Exchange Semester in Sydney 2014 Pt. 7

Blog 12

The 26^th of December 2014 at 13:00 at Pink Bungalow, Koh Phangan, Thailand.

By: Christian Ljungbeck

(Reading time: 10-15 minutes)

Classes Ending

At the end of October all classes had ended and the exam period was about to begin. One of my courses; however, had an exam on the 29^th of October already, which was just 2 days after returning from Brisbane after almost 2 weeks off from school work. So I had a bit of work to do to prepare for it. And of course on the 28^th there was an evening seminar in Sydney on the psychology of wealth by Martial Peter, which I had to attend. And wow, I am glad I did so. I had never seen anyone else do what he could do. We were just a few people that day, and Martial could practically read people like an open book to an extent that I feared he knew what I was thinking the whole time. Amazing! More on Martial and his extraordinary ability and gift will follow later in this or the next blog, as he was doing a 2-day-seminar in November, which I later participated in.

On the day of my exam I spend the whole day studying from early morning to late afternoon. At 5 pm I left my apartment to get some food and be ready for the 6 pm exam start. At 5:50 after eating my food I walked up the stairs to what I thought was the room where the exam would take place. But to my big surprise I was at ‘Matthew Theatre’ and not ‘Colombo Theatre’. Ups! Such a small detail that just makes all the difference. I quickly asked around and the few people who were present could not help me, so I ran to the library to find help. The person even had to look at a map to find it, and apparently it was located right next to my apartment. So I ran from one side of campus back to my apartment all sweaty and stressed. As I entered the building I saw everybody walking in the doors to the room, so I still made it on time, but not in the best mental conditions after the running and stress. However, the exam went well I thought.

Exam Period Beginning

I had my first exam on the 11^th of November, so I took a few days off at the end of October to do some fun stuff. This included a ‘Halloween Harbor Cruise’ from Darling Harbour around the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge at night time on a big party ship with 3-400 people with a club in the middle of the ship. On the first of November I initiated my ‘From Geek to Freak’ experiment, which you can read about in a separate blog.

2 Day Trip to Canberra

On the 5^th Frederik from Germany and I decided to take a trip to the capital of Australia, Canberra, which was a 3-hour-drive from Sydney. Apparently many Australians say it is a boring city with not that much to do, so the expectations were rather low, but both Frederik and I wanted to experience it anyway. We arrived at Canberra early morning and went for a walk through the city, which was fairly small. We then went to the parliament buildings – both the old one and the new one and we got to see the Senate and the House of Representatives both places. Although I am not known for my interest in politics, it was great to see and experience it myself. First is the New building

After our visit to the political locations we went to the State Library and the High Court of Australia, which was the highest court in all of Australia. We even got to witness a live court case. There were five judges in long dark clothes facing everyone in the room. Surprisingly both the prosecutor and defender were wearing long white wigs. I thought that tradition was discarded at least 2 centuries ago, but apparently it is still alive here in Australia.

The following day we went to the War Memorial Museum and got a free guided tour, but the museum was extremely huge and since we weren’t the greatest history fans we left the group to experience the museum on our own at a faster pace than the group did. The museum had exhibitions from every single little battle Australia had every participated in – or at least so it felt. That being said it was a very modern and interesting museum (especially if you have a little more interest in history than I did). After the War Memorial Museum we went to yet another one, this time the National Museum of Australia. Thus museum contained everything from painting, sculptures, statues, old artifacts etc. from many different periods. As we walked around the museum we encountered a huge painting by Pollock. One of the employees asked us how much we thought it was worth. We said around 5 and 10 million AUD. But no, not even close. It was a staggering $400 million AUD. Wow! He continued by saying that it wasn’t even the most expensive piece of art they had. Downstairs they had 2 sculptures worth $450 million AUD. The painting was unique, but the sculptures didn’t look that unique.

The Psychology of Wealth

On the 8^th and 9^th of November I flew to Gold Coast to participate in Martial Peter’s 2-day-seminar on the psychology of Wealth. Even though it had only been a short while since the introductory event in Sydney I was very much looking forward to spending 2 full days with Martial and learning more about myself, Martial, and the human mind. The information shared by the participants in the room during the seminar is confidential and I cannot share that. Instead I will explain the even in broader terms. I should also mention that the following is my interpretation and understanding and therefore the accuracy of the information might be inadequate. Martial uses a combination of several tools and techniques which coupled with his fantastic understanding of the human mind and behavior enables him to get his lessons across and teach them very effectively to people. It wasn’t just an intellectual understanding he gave us, but also an emotional one – unlike traditional education. He used his techniques to create what is referred to as a breakthrough session. A breakthrough is when a person reaches a threshold in their mind on a particular subject, and when that happens this is the point where you can create lasting change – changes that most people believe take years to do. Using breakthroughs Martial created more changes in record time than I have ever seen or heard anyone do before. It sounds unbelievable and it sure seemed like that until I witnessed it myself. It was much like seeing Tony Robbins in action – both men with an extraordinary understanding of human behavior and sensory acuity. Only very few people can do what Martial and Tony does. As far as I am aware they are the only two people in the world I know of. Again, I cannot go into specifics about the event, but it was an absolutely amazing experience and a fantastic weekend in which I learned more about myself and how the mind works than I had in a long time. I give Martial my deepest recommendation. You can learn more about Martial on his website: www.martialpeter.com.

Trading Justice Podcast and First Speech at Toastmaster’s

With my trip to Canberra and Gold Coast the 2 weeks I had before my exams were almost over and I hadn’t been studying a whole lot before my first exam on the 12^th of November. And of course I had also volunteered to do my first speech at Toastmaster’s on the 11^th of November – the day after returning from Gold Coast. On the morning of the 11^th I had my weekly online webinar with people from the US on trading stocks and options and the financial markets. I had a question for my instructor, Tim Justice, after the webinar, so we spoke on Skype afterwards. He then asked me if I wanted to join him and his both Matt Justice on their Trading Justice Podcast. They usually do 2 podcasts a week on the financial markets on everything from trading opportunities, trading strategies, currencies, financial politics, global economics new etc. They are always super good, so for sure I was happy to be offered to participate. Since I appeared in this episode and taking my age into consideration the topic was on the evolution of a young trader. We talked about my story and how I got involved with Robert Kiyosaki’s company Rich Dad and when I started having an interest in the financial markets. We then progressed talking about trading strategies and the differences and challenges of being non-US-based and trading the US markets. It was super fun and exciting and hopefully I will be back again in the future. For some reason the sound was all perfect when we recorded it, but on the final file there are some lags and short periods with silence. You have to create a free profile to access the podcast. The podcast can be found here (I appear until around 40:00): https://www.tackletrading.com/trading-justice-39-christian-ljungbeck/

Recording the podcast took a while and I then only had a short time until I had to leave my apartment for the Toastmaster’s meeting. I spent that time rehearsing my speech so I would be ready for my very first official speech.

We were around 20 people at the meeting and after the first half it was now time for me to deliver my speech. The first topic every speaker talks about is themselves, their life, and interests for 3-5 minutes. After the initial nervousness which according to the audience wasn’t visible I got back on the right track and in my opinion I delivered a very great first speech.

Exams and Goodbye

The following 2 weeks passed with exams and a lot goodbye BBQ’s and other goodbye events:

12^th: ‘Financial Institution Management’ exam.

14^th: Ria Dev from my ‘Managing and Leading People’-class graduated. I wanted to see an Australian graduation, so I went and say congratulations. Since I was about to graduate from my exchange semester at UNSW I figured it would be appropriate taking a picture with a graduation hat on.

In the evening we did a BBQ in Coogee and went out for drinks at Coogee Pavillion and the Hotel.

15^th: 2 Danish girls hosted a big party with close to 100 people in a very small apartment connected to a small garden.

18^th: I had spent the last few days studying for my ’E-Business’-class. I started reviewing everything from week 1 of classes and finally made it to week 12. Then on the very last slide of the whole course the teacher had specifically indicated from which chapters the 7 exams questions would be coming from and in 4-5 of them she had also indicated the topic within the chapter. As soon as I saw that slide I remembered that she had talked about it during the last class – I had just completely forgotten about it. Doh! I had spent a lot of time reviewing all the course material, and most of it could have been saved as a lot of the chapters and lectures would not appear in the exam. Well, it was all sunk costs at that time, so I spent the next few hours reviewing only the relevant chapters.

Since I was about to leave Sydney soon my Toastmaster’s club had given me the opportunity to do my second speech on the 18^th. I really wanted to do that, but I didn’t feel I had the time to prepare for it, but I had volunteered for it anyway. So I went and did my second speech on ‘The 6 Human Needs’ in front of about 20 people again. I tried to think about the areas of improvement from last week and focus on those points. And it went extremely well! And people were happy about the topic as it also related to them and not just me.

19^th: ‘E-Business’ exam

20^th: Goodbye dinner with Kathrine, Saina, and Nathalie in Coogee and playing pool at Coogee Bay  Hotel.

21^th : ‘Real Estate Economics and Public Policy’ exam.

In the evening Åsmund, Erik, Laurens, and I went to the city for dinner. We walked around the city and went to Glenmore Hotel where Laurens’s girlfriend Lauren was working. They had a rooftop bar right next to the Sydney Harbor Bridge overlooking the water, the city, and the Opera house. We then decided to go on a rooftop pubcrawl, so we continued to Shangri-la Hotel and went to their bar on 36^th floor with an amazing view over Sydney. Laurens and I were both wearing flip flops which made it very difficult to enter any bars, but when the employees in the door were looking the other way, we quickly went inside. We all purchased one of their very delicious drinks and enjoyed it watching all the lights in the city. We then continued our pubcrawl, but we quickly discarded that as we were rejected 4 different places because of our flip flops. But then all of a sudden I got the fabulous idea that Laurens and I could just turn our flip flops upside down so that we would be walking on our feet but the flip flops would cover the top of our feet until we would get into the bar. That way the security persons would not be able to see the white skin on our feet and only if they were to look down on our feet specifically would they see it. We decided to try it. We got in line at a bar and after showing our IDs we were allowed to enter. It worked, Haha! We had to take 5 steps up before we could enter and both Laurens and I were walking like penguins on the stairs half laughing still trying to act normal. We went on to several other bars later on and surprisingly it worked every single place. Only one place did they notice my shoes just after letting me in, so the security guys stopped me and to my surprise in a hard tone he just said “Hey, turn your shoes around properly, man!”.

22^nd: Lauren joined the four of us and took us to Shark Bay and Milk Beach in the north-eastern part of Sydney. Here we could do some cliff jumping from a 5-6 meter cliff into the water. It was super fun, and we had an amazing view of the whole city and landscape surrounding it. In the evening we went to a running Sushi restaurant before continuing to Coogee beach where we had some beers and later we went to Pavilion.

23^rd: I spent 5-6 hours planning my travels after the semester before going to Erik and Peter’s house. It was Erik, Peter, Laurens, and Stine’s last day in Sydney, so we said goodbye and see you in Denmark.

24^th: Picnic at Coogee Beach with a mixture of people from everywhere.

25-27^th: Practical things to take care of and getting ready to leave Sydney on the 2^nd of December.

28^th: Meeting with the official Anthony Robbins group with Dave and Katrina Elliott from UPW crew in Sydney on business mastery.

1^st of December: My final day in Sydney. I wanted to leave Sydney earlier, but because Empowernet were hosting an event ‘Masters of Wealth’ featuring Robert Kiyosaki live in Sydney I postponed my travels so I could get a chance to see Robert live. The event had 6 speakers in total including Scott Harris, who is the facilitator on Wealth Mastery, so the audience was in very great hands this day. There was a bit of selling with so many different speakers promoting their individual products to take advantage of the changing future and economy. Finally Robert Kiyosaki appeared as the final speaker and he received a standing applause even before he started speaking since he had touched almost everyone’s lives in the room. Robert Kiyosaki is the author of the book ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ and he is the leading authority on personal finance. His teachings are mostly very controversial to common sense and traditional advice. He was awesome to see and experience live after having read several of his books and bought my trading courses from his company.