Has life on earth gotten better or worse from 1990-2020?

What is your answer?

There are some who say things are getting worse.  What do you say?

Well, here are some statistics of what happened between 1990 and 2020 – 

Global life expectancy increased from 64 years to 73 years.

The percentage of children who die before the age of five decreased from 9.3% to 3.7%.  Despite a significantly larger population today, this means that almost 7.5 million fewer children die annually compared with the early 1990’s. 

Deaths from mothers giving birth dropped by 55%.

The proportion of the world population receiving basic education has skyrocketed and the illiteracy rates have almost halved: from 25.7% to 13.5%.  In the age group 15-24. illiteracy is now just over 8%. 

Child labor in the 5-17 age group decreased from 16% to just under 10%.

The number of people globally living in extreme poverty dropped from 38% to now just 8.4%.  For the first time in history, fewer than one in ten people were poor.  Despite the fact that world population increased by more than 1.1 billion people.  According to Johan Norberg in his book “The Capitalist Manifesto”, that is the greatest thing that has ever happened to mankind.  The relentless hardship that most of humanity has suffered throughout its existence has been pushed back faster than ever and in more places than ever.”

This progress has not come because of any government planning or welfare program.  It came by unlocking the ingenuity and effort of people with economic freedom and open markets, including across borders.

I don’t attribute many things to luck.  But that we were born at this time – well, that’s plain luck. 

Rockets and paper airplanes

If you are going up, there are many people around you now that are not coming with you.

They won’t; it’s not their choice, and that’s ok.

You will have to leave them behind if you are to move forward.

You will have to say no.  You will have to spend less time with them. 

You will have to break away from their influence and open time for being influenced by other more valuable voices.

It’s not to say you don’t love them/like them or never want to see them again or to burn any bridges at all.  You don’t have to make any declaration to anyone.

It’s simply recognizing that where you are is not all there is for you, and improving yourself by how and where you spend your time.

Upgrade your standards

What bothers you?  What makes life difficult and no fun?

What if you upgraded your standards of what you will allow in your life – even from yourself?

Prove your worth to yourself.

Level up.

A sense of control in our lives

Freedom and free market economies give citizens a sense of control over their lives.  We have choices and the freedom to make them.

Imagine if you had little choice of where to work, or what kind of work to do.  Imagine if you had little choice of what food to eat or clothes to wear.  Imagine if you had little choice of where to live, or if little entertainment were available.

The double dose of freedom and capitalism have given us a sense of control over our lives, and that has made us far happier.

Positive thinking

When I was 19 years old I discovered Nightengale Conant audio programs.  They cost $60 in 1983 for a six-cassette set, which was a lot of money for me.  But I invested in myself and was always listening as I drove anywhere.  Zig Ziglar was a speaker and sales trainer whom I admired a lot.  He had many easy-to-understand insights that helped me very much to make sense of the world.  Here is one of them – 

“Positive thinking won’t let you do ANYTHING.  But it will let you do EVERYTHING better than negative thinking will.” – Zig Ziglar

Right now, are you thinking positively about the things you will do today, or negatively?

You are where you want to be.

If you have been where you are for a while, then it’s where you want to be.  If it wasn’t, then you would have changed it by now.

If it’s not exactly how you want it to be, then you want to be here more than you want to do the work or expend the energy to change.  You’re resigned to your spot.  If that’s ok with you, great.

Human beings are unstoppable if we get a vision in our head, commit to it, and become obsessed with taking action.  You can create something else – IF you want it more than anything.

What do you want more than anything?  What you have – or something different?

We are incredibly fortunate that we live in a free society and in this era where we can even bother with such questions, let alone carry them out.

I will not waste this opportunity.

How about you?

Invest in you.

You spend money ON yourself, but do you invest money IN yourself?

How much do you spend to improve your ability to create value?

How much do you spend on seminars – or even traveling to free training?

How much do you spend on books and audiobooks and how much time do you invest reading them and taking notes?

As for me, had I not made those investments for the last 40 years, life would be very different for me, and there would be no Think Daily.

Invest in you – and change everything.

Obstacles faced = strength we need

The obstacles we face are a proving ground for that inner attitude of resilient self-confidence that we all need.

“The powers we have can never inspire in us a genuine inner self-confidence until we have confronted many difficulties along the way, and every now and then have to struggle fiercely with them.  This is the only way our true spirit can be tested – the inner spirit we have that will never consent to be ruled by outside forces.  The nature of such spirit can be seen in the fact that no prizefighter can go into a contest with high spirits if he has never been beaten black and blue.  

The only man who can enter the ring with confidence is the one who has seen his own blood, has felt his teeth rattled by an opponent’s fist, has been tripped up, and has experienced the full force of an adversary’s charge, who has been knocked down in body but not in spirit – one who, as often as he falls, gets up again with greater determination than ever.” – The Stoic Art of Living

Some of the most important lessons I have learned are when I failed, lost, or got my butt kicked by a situation.  I am stronger, smarter, and more qualified because of all those failures.

Can you look back and see how adversity has made you stronger?

The Science of Hope

Hope – we know the future will be better than today…

because we understand cause and effect (we have learned/are still learning)….

we know what actions cause the results we want….

and we work each day on those actions.

Is this you?

Do you have hope?

Disaster is Virtue's Opportunity

It’s easy to show good character when the sun is shining and things are going your way.

But then a crisis comes that threatens you or sets you back or dumps on your expectations…how do you behave then?

Do you have situational ethics – where you change your standards and behavior depending on how things are going for you?

Or, do you have solid values and character traits that don’t change with events, but over the long term cause their trend?