Learn Language through the song - | English exercises

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[Music]

Do you guys remember my old videos where I had Layla in the back?

I've actually had Layla since 2018.

I'll show a clip of that.

But she used to be in the background of my videos

when I was at my mom's house.

But I just want to show you how tall she has grown now.

She's almost reaching the ceiling.

I feel like I have to like cut her so that she can branch

because there's no more to grow.

Check out how much this plant has grown in just one year.

How do we reframe our failures and low seasons

and see their true purpose in them?

Hello my loves.

Welcome back to Lavendaire.

It's been a while since I've done a casual sitdown video

where I catch up and share my lessons

in this chill format.

I think for a while I haven't posted as much for two reasons.

One reason is I've been working a lot on the app Resonance.

I talked about that in a recent video.

But number two is that I think

I've started to like overthink videos sometimes.

I feel like they have to have like a right title,

topic, hook, and they have to be like produced to a certain level.

And then I forget that sometimes

YouTube is just about me talking to you,

connecting like, just like this, right?

No extra frills or editing or voiceovers needed.

To be honest, life in the past couple months,

ever since I got back from my Asia trip,

has been very fast-paced with new energy.

I'm shooting a podcast today with my friend.

The podcast is called Local Godz,

and they're still recording their previous episodes.

So, I'm just waiting right now. Fit check.

I'm on set. This is Mark.

Hi. Local godz.

What's up? I'm so excited.

That's a wrap. James, where are you?

Oh, a podcast OG.

New inspiration and motivation to work on the apps

and to go in a whole new direction

with my brand Lavendaire, right?

I think I'm kind of moving on to the next chapter and the next level.

As I spoke about in the last video.

But I just feel like I'm changing.

But every day I'm inspired and I'm learning new things.

I'm sharing a lot less.

I haven't been, you know,

I haven't had the time to like sit down and make videos

cuz that could be a full-time job on its own.

But I've been putting my energy in other areas

that have been new and exciting and fun.

And while I'm in this life stage now,

I took the time to reflect on the experiences

and the phases that led me here.

I had a lot of phases of failures and low seasons

and trial and error in life as a whole.

And it just again reminded me how important

it is to have low seasons and failures in life

in order to get to where you need to be.

TLDR, the low seasons give us the space to pause,

reset, reflect, and pivot, make changes.

Because something is not working,

so we need to start to change things up

and see what does work.

That's the beauty and the gift that low seasons give us.

Ultimately, failures are a gain because

they are the knowledge gained,

the experience gained,

all the lessons you've learned

so that each one moves you closer to your goal,

closer to the success.

So don't be afraid of failure.

Don't be sad when you fail

because that failure is data.

It is experience that you now have in your life

in your arsenal that you can take from

and learn from and use that

to take you one step closer to the success.

First, let's talk about the low seasons.

So, when I say low seasons,

I mean seasons where things are not working out,

they're not going the way that you wanted them to go,

or maybe you're feeling burnt out, unmotivated,

slow, unproductive, and not at your best self.

And things are just, they're not flowing.

Something is not working, something is off, you're feeling off.

I think we're so used to feeling

shame around those moments.

Like we're not allowed to have low seasons.

Like when we're in those seasons,

we are feeling like "I shouldn't be here.

How can I get out of here?

What can I do?

Why are things not working out?"

And you're just trying to fight it, right?

You're not understanding there is

a reason you got there and there is

a purpose for that low season.

And to use my life as an example,

I felt like my career has had its ups and downs,

but I and I had moments of like burnout

and then go ramping up and burn out again.

And basically content-wise,

in the past couple years,

I felt like I was in a low season, uncertain season.

Didn't want to do the same things over and over again,

but didn't know what was next.

And things that used to work

were starting to not work.

And that includes like my business,

like the shop and like the content,

how the algorithms and social media is always changing.

And just feeling really tired from

just what I had been doing up to that point.

And having the desire to not share as much

and having the desire to just get quiet

and retreat and tend to other areas of my life.

Whether it's like health, home, family.

And for a long time I had like a mental battle, right?

And I think I also negatively influenced this low season

because I would be sometimes in the mindset of fear

and the mindset of "Oh, I'm scared of things failing.

I'm scared of things falling apart."

And I think the more you focus on that negativity,

the more the reality kind of follows through with that reality.

And it just feels difficult to be in a low season

because you feel like things are not going smoothly,

things are not going right

and you wish they were going better

and you're trying your best to get things moving,

but something is not working. Something is off.

