Kyle Phoenix Answers: What can poor people learn from rich people?

There must be effort into change and a consciousness that one is making an extreme change in one’s content and context.

I read a lot of answers and was thinking about this in relation to a pet peeve I have.

1. Patience. I travel twice a month as part of work projects and I stay at two different hotels but the same ones pretty much twice a month. Because the projects have been ongoing and will be ongoing for a couple more years I’ve been able to bounce around to hotels and figure out which is the best for my expenditure budget in terms of comfort, space, safety, convenience. One of the hotels I stay at has some sort of contract with the City so it accepts lower income people who are going through issues. It’s about $2000 a month for a single room. I’m in and out twice a day—-to the project and then to go exercise when weather permits with a 4– 5-mile power walk.

I have noticed this on elevators from when I’m in this concentrated environment with more people of poverty, visibly and when I’m in Manhattan at skyscrapers. Patience. I watch adults and their children press the call button, frantically over and over and over. There are two elevators, it’s not a particularly crowded place weekdays but even on the elevator I see people get on, the less prosperous—-there’s a visible difference between those of us there for work or vacation and frantically continue to press their floor buttons as the elevator is moving, after another passenger has boarded. They’re near frantic and often on their cell phones texting and scrolling and rushing for more stimuli, answers, information, speed, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, I have to get to…the vending machine.

So a few months ago I started really watching this trend, seeing if it was just a human thing that some of us do and some of us don’t but sure enough I was seeing this impatience. A lot of my poorer students have this which leads to the next point.

2. Time Perception. I wandered into CVS and one of the associates greeted me, he’s seen me often from the office building area and recently after a year of going there and a longer discussion with several of the other associates, I told them my name and they looked me up online and now they greet me as soon as I come with whatever you call it when you’re smart and people announce it when you walk in—-it’s been happening since I was a child, sometimes positively, sometimes not, I don’t know what it is, it does no ego aggrandizement but people do it. I ask how he’s doing and he asks, demands an answer from me about how he can change his life. He asks how he can get out of the ghetto he lives in, he, like most people—-this goes to Point 3, expresses disdain at his work. My goal was lemonade but okay, here I am and as a young Black man, in the circumstances he’s expressing he has less access to someone like me, regardless of my race but particularly of my race so if possible, and since I see him at least weekly, I try to start laying some inceptions infections of change (I’d been thinking for the past couple of months of some materials to give the staff about financial management—-its a delicate thing so I’ve been gently strengthening my personal connections to them identifying them by name without looking at their badges, being convivial, congenial, etc.)

One of the things I point out is that he’s about 25. There was a study that children born after 2000 have a mortality lifespan of 125 years because of the advancements in medical technology so I said to him that’s your first place to start. Drugs, drinking, unsafe sex—-you have to stay on the right sides of those, be in control of those. Then food intake, try to reasonably exercise. This will give you more healthy time. He wanted Point 4 but we went back and forth with him asking me what was the lifespan expectancy of Black men and I was like well, it’s shifted. An actuary, I explained what that was, would approximate at least 78 years but that’s longer one, for his generation and two, if you manage the factors I was mentioning. He thought his life expectancy was about 46 to 50 years old, he didn’t think he’d live any longer than that. I was shocked, I thought we were going to quibble about the 78.

3. Work. I work several jobs/projects because it’s just easier or some of my work overlaps or external laps or school is expensive and there are some work projects that absorb tuition costs, it’s a scene. Anyway. I come into contact with 3 distinct social classes every week—-Poor/Working Class, Middle Class, and Rich/Wealthy. I get to distinctly hear and see how all three experience their work lives, whether separate or integrated. Poor through Middle-Class kvetch, complain, hate, distress, stress, worry and are pretty close to paranoid about other workers, managers, changes, etc.. There’s a sense of almost prison-like fatalism about work rather than an engagement. I don’t mean that they necessarily do the job badly but they language hating the job/work they do. Then there are other Middle Class to Rich people who seem pleased, interested, invested, intense and engaged in the work they do, even when not self-employed or owners of the business. There’s one lawyer who works 7 days a week, 8-12 hours a day, his wife often meeting him to leave midday on weekends, getting in at 6am. He teases me about my work hours being wacky and seeing each other in passing and I do the same to him.

4. The Magic Pill.

When I’m teaching often my students want the Magic Pill, no matter their age. My point about the Magic Pill is that its slow acting. A college degree is slow acting. It takes about 10 years to be activated and used but in that 10–14 year period your brain has been changed by education deeply so that you can think far better, more efficiently, broader and deeper than the non-educated. It’s the difference between being able to walk and not being able to walk.

