Quote
"Seeking happiness outside ourselves is like waiting for sunshine in a cave facing north."
-Tibetan saying
My Thoughts
I appreciate all of the feedback I received from last week's message. I believe some people perhaps misunderstood the meaning of the message. Some people were worrying that I may be feeling depressed or that I could possibly become depressed. I assure you that there is no need to worry.
You see, I am not seeking happiness because true happiness cannot be sought. True happiness resides within you, however it takes a shift in perception to become aware of it. You may believe that a Mercedes S600, a 5000 sq ft/140 pyong apartment, and flying first class will bring you happiness. Those things will bring comfort but they won't bring true happiness. Why? Because all of those things can be taken from you.
Much of your happiness depends on your attitude towards life. Do you tend to see hope or despair? Do you tend to see love or hate? Do you tend to see opportunities or obstacles?
The answers to these questions will give you clues into what your attitude looks like.
What has helped me?
First, I recommend you read every day. I also encourage going back and reading over books that have helped you in your past. You will see new information each time you read a book over.
Some books I recommend:
"Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill
"Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl
"Psycho-Cybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz
"Building Your Field of Dreams" by Mary Morrissey
"You Were Born Rich" by Bob Proctor
"The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership" by John Maxwell
"The Power of Intention" by Wayne Dyer
"The Success Principles" by Jack Canfield
I would keep going but those are enough to keep most people occupied for the time being.
Second, I highly recommend meditation. There are probably hundreds of different forms of meditation. I would guess each of them has their own benefits. I personally have been using Zen meditation for the past six months. I meditate for 5 - 60 minutes every day. I suggest starting with five minutes every day. Meditation really helps bring inner peace and also allows for a deeper connection with your source.
Until next time....
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Comfort
Quote
"Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket."
-Andrew Carnegie
My Thoughts
Many people haven't heard this advice. It sounds risky, doesn't it? Most people dread the thought of taking risks or of getting uncomfortable. Here's the thing, if you want serious change in your life you have to take risks and you have to get uncomfortable.
How uncomfortable do you have to get? I suppose it has to do with how much change you want.
I also mentioned a few weeks ago about sacrifice.
I would like to share what is going on in my life at the moment. Why am I sharing this now? In hopes that if this inspires just one person then this message has done it's job. You know we have all heard Steve Jobs, Oprah, Donald Trump, etc... tell us to follow our passion. I know what some people think:
"Well that is easy for them to say. Look at them, they have succeeded in their fields. What about me? I can't do that."
To some people it's almost as if Jobs, Oprah, and Trump have reached the top of a mountain and are yelling down at all of us "Just keep climbing, you'll get here eventually".
I am in the process of climbing my own mountain. So I want to share this with all of you. All of us have our own struggles to overcome. It helps knowing that someone else has been through the same thing, or even endured more.
I walked away from a job that paid me $10,000 a month after taxes. I left behind a stable job, great benefits, and excellent vacation time to pursue a dream. That was just the beginning.
This is what has happened over the course of the last year or so:
I moved out of a nice apartment
I sold my car
I sold all my stock
I sold my 401k
I've used up most of my available credit
I recently started counting all the coins I have
Sacrifice. I have been here before, just not this far down.
In 2003, I had 500 won left in my bank account and I owed about $2500 on my credit card.
Five years later I had managed to pull myself up, and I had saved $100,000.
I owed nothing on credit cards.
Now I find myself back in 2003, except in a far more challenging situation.
You may be wondering why on earth did this guy do this to himself? It has all been to pursue a dream.
The interesting thing is I've had three job offers over the past year. All of them would put me back into being comfortable. They all pay between $8,000-$10,000 a month. I have turned them all down.
Why? For a dream.
How much are you willing to give up for your dream? How uncomfortable are you willing to get?
I firmly believe that you have the ability to change your life if you truly would like to. As I have said many times before, we all have our lessons to learn from life. This is just one of my lessons. It's not bad, it's not good. It just is.
Right now, I am in a stare down with failure. One of us will blink first. It won't be me.
I will get to the top of my mountain. When? I can't say for sure.
But know this, I will be here, climbing.
One day I will reach what appears to be the top.