And so in the low season of my life,

I found the seed of the birth of a new season.

And what I realized in hindsight,

what these low seasons give me

is they give me more time and space for reflection.

They give me more time and space

to explore my curiosity, to explore new things,

to reflect on what's not working

and to do all that work that takes a lot of inner work,

a lot of thinking, a lot of meditating, journaling.

And it's from those experiences

and also the bravery

and the time to do something new or

to try to explore new things.

It's from that space of exploration

and reflection that you can birth your next chapter

that you birth what's right for you because

you're not meant to be doing the same things

over and over again for the rest of your life.

You're meant to change, to grow, and evolve.

And so that's what those low seasons are.

They are just a recalibration.

For some reason, we feel like,

oh, life is supposed to go well all the time.

We're supposed to be flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing,

and things are supposed to be like always going well.

But that's not how it works.

If things are going well, you have no incentive to change.

So for example, there was an era of like my YouTube career

where I was like getting a lot of jobs,

a lot of opportunities, things were growing,

they were doing really well and I was really busy.

And on one hand, I was really productive

and busy and getting paid a lot, which is great.

But on the other hand, I had no time for much else.

I had no time to tend to organizing my house,

to my self-care, to writing the book

that I've always wanted to write,

to just doing all these things

that I really wanted to do.

But I set them aside because I was so busy,

because I was getting so many opportunities.

And so, there's a time and place for everything.

So, who's to say which time is better or worse?

Because there's the really fast-paced time

where you're busy, but when you're busy,

you don't have time to reflect.

You don't have time to think of how you can change

and how you can improve.

You're just doing the same thing

because that thing is working.

When something's working,

there's no incentive to change.

But when things stop working,

like you're doing the same things that used to work

and then eventually you get to a point

where it's not really working

or it's not really feeling right anymore.

Maybe something used to feel aligned,

something that you used to love,

but a few years later you're like,

it doesn't feel aligned anymore.

I don't think I love this thing anymore.

And that's okay because we grow and change.

So that's all I'm saying is that we need to learn

to embrace both the low moments

and the high moments and everything in between.

Everything has its purpose.

Everything is giving us something.

It's giving us gifts to take us to the next stage,

take us to the next level of how we are meant to grow

and what we are meant to experience in this lifetime.

If I were to never have a low moment,

if my career stayed on the same trajectory

and things were going well and things were growing,

I wouldn't have the time to write the book

that I've always wanted to write.

I wouldn't have the time

to explore a completely new industry,

to go to all these conferences,

exploring tech and wondering,

oh, should I create an app?

Something completely different than I've ever done before?

I wouldn't have the time or the space to do that.

But because I have the time and the space

and the incentive to make a change,

now I'm in a life state where I'm so excited

and I'm having fun again

because I'm doing something new,

something challenging.

And it's bringing me back to

how I used to feel like 10 years ago

when I created the first version of the workbook.

How excited I was, how challenging,

and how new it was back then. 10 years ago.

These are my workbooks from 2023 all the way down to 2017.

Look at this quality from the first version.

Oh my god, so funny.

And now I'm having that same feeling again

for a totally new field.

Because I wasn't meant to do

the same thing forever for the rest of my life.

Now let's talk about failures

and the beauty of trial and error.

So, I am the type of person that has to try something

to see if it works for me.

And that's how I kind of learn

whether something is right for me or not.

You can't just sit there and think about

if something's going to work, right?

You have to actually take the action

and try it out and then you kind of let it play out

and see what happens.

And so, for me, failure has always been

a part of the journey.

Obviously, it's not easy to deal with.

It happens though.

So you have to acknowledge

and accept that it is going to be part of your journey

if you're taking any risk, any chance at all.

Like if you are brave to try anything new,

then you're going to have to accept that failure

might be one of the options, right?

It's probably going to be one of the options.

It's impossible to expect yourself to do everything well

and everything perfectly every time.

Like that's just so unrealistic.

So failure and mistakes are all part of the process,

but each one is an experience gained

that gives you so much.

Something that you can like

stepstone towards your success.

And so I'll give you an example of

my I guess life path as a whole.

So when I started out,

I knew I didn't want to work a corporate job,

but I didn't know what I wanted to do.

I knew I wanted to have this version of a life

that was creative and free,

where I can travel whenever I want,

where I had financial freedom

and creative freedom, location freedom,

all of these things.

But I just didn't know what path would get me there.

So instead of sitting there and

thinking about it, I had to explore.

