An Introduction...

My name is Hans Christian Gonzalez.  I was born in August 22nd, 1973 in the town of Salcedo, Dominican Republic.  As you guessed it,  I am 37 years old.    I have three sisters from my mother's side: Maribel 41, Biembenida (Amy) 39 , and Rosa 31.   Two Brothers and one sister from my father's  side:  Emmanuel, Alex, and Stephanie.   My parents divorced when I was about 12.  My mother moved from Salcedo to Santiago and I moved with her when I turned 13.   Lived with my mother and three sisters for 6 years before moving to Paterson, NJ when I was 18.

In Paterson, I lived with my grandparents Aida and Luis for almost a year.   Aida was beautiful blond with very pale skin and Luis was of a dark complexion.  They loved each other but never stopped arguing.

I Worked at a Carton factory where I made 5.50 an hour,   Took English classes at a school during the evenings.  No, I never finished High School.  Instead,  smart Hans decided to take the GED test.  Because of my poor English, I had to take it  three times before passing, never studied for it thought.  It was a stupid test designed for people who hated education.   I passed with a very high number. 

During that time in Patterson,  I used to commute every Sunday to New York to visit my grandmother, aunts, uncles and alcoholic cousins from my father's side of the family.  My girlfriend back then was Yesenia. We were together for about a year before that, but the relationship ended in the summer of that year 1992.

When I moved to New York city in December of 1992,  I lived with my mom and little sister in a one bedroom apartment that my mother had rented in Inwood.  Immediately coming to the city,  I enrolled in a a special study program designed to prepare high school drop-outs to work in an office environment.  I learned how to type, use a computer,  and prepare my resume.  It was a cool place to study because the city gave me 60 dollars or so a week to attend so I could pay for my lunch and transportation.

The program was going to be for around 9 months and started in January of 1993.  Around the same time,  I started to work in D'Agostino Supermarket down in the Greenwich Village.    I've got that job by chance while accompanying my second cousin Elena to an agency that helped pregnant women get jobs.   The officer took a look at me and asked me if I was working, and I said no, and he recommended me to work for D'Agostino.  I started to work part-time for D'agostino slicing turkeys and cheeses and making sandwiches.  It was a great change of environment.  The Greenwich Village was a great place to work and meet chicks.    

After my program completed I was hired by Castle Check Cashing where I made 7.00 per hour.  I worked at Castle for almost 4 years as a part time teller.    In the Spring of 1994 I started going to Baruch College  I wanted to become an executive.  I did some theater work in my first semester.  Landed a mayor role in a big production called Filumena, where I played a rich merchant owner, seducer of women.  The funny thing was that I didn't know much English back then to memorize some many lines, but I did and was very impressed at my performance.  

Baruch was an amazing place to study  and make friends.   Because I never finished high school, getting accepted there was almost a miracle.   There,  I learned how to read and write in English.  The classes that I loved the most were the ones that involved literature, writing, and reading.  Psychology, Sociology, Political Science,  Philosophy, Art...   It was orgasmic to sit through those classes.  It was one of the best experiences of my life. 

In 1995 I decided to change jobs as an office filing clerk at a mental health clinic in the Upper West Side.  

I worked there for about a year and hated it.  By December of that year I quit without having a job to fall back on.  Then bad things began to unfold.  I stopped paying my credit card bills,  didn't have enough money to continue going to school,  and the Spring semester of 1996 I dropped out of Baruch.  

I finally found a part time job at Sears in the Bronx and worked for a few months at UPS emptying trucks in the summer of 1996.  It was a horrible experience.

In January of 1996 I met Olga,  who would become my wife and mother of my child a year later.  She got pregnant in January of 1997,  and moved with her in June of that year in the city of Miami.   We married in the 29th of September.  Hannah, my daughter was born five days later, on October 3rd. 

It was in Miami where I started my retail career.  I began working at Bally of Switzerland there.  One of the associates had died of a heart attack and the manager needed to replaced him.  I felt sorry for the guy,  but was happy to get a stable full time job to support my family.  However,   the store was closed in June of 1998 and I was transferred to a Bally in Hackensack, NJ out of fear of being unemployed with a newborn child.

I moved to New York and commuted to Hackensack, NJ for about 6 months until I got a job in New York working for a French Shoe company called JM Weston.   Worked there for 2 years under a crazy manager named Bruno Francois.  In the Summer of 2000 I was approached by Hermes and worked for a year in John Lobb Hermes.  In November of 2001 I started working for Prada and stayed there until the end of 2005.  I started working in the ultra exclusive Bergdorf Goodman Shoe Salon in January of 2006 and stayed there for about 3 years, until I got laid off in January of 2009.  

My marriage to Olga ended in December of 2006 after many futile attempts to avoid the inevitable.  My frustrations resulted falling into depression and not paying attention at my work, which resulted of being thrown out for poor sales performance.    

Now that 2011 is upon us, the start of a new year and a new decade,   I humbly ask God for guidance and support.  Because I do hope to get a second chance on being happy.  We all deserve that.

By Hans.

CREATIVITY

We live in a thought world.   Most of what you see around you was first created in the mind in a form of a thought.   We hear this statement countless of times, but do we know what it actually means?  