However as I told the CVS associate, change will take time. Your ability though is to figure out what to do with Time. To plan Time and not just have Timepass. When pressed I talk about not watching TV, rarely going to the movies and The Poor to Middle-Class RAGE as if I’m talking about leaving God in a ditch—-what do you do then? They often lack the self-reflection to look at the panacea entertainment is used as so if I say I don’t take the video pills (digital Vicodin) then people can’t understand why I’m voluntarily in “pain”. The pain is the experience of an existence that doesn’t have billions of dollars to distract me., which is Point 5. Nope, haven’t seen Wonder Woman, nor Black Panther, nor Avengers, nor Star Wars——now breathe. Really only a small number of people have seen it. To make $100 million at the box office is only about 10 million people in a weekend. The larger the studio investment, the greater amount of screens it’s shown on. Most movies play on 2000–3000, the above played on 4500+, it would literally have to go black in the middle to not be a financial hit.

Poor to Middle-Class people often talk to and around me about the conspiracy about propaganda but like a brainwashed hooker chatter on about it then tell you to excuse me, they have to go service that biker gang over there. One coworker, whom I have no idea how he’s still alive at 60, scraping along, literally the epitome of Uncle Ruckus rails about his poverty and White influence and subjugation, yet has two cable boxes at home, $250 a month and no pension nor 401k though the company offers it on his $8 after taxes job. He’s stuck. No, really, he looks like Uncle Ruckus…except for the eye and has the same mentality.

5. Either Entertainment or Money is seen as a distraction from reality. I sit on trains and buses and planes, far too many and watch poor people feverishly working on their smartphones and I lean over…and it’s video games and now the new more dullard action, movies/TV shows on phones. Two things I’ve learned from this—invest in phone tech, it is legal drugs and two, it crosses all ages, all races but concentrates in the poor to middle class.

I’m often watching this Impatience, distorted view of Time, Disdain of Work as the first tree and I think about how they mass together to an outcome. Impatience and Time Issues mean you can’t plan. If you can’t stand patiently, sometimes I count, for three seconds, as an elevator door closes without erroneously thinking if YOU press the button the Universe will speed up then how are you going to look at 4 years of investment time to 10 years of educational outcome. It seems very basic, as if I’m pointing out elements of a sneeze to how that gets you to brain cancer but Patience and Time, are required to change an overall situation and I say that as someone deeply invested and aware of both who is constantly pushing myself to do more, thinking that I should be doing more, that when I take a day off have I failed all of my plans. That I should petition to take a few more classes, finances be damned.

Then hating your Work, which I’ve never understood. But then I think I haven’t understood it because I’ve always engaged my work from a happy Middle Class to Rich perspective. So even when it hasn’t been the right hand to the President of the USA or has been some lower skill or no skill job that I’ve taken throughout my entire college career to make ends meet or make sure that school wasn’t interrupted. But the disdain at work I think narrows what you absorb from it, what you give off, who notices you. If I’m pissed at the Concierge desk and you’re looking for a receptionist at $5 more dollars an hour, will you scoop me up or pass me by? People are always watching you. And listening to you. Are they watching you be pissed at your circumstances or putting on your professional face.. and yes, maybe reading tech manuals in the bathroom or taking free online classes on your phone—-you know I’m the only one I’ve ever seen doing that on the train, when I’m not reading a book? Coursera courses are downloadable and transferable to phones—-if I can figure out how to do it, anyone can.

The Magic Pill. I’ve never thought there was a Magic Pill. I have thought with my work and watching it increase in range and value that it will take Patience, Time, Enjoyment of the Work itself and eventually over decades it will manifest as I envision as long as I have critical benchmarks and keep infusing new abilities and ideas into it. Tending the garden.

I have Netflix and Hulu and I lost all reason in my book and on my day off, Monday to Tuesday night, I watched all of Homeland Season 7. I watched it in one day because I have this thing about preferring to see things in a long-range time frame availability like that, rather than wait for an episode a week. I like to see it like a book that I can whizz through in a day. Entertainment in Moderation is fine, refreshing, useful, pushes to new creative boundaries. But here’s how I look at it.

Am I creating as well?

When I watch something, a movie, a film, a TV show, a play, a music concert, a musical, do I then go back to my life and create or do I just pay to see other people create. And if I just pay to see others create, what does that make me?

I write. I try to write a minimum of 25,000 words every couple of days. Really hot years I get up to 10,000,000 a year, the average is about 5,000,000. Some of it good, some published, some online, it’s a mix. Some are just stacked up to be used later. Some are work/teaching related—emails, curriculum, etc..

