You can get all "A's", and still flunk life

You can be right all the time, but how are you interacting with other people?

The positive residue of tragedy

If our lives were all easy and full of peaches and rainbows, we’d be pretty weak, and pretty vulnerable.

Tragedy helps us grow.  It makes us stronger psychologically and emotionally; and that strength is what is necessary to live an even better life.

Use it.

Memory-go-round

Some of us live mostly in the past, letting what happened have a strong influence on today, and their identity.

If the past, or parts of it are not good, then there is a strong argument to change your habits of thinking to let it go.  The first part of any change is to notice what you are habitually doing, and want to change.

Understand that the mistakes others made had nothing to do with you.  And you were doing your best (and learning) when you made mistakes.  It was all part of the process to make you better and stronger – if you let it.

There’s a longer answer here, but put symbols, words, and images, of who you want to be and where you are going in your environment. Change your environment, and change the words you say to yourself, even if you don’t believe them at first. Make it a point to focus on the better you, free from any past negative influence on purpose each day, until it becomes a habit – which will take longer than 30 days.

The past was events.  You are not an event.

You are a dynamic human being with the power to create any life for yourself that you want.

Now go out and take it.

Know Value

Know value.  Know what things are worth to who and where.

Until you know the value, everything is worthless.

When you know the value, everything is valuable.

See! It's true!

Do you realize that if you search something on YouTube, watch it and “like” it, it will feed you more videos fo the same idea, the same position, the same viewpoint?  

All of a sudden the world is validating the point of view you had in the first place.

You don’t get diversity of opinion or subjects.  It’s a huge confirmation bias that holds you to who you already are and does not support you being someone different (who thinks differently and gets different results).

You can use this in your favor by typing something better in the search box, and liking a video that’s good for you, so they give you more of them.

You know this right? 

Endurance Training

If you do some physical training and push yourself to do it for a long time, you will have more mental stamina.

Running, biking, working physically…push it for longer than you want to.

You’ll build mental toughness and your other problems will get smaller as you get stronger.

How much time did that cost?

The real measure of prosperity is time.  Do you have time, ultimately your most precious finite resource, to do what you want?

If we produce value that we can get paid for in a reasonable percentage of our time, we have some money.  But if we consume too much relative to our income, we have debt and are spending even more of our time paying the bills.

It’s a balance between the volume of production and consumption, and the nature of the production and the consumption that will determine how prosperous we are – our available time.

How is this playing out in your life?  Tell me with the orange button!

The Optimists Always Win

In 1798 a really smart thoughtful respected guy, Thomas Malthus, concluded that the planet could not feed the growing population and that soon, humans would starve.  It was dire and freaked people out.  He was wrong.

When I was growing up, we worried about an inevitable nuclear war with Russia.  It would be the end of the world.  It never happened.

In the late 70″s really smart people started talking about “peak oil”, and that the world would run out by the 1990s or so.  It was a scary proposition.

In 2001 we talked about terrorism and how we couldn’t fight it because it wasn’t a country.  Smart people told about how it would spread unchecked across the world.

Al Gore and others began talking about how global warming would be the end of us all, and that time was short.  The planet would heat up, the oceans would rise, storms and droughts would overtake us all…by now.

Today we have a pandemic and riots…

Humans worry, because we are wired to pay attention to bad news to survive.  Pessimists like this, smart academics with credibility, have always been there to scare us with their theories.

But look around.  Pessimists never win.  They are always wrong.  The primary reason is that they ignore humans’ capability to solve problems and innovate.  The progress from the majority of the 7+ billion of us trying to make things better can not be stopped.

Optimists always win, and this age will not be the exception.

Unlearning

What did you learn that is hurting you?

What did you learn and accept as true, that is holding you back now?

People are…

I can’t…

I’m no good at…

The world is…

I should worry about…

I’ll never…

Pick something.  What one thing did you learn and believe that, if you are honest with yourself now, is not true?

Lives are made up of moments

We can only live, dream, create, decide, love, and experience here, now.

Decades are made of years, years of weeks, weeks of days, days of hours, hours of moments.

How many decades do we get?  We don’t know.

Make the moments count.  Make them rich.