look at this line look at this line always in front of me running straight up my spine imperfectly balanced between give and take sides with give on my left and take on my right it's nature's design so well defined plants bugs in animals straddle the line perfectly balanced between the two sides where else and eagles trees b s lions their wisdom and beauty still baffle si they live on pure instinct in a will to survive but given take equally to create a circle of life this remarkable system has been tested by time in the manton's the oceans the rivers the valleys the deserts in the skies but what about us we live here too are an important point we need to discuss why because we are divine blessed with our minds we get to choose which side of the line so why don't we try to see what we find if i shuffle my feet until they give side of my life a giver my a giver my spending some time under give side of my life and fully aware that we're all intertwined sharing earth land air and water supply and thankful for what we've been given no lies no bribes no blurry gray lines no reason to hide i'm bursting with pride are stand up and shine in the of times and work every day towards a meaningful life why because i care and giving is more than a physical act it's an attitude a favor a positive chat but it's true none will survive without taking sometimes the earth provides harvest to keep us alive so why don't we try to see all we find if i shuffle my feet on to the take side of my life a taker in my a take or a my what do i need how much or why well maybe it's food clothes or ride these things i will take for good reason but listen up closely it's time to be wise don't waste what you take or litter outside because whatever you take comes with a price it's not only money that gets sacrificed open your eyes your heart in your mind i've seen too many plastic bags in bottles flo by the earth as our garden our precious lifeline it needs to be healthy so we can survive so take what you need don't take all the time or we'll be leaving behind a junkpile shr you know the more that i think the more i see my eyes when i see a strange twist in this rhyme taking too much would make me feel empty inside not fall i mean if i'm hurting the earth how hollow my but giving giving would fill me up flood my heart with purpose and pride knowing i'm helping the circle of life so think long and hard study both sides crossing this line should be thought kind but at any given time you have to decide which side of your line you choose to reside a giver overtake or a giver or a taker you are the future in this is the most important choice of your life thanks to mark in tyler for helping to inspire welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host and the person you saw performing that very thought provoking rhyme of rap is jim scanlon he is the author of the musical adventure of one shot billy welcome thank you so much for having me so i read the book and i really listen to it as you did your rap and there's a very compelling message so how did you come to create this message what was your driving force my driving force behind the message  not only the rap last rhyme in the book is the fact that i have a daughter named holly who i see her future in some of the things that i'm aware of being a father and an older person is that we really need to start paying attention to things that are going on around us of being aware of each other and certainly be aware of the planet not to sound too preachy so i wanted to wrap that message up in a nice light hearted entertaining vehicle that people could aspire to which includes music rhymes raps poems as well as a story line that's a frame narrative that starts out takes place in a fifth grade classroom right so again you have these characters i've read the book and i thought it had an important message and i thought it was you know i think i shared with you that i always read to my kids even you know probably into their early teens it was kind of something we shared and this would have been the kind of book that i would have liked to have read to them because there is a a story and then adventure but there's a message without being preachy and banging your  nothing makes me feel better than when a parent comes to me and said i read this to my children and that the children had a chance to ask questions in a parent had the ability to then explain some of the things that are going on in the book it recently happened that that happened to me this weekend where i sat down with a parent and his three children and in fact they asked me to play some music for them as well and we talked about the book and i think the idea behind the characters i wanted to personify the forces of nature we do that term all the time the forces of nature or what are the forces of nature so i thought to myself in this really came from a song i'd written earlier about mother nature and the role she really played in imagine her face and in her family and who should be sure she would be in her feelings and it turned out she was a doting mom no different than most of us and her children who were really important players in the force of  nature as forces of nature she didn't really treat them or discipline them as much as she should have and she found out wow it's time to really become a parent and show these children what makes the most sense most namely the youngest one william who to ultimately becomes one shop billy so that's great and it's so creative so can you say a one shot belly i mean i know what that means but why one shot belly well the character the forces of nature are made up of mother nature as a c e o of a company called earth management systems and her three sons are the forces of nature the oldest his name frederick his father time there is no dad involved with his family so he always imagine himself as the man of the family the middle brother is named aaron the middle man in the moon and his responsibility was for the chaotic rhythms of department of evan flow all the things that happen in the atmosphere that are somewhat chaotic and then the youngest brother is young men named william he's the baby of the family and rightly so he's stupid and we find out that his job is not necessary to just make people fall in love his job is to go out like quality control like we find in most businesses and find givers and make givers fall in love so then they'll surround themselves with givers if they have children they'll teach their children to be givers and will always continue to have the circle of life and everybody being more aware that we need to be givers as a as human beings more than takers because ultimately the earth is our asset and we are maybe taking too stuff i think the most compelling thing to me is the choice word you know there is a give and take and nature is balanced and not just in this very superficial way but if you look even at one individual flower and it's every aspect of it is significant and meaningful and necessary and then it is attached to getting fertilized and so there's this whole stream of events that we typically just look at the surface and we think oh we lose a species big whoop but everything on the planet is impacted by that loss and so i think that whole thing about balance is one of the key messages but as humans the flowers are just flowering you know and a dogs are just being dogs but as humans we actually have choice and i think the whole idea of focusing on you get to choose and yes you're going to have to give and yes you're going to have to take and there's nothing wrong with that but you kind of overdo one over the other then bad things happen it's thank you for reading the book the matter sussman is correct and you may have wondered during the rap that i have construction comes and caution tape yet uses my props and i look at myself no different than anyone else on the better that i just have to always think there's consequences to my actions so i consider myself trying to become a better person all the time and i'd literally in my mind envision a construction site so that's why i use its construction crews in this caution tape to say where ever i go and it and it given time i have to choose whether i'm a giver or a taker and not to change people's minds not to get but awareness is so important and again that's that's the most fulfilling thing in the book is when some of the the people the younger people even the older people they say everybody needs to hear this message it's not beating anyone over the head it's a fun message but at the same time it's very important it's really important it's hard to live with your head in the sand saying that we don't have to wake up a little bit and just really realize what we're doing as people there's a couple of lines in the story william says it's not how much you win it's what you choose and i i really appreciate the time with you because i haven't had a chance to talk to people on an intellectual level on some of these what some of these things mean but to win our society is run win win win win win it's ok we compete animals compete but it's we have a choice when we win we get power let's choose to do the right thing with it we too often build higher wall separate ourselves from everyone get our private jets do all the things we we do to separate ourselves rather than we win win win win let's try to do something for everyone in it it's not easy because when it's just a few people do it you really get run over if everybody just started have a little social conscious to what their impact of their choices and then import that wisdom eventually able to called annette i call this book a goodwill mission and i'm hoping to usher it in shepherd along its way and have it come to life one day the reason i wrote all the songs because the character sings was because it gave it so many options meaning that it could be a stage act right now i do motivational speaking for young audience so i go to schools camps and houses and i'll sit down in to the wrap and do the rhyme and then tell the story an unabridged story of the musical venture one shot billy but show is motivation and it really boils down to two things self esteem and nature conservation and i believe those are the two most compelling issues we face again not to be preachy just to be smart just to be smart i've got to deal with the things i have to do no different than anyone else  convinced that i could not have embarked on this mission or had the insight to try to write a story like this unless i've lived both sides of life here and i think the issue of self esteem you know as a life coach i  clients deal with that on some level and i don't care if you're a kid or an adult or a really hugely successful financially successful person if there's there's always some issue with self esteem and i think the experience that people have when they consciously give really contributes to the self esteem and so you know this whole idea of winning and getting more and getting more it kind of alienates us from one another so i think we have to redefine winning because and again what i'm so happy about what you're doing by going and performing in front of children is that right now mostly people are disconnecting you know and we could go on the rant about technology and whatever but i think children long for stories they long for heroes and it's very easy to get them engaged but if nobody's doing it the only thing they're engaged in is what everybody else is engaged in is a little tool that they stare at and that starts to overtake it so i think it's developing consciousness you are hidden everything that i tried to present in the book in fact self esteem to me is an interesting one when i wrote the book and i wrote the songs i had this vision a mind i didn't try to get a publishing deal i just said it's an organic story i wanted to travel the world just because people would read it and it often and i try to do everything from behind my kooky board in it so it was a little  shortsighted but it was really driven by low self esteem meaning that i could not imagine myself in the scenario right here i could never imagine myself in front of people playing guitar because quite frankly you know i was told a lot of times you're not a great singer  guitar player so i didn't try and i never played up so now i have to give kudos to a group called toastmasters international and kudos to my brother harry who assured me to open mike four times it said go up there and do it you can do this is  important but for me to stand in front of people in be passionate about this is the easy part but it's really getting there and i build that into my presentation i tell the kids i said listen before i came out here i was afraid i was afraid because i was told all these bad voices tell me i'm not good so is the young lady yesterday was a young man they always know you're really good and it's like it's really it's how you decide to see yourself is so important how you choose how you the shoes to see yourself yes and i think that's where we kind of are lacking is we don't really emphasize the whole thing of choice and and how you think is a choice because typically you know our thoughts are just there so we don't question them they just surface we believe them we think they must be true because there are thought and they're in our head as opposed to examining it well see i would argue the other way that fear keeps good thoughts from coming up meaning that you know i look at fear as a very important thing because it creates thought but fear beyond thoughtfulness is no good because then it's crippling it's in so when i look at politicians you know when i see somebody who commands a stage and can just stand up in front of hoping there's fear inside them the same way there isn't a because even in this interview i want to try to be thoughtful i want to try to be sincere i want to try to be correct in my assumptions but trust me when i say nothing is coming out of my mouth out of arrogance of being careless it's always there's always a bubbling fear in me trying to do the right thing i always try to do the right thing and that's a good thing yes and again nervousness a little fear it kind of gives you your edge or keeps you conscious or  aware it keeps a racecar driver from flying off the track but yet the guy that pushes that line so far gets you know wins the race you know i want to go back to this winning thing because competition is part of nature youthful and but again we get i think lost in the end game and the whole thing is you know again with self esteem i think when you talk about being a better person the one thing that i think is important for people to realize is that they don't need to be fixed i don't need to be a better person because i need to be fixed because that's where you go into so low self esteem so it's just i need to be a better person because like a beautiful blossoming flower i need to evolve to my peak potential and i said a better way maybe yes i try to be a better me yet always own me and i know i come with good things and bad things but i always want to try to be a better me in this and there's things i say sometimes i cringe and i will go back and apologize or things i do and i want to take you know  at least in a better look at how i dealt with that situation happens all the time if you're a dad yes you're trying to raise a daughter you make mistakes but you need to but then again as ms yes but again mistakes do not again i have so many people i work with so many people who think that making a mistake makes them defective well there in lies the issue which is why i was so fearful of prison performing in front of people because mistakes him being judge it's not easy and you try to put your best foot forward but you know what that's when you abandon who you are because we're all going to make mistakes and the character in the book certainly makes your mistakes i hope that you got at his root he's a good person and any any any tries to find love and try to find acceptance acceptance in all the wrong places and when he really finds the end in this is not a new story it's just a different way to tell the same strike when he finally except himself or who he is and he finds out through giving writing all the cure all my wife and i decided to write the book she said oh you should be a psychologist or whatever i said you know i would just get a pickup truck in a sofa that's all i need and she's like why i said well when i saw somebody that was having problems i was pretty much well off i'd put him on my cell phone or drive to the children's hospital of philadelphia and we'd sit in a lobby and say how do you feel now because if you really use ask you just saying again but before we do that explain a man you they manju is the tagline that the character william who is cupid his job as a human resources director is to shoot and it's just a catchphrase for him saying if you're a giver it's time to shoot you with a lot of arrow meaning aim on you and that's his catchphrase and it really comes from good on you from australia i just thought a was just a nice way to say it i i i had it as the title of the story for a little while and then some things happened in our society that i didn't know whether it was the right thing to put out there namely sandy hook so i backed off of that but it's really i have people now who know what i do and if they see me on the street to go in on you and it's almost like right on it's almost like i'm a giver you're a giver and we're gave years and we're going to try to do the right thing so that was and the impetus behind it because i wanted the character to have a catchphrase i've baked in all these things and we could talk about it for three hours and all these little things for this book story songs to catch fire in fact in the song i'm going to sing it's the part of the story where william invents this character one shot billy who he believes is a superhero when he thinks about it he's got love arrows in love ours is the greatest power of all love conquers all phrase for that and he knows he can fly in a hyper speed so why not he could be a superhero too but he says something in the song that i've never disclosed to anybody that shows why at this point maybe he wasn't ready to save the day asked thank you that was a wonderful my name is natasha sherman thank you for joining us and i invite you to get in touch with jim goes into schools it has a message and i want to thank you jim there's no place i'd rather be than right here with the unit tasha since the moment i met you you really were thoughtful person and i know you're always already ahead of me in trying to make a difference with people but i think it's fantastic what you do so thank you so much and thank you for