I had to literally take action and

try all the different paths that I was curious about.

And so I tried music, I pursued acting.

I was doing like TV hosting

and being a spokesperson, doing PR,

marketing, event planning.

I just threw myself in all these different roles

just so that I can experience it.

So when I graduated for a few years,

I was pursuing music as an artist.

So I was trying to be a singer,

songwriter, music producer.

I was taking songwriting classes,

music production classes.

I was performing multiple times a month,

going from place to place.

And I was really really pursuing that path,

doing all that I could, making songs,

posting YouTube videos of me singing

and trying working on like my first album.

So through taking the action

and going through the motions,

it started to reveal itself to me that

there were parts of this career

that I didn't really like.

It didn't really fit into my ideal vision

of my ideal life and my ideal career.

And so something that I thought I wanted

so bad at the time started to not be exactly

what I thought it would be.

For example, one aspect of being an artist

and a performer is that you have to tour, right?

Even if you're a recording artist,

you make albums, there's still a part of your career

where you are out there playing concerts

and touring, going from city to city.

So I had the experience and back then

I was just a oneperson team.

I had like my keyboard, my stand, my mic.

I lugged all my equipment in my car

and unloaded and loaded back into the car

like every time I went out to perform.

So I realized that that experience of going, traveling

to perform like loading, unloading, setting up,

taking down, it was so exhausting

and I really didn't like the logistics of the travel

and the going outside to perform aspect of being an artist.

And so I realized then that I actually prefer

a career where I can be at home.

I do everything online.

It's just so much more convenient

and ideal for me personally as an introvert, right?

I just get exhausted when I'm going from place to place

driving here and there.

And so that's an example of trial and error.

Is that through trying it out,

I realized what didn't work for me.

And it led me down to explore

other paths that could work for me.

So sometimes you want something so bad

and it's like you want it to work out so well,

but there might be like a failure.

Even if there might not be a failure,

you might feel in your body that

eventually it changes, right?

You thought you wanted this thing,

but hm, doesn't feel right anymore.

It feels a little off. That is a sign.

That is a sign that it is taking you forward to

where you're meant to go.

You're getting clues. You're gaining experience.

It's only through the experiences that I've gained

that I have learned to like improve it on the next iteration.

And so, this brings me to like my experience now,

me working on the app.

I realized that this whole time of building Lavendaire,

I had been trial and erroring my business model, right?

As a content creator, there's so many ways

that you could make money, but at the same time,

different ways have pros and cons.

Some are more unpredictable than others.

Some have a compromise to your creativity, right?

When you do brand deals, there's a compromise to your creativity.

Or when you're just like living off the YouTube algorithm

and the YouTube AdSense that is so unpredictable.

Like any day social media can change

and you're like your business model is

it doesn't make sense anymore.

And so all of these years,

the past 10 years behind the scenes for Lavendaire,

I've been trial and erroring the business model

and I haven't felt like I found something

that really worked long term until now.

Like I thought I found it with the shop with like

the Lavendaire workbook and the stationary

and I really really wanted that to be like

the strong business model but the truth is

it's not and it hasn't gotten there and maybe

it's because stationary is too niche of a thing

that it's not sustainable.

I've also learned through the experience that

like product businesses are so expensive to just maintain

upkeep because not only do you have to buy inventory,

it's like the logistics cost so much like the shipping,

handling, warehousing, like that stuff is just it's it's a lot, right?

And so digital businesses like just selling something

digital like an online course or something is so much easier

because there's no physical good that needs to be handled.

And so there's pros and cons

with different types of businesses

and different types of business models.

And so I've just been experimenting this whole time.

I launched Dream Life Club.

I launched our Mastermind.

And I ran that for I think 3 years.

And I recently closed it in May because it just something

was not working anymore.

Like people were joining but like

I think it's hard to get people to stay engaged

throughout like a year.

And so again, with every experience,

with everything that I'm trying, it's a trial and error.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work.

Sometimes something can work for a few years.

Like the workbook, it still is working to a certain level,

but it it has its ups and downs and it has moments

where you realize this is not probably going to work long term.

It's not the ideal business model or the ideal path

that's going to take me to where I want to be ideally.

And this is not just talking about the money aspect,

but also like the mental health aspect.

As a content creator, if you rely all your income

on brand deals and social media,

like YouTube, AdSense, it's so unpredictable.

It's out of your control. It can be up and down.

You can never like estimate in a year how much

you're going to make. It's just so random.

