Words and Memories

As a kid, I grew up around people who were older than me, and this was because I had two older brothers and would always hang around and just listen whenever they were having conversations with their friends. I did this for two major reasons, the first being because their conversations were mostly very interesting and mature, and the second reason being that at the time, due to where we grew up, a lot of kids my age weren't exactly the kind of kids I wanted to play with because they were very very corrupt.

_{photo by Simon Wilkes}

I had friends, but they weren't exactly my age (I was a little older than them). So whenever I wanted to listen to matured conversations, I would hang around with my brothers and their friends, but I would always make sure to say nothing and be invisible, because the moment they become very aware of my presence, they would send me away or just not dive deep into whatever they were saying, depending on the topic.

Funny enough, I found out years later that me doing that, hanging around them was doing a lot more for me than just entertaining myself, it was coaching me into becoming a better man because I was listening to this people talk about life and some mistakes they had made, so automatically I just knew not to make those same mistakes.

And it's not like I had a jotter somewhere with keypoints on things to do or what not to do, it was all just in my subconsciousness and would occasionally come to mind whenever I found myself in a situation where that thing would be useful.

Realizing all of that and seeing the importance of these conversations, I had taken it upon myself to always try to impact at least a little bit of knowledge to some of these younger boys whenever I get the chance. But rather than make it sound like a straight boring advise all the time, I've developed a method where we start with fun conversations, and somehow somewhere, I find a way to put the message in it.

Just last week I had talked about savings and investment to one of the lads, and he had showed interest in wanting to start saving as soon as possible, no matter how little the amount may be.

Anyways, I'm doing all of this, hoping that someday, when they're on their own, they could hopefully apply at least one of this wisdom where necessary.