I will look back on what I have accomplished, on what I have learned.
I will realize how much I have grown.
I will then look up, and notice the mountain has also grown.
There is still more to go. I'll have so much more to learn because it's impossible to know everything.
I'll have learned all of this through experience. It's not what I read in a book, or what I learned from my coaching certification, or what Steve Jobs, Oprah, Trump, Carnegie etc... told me, it's what I have experienced.
Why? Because I climbed the mountain.
I put all my eggs in one basket.
I risked everything....All for a dream.
Until next time...
"Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket."
-Andrew Carnegie
My Thoughts
Many people haven't heard this advice. It sounds risky, doesn't it? Most people dread the thought of taking risks or of getting uncomfortable. Here's the thing, if you want serious change in your life you have to take risks and you have to get uncomfortable.
How uncomfortable do you have to get? I suppose it has to do with how much change you want.
I also mentioned a few weeks ago about sacrifice.
I would like to share what is going on in my life at the moment. Why am I sharing this now? In hopes that if this inspires just one person then this message has done it's job. You know we have all heard Steve Jobs, Oprah, Donald Trump, etc... tell us to follow our passion. I know what some people think:
"Well that is easy for them to say. Look at them, they have succeeded in their fields. What about me? I can't do that."
To some people it's almost as if Jobs, Oprah, and Trump have reached the top of a mountain and are yelling down at all of us "Just keep climbing, you'll get here eventually".
I am in the process of climbing my own mountain. So I want to share this with all of you. All of us have our own struggles to overcome. It helps knowing that someone else has been through the same thing, or even endured more.
I walked away from a job that paid me $10,000 a month after taxes. I left behind a stable job, great benefits, and excellent vacation time to pursue a dream. That was just the beginning.
This is what has happened over the course of the last year or so:
I moved out of a nice apartment
I sold my car
I sold all my stock
I sold my 401k
I've used up most of my available credit
I recently started counting all the coins I have
Sacrifice. I have been here before, just not this far down.
In 2003, I had 500 won left in my bank account and I owed about $2500 on my credit card.
Five years later I had managed to pull myself up, and I had saved $100,000.
I owed nothing on credit cards.
Now I find myself back in 2003, except in a far more challenging situation.
You may be wondering why on earth did this guy do this to himself? It has all been to pursue a dream.
The interesting thing is I've had three job offers over the past year. All of them would put me back into being comfortable. They all pay between $8,000-$10,000 a month. I have turned them all down.
Why? For a dream.
How much are you willing to give up for your dream? How uncomfortable are you willing to get?
I firmly believe that you have the ability to change your life if you truly would like to. As I have said many times before, we all have our lessons to learn from life. This is just one of my lessons. It's not bad, it's not good. It just is.
Right now, I am in a stare down with failure. One of us will blink first. It won't be me.
I will get to the top of my mountain. When? I can't say for sure.
But know this, I will be here, climbing.
One day I will reach what appears to be the top.
I will look back on what I have accomplished, on what I have learned.
I will realize how much I have grown.
I will then look up, and notice the mountain has also grown.
There is still more to go. I'll have so much more to learn because it's impossible to know everything.
I'll have learned all of this through experience. It's not what I read in a book, or what I learned from my coaching certification, or what Steve Jobs, Oprah, Trump, Carnegie etc... told me, it's what I have experienced.
Why? Because I climbed the mountain.
I put all my eggs in one basket.
I risked everything....All for a dream.
Until next time...
Monday, July 12, 2010
Exploration
Quote
"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens."
-Carl Jung
My Thoughts
This week I would like to share something from one of my mentors, Christian Simpson.
I know you may think this is long, but I assure you it is well worth the read.
Feel free to check out his website:
http://www.christian-simpson.com
It all comes down to results. The name of the game in life is results. Success may be a relative term that means different things to different people, however, the most accurate description of success has to be improving the results we get in every aspect of our lives.
Here’s the problem: many of us have become so fixated on our results, we’ve lost the ability to influence and improve them. Let me explain what I mean. The results we get in our lives are effects, they are outcomes of a very orderly and specific creative process. Results have ancestry, and the common error made my many individuals and enterprises is the seductive nature of focusing on the effects of performance not the cause of them.