I’m not just Consuming. I’m also Producing. Something. And amazingly I put it out on market and they keep bringing back revenue 24/7 from all around the world. Hmmm, with a little patience and time…

Uncle Ruckus often pontificates about America the great, racism, capitalism and consumerism in a hodgepodge ball of vitriol, confusion and lower educational perception of things far beyond his capacity to reason through. I asked the CVS associates, several of them, did the company offer them the ability t purchase CVS stock at lower prices because of the AETNA merger. They said yes, but one said, rather condescendingly that he couldn’t think about that because he was paying school loans. He proudly thinks that paying a bill is “having money” or maybe moving money is money. Or what I often find in poor young people when they don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about they flash arrogance rather than the humility of I don’t know or how or what is that?

The deeper juxtapositions of these 5 thought-frames, ways of being are what I think the Rich—-hell, the happier Middle class have to teach Poorer people and the unhappy Middle Class.

Further poverty based strategies to get out of poverty that I regularly teach and learned to identify in myself are in Ruby Payne's’ Bridges Out of Poverty. While I don’t agree with absolutely everything, and you’re not supposed to, I don’t know why people think ONE thing (The Magic Pill) is the absolute answer, this is one of the collected, concise pieces of learning to how to shift from poverty mindset.

Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@gmail.com

The Kyle Phoenix Show 

 LIVE STREAMING on MNN.org 1130pm, Spectrum Cable Manhattan, NY 
Channel 56 & 1996, also FIOS 34 and RCN 83. 

You can Like & Follow Us on Facebook &Twitter

Or Click Below to:

·                     Stay In Touch with Kyle Phoenix by receiving updates, newsletters and free gifts by clicking HERE 

·                     Kyle Phoenix Website

·                     The Kyle Phoenix Blog

·                     Check out Kyle Phoenix Products on Amazon .com

·                     Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show LIVESTREAM on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) Thursdays 1130pm

·                     Email: KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com

Dating Skills 202 for MSM: Getting To A Relationship, Part 2 by Kyle Phoenix

Ok. you've gotten to the point where not only are you going out on regular dates (once a week at least) but you're really starting to like him and vice versa.  Maybe you've even wisely put off sex for the moment deciding to experiment and try something radical---getting to know a man first before being sexual.  There's been some casual bumps, maybe a goodnight kiss or two but you're playing it real cool, but you think you might have a Good Man here.  First, how did you get here?

1. You spent time listening to him  

That's what non-sexual dating allows you to do, simply listen.  You've been able to hear his short term goals, long term goals, about his school/job/career, some stuff about his finances, seen his level of manners towards you and others in public and been able to hear about his family relationships.  A couple of years ago I was out on a date with a guy who spent half the meal on his IPhone "waiting for an important email" and the other half dodging someone he knew in the restaurant---dodging them when he wasn't trying to get them to pay attention to him---even to the point of calling out their name(which they ignored).  By simply being present and listening I was able to see him clearly and not go further.  Another dude talked about women in really debasing ways---bitches this, cunts that---women we were both in contact with often at work and I realized that not only was he a misogynist but he was really angry.  Another jettison.  

But if I'd glossed over that stuff and been sexual with either of them I'd probably have a full blown emotional drama story to relay.  Instead it's like driving a car where you spot a pothole ahead and either swerve to avoid it or slow down enough to gently glide through it with no damage or jarring to you.  

2. You've watched him

This isn't the time to take care of someone else's emotions.  Now you can of course be courteous but you're really paying attention to his personality and his character.  What's the difference?  Personality is if someone is playful or goofy or nerdy or feminine or masculine or teasing or cautious.  Character is what they truly are: generous, thoughtful, considerate, loving---all the things that matter in the long run.  If you (or he) are concerned with short run personality traits it's probably why you're constantly disappointed.  Everyone is a little clumsy or silly or nerdy or even feminine---but you're in it to win the prize and be happy with someone, not to be "Aha!  I got you pinned down!" right about measuring a man's masculinity.  Right?

And you're able to be this mature because you know that you're not exactly rocking out every high scale yourself in all areas too.  Right?

If you don't and you have these invisible bars of measuring men by such redundant values as masculinity and femininity it's why you get used and dogged out because all someone has to do is play up hyper-masculine and because that's all you've set your standard at---he dogs you out.  And then you're bitter and upset and hurt and alone at night wishing, wishing, wishing or pulling a Lauryn Hill doo wop and "...still defending him now..."

3. You've internally checked out what you really want.

Nothing will elucidate yourself to yourself like dating.  Which is why weak men avoid it like the plague.  One, it does put you on stage to another human being's examination.  Comfortable, secure, confident men recognize and can manage their own neuroses and are cool with doing this because they know the reward outweighs the uncomfortability.  Weak men who know their shit will be blasted, found out, challenged and walked away from, abhor dating. They hate it.  Now they'll give you all kinds of reasons that have to do with OTHER people.  But truly, it's about them.

(In fact as just a psychological tip: If someone tells you how wrong other men, women, children, waiters, people, friends, you, are---RUN!  That's a sign of low self esteem and abusiveness tendencies.)  

Now if he says others make mistakes and he jokes about it or jokes about his own errors, that's balance.  We all get irritated at others, but it says a lot about us if we gently forgive fools, chuckle at children, dismiss silliness or demand summary execution for anyone who does it anyway other than ours.

Sitting across from someone who is asking you questions, sometimes from a diametrically new directions about your career, your schooling, your past can be unnerving.  One, you're trying to maintain your in public composure; two, you're trying to manage yourself to hint at but not gush your attraction to him; three, you might even be trying to really measure if you're feeling a spark, a flame, an explosion or a nuclear bomb.  

(Mature men know that it's the atom that sets off the nuclear bomb so sometimes you're not immediately in full blown lusting chemistry laden devotion but it's simmering and getting there as you hear and observe more and more.)

But he's asking all these damn questions!  And if you just deflect and ask him some damn questions, he either looks like Joe Cool by having good, cogent answers or he pushes back for you to answer first.  What to do?

Breathe, baby.  He's interested in you.  And that's what you want, right?  Right?  The first level of self introspection might be am I comfortable with this?---which is him extending and looking to bond with you to create intimacy.  Do you feel safe and secure with him or intruded upon?  You can politely deflect things you feel are too deep, like, when was the last time you had sex?  But, where do you work? shouldn't illicit---"Men ask too many damn questions!"

You signed up for this and to some degree he's genuinely interested in getting to know you so calm down and answer like you were on a talk show.  Don't look crazy, don't talk about your crazy uncle but do answer clearly, politely and honestly.  You're sharing your inner self with him and he wants to know about it, in fact he's probably been thinking of different things to ask you about because you are and always have been a fascinating human being.

4. When should we talk about our Exes?

Smart dating would say never.  Truth says eventually.  But real truth says don't push it.  You're not a spectator to his past nor he to yours.  First date, no.  Second date, no.  Third date, no but maybe an acknowledgement to the past.  Aim for the seventh or the tenth.  Look at that now you have to be sharing some level of intimacy over time before you have a discussion about Big Earl.  

What if he brings up his ex?  Gently, lovingly, with a dazzling smile say, "Oh, we can talk about our pasts later.  I'm more interested in hearing about you.  Tell me more about your____________<<

He has a past.  You have a past.  But you're on the date to create a future.  If he asks you then you gently deflect with, "Yes, I've dated and been in relationships, currently I'm single.  However, I'd really like to focus on the present and the handsome man across from me."  And then SMILE.

Nice, polite, deflection, honest but still answered, stated your position and even slipped in a compliment.

Men have messed up more dates telling about the crazy convict/whore/manic depressive/narcissist/violent/thieving/effeminate/fool/thief/liar they were with---on the first date.  The signal this inadvertently sends is that either his radar about you is off (because you were crazy enough to be in a relationship with crazy) or that his (hopefully low level) craziness is going to soon be on blast before he's seen as a full person who's had some problems and drama in life, the way we all have.  When you give it some space and LISTEN and WATCH you'll know if his comic book collection is just a carry over from his childhood that you can deal with or worse level of crazy---that he's planning on bringing his momma to be part of the second date.

Dating is a lot like job interviewing in the sense that yes, you are presenting yourself.  But the good news is that it's the job interview where it's your job to lose.  He likes you enough to make an effort and that means that you have time to build, bond and see if this works for you.

Remember heterosexuals get practice at this from grade school on up so they get into relationships that are deeper and last longer faster because they have been studying this process and are coached in it from infancy by parents, siblings, tv and movies, and then friends.  You're just working it out for yourself even if you were one of the rare ones who was out and dating as far back as high school.  He might not have as much experience.  The biggest plea I try to leave men with in workshops is: BE PATIENT with him (and yourself); he's overcome his momma, his daddy, his community, his church, society, presidential candidates  the internet and his cray cray gay friends to get to the table with you---cut him (and yourself) some slack!

Next: Part 3: Getting Boomtastic!  Sex, Sex, Sex---When Dating Involves The Rubber Parts!

Thank you!
Kyle Phoenix
Email your comments and thoughts to: kylephoenixshow@aol.com
Sign up for the E Newsletter at: http://kylephoenixsite.com/
Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us/Share this post on FaceBook, LinkedIn, Google+ or Follow Us on Twitter! Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast on http://kylephoenixsite.com/