Just your average 30 something guy who enjoys creating helpful content and spends his time observing life in between adventures.

• Hiking & Outdoors – Escaping from city life and getting into the mountains for the few days, or cruising down some rapids on a kayak and sleeping under the stars. This is what life is made for! 
• Yoga & Mindfulness – It is something you do for yourself, and something you do to be a truer version of yourself, or at least to discover it!
• Reading – Hi my name is Bernard , and I’m a bibliophile… The first step is admitting you’ve got a problem, but just like any true alcoholic, it’s only a problem if you’re trying to quit! Be sure to check out our Library, where you will find some of the best books I’ve read!
• Health & Fitness – Understanding how my body works, what to feed it, how to maintain it and remembering to love it too!
• Communication – Observation, persuasion, human behavioral psychology, seduction and all other forms of communication fascinate me! 
• Language – As a South-African I am comfortable with 5+ languages. Afrikaans & English on a first language basis and Zulu, Xhosa & French on a functional level. I also have some understanding of German, Spanish, Japanese and I’m busy learning the introductory basics of Chinese for an upcoming adventure! Language is amazing!
• Music – I play Piano and Guitar, and have a love for everything from Liszt and Chopin through to Billy Joel, Michael Jackson, Tool and All them Witches. My playlist is a lucky packet!
• Drawing & Design – Being able to capture the illusion of three dimensions onto two is something everyone should build a schemata for. Learning to draw has become a life long hobby for me! 
• Gardening – With 20 Fruit trees, 8 berry bushes and a wide variety of seasonal vegetables in my backyard, understanding soil webs and applying permaculture techniques to grow my own food, along with chatting to my little garden birds has become one of my greatest daily joys!
  
  One of the most important things I learned after thirty, is that if you’re going to be the person you spend the most time with for the rest of your life, you may as well invest some time into becoming the type  you would want to spend time with!

A really positive one. 

One that is still being written, every day!

Stories are powerful, and the narrative we choose to follow determines the type of person we end up becoming. Just like any other story mine has three parts. 

– The Beginning : My past. Where I come from, my backstory, tragedies, joys and experiences.
– The Future : Where I am going, what I wish to achieve and where I will eventually return to when I close my eyes for the last time. 
– The Present : A gift. The only place I can actually live in. 

It is important to know where we are coming from, and just as important to know where we are going, but just like any great book, we can only read one page at a time. 

The personal narrative I choose is one focused on the happiness of pursuit instead of the pursuit of happiness.

Life is all about value.

Your Friendships, Career and Relationships are all based on the principles of value exchange and the balance that you keep within their relationship dynamics.

The better you are at identifying peoples wants and needs, and being able to provide them, the more value those people will assign to you, and the more you do this, the more valuable you will become to them.

The sooner you realize it the better, but the good news is, it’s never to late. This is advice that I would give anyone irrespective of their age.

One of the secrets to a successful in happy life is being able to apply this understanding to the relationships in your life.

You see, when it comes to value there are two participatory roles to it.

The one is Consumption – This is everything from the consumption of valuable resources like food or water, to the consumption of knowledge and information from teachers.

The other is Creation –  All the knowledge in the world is useless if you cannot apply it to practical reality, which is the act of creation.

While the both appear on the same scale, they are substantially different. While you need to consume value in order to raise your skills, if you spend too much time consuming and too little time creating you will find yourself in a dull dreary life never accomplishing much. 

Learn to create value early on. For yourself, but especially for others.

 This way you will never find yourself out of place.

You can check out my article on 111 things learned after thirty if you want to read some of the life lessons I’ve learned over the years.

Because it grabs your interest with entertaining and high value content that provides you with value!

At least I hope so, and at the very least, I must be doing something right with my efforts if you managed to get this far into my profile page!

I am not the smartest or most well qualified person on this earth, as I said at the start, I really am just your average 30-Something  guy, filled with life experience, consequence, skills and many flaws, but luckily the blog isn’t about me!

It is about providing helpful insights and providing practical solutions to the problems we all experience! Always about that value!

Hopefully a win for us both.

Life is made up of choices, it is not single events that shape us, but the hundreds of micro decisions we make in reacting to them. 

So make those count! 

Up the positive self talk, becoming your own best cheerleader, and try and behave as if you’re the main character in a movie or book. 

Just be sure to pick something with a plot you want to follow!

If you need any help with this, just spend some time on my site, and if I’ve been doing my job hopefully you’ll find everything you need to turn yourself into the person you want to be.

Most definitely!

Things Learned After Thirty was created to contain much more than just the experiences and lessons that I have to offer!

One of the greatest truths about life is that everybody is amazing at something, and I have a vision of turning this site into a platform that will allow people to learn from others, but also to teach others.

If you’re interested in this, check out our guest post page and share your knowledge with the world! 

You don’t need to be in your thirties to do this either!