EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY IN LIFE & LOVE

Embracing Uncertainty in Life and Love embracing uncertainty The only thing that's certain is uncertainty. Life is change and growth and evolution, which can be exhilarating but change can also feel taxing and painful. Change creates new tensions and uncertainties in our lives. There are so many events over which we have no control. Can you let go of control? In doing so, you are able to step back and appreciate the wonder of our world and learn to embrace uncertainty, a fearsome, yet beautiful certainty of life. To embrace uncertainty is one of the highest levels of spiritual growth. It demands a high level of spiritual fitness. We have all had moments of great clarity, when the world revolves and spins in perfect harmony with our own rhythm, like a precisely calibrated grandfather clock. You seek to find the highest level of your spiritual development. This is your enlightenment. As you grow and learn, new ascendancies offer greater rewards. One of these gifts and skills is an ability to embrace Uncertainty. All you can do is exhale. Breathe deeply. Relentlessly ride on through the cycles of your life. To embrace uncertainty in Love and Life, you need an understanding of the world and your place in it. Look for the interconnectivity in all things. You are a part of the network. You will come to appreciate the joy of change, like a cheese connoisseur favors a washed rind. We are not programmed to embrace uncertainty and fear. It goes against our nature. It triggers our fight or flight instincts. Carefully examine the situation. Put a light into the dark places. Dig deep and objectively and you will begin to understand what you fear. In the end, it is all quite simple. You will find your worries are baseless or understandable. There are many layers of confusion to sort through when we examine what we are afraid of. All it takes is time and clarity. This level of objectivity is required to embrace the uncertainties of Love. In Love, you bond for the comfort and security of a safe place. Safety is generally incompatible with change and this is where the danger lies. You must step back and always keep an eye on your relationship from a distance. Perspective is oxygen to Love. Sometimes you get so confused and enmeshed in the details, it is easy to lose sight of the big picture of the grand design. This perspective will remind you that Love is like a river - it keeps rolling along. The stability of your Love is as secure as a wide raft on a wild river ride. Your Love will always be tossed about, cresting waves and plunging down the trough. But you stay together. Your ideal relationship is akin to a long-lasting, deeply felt friendship. You have a partner with whom you will navigate Life. The unit that you create, by its nature, is always growing and evolving. Uncertainty in Love is like fertilizer for a flower. It keeps things fresh and exciting. Love does not have to be uncertain or suspicious. Together, you can make an adventure of the rocks and potholes in the road of your journey. You must treat all of the hardships that Life tosses in your way as grand entertainment. You must have faith in the evolution of your Love, the belief that your Love will triumph through all challenges, evolutions and uncertainties. This is how you embrace uncertainty. This is how you embrace Life. Find comfort in the process of the journey. Where does uncertainty originate? Why do we doubt? If your sweet pure soul were never influenced, you would never know uncertainty. Other people have influenced your Life. Circumstances, tragic and transcendent, have forged your character. You have been taught to worry about many things. Use this knowledge to maintain your perspective. You can disown the worry. On a physical level, laughter is a fast and easy way to embrace uncertainty. Laughter can relax you. It can cut a bully of a problem down to size. You don't need a joke to laugh. You can fake it. Your body does not have a sense of humor, but it does know the physical sensations of laughter. When you laugh, you breathe deeply, using all of your lungs. Your body moves and relaxes. Laugh and you will embrace uncertainty. To laugh is to breathe. Embracing uncertainty is one of the most difficult things you can ever do. The action resides on the highest levels of spiritual growth. This is the goal for the enlightened: To embrace uncertainty.

ARE YOU ON THE RIGHT CARRIER PATH ?