If you are to sustainably improve the results in your personal and professional life, you need to be influencing the cause of those results, not focusing your attention on the results themselves. So let’s “unpeel the onion” and define that ancestry.
Results are a direct consequence of our actions and behaviors. They, in turn, are the physical expression, through the body, of our feelings, we’re all emotive beings. So what creates our feelings? The answer is thought, the first level of creation. Our thoughts create our feelings, which are then expressed as actions and behaviors, which, of course, create our results.
The quality of a person’s results will always correspond to the quality of their thoughts, and yet most people give little thought to what they are thinking about. Nothing undermines success more than this fact, and I’ll be sharing more about why that is in the 3rd step to success.
Even though thought is the first level of creation, it doesn’t end there. Remember, I outlined it was the quality of our thoughts that correspond with the quality of our results, so it’s about understanding what is influencing our thought process.
Tragically, for many people, they allow their thoughts to be shaped entirely by the existing conditions and circumstances in their lives, or they're influenced by the opinions of others, or, worse still, the media engine. They think in reverse, outside in not inside out, and their results cannot fail to reflect it. There are other influences too, some of them far more potent.
If we unpeel the onion another layer back from our thought processes, we’ll find our belief systems, our programming, most of which we inherited from authority figures in our lives (parents, teachers, friends, leaders). Without question, most of us are products of somebody else’s habitual way of thinking. I don’t think I need to explain the influencing power of beliefs on behavior, you can observe them in many of the problems we face in our immediate and global society today.
The key to overcoming all of this and taking control of your personal and professional success is self-awareness. You cannot influence that which you are not aware of. That is why investing in your own personal development, your self-leadership, is so essential. Knowing yourself is the prerequisite for greater success in life, think about it for a moment, if you can accept that you are the common denominator and primary influence on every result you get in life, the true architect of your success, can there be a more important pursuit for you in relation to greater success?
So does it end with our beliefs? No, because if we unpeel the next layer we find our values, without question the most important information a person can possibly know about themselves. Your values are who you are, they make you tick, they’re your compass, your spiritual DNA, your blueprint that defines what has meaning and heart for you in life. A person living their values is a truly successful person in every sense of the word because they shape their lives to who they are, from business to personal relationships, finance to health, living a life on purpose aligned with their primary values.
There’s a reason why all of the ancient scriptures referred to the axiom of “know thyself”. We create our outcomes in life, knowing who you are is far more important than knowing what you want, because if you don’t know who you truly are, what truly has meaning to you, then how can you really know that what you want is truly that which you want? Life doesn’t give you what you want, it gives you who you are. Know thyself is essential for success, the consequences of not doing so are, to an advancing person, significantly disturbing.
Until next time....
"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens."
-Carl Jung
My Thoughts
This week I would like to share something from one of my mentors, Christian Simpson.
I know you may think this is long, but I assure you it is well worth the read.
Feel free to check out his website:
http://www.christian-simpson.com
It all comes down to results. The name of the game in life is results. Success may be a relative term that means different things to different people, however, the most accurate description of success has to be improving the results we get in every aspect of our lives.
Here’s the problem: many of us have become so fixated on our results, we’ve lost the ability to influence and improve them. Let me explain what I mean. The results we get in our lives are effects, they are outcomes of a very orderly and specific creative process. Results have ancestry, and the common error made my many individuals and enterprises is the seductive nature of focusing on the effects of performance not the cause of them.
If you are to sustainably improve the results in your personal and professional life, you need to be influencing the cause of those results, not focusing your attention on the results themselves. So let’s “unpeel the onion” and define that ancestry.
Results are a direct consequence of our actions and behaviors. They, in turn, are the physical expression, through the body, of our feelings, we’re all emotive beings. So what creates our feelings? The answer is thought, the first level of creation. Our thoughts create our feelings, which are then expressed as actions and behaviors, which, of course, create our results.
The quality of a person’s results will always correspond to the quality of their thoughts, and yet most people give little thought to what they are thinking about. Nothing undermines success more than this fact, and I’ll be sharing more about why that is in the 3rd step to success.
