Who are the five people you spend the most time with?

You probably already know Jim Rohn’s line: “You become the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.”

Question to consider: WHO are YOUR 5? 

If you mixed them up in a blender, what quality of character, values, thinking, and actions do you get?

Direction + Time = Destination

It’s always a good question to ask again – 

“If I keep going the way I am going, where will I be in 5 years?”

10 years?

20 years?

What is your answer?

Do you like the answer?

Memories are not accurate

Memories are not accurate.  They feel like facts, but they are not.

Memories are colored by the limited facts you knew or observed back then, what story you want to support today, what was documented (and repeatedly impressed) and what was not, and other factors.

What incentive do you have for your memory to support? Once you filter your memory through the incentive, the memory is altered.

People don’t doubt their memory, but you should.  

The past is a memory.  If the memory is not accurate, then neither is the past.

Question – do you want your memory to support victimhood today, or empowerment?  Because it can do either – it is your choice.

Love. medicine and miracles

This is the title of a book by Dr. Bernie Siegel.  Here are some ideas from it – 

The mind and the body are deeply connected.  Emotions like hope, purpose, and love can boost immunity and aid healing.

Self-love matters.  Patients who treat themselves with compassion tend to heal better than those filled with guilt or self-rejection.

Visualization and belief shift biology.  The brain responds to imagery and positive expectation – what you believe influences how you heal.

Love is the most powerful medicine.  When people feel deeply loved – by themselves or others – they will heal faster and more fully.

Your mindset can be part of your medicine.

Here’s a comment from me – If mindset can be part of your medicine, and I firmly believe that, the opposite is true.  Consider your mindset is part, or even all, of your disease.

What do you think?

Failure of Purpose

Here is an excerpt from a Joe Polish email –

“In the 1970s, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health built the perfect mouse habitat.

Unlimited food. Unlimited space. No predators. No scarcity of any kind.

And the colony completely fell apart.

The males stopped competing. The females stopped nurturing. Play disappeared. Society collapsed.

He called it Universe 25.  And his warning was simple: abundance without challenge doesn’t produce flourishing.

It produces collapse.

Peter Diamandis has spent decades at the frontier of exponential technology. Steven Kotler is the world’s leading researcher on flow and peak performance. They sat down at a recent Genius Network meeting to talk about their new book, “We Are as Gods,” and what it actually means that we now have godlike capabilities.

And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, the question got uncomfortable.

If AI removes friction… robotics handles labor… and abundance is no longer a question of resources…

What happens to us?

Because the same thing that makes the future extraordinary is the same thing that could hollow it out.

Too much delivered. Not enough earned.

Peter says we’re already watching the first fork happen. Not between rich and poor. Between consumers and creators.”

When we can get almost anything with little effort, bad things will happen to us.  I am a firm believer that the effort, challenge, “failures” and struggle are necessary for us to be mentally and physically healthy and strong long term.

What do you think?

Make success come to you

Success is not something you chase.

Develop the habits.

Learn what you need to learn.

Do the work.

Keep showing up and be consistent.

Success is something you attract by the person you have become.

Life is a terminal condition

“Life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease.” -Wayne Dyer

This is it!  Your big moment in cosmic time and it is the only one you will get.

What are you doing with it this week?

Reputation

Your reputation is very valuable. 

It’s your track record in the minds of other people.

People don’t forget.

A good reputation takes a long time to create, and a minute to ruin.

Think twice before you do something dishonest, yell and scream, insult others, do something in poor taste, be rude or greedy, or say something stupid.

And with the internet, your reputation is killed at the speed of light.

Be kind, smart, thoughtful, help others, work diligently, don’t talk when you’re angry, and work to make things better for everyone.

Act as if the whole world is watching, even when nobody is.

Your reputation is not what you think of you, it is what everyone else thinks.  

A good reputation opens doors, creates opportunities, makes friends and money, and makes your world a nice place to live in.

The horrors of a half-lived life

When we get to the end, we will most often regret the things we did NOT do, rather than the things we did.

It’s too late then.  Your one chance will be over.

Live.

What do you need to do NOW?

Grandma School

This is from my Aunt Donna who lives in Jacksonville Florida.  I thought you’d like it.

WORDS MATTER 

            My grandson Dallas wanted to bring some friends with him when he visited me, so I said, “Sure, bring them along.” There were three of them! Oh my, where would they all sleep?

We managed with double beds and couches, and they settled in for the weekend. Two of them were Black,  one was Hispanic; my grandson is white. It pleased me that my grandson had friends of diversity, and we set out to have a great time together. We went ice skating- totally new to Dallas’s friends. They played basketball together. We went to the Dreamette for their famous ice cream. We did Thrift Store shopping, which they really liked.

            Now I have a program I like to do with kids- it’s called Grandma School. In it I teach about budgets, writing thank you notes, setting a table, cooking basics, sewing on a button- you get the idea. Many of these things are not taught in school and busy parents don’t always have the time or energy.  So- I thought, why don’t we have a few sessions of Grandma School?

I chose to do Thank You notes, and one I just developed. It’s called “Words Matter”. Joe Namath, the football player grew up thinking his name was “Shut Up”until he was thirteen years old.

“You are fat”; “You are Ugly”; “You are stupid”; “You won’t amount to anything”; “No One likes you”, and so on. All had experience these words or something similar spoken by classmates, friends, or family, or they had heard them spoken to others.

What we hear every day becomes our reality. If you are told every day that you will never amount to anything, guess what? You may never try.

And so, I had each boy write down five positive things they will place by their bathroom mirror and say to themselves every morning. We then passed a mirror around and each boy read what he had written.

That was pretty much the end of the exercise, until my Grandson said, “Let’s go around the table and say positive things about each person. He began, and since I was sitting next to him, started with me. Oh my! My heart was full. As each boy spoke, the emotion was over the moon. We all took turns speaking to each person, and by the end of the exercise we all had tears in our eyes! What an experience! Perhaps these boys had not heard such words before. Or hearing them in this way made it such a moving experience.

And so, they ended the weekend with good memories and promised to return.

Bruce Lee said, “Change the way you speak about yourself and you change your life. What you’re not changing, you are choosing.”