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Neo-Bedouins - commentary lesson

Okay, welcome to the commentary for the Neo-Bedouins article.

This is an exciting article. I really like this article. I saw it on the front page of the San Francisco newspaper, which is called the San Francisco Chronicle.

This week a couple of days ago, and when I saw it and read the article, I thought “Wow this is me! This is what I’m doing with Effortless English”, right?

I don’t have an office for effortless English, in fact, I go to coffee shops here in San Francisco often, and I think about the website, I write down my ideas. Sometimes I bring my laptop, although usually, I do this in my apartment, actually recording, because I need more private space to record lessons.

But anyway, I write the lessons in the coffee shops quite often, and in the coffee shop I always see many many people with laptop computers.

And often I will hear people having little meetings about their internet company and discussing different issues designing their websites.

It’s very exciting actually to be here in San Francisco at this time, especially being involved with an internet business, with internet teaching. Because really in America, this is the epicenter of computer technology of IT (internet technology), it’s all right here, it’s happening here most of all.

Silicon Valley, you’ve probably heard of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is the place in California where there are many many computer companies. Apple computer, Hewlett Packard (HP) company, a lot of Japanese computer companies have offices there.

But Silicon Valley is near San Francisco. It’s a short drive from here. In fact it’s between San Francisco and San Jose. From San Francisco, you drive to Silicon Valley or take a train maybe, I don’t know thirty minutes, something like that, thirty forty minutes, not far.

So San Francisco and Silicon Valley are really one area, and this is where all the innovation is happening in the United States with computer industry and specially the internet.

So it’s quite exciting to be here involved in that. It’s kind of a really great energy, a lot of new and interesting things happening, lots of creative innovative people, a lot of flourishing, growing, succeeding internet companies. I mean Google’s based here for example, yahoo as well.

So anyway, it’s fantastic. It’s a great place to be if you are involved in the computer industry or if you’re involved in the internet in any way.

Another thing about this article that I liked a lot that I said “Wow that’s me”, is the part about the nomadic tribes, being nomadic, traveling around. That’s another reason I have chosen to teach with the internet.

Now, I believe that teaching with the internet and also learning with the internet is just amazing. It’s so flexible. You can be nomadic and still have a business. You can be nomadic and still have all your English learning materials, right?

With your computer, the internet and your little iPod, that’s all you need, you can go anywhere. You can travel to a beach in Thailand but still study English, right? You got your iPod, that’s all you need. There is internet connection everywhere.

So it’s very simple and it’s so much more flexible than in the past. It’s the same for me with Effortless English. I can do Effortless English from anywhere.

So if I wanna travel to Mexico, I can go to Mexico and continue to work on the website. I can travel to Thailand I can live in Thailand and still do the website, still build Effortless English.

I can move around, I can be nomadic and I love that, because I love traveling. The reason I love teaching English is that it connects me to people all over the world. I just love going to different places in the world. I love meeting new people. I love seeing and learning about new cultures. It’s just fantastic.

So it’s really exciting to me. I have a lot of emotion about this topic, because this is why I’m doing it, this is why I’m doing Effortless English. It’s just really exciting, it’s an exciting time.

Another key point in the article is about this idea of self-employment, right? It’s not just nomadic employment, it’s self-employment. It means you are your own boss. And this idea that the job market is insecure, right? There’s a lot of insecurity now.

In my father’s generation he worked for IBM over twenty years, one company. That was normal for him, but here now in my generation and younger, in the United States, that is not normal.

Almost nobody works for the same company for twenty years. It doesn’t happen. They get fired, they get laid off, right? Because older workers are expensive and the company wants to save money, so they cut their older workers. There’s just no job security in America anymore. It’s a reality.

Now, for me, I don’t mind. My dad probably doesn’t like that. Maybe older people think that’s a bad thing. But there’s a good side to it and the good side is in this article and that is we can be more independent.

Now we have the ability with computer technology, with the internet, with a lot of things to be our own boss. We can start our own companies and be freelancers, meaning we do some work and we sell it to other people, whoever will buy it. Writers and photographers do this a lot. But now we can do this with many many different things and that’s exciting.

Why is it exciting to me? Well to be honest, I don’t like bosses. In fact, I hate working for other people. I hate having a boss tell me how to teach or what book I must use or what method I must follow. Yeah, it’s not good for me, because I don’t listen to them and that gets me in trouble.

It got me in trouble in Thailand, in fact. I have a strong idea about how I should teach and what I’m good at and what is my best teaching style and how to make English learning more fun, more interesting and more effective.

And unfortunately or maybe fortunately, I don’t know, but anyway, those ideas go against traditional English teaching, right?

I don’t like textbooks for example. I refuse to use them. I won’t use them. I certainly won’t spend all my time in class teaching from a textbook. I don’t like grammar analysis, because it does not work. It just does not work for most people. It fails most students. So I don’t like doing things I know are failures.