Even though thought is the first level of creation, it doesn’t end there. Remember, I outlined it was the quality of our thoughts that correspond with the quality of our results, so it’s about understanding what is influencing our thought process.
Tragically, for many people, they allow their thoughts to be shaped entirely by the existing conditions and circumstances in their lives, or they're influenced by the opinions of others, or, worse still, the media engine. They think in reverse, outside in not inside out, and their results cannot fail to reflect it. There are other influences too, some of them far more potent.
If we unpeel the onion another layer back from our thought processes, we’ll find our belief systems, our programming, most of which we inherited from authority figures in our lives (parents, teachers, friends, leaders). Without question, most of us are products of somebody else’s habitual way of thinking. I don’t think I need to explain the influencing power of beliefs on behavior, you can observe them in many of the problems we face in our immediate and global society today.
The key to overcoming all of this and taking control of your personal and professional success is self-awareness. You cannot influence that which you are not aware of. That is why investing in your own personal development, your self-leadership, is so essential. Knowing yourself is the prerequisite for greater success in life, think about it for a moment, if you can accept that you are the common denominator and primary influence on every result you get in life, the true architect of your success, can there be a more important pursuit for you in relation to greater success?
So does it end with our beliefs? No, because if we unpeel the next layer we find our values, without question the most important information a person can possibly know about themselves. Your values are who you are, they make you tick, they’re your compass, your spiritual DNA, your blueprint that defines what has meaning and heart for you in life. A person living their values is a truly successful person in every sense of the word because they shape their lives to who they are, from business to personal relationships, finance to health, living a life on purpose aligned with their primary values.
There’s a reason why all of the ancient scriptures referred to the axiom of “know thyself”. We create our outcomes in life, knowing who you are is far more important than knowing what you want, because if you don’t know who you truly are, what truly has meaning to you, then how can you really know that what you want is truly that which you want? Life doesn’t give you what you want, it gives you who you are. Know thyself is essential for success, the consequences of not doing so are, to an advancing person, significantly disturbing.
Until next time....
Monday, July 5, 2010
What are You Willing to Give Up?
Quote
"The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
My Thoughts
This is quote is referring to sacrifice.
You can not attain something of a higher value without giving up something of a lower value.
For example, maybe you would like to lose weight. However, you currently eat fast food five times a week. In order for you to achieve a healthier/fitter body (higher value) you will have to give up, or cut back on, the fast food (lower value).
Sometimes, people look at someone they perceive as more successful and think "I wish I could be that person.". However, what many people seem to forget is what that successful person gave up in order to get to where they are. Most successful people have given up large portions of their time and money to achieve their dreams. Successful people will spend time reading, researching, working, etc... in order to achieve their dreams. They will spend money on books, professional memberships, seminars, etc.. in order to achieve their dreams.
Sidney Poitier referred to sacrifice in his book 'The Measure of a Man'. He said "You have to go down before you can go up". You must become the person that is capable of handling what you desire before you will be able to achieve your dreams.
Here is something I recommend asking yourself if you are not making progress towards your goals:
Am I making the necessary sacrifices?
Really take a close look at where you are spending your time and your money.
Until next time...
"The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night."
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
My Thoughts
This is quote is referring to sacrifice.
You can not attain something of a higher value without giving up something of a lower value.
For example, maybe you would like to lose weight. However, you currently eat fast food five times a week. In order for you to achieve a healthier/fitter body (higher value) you will have to give up, or cut back on, the fast food (lower value).
Sometimes, people look at someone they perceive as more successful and think "I wish I could be that person.". However, what many people seem to forget is what that successful person gave up in order to get to where they are. Most successful people have given up large portions of their time and money to achieve their dreams. Successful people will spend time reading, researching, working, etc... in order to achieve their dreams. They will spend money on books, professional memberships, seminars, etc.. in order to achieve their dreams.
Sidney Poitier referred to sacrifice in his book 'The Measure of a Man'. He said "You have to go down before you can go up". You must become the person that is capable of handling what you desire before you will be able to achieve your dreams.
Here is something I recommend asking yourself if you are not making progress towards your goals:
Am I making the necessary sacrifices?
Really take a close look at where you are spending your time and your money.
Until next time...
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