but who is willing to work, a means by which they can create passive income over time. Obviously nobody is going to make a fortune off this immediately, but over time, I think we can help a lot of people help themselves.
So, back to Oprah and her story about the people who are struggling financially. I hope to do my part.
I hope to make a difference in this world by providing some tools with which people can help themselves prosper.
When I spoke at BYU a few weeks ago, I told the class that they need to do more good in life. Each of those students (I was in their place a few years ago) is going to have a ton of opportunities in life. Way more than most people in this world. I told them to do more good in the world than they think they can, because the world needs it.
Oprah does it. I hope they do too. I’ll try to do the same.