Personal Responsibility and Freedom

Maintaining responsibility for yourself and your family in a world that allows and sometimes even encourages dependency is the only way to maintain your freedom.  By being dependent you are sacrificing some of your freedom.

Nothing is free. 

Delaying Gratification

When you were a little kid, if they gave you a marshmallow and told you that you could eat it now, or wait four minutes and get a second marshmallow, which would you have done?

They studied thousands of kids in the experiment, 1/3 of which waited for a second marshmallow.  They found the group who delayed gratification scored WAY better on their SAT’s and did WAY better in life.

The future is coming.  What you do now determines how it will be for you.

How’s it going to be?

Paper or plastic? Neither. BYOB!

It’s not so easy.  Here’s how paper and plastic stack up side by side:

To make all the bags we use each year, it takes 14 million trees for paper and 12 million barrels of oil for plastic. The production of paper bags creates 70 percent more air pollution than plastic, but plastic bags create four times the solid waste — enough to fill the Empire State Building two and a half times. And they can last up to a thousand years.

Plastic, because it’s cheaper to produce, is the overwhelming choice of grocery stores across the nation — the average family of four uses almost 1,500 of these a year. San Francisco is limiting consumers’ freedom of choice, allowing only biodegradable plastic bags, which break down over months rather than hundreds of years.

For both types of bags, the environmentalist mantra is the same — reuse and recycle. But the best choice, they say, is cloth or canvas, and BYOB — bring your own bags.

A World of Choices, A Choice of Worlds

There are so many lives we can lead; each with a (very) different experience of life on earth for us.

Teacher, surfer, parent, missionary, engineer, athlete, traveller, businessman, bartender, archaeologist, musician…it goes on and on and include the variables of place (where).  Each is an entire world to be immersed in, experience, affect and be affected by.

Which world did you chose?  Will you be “changing worlds” later, or stick with this one?

The Unsustainable Water Bottle

People need to drink 8 to 13 glasses of water a day.  But if we get that water from plastic water bottles we have a big problem. Americans throw away 50 million plastic water bottles a day that ARE NOT recycled.  That’s nearly 20 BILLION bottles a year – and that’s only one in six Americans throwing out one bottle a day each.

That’s a problem.

I refill water bottles many times.  Some people have durable reusable bottles.  In our office we have a filtered water machine and our employees are welcome to fill all the bottles they want. Avoid them, reuse them, or at the very least recycle them everytime.  (The same for any beverage container.)

Remember the days when there was no bottled water?

The Master and the Slave

When we believe the voice in our head, we become a slave to what it says.  But that voice is only our ego that has hijacked us into believing that it IS us.  

It’s not.

You are something else, and you can liberate yourself from your ego by observing it as something separate and apart from you.

You’re the master.  Your thoughts should be the slaves.

Big Life

You’re not here to compete with others to live the biggest life.

Nevertheless, this is your chance.

Make it count.

We have no future

There is no future.  There is only now.  When the future gets here, it will be now; again and again.  You can only act now, decide now, feel now, experience peace now, and be here now.

What is going on with you NOW?

“Ever Changing Truth”

As we grow, what we thought was true, changes.  If we keep growing and learning, this pattern becomes so obvious, that we learn to hold onto what we think is true quite loosely – because we understand we are likely to change our mind in the future.

Are there things you used to believe that you don’t anymore, have learned were not true, or replaced with somethng else?

“Good with people”

You know a few – people who are half as smart as you and half as talented – but they get twice the results with others.

Chances are they are just better with people.  Attitude, respect, communication, personality, caring, optimism – and just plain smiling.

Are you “good with people”?