I don’t like doing things I know will not help students. So I disobey, I don’t follow my bosses’ advice. I don’t listen to my bosses and, you know, they don’t like that sometimes.

So after I had a lot of trouble in Thailand, because I was doing my own method not using their method, somebody told me, actually somebody on Tom Peters’ blog told me: AJ you have to start your own business.

Your personality and your ideas, they’re too different. You’ll never be happy working for another person. You must be an entrepreneur. You must start your own business.

And that’s when I started really thinking about, you know, I need to do this myself. I want to teach the way I feel is best, the way I’m the best at teaching, the best style for me, and what I think is the best for students. That is always what I want to follow, not some rules from a company, not some principal or boss’s rule.

I want to do what I think is the best. So the only way to do that, really, is to start your own business. And it doesn’t matter, even if you’re not a teacher, if you’re a doctor. The way that you want to treat your patients, the best you can treat them, you have your very strong ideas how to do that.

Well, you have to have your own business, your own medical practice, your own medical business. To do that, if you work in a hospital, you probably have bosses telling you what to do.

If you’re a business person, maybe you have strong ideas about what is right and what is wrong. If you have your own business, you can follow those, but if you work for someone else, well, they might want you to do things you think are not good or not ethical, right? Not moral, maybe they…

You think: Oh I don’t wanna lie to my customers. I have to tell them the truth. And if there’s… if I make a mistake or something is bad, I have to tell them the truth. But maybe your company says: No, no, no, you have to lie to them, right? Some people, in fact, a lot of people don’t like that.

Well, the only way to follow your own principles is to have your own business. And so anyway, that’s the long answer to why I love self-employment, why I think it’s great.

Unfortunately, right now, I am a part-time bedouin. In fact, a lot of these bedouins you see in coffee shops, a lot of them are part time with a startup, with a new company. You know, you have no money, right? You have very little money, so usually you have to work another job at the same time, while you build your company.

So I’m doing that right now, I’m building Effortless English slowly, but I don’t have enough money to do it all the time. I can’t do Effortless English full time right now.

I did not borrow money to start this website. I do not want to borrow money. I don’t want a bank controlling or owning the website. So I want it to be mine, so I can do it my way.

So right now I’m teaching classes here in San Francisco, to students in San Francisco, and I’m doing the website part time. I’m a part time bedouin. In the future, I hope to do it full time and that’s what a lot of internet companies are doing.

You see these people in the coffee shops, many of them are part time, some of them are full time, maybe they’re making enough to survive. And they’re trying to build their business and they’re trying to do it in a very cheap way without borrowing money from a bank, or at least borrowing very small amount.

And that’s really exciting if you think about it, because anybody, any Effortless English member could start their own businesses. You can start your own business on the internet.

Get a laptop computer for I don’t know, Apples are about a thousand dollars, I think Windows would be cheaper. So you get a laptop computer, I mean that’s expensive, but compared to the past it’s very very cheap.

In the past, you had to borrow ten thousand dollars, one hundred thousand dollars. Well now a thousand dollars, you can use a credit card if necessary or you can work and save your money, you get a laptop computer.

You can get internet connections for free in some coffee shops. I know in America you can, in Thailand, yes, I could do that sometimes in Bangkok. I found free internet access.

Or you can find it very cheap somewhere. And you know, you get a cellphone for your phone, that’s all. You have your business. You’re ready to go. Now you have to, you know, of course find a website.

You can usually, you can start a yahoo store or Google has internet business programs to help you create your website and they’re also quite cheap. So this is an amazing opportunity to start your own business if you want to.

So I encourage you, if you have thought about it in the past: “maybe I should start my own business”. Well, do it! Do it! Try it, you can do it part time, keep your normal job, start your website. It’s okay if you don’t know what to do.

When I started Effortless English, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anything about business, I still don’t really. I just tried things. I started it, I tried something, sometimes it worked, it was successful. Sometimes it failed. If it failed I got rid of it, I threw it away and I tried something else.

That’s how I’m developing Effortless English I just try things and try things and try things. Some things are good, I keep them. Some things are bad, I throw them away. That’s all you do, that’s it, that’s the key to starting your own business. Just start it cheap, try things, keep the stuff that works, get rid of stuff that fails.

Keep doing that again and again every year, every month, every week, every day, and you will build the business. So good luck. I hope that more people will do this, because it’s very exciting and it feels so good to have your… something yourself. It’s yours. You are building it. You are responsible. That’s big, that’s huge. It’s really important and it’s a good feeling.

I love Effortless English. I don’t care if I make a lot of money or not, but I really love being responsible for it, I love that it’s mine, that I’m building it together with learners. No other boss, nobody telling us what to do. It’s fantastic. It really is great.

All right, So, I encourage you become a neo-nomad, become a neo-bedouin yourself.

All right, see you next time. Bye-bye.