CURRENT MISSION

perfect my moonwalk

ABOUT ME

I graduated from college in May, traveled throughout June, and started working in July. I have a feeling I'll be traveling again soon.

photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deliveryguy/
website: www.mikylebengtson.me
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mikyle.bengtson

PHILOSOPHY

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Mead

"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love." - Che

"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
-Thomas Paine

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful." - Oscar Wilde

“Everything popular is wrong.” – Oscar Wilde

"A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice." - Albert Einstein

"Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny nonny."
- Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of majority, it is time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination." - Oscar Wilde

"I can't give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time." - Herbert Swope

"Many a false step was made by standing still." - fortune cookie

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

"Life is too short to be small." - Benjamin Disraeli

"Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away." - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

"It is vain to do with more what can be done with less." - William of Occam

"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." - Albert Einstein

"There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece." - Ralph Charell

"Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activities that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate." - Dave Barry

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." - Henry David Thoreau

"As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Genius is only a superior power of seeing." - John Ruskin

"I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow." - Woodrow Wilson

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment." - Warren G Bennis

"Companies go out of business when they make the wrong decisions or, just as important, make too many decisions. The latter creates complexity." - Mike Maples

"It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains." - thomas H Huxley

"By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day." - Robert Frost

"Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him." - Thomas J Watson, founder of IBM

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." - George Bernard Shaw

"All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer." - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

"The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain." - Colin Wilson

"Only those who are asleep make no mistakes." - Ingvar Kamprad

"The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research." - Rolf Potts

"There is more to life than increasing its speed." - Mohandas Gandhi

"Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything." - Charles Kuralt

"It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot." - Paul Theroux

"There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do" - Bill Waterson

"man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another." - Anatole France

"People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think this is what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive." - Joseph Campbell

"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task." - Viktor Frankl

"Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages." - Dave Barry

"The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive." - Thich Nhat Hanh

"If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake." - Frank Wilczech

"Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to be free." - Statue of Liberty

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" - Mark Twain

"All truth goes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed,
Second, it is vehemently denied, and
Third, it is accepted as self-evident." - Daniel Amen

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I'm inactive now while I figure out my life. I'm living in a couple's spare room right now so I can't offer any space.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I spent June traveling throughout California and Mexico thanks to couchsurfing - best month of my life.

Interests

Reading
Writing
Motorcycles
Photography
Rock Climbing
Hiking

• dogs
• writing
• photography
• acting
• education
• running
• motorcycles
• chess
• reading
• traveling
• music
• hiking
• rock climbing
• business
• teaching
• languages
• religion

Music, Movies, and Books

Movies:

V for Vendetta
The Lives of Others
Tucker
The Bucket List
Ip Man
Schindler's List
Spirited Away
The Matrix
The Pursuit of Happyness
Vicky Christina Barcelona
Shawshank Redemption
The Baader-Meinhoff Complex

Music:
Explosions in the Sky
Mono (Japan)
Flobots
Pretty Lights
Gramatik
STS9
Royksopp
Ronald Jenkees
Thievery Corporation
RJD2
Imogen Heap
Wax Tailor
Radiohead
Green Day (Just went to Christine Rd!)

Books:
A People's History of the United States
Manufacturing Consent
Cosmos
The Red Queen
The 4-Hour Workweek
Vagabonding
Calvin and Hobbes
The Medici Effect

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

This trip. Sold my motorcycle, got rid of all my "stuff", moved out of my apartment, parked my car in Boston, and flagged a plane down for a trip out to Cali. A little research was done in the name of safety but otherwise, I have no clue what I'm doing, and I love it.

Teach, Learn, Share

I can blow bubbles off my tongue, and I know how to ride a motorcycle, I can help with most computer issues.

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