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My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality.
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This is the story about planning for my Eagle project. So in 1985, I decided I was going to do an eco project when I was ready that was going to combine Carl Sagan ideas with Buckminster Fuller's ideas, and Native American philosophies about living in harmony with nature over multiple generations.
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And I decided I would make a plan.
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And the plan was to do the project when I was about 55. Because that's how long I figured it would take me to create enough money to feel safe, that I had enough money from that point to the rest of my life, to do what I want it. Part of that planning came from the idea that I could visualize business systems at this point, and scale models. And I learned this ability to visualize business systems through visualizing models of energy transfer, which I discovered when I was 10, with watching marbles, roll down ramps, and modeling them in spatial models that are color coded that I can see.
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And in 1985, I started mowing lawns in my neighborhood, and I was modeling the money flowing through the business in the same way, in that there's potential money in my habitat, some of the money in that habitat I can get.
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And I can move it around and basically, imagine $1 bill in a customer's pocket, and then imagine the dollar bill in my bank. And then imagine all the steps in between, and how does it move through the system? And what am I trading time, effort and risk which is work for a perception of value, which in that case was the value of the other person's time, effort and risk to not mow their lawn. I understood this in a model. And I knew that I could leverage that model and scale it. And then use that model to gather energy, which is called money, then use some of that money to launch this project. And everything I just said
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I knew when I was 15. All the things I'm explaining now.
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I knew then, and I knew no one would ever believe what I just said, As unbelievable. People say that's unbelievable. And I don't like the word unbelievable. And I have a tactic and my plan was called Can you believe how believable This is? Basically want to change the definition of the word unbelievable. And the idea is that things that are good, are believable. And things that are bad are unbelievable. So the idea of Oh, I got in a car accident does unbelievable. But oh, you know, I won the lottery doesn't believable. So I'm telling this story to launch that tactic. It's on my website on my list of tactics.
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I decided in 1985 that since no one would ever believe what I just said that I was going to create pre emptive proof. And in 1985, the movie Back to the Future came out. And in this movie, it was like time travel and things like that. And I started thinking about things I could do in 1985. That would prove this later, what I just said. And there were not a lot of options for a 15 year old to create something that was permanent. But one thing that is permanent is a deed for land, or building or something.
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And at that time, there was a magazine called Mother Earth News, which may still exist today.
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And I would read that magazine. It's sort of like a hippie magazine about solar panels and like clean water and growing your own food, things like that. In that magazine, there was an article about homesteading and buying land outside major cities in the US. And somehow in that article, I learned that outside Washington DC in West Virginia was a good place to buy relatively inexpensive land that was close to the city.
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And it was beautiful. And like sort of like the articles about like what are the closest nicest places to major metros in the US. This place was in West Virginia, which was the one that was closest to where I lived.
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So I decided in 1985 that I would use some of the money I made that summer mowing lawns, which was about $4,000 that I made and I used $2,900 to buy a couple acres of land in western
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Jania
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in the middle of the woods, at the end of a dirt road, where there was nothing, absolutely nothing up a hill. And I did that for two reasons.
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One, I wanted to have a cool place in the woods to tinker around with solar panels and water purification, and growing my own food and greenhouse, and like hydroponic setups and fun things, maybe get some chickens, goats, who knows. So that was part of that. And the second reason which was more relevant for this story is, I wanted to get my name on a deed, I got my name on that deed. And at first, they were going to put my dad first, even though I paid for it, I insisted that I go first on this deed. And they're like, Why do you care whose name is first, and I said, because I'm gonna be showing it to people later when I'm in my 50s. And they would have known that the the adults would have gone first on the deed. And so by me, putting my name first, that means I would have had to have advanced. The point of it is, I'm first on the deed, because I asked them to put me first, because I plan to show it to people now. And I knew that by being first to have made it just a little bit more believable than the unbelievable nature of this story. And I'm mentioning this story, because it's about planning, multigenerational planning, I plan my whole life, in the beginning of my life, and I'm just catching up to the future now. And I see all the steps that I've gone through various flowcharts and models, cross functionally connected with probabilities of likelihood of success and things that went right and things that were totally wrong and what I learned from those branches and constantly updating this model.
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And I'm close right now, it's almost September 2023, close to the launch sequence of a project honey Lake. Where is it going to launch this project is globally cool project. And the objective someone asked me this the other day, like, What's the objective? My objective is to buy time
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by time to stabilize the ecosystem in the ways I can. And if nothing else, to try to help my kids and other people's kids live longer. In the book, I wrote a honey as money I talked about the idea that the habitat is shrinking. And lifespans are shrinking too. And in the US, right now, lifespans are going down. And I have a couple kids, and the idea of doing things that shorten their lifespan.
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By consuming and buying things.
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Doesn't feel good to me. And also mentioned now back in June, I undid my lifetime carbon footprint several times over. And that means that I have created systems and processes to absorb the carbon that I created in my life. And at least try to create some habitat planted about 25,000 trees so far through a charity called one tree planting. And also invested in carbon offsets that hopefully, will result in projects that reduce carbon or prevent carbon, also invested in water filtration projects so that kids don't have to spend, you know, hours and hours a day searching for water. And they can go to school. And that's better for everyone and everything. And so mentioning all this combined on this story, because there's things we can do to improve the future. It is not hopeless unless we believe it is and everyone can plant a tree. I think what's important is planning for the future.