Pay attention and  think for a moment.  The computer monitor in front of you, the CPU, the empty cup of coffee, your chair, the layout of your apartment, your TV, your mattress, the lamp, your sofa,  etcetera were first created in the mind of the person or persons that helped designed them.  Take this into consideration the next time that you come outside.  Think about everything that you see, and see it through the eyes of the people that invented them.  How would you perceive your world?  


Said it another way, everything that was created by us humans had to first come into form in the mind.  A thought is the blueprint of everything that was created.  Which means, that in order for you to create anything, you first need to see it in your mind as real as it would look when you have it.   You can't really create anything if you first can't see it in your mind. 


Think for a moment.  Are your thoughts a reflection of what you see around you? Or are the things around you a reflection of your thoughts?  If everything is created by the things that you think, and by what you say,  then your whole life is currently being created by what you think, say and do on a daily basis.  

Two things to keep in mind.  First, we all have a brain, and the power to think.   There are infinite possibilities.  You can either design with your mind the life that you want to live, never stopping until you see that vision your reality (why settle for less?).   Or we could just handle the things that were already invented.  


What do I mean by that?  Well,  most likely, you go to work for a company that was originally created by somebody else.  You can become extremely good at what you do.  You can be an excellent manager, and make enough money  to have the impression that you are making it.  But who is more powerful?  The man that came up with the original idea to start the company that grew to the point of becoming an empire?   Or you, who went to college to learn how to successfully manage it?

We hear that ideas make us rich.  How many of us really think that?  Do we really use our imagination?  We waste so much energy in mindless conversations with no substance.  We are so fixated on entertainment, on escape, on getting hooked on vices, on having a good time that very little if any is spent on thinking the things we want to think.  Have we forgot our purpose?   

The first thing that you have to keep in mind is that you are unique.  Stop wasting your time comparing yourself to others.  Your perception is deeply subjective and what comes out of your mouth are just opinions.   Everything is an illusion. Why?  Because everything that surrounds you at this moment,  i.e,   the money, the family,  your friends, problems, etc, will at some point disappear.  Only you will remain 'til the end.  And you too, will cease to exist.   

Your mind creates everything.  Realizing this gives you tremendous power.  Because as long as you think that things just happen, you will never exercise the power that resides deep within you.  Only when you can clearly see that everything in your life was brought about with your thoughts,  you will start to assume more  responsibility for everything that surrounds you.   


Then, and only then, the wheels of your fate will begin to turn and you'll have the life that you've always dreamed.  

By Hans Gonzalez.  

Self-Help Books

Talks and writings of the law of attraction, and the power of the mind have become very popular nowadays.  Around 7 billion dollars in self-help books are sold each year, and if you count all the audio tapes, infomercials, weight loss programs and personal coaching systems being sold in the United States,  the figure comes close to 10 billion.

From a point of view,  these figures indicate that the general public is leaning toward  a betterment of their own lot in life.   It is a fact that people have the ability to enhance their current level of happiness.  That we can get out of debt, lose weight,  live in an abudance of love, money, and good health.  But if the underlying need to seek improvement stems from a deep sense of being incomplete, not good enough,  unhappy, or depressed,  then no matter how many books we read, tapes we listen to, or seminars we attend to, the continuing need to spend more money on self-improvement systems will never stop growing.

This is not to say that self-help books  do not offer practical advice, or that the reading of them is a complete waste of time.  Many of them are well-written, well-researched, and very helpful indeed.  But from the reader's standpoint, if the need to read them comes from a shaky foundation such as lack or the feeling of inadequacy, the problem will continue to persist, and the buying and collecting and reading of these types of books will just be a reminder of this belief: that there is something really wrong with you.

Reading lots of these books, one after another, creates a false feeling of hope.  Most of us do not know how to read books anyway.  If you read a book only once, all you do is to become familiar with its subject.   To really understand it,  you will at least have to read it 10 times.   With a long list of books to buy and read, where are you going to find the time to do that?

Living with a deep feeling of unworthiness is a horrible way to live.  And it mostly comes from a belief that we have convinced ourselves in believing.  It is the lie that robs us from our healthy sense of worth.  Telling us that there is something really wrong with us, fixing our attention to what we believe are a long list of things we wish we never had in our lives.

This belief comes from various sources. One source is living in a society that is dominated by consumerism.   I am sure that you have heard this before.   A capitalist society works by making people buy things, and by teaching them that the  products being developed are things that they need to buy to better their lives.  So, billions of dollars are spent to tell you, that unless you have a particular product, you are left out, not good enough, etc.

Other more complex sources are traumas and painful experiences from early in life.   But in the final analysis,  the feeling of not being good enough is produced in our own brain by a belief from something that we told ourselves repeatedly after a painful experience  or set of experiences;  from what we read in magazines, newspapers, see in TV, the movies,  etc.

Everything that I am writing to you about in this post can be expanded to many pages.  But the message  that I want to convey is this:  If you feel the need to buy a book because you think you are not good enough,  don't do it!   Address the feeling.  Listen to your thoughts,  your self-talk, ideas of life, etc.  Instead of a book,  study yourself, what drives you to do the things that you do and it will be a far greater investment of your time.

In your reflection, you will find, that you are an amazing creature.  A miracle of nature, who has been given the gift of life.  That no matter your short-comings, past mistakes, or current situation,  you have the ability to stop and think, and appreciate all the goodness that surrounds you.  The people that are in your life,  your health,  good moments,  special moments, etc.

Thanks for reading.

Hans.