And something with the workbook,

at least what I love about the shop is I own it.

It is my business, right? But again, the workbook is seasonal.

So I have no idea how a launch is going to do until October.

Like literally the workbook is October through January

is like where we make most of the shop sales and

I have I just don't know how to predict because every year is different.

And that always gives a lot of anxiety

and a lot of stress during the year end time.

When it's holiday season

when I really just want to be relaxing and enjoying my time

with my family and my friends.

So every year for the past 10 years is stressful

and again it's like lifestylewise it's not super ideal.

I would like something that is more consistent

more like year round evergreen that

I can feel a little bit more balanced in the lifestyle

and also the business model.

So that's what I realized I've been trial and erroring

this whole time, all of these years.

And now I'm super excited about

the new app that I'm creating.

I'm working on Resonance first

and then if that goes well, then

I will build Align for any of you guys

who are wondering on the update on that.

But I'm just so excited because I see so much potential.

I see the potential in this being just a more balanced

type of model and also a more scalable model because it's all digital.

And I'm literally doing the same thing.

Once like the hard part is building it.

But once it's built, I'm doing the same thing.

I'm creating content for the app.

I'm creating audios and I also am having a lot of fun

because I'm getting to use my music side,

the side that I kind of put aside for a long time,

but I'm having so much fun curating music

for this app because half of it is going to be

my guided audios and then the other half

is going to be music playlist for relaxing,

for focusing, for creative flow,

and even sound healing.

I love listening to like calming,

relaxing playlist throughout the day.

I have my different moods, right?

And so I love curating music playlists

that make your life feel just more at peace,

more centered, and more elevated.

So, I've been having a lot of fun just in general

with this whole creative process.

One of my biggest passions in life,

probably my biggest passion in life,

is having a vision and then making it real.

That's that's what I do best.

It's what I love to do and it's what I do best.

That is how I see my life.

Like having a vision for my life and

then trying to make it real and then having a vision

like in a product and then making it real.

And then if you look at this house like

I spent a whole year like envisioning this house

and then working on making it real.

And now that the house is done,

this feels like my biggest like art project.

The biggest physical art project is my house,

but I'm always working on creative projects.

And so the current project

I'm working on now is Resonance.

So I'll leave the waitlist link down below

in case you guys want to sign up for that waitlist.

But going back to the topic of failures and trial and error,

I realized that every experience that

I had leading up to this point taught me something.

It gave me experience.

It gave me more knowledge or data

to work with so that I can do the next thing even better.

Like even though we ended the run of Dream Life Club,

that was 3 years of experience of me doing monthly events.

I was doing live meditations and live events

almost every single month for those years.

And I built so much confidence.

Like if I just close my eyes and put on a track,

I can freestyle meditations. I can freestyle a flow.

Like I just feel like there's a part of me

that when I'm really tapped in,

I just I can freestyle something and

whatever comes out of me, I'm just like,

"Wow, where did I where did I think of that?"

It tapped into a different side of me

that was so different from me writing a script

for a YouTube video or preparing something for a YouTube video.

So typically my guided meditation process is

I write a script, then I read the script.

But from Dream Life Club, I experienced like just doing it live,

not even writing a script and not even planning,

just maybe having an outline.

And I realized that I can do that as well.

And I got practice doing that over and over again.

And so I can do either, right?

I can prepare the script or not.

But either way, I have more experience

and more confidence to create audios

and to create this type of content.

And that further strengthens like

the next thing I'm building, which is Resonance.

The lesson here is if you are in a place

where you feel like things are not working out and

you're struggling, you really wish and you really want

for things to work out but they're not working out.

That is just knowledge, experience that you are gaining

that will take you closer to what will work for you.

So you are just moving up the ladder in life

because if the first thing worked then

that would be boring, right?

And honestly, like life is going to take you to places

that you could never expect.

And so, a big part of this is learning to trust that

you are on the right path.

Even if things are not working,

it's a sign for you to reflect,

see what you can learn,

see what lessons you can gain from this experience.

Even if in the moment you don't know

what the lesson is, that's okay.

Because that was how it felt like for me, too.

I'm just like, this just feels like a fail,

but I don't know what the lesson is.

But eventually it will make sense. You'll be like

"Oh my gosh, I'm using what I learned in that experience."

All right, my loves.

Let me know down below:

What is the biggest lesson that

you've learned from your failures in the past?

Sending you so much love

and I'll see you in the next one.

Bye.

[Music]

Please choose the correct answer for each question below: