The Beneficiaries: Live Your Legacy Now

By Virgil Brannon

You are the descendants of this great land. You are a gift to the world. You are the beneficiary and inheritor of your ancestors no matter what they endured or suffered. You inherited their greatness and accomplishments. The creator has blessed you and has left the world in your care. You must learn what to do with it.

In The Beneficiaries, author Virgil Brannon discusses how you are the gift with great power and influence in the world. He offers a step-by-step guide on how to find your gift and to live your legacy using basic knowledge as a strategy for success. Brannon teaches that self-reliance and self-respect are the main tools to realizing your purpose and achieving your goals. He brings a fresh perspective on why it’s important to stop complaining about the past and to understand that there is a possibility for a new start and a new beginning.

The Beneficiaries was written to inspire and build confidence, to empower one’s unique abilities, and to find yourselves and your purpose. It communicates that the key to life is growth. It empowers you to go forward in living a happier life while providing solutions and simple ways for you to make your life better.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532074882

Virgil Brannon

Virgil Brannon is the founder of I AM VISION INC., a nonprofit youth program. The mission of I AM VISION INC. is to embrace and empower youth by challenging them to boost their vision via hands-on opportunities and encouraging their determination to excel in life. Virgil’s overall effort is to promote young people’s growth and their ability to dream and envision success to develop their leadership and academic capabilities. However, his charitable heart is with the empowerment of young people seeking positive mentors to help them navigate challenging obstacles. Virgil’s career background is also in private investigations and legal support, marketing, music management, and consulting. To better serve youth and their families, Virgil attended Shepherd’s Care Bible College and received a dual master’s and doctorate of ministry in religious counseling so that he would be equipped to address vital issues associated with socioeconomically disadvantaged youth and their families. Virgil didn’t stop there. He embraced a large number of business and socially based courses so that he could make certain that his organization was just as business savvy as it was charitably focused. These efforts resulted in not only master’s and doctoral degrees but an astonishing concentration of social enterprise. Today, you can find Virgil with his hands in a number of business deals that generate funding to support his endeavors to make it a little easier for youth to reach their full potential.

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Copyright © 2019 Virgil Brannon.

Photo Credit: Justice Brannon

First Edit Credit: Julie Scandora

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-7487-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-7488-2 (e)

iUniverse rev. date:  06/28/2019

This book is

dedicated to Austin and Justice.

Sons do not come any better than the two of you.

CONTENTS

About the Author

Preface

Introduction

Part 1    The Legacy

Chapter 1    History

Chapter 2    Language

Chapter 3    Science

Chapter 4    Mathematics

Part 2    The Life

Chapter 5    Build a Legacy

Chapter 6    Follow the Rules

Chapter 7    Our World

Chapter 8    Take It Further

Chapter 9    Have a Dream

Chapter 10    Gifts and Talents

Notes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Virgil Brannon is the founder of I AM VISION INC., a nonprofit youth program. The mission of I AM VISION INC. is to embrace and empower youth by challenging them to boost their vision via hands-on opportunities and encouraging their determination to excel in life. Virgil’s overall effort is to promote young people’s growth and their ability to dream and envision success to develop their leadership and academic capabilities.

However, his charitable heart is with the empowerment of young people seeking positive mentors to help them navigate challenging obstacles. Virgil’s career background is also in private investigations and legal support, marketing, music management, and consulting.

To better serve youth and their families, Virgil attended Shepherd’s Care Bible College and received a dual master’s and doctorate of ministry in religious counseling so that he would be equipped to address vital issues associated with socioeconomically disadvantaged youth and their families.

Virgil didn’t stop there. He embraced a large number of business and socially based courses so that he could make certain that his organization was just as business savvy as it was charitably focused. These efforts resulted in not only master’s and doctoral degrees but an astonishing concentration of social enterprise. Today, you can find Virgil with his hands in a number of business deals that generate funding to support his endeavors to make it a little easier for youth to reach their full potential.

PREFACE

The Beneficiaries! was written to focus on our purpose in life. It is intended as a spiritual guide to embrace the positive over the negative that we face every day. I wrote it to show readers how much we matter to the world and how important it is for us to challenge ourselves. It was written to explain how we are the beneficiaries and the inheritors of our ancestors, no matter what they endured or suffered, and not a burden, for better or worse. It was written to show that although the Creator blessed all of us, we have to learn what to do with those blessings. The book will empower readers to go forward in living happier lives while it offers solutions and simple ways for us to make our lives better. The aim is to present information that will be relatable, informative, and interesting. I hope it inspires and boosts readers’ confidence to do more with their lives. At the same time, I want to bring a better perspective to why it is so important to stop complaining about bad events that happened so far in the past that cannot help us today. Unless we know what to do with that knowledge, these problems will still bloom. I hope readers will see and understand the importance of the basic knowledge we learned in school and how it transforms our lives.

I wrote the book to show how there is no limitation to what we can do and that nothing holds one back but oneself. The Beneficiaries! will give those who do not know their purpose a fresh start, a second chance, or a new beginning. The book will show them who they are and why they matter and then offer solutions for how to change their lives for the better.

I hope readers will discover how unlimited the sky is to them; what their roles and responsibilities are; and how we must become better at controlling our own lives, our destinies, and, most importantly, our individual selves.

