The best year of your life – starting now

Make a decision that the next twelve months will be the best year of your life.

Making that firm decision and making plans gives you optimism.

What would have to happen?  What would it look like?  What do you have to do?

List your reasons – your motivations; the more the better.

You need a pen and paper to get started.

Then you need belief and action.

Go!

Everyone's a fraud – until they aren't

Fake it until you make it.

Act the part, until you become the part.

Learn, act and talk like the person you want to be, and soon enough, you are that person.

Do you believe in yourself?

Are you betting on you?

Do you invest in you?

Do you have faith in you?

You should.

Courage in the calm

Most people don’t get out of their comfort zone until something happens that forces them to.  When their back is against the wall, they (may freak out first and then) exhibit courage.

The people that make the most progress and use more of their potential, exhibit courage and take action before they are forced to.

Is that you?

Are you emotionally reactive?

“You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you.  True power is sitting back and observing things with logic.  True power is restraint.  If words can control you that means everyone else can control you.  Breathe and allow things to pass.” – Warren Buffett

I meet with a lot of people.  I travel.  I try to affect lots of people.  I need to in order to accomplish my goals.

But the more people I come in contact with, the more people I will meet who will say things to hurt me.  The more people I meet, the more I will see who are doing things and saying things I do not believe in.

If I put my own happiness in their hands, I will surrender control of it to them.

I know those people are out there.  That’s ok.  I will continue to be intentional and take action to craft the life and build the world of my choosing and bring my friends and family with me.

Want things to change for you?

What did you do yesterday?

If you lived every day of your life like yesterday, where would you end up?

Physically?  In your relationships?  Economically?  

Would you be fulfilled and happy?

People want things to change for them, but they don’t want to change.

It’s not hard to understand.

Until you change, little will change for you.

Unlearning

“It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” – Will Rogers

“Teachers touch us most deeply when instead of answering our questions, they help us question our answers.” – Dr. Mardy Groethe

What do you “know” that is holding you back?

Quotes on Stupidity

“Too many of our countrymen rejoice in stupidity, look upon ignorance as a badge of honor.  They condemn everything they don’t understand.”

– Tallulah Bankhead

“Nature delights in punishing stupid people” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity.” – Saul Bellow

Self Mastery and Sugar

In the last week we talked about conquering yourself, and we talked about sugar. Let’s put them together.

I went out to dinner and it was an all-you-can-eat place – with a sundae bar.  I went out to another dinner and the host ordered dessert for the table.  

I LOVE ice cream.  I mean, I really love it.  Just writing this gets me excited!

But I know it’s not good for me.  I weigh myself every morning and when I am over 183, I need to do something different.  181 is my target.  When I eat sugar and/or load up on other carbs, it makes a difference – that day!

So this idea that the hardest thing to master over is yourself, is embodied in the moment when you decide to load up on desert or not.  It’s having the craving and showing self-discipline and NOT doing it.

This can be applied to other cravings and habits that are not good for you long term.  And thinking long term gives us the reason for mastering ourselves.

When you get to the end and you have diabetes, heart failure, your liver is shot, lung cancer or any number of other things, it’s too late.  You can’t go back and relive the last 30 years and do better.

Obesity is more of a problem than COVID ever was.  I’m not preaching.  I struggle with this too.  I need this message as much as anyone.

“We are ourselves the stumbling blocks in the way of our happiness.” – L.E. Landon

Master yourself.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SUGAR

“Our livers would be easily capable of metabolizing the trickle of fructose that they would have encountered during the few million years that preceded the coming of agriculture about ten thousand years ago: a little sugar, a little fructose, seasonally, in fruits, bound up in fiber, slow to digest (and not necessarily ripe fruits at that). Our livers might have had to deal with the fructose of honey as well. After the twelfth century, depending on where our ancestors lived and their wealth, the trickle increased very slightly as refined sugar, now separated from the fiber that slowed its digestion and absorption, was first imported from the Middle East into Europe. Then the Industrial Revolution came about, and the beet sugar industry was launched to join the cane sugar industry, and the trickle turned into a flood. In the late 1970s, the corn refiners got into the game with high-fructose corn syrup, and the flood of sugar rose even higher; some variant of sugar was consumed in huge amounts daily by all, from breakfast to postdinner desserts, drinks, and snacks.