Are You on the Right Career Path? the right career path As children, we hear it all the time - "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Yet the answer to that seemingly simple question is not always clear, even when we reach adulthood. Many factors influence our professional paths, including our natural strengths and talents, our families' wishes, our own hopes and dreams for the future, and unexpected opportunities that arise along the way - or not. It can be difficult to distinguish outer pressure to succeed from inner ambition. Even if you are firmly established in your career, you still might wonder if you're on the right path or if there is something more you could be doing with your life. After all, an occupation and a career are not necessarily one and the same, and working hard toward a long-held professional goal doesn't always bring the fulfillment you might expect. Have you found your calling? The career path that's right for you? Or are you still searching for work that will satisfy your inner need to feel you're doing something important with your life? Read on to gain insight and predict whether you have found your true life's calling. If you haven't yet found the career that's right for you, there will be clear signs that your current job is out of sync with your true personality, skills or interests. These signs might include one or more of the following: You have never stuck with a job for longer than a couple of years (or months). In college, you waited until the last minute to declare your major, and even then you kept second-guessing yourself. You've been reprimanded at work for slacking off - stretching lunch hours into full afternoons, for example, or spending on-the-clock time emailing friends instead of colleagues. You have dutifully completed an academic or training program geared toward a certain profession in order to live up to familial expectations. Your friends and family often comment, "I always said you should have been a lawyer," or, "Your life is so colorful, you should write a book!" - and some part of you agrees with them. You have to drag yourself out of bed in the morning to get to work on time. When interrupted during the workday, you either welcome the chance to procrastinate or resent the intrusion since it's so difficult to get back on track. When you were young, you knew just what you wanted to be when you grew up, but you gave up your dream for something more practical. When people ask what you do for a living, you answer with reluctance or plenty of qualifications ("Well, this is my current job, but someday I hope to do..."). When you think ahead ten years, the idea of still working in your current job or field feels distinctly unsettling. You think of your work as something you do, not something you are. If you have, in fact, found your true calling, the signs are clear - even if you're the only one who believes in the path you've chosen. These signs might include one or more of the following: You've stuck with the same company or occupation through thick and thin, despite other opportunities that have arisen along the way; you just can't imagine leaving your current work behind. You've known what you wanted to do with your life since you were very young - exactly what you're doing now. Your current work is different from what you used to imagine yourself doing, but somehow, it feels right. You enjoy your job enough that you would keep it even if you had to take a pay cut. You don't consider your work to be "work" - it's that fun. Even when you have a tough day on the job, you feel fulfilled, or at least confident that you did your best. You have a deep conviction that your work matters; you are contributing something important to the world or to your community. When people ask what you do for a living, you're proud to tell them. You identify with your work, thinking of it not just as something you do, but who you are. When you think ahead ten years, you imagine yourself working in the same job or field you're in now, and the idea brings a deep sense of satisfaction. You love your job - plain and simple. If the information above has you wondering whether to stick with your current occupation or find something that is a closer match for your skills or personality, that's a sign in itself that you haven't yet found your true vocation. The next step in predicting which career is right for you is to consider your natural strengths and interests. Do you gravitate toward leadership roles, or do you do your best work when following someone else's direction? What about teamwork - do you enjoy collaboration or do you need autonomy? Do you think of yourself as a creative type, a problem-solver, a people person? Once you have identified your gifts and your professional "style," you can consider what type of work hours and environment you prefer. Relaxed, competitive, fast-paced, self-determined? The answers to these questions will steer you in the right direction, toward your professional destiny. It can be difficult to follow your true path when doing so might mean accepting a more limited income for your family or facing the disapproval of someone whose opinion you value. But when it comes to your life's work, taking a risk - financial or otherwise - is sometimes the smartest thing you can do. Only you can predict whether that time is now.

ALL ABOUT BODY LANGUAGE

All About Body Language all about body language How did he know it was time to kiss you when you never said a word? You could have been sending him psychic messages. He might reject any notion that he is psychic, but most people hone their abilities to pick up psychic cues without even realizing it. Your body language sends the most signals. If you are able to consciously control the signals your body reveals, you can withhold certain information about your desires. When you are ready to be approached, you can let the world know without ever saying a word. Observe his ability to pick up your signals. If he is quick to act and makes a move, you are with a man who can get ahead in the world, but beware of his ability to seduce lovers all over town. Be even more wary of an interloping male who intercepts on the signals you intended for someone else and tries to insert himself in the picture. Here are the most common body language signals to look out for from someone who is thinking about approaching you on a deeper level. Understand that you also send these signals and that a sharp sixth sense moves in when invited. THE MIMIC When you are out dining with a man you desire, observe that you almost involuntarily pick up your glass and drink in rhythm with him. If he picks up a napkin to wipe his mouth you might do the same regardless of whether or not there is anything on your lip. This is a psychic signal that is hard to stop because as you fall under the spell of desire, you want to reveal to this person that you follow his lead. The reverse is true as well. You might notice people mimicking your movements in many situations. Suppose your boss at work sits across from you at a company function and follows your casual movements a few times during a meal. No matter how professional he may be acting, there is a part of him that wants to throw away his whole career for a night of passion with you in his arms. When you want him to know that dinner can lead to you as his dessert, use the mimic can feed his confidence to make a move. When you want to remain cordial or professional, try to consciously avoid altering your behavior based on his little cues. You can pick up his intentions by observing whether he too follows the subtlest moves you make in an involuntary psychic broadcast of his deepest desires. THE FOOT POINT When a man is interested in you and cannot get away from a conversation, he will often involuntarily point his foot in your direction. He doesn't realize that he is sending this signal to you. And he would probably deny it if he were confronted by the woman to whom he was looking at and talking to. You might be pointing your foot right back at him as you stare at the painting on the wall and you will rarely notice yourself doing this. However, did you notice you lingered while looking at that painting and kept your foot pointing in his direction - and the artwork really wasn't that interesting? Wait around for the man whose foot is pointing at you. Walk away from the man who points his foot at another woman while he nods politely at a story you are telling. TOUCHING The involuntary rubbing of a hand across a shoulder might appear innocent, even flippant, but it is not. It is a psychic signal of desire that is strong and easy for the person being touched to read. It might, however, be interpreted as more desperate than passionate. Some people have different levels of socialization that inhibit their psychic understanding of intentions. Understand the nature of what someone is seeking when there is a casual but unmistakable brush-up between you. SASHAYING A slower, more sultry walk sends multiple psychic messages. It announces that something is worthy of inspection and a desire to be examined as well as a certain confidence in what will be discovered. While this might be a way to meet a lot of creeps, it does occasionally deliver a great catch who is tuned into the messages you send. You might sashay right past the man of your dreams only to find out that he knows you better than you know yourself. REVEALING UNDERARMS The message of deep submission is the revelation of one or both of your underarms in the presence of the man you want. If he picks up on this psychic signal you will be his. If a man is casually revealing his armpits to you he feels comfortable around you and wants you to pull closer. One reminder: the person doing the revealing is not in control. This is the ultimate sign of surrender to passion, desire and the imagination of what might soon be