As we make corrections, we must understand how we arrived at this point where we have failed to apply and celebrate our ancestors’ accomplishments and instead applied and assumed their suffering. We are not savage beasts, slaves, murderers, rapists, and fools. Our ancestors were doctors, lawyers, engineers, designers, scientists, mathematicians, writers, builders, and other great human beings, and so are you. We are the beneficiaries of the past, and all we have today is our inheritance. The key to life is growth, and everything must progress. We cannot take life for granted and spend too much time talking about oppressive and depressing things we cannot change. And we cannot be something we have never lived, let alone experienced. How can we be affected by something if we were never there? This type of teaching and constant indoctrination about the past limits your thinking and progress; holds you back; and comes from those who have an agenda to separate you from your gifts, talents, and other human beings.

The burden lies on those who have restricted you. It’s time that we take things seriously because we have been purposely distracted and not shown what to do with the Creator’s work. The solution rests at the basic level of learning.

Many of us have grown to believe that several academic subjects are not needed in the real world. We believe addition and subtraction have no real uses, other than to count money. We believe language is just about learning how to read. Many believe history and science have no value because history is about someone else’s past and science is just about animals, plants, and body parts. These four basic activities are the primary tools we need to achieve success if they are taught as I see them. There are two parts to success: first you get the lesson, and then you must apply it. Many of us were not taught how to apply them and use those subjects to survive, where to look to see them play out, or how to make the corrections when we failed so the worst of history will not repeat itself through us. One of the main reasons many of us thought we would never need those subjects is that we were never taught how to apply them, find ourselves in one or more of them, and nurture our gifts or talents in them.

As we move forward to make the correction, my hope is that we will stop dwelling on the past and instead learn how to forgive, get up, and go get what is waiting for us. It’s time. Make them remember you! Go get it and live your legacy now.

INTRODUCTION

Education has changed our society as if we are a social experiment. It seems like we are guinea pigs in labs, running in circles trying to find the nearest exit to set us free. It has gone from what God wants us to know to what politicians plan for us to know. This agenda they have planned creates division between us and separates the haves from the have-nots and blacks from whites. This agenda makes one believe they have no purpose. If we believe in success, why are we showing envy and jealousy toward one another? These are two of the sins we were told to avoid.

For far too long they have had us sitting around complaining about what others have done to better themselves. We complain that they make too much money, are only out for themselves, and don’t want the rest of us to succeed. Continuing to complain as they would want us to will not help us! Whatever hard work people put in to acquire wealth, they deserve it. Whatever they decide to buy for themselves with their money is rightfully theirs. We have to stop complaining about someone else’s moment in their story. For us to advance in life, we must first learn what has not advanced us and then search for what will change that.

Every year, we are losing thousands of our young people because they don’t know who they are and their purpose. Our youth are losing their lives to gun violence, drug addiction, sex trafficking, suicide, gang affiliation, teen pregnancy, dropping out of school, and the breakdown of family structure because most of them do not know who they are, do not see their self-worth, and have not yet found their purpose. Children today are lost without a recognizable alternative or another way to envision life. Out of all that they are taught, many of them believe they will never use that knowledge after finishing school. Other times, they cannot see or understand what the material has to do with them or their future. Many are lost because we are not tending to their needs, showing them the way, and passing a legacy of values down to them.

With almost 70 percent of African American households headed by single mothers, 51 percent of our youths without jobs to occupy their time and minds, and 20 percent of kids graduating from high school not ready for college, these tragedies will continue to happen. These children do not know that greatness is within them. They do not know the Creator passed down a legacy to our ancestors and that now it lies with us to pass it down to them. Adding to these problems is an outrageous number of fathers who continue to abandon their responsibility of making day-to-day corrections in their children’s lives. These fathers are not living up to their ancestors’ legacy by making their own future generation’s life better. Instead, many of them react violently and become criminals because they are lost. Homes with no fathers are destructive and worsened when the controlling government comes and seeks total control over the family, becoming the parental guardian after forcing the fathers out.

One of our biggest failures was allowing the removal of God’s name and prayer from American public schools just to bring comfort to others who are not from this country. But that, too, is our problem. We all should know God and His work. The inability of students to learn what the Creator wants from them has made them more chaotic, confused, and lost. Today, many of the lost and confused are not afraid of committing the same crime or worse. Some of them later become repeat offenders with no chance to get ahead because they are not sure of themselves and their creative purpose.

For the last four decades, we have failed to approach this problem correctly, and as a result, we have the same problems today, although they are worse because no one is willing to take responsibility and challenge the status quo. The government decided to take matters into its own hands, creating programs that do not work. The government did not create a program that teaches young people how to apply to life what they learn in school. Although it put bandages on the problem, it did not solve it. It gave us gang prevention and conflict resolution, which helps some gang members understand some of their problems and maybe later get jobs, but it has never elevated them out of poverty, away from their neighborhood, or from the problem completely. It gave us Scared Straight, a program that allows kids to visit a correctional institution to experience a fast-forward view of the consequences of criminal behavior, but it never shows them what to do or how to find their greatness. As a result, many of them have become the exact image of the inmates meant to scare them. With no alternative to change their environment, many youth find comfort in the scare because they cannot find a straighter path to succeed. The government also gave us Job Corps, but it failed because most of the kids could not find jobs. The government even claimed to stop teen pregnancy