Discipline

Discipline. Without it, you're one of the 80%+ - the failures in life. Remember, this is not my judgement on others - I have no right to judge. These people are failures by their own admission and definitions. If you were to ask them if they feel they have succeeded in life, or failed, they would readily confess to having failed, although they would, of course, blame factors outside of themselves for this failure. With discipline, you have a good chance of rising above the crowd and retiring early as a wealthy man or woman. Everything I write is aimed at preventing you from reaching retirement with nothing. If you reach retirement as a pauper dependant upon charity, having lived a life of quiet desperation, frustrated, never having achieved anything much of note, not really having had a good time (apart from the odd high point), never having dreamed, never beaten a real challenge, then your life is a failure by any standards, but certainly by your own. Of course, if you are happy in your powerlessness and poverty, then none of this matters. Are you a disciplined person, in general? There are hundreds of indicators of a disciplined mind, not one of which is essential, but put together, they start to add up to a pattern. Can you get up in the morning? Are your shoes clean, your hair and teeth brushed? Are your car and house tidy? Are your personal papers (gas bills, bank statements, etc.) filed in some sort of reasonable order? Do you turn out a good job of work, even when nobody is looking? I could think of five hundred more indicators, but you get the idea. It's up to you to look at your life and make an honest assessment of your level of discipline or lack of it. Again, I am not judging you. Live how you want to live, including in a pigsty, unwashed half the time - it's your life. But if you want a life of power and wealth, then I can guarantee you will not get it without some discipline. Discipline is vital. When I meet consultation clients face to face, I tell them I'm just a regular guy, and that's the truth. Yes, I have an education and a certain amount of common-sense. But I also have discipline. Often, the people sitting opposite me do not have discipline, or at least they haven't made it central to their lives because, heck, it takes discipline to be disciplined! I can see the lack of discipline in the way they dress, the way they sit, and the way they talk. What is Discipline? Well, I guess one definition is being strict with yourself. You know why discipline is important for a child or teenager, don't you? It's to keep them in line. It's to stop them getting out of hand - getting away with too much. Also, you discipline your children out of love, and not because you enjoy the power-trip (I hope!). Often, you hate to discipline your kids because it spoils their immediate gratification and enjoyment, doesn't it? But you do this because the long-term benefits and rewards vastly outweigh the immediate greedy, thoughtless and short-term gratification of their desires. Correct? I think so. So another definition might be 'gratification postponement.' Not eating the whole bowl of jello right now. Eating some and saving the rest for the next few days. Not because it's 'naughty' to eat all the jello. Not because it's 'wicked or sinful' to eat all the jello. It's because if you eat all the jello now, your enjoyment will be, say, ten units (8 for the one bowl, plus 16 for the rest of the jello, minus 6 for the sick feeling, minus 8 for the realization that you have no will-power!). If you have one bowl now, one tomorrow, and one the next day, you get 8+8+8 = 24 units of pleasure, plus 6 units for feeling smug about your strength of will. That's 30 units of pleasure compared with 10 units. I'm not fooling around with this jello analogy. This is exactly the way it works. Disciplined people save money. They don't spend every single penny they have in their pockets on goodies to consume right now, as fast as possible. They don't then rush out and borrow more money to buy more goodies to consume because they can't wait until next pay day. Such people are eating all the sweets in one sitting, then borrowing sweets from their friends so they can eat those too! What would you say to a child who did that? Why, what a spoiled and greedy child that would be, don't you think? One of the keys to a successful life (however you define it) is the ability known as 'gratification postponement.' The name speaks for itself and many people learn this ability and its advantages quite early on in life. At its most fundamental, it is the ability not to eat all the candy today, so that you will have some left over for tomorrow. As you grow up, it manifests itself in several ways. For example: 1. As a child: Your ability to delay playtime until you have completed all of your homework. 2. As a teenager: The ability to postpone the advantages of cash in your pocket right now from some mundane job. Instead you do further study so that you might enjoy a higher salary later on. Every hour of study you do gears up through your life to an effective rate of $1,000 for each study hour - but paid later, not right now. 3. As an adult: The ability not to spend every penny of the money you earn on goodies, but instead to save a percentage so that it might grow and you can enjoy more goodies later on. Before I proceed, let me tell you there is nothing ascetic in what I am describing. The point is not to deny yourself forever and always postpone pleasure, possibly even until you die. That is ridiculous. No, the point is to enjoy today with all of its richness and pleasure, but to master the trick of gratification postponement for a percentage of life's pleasures. And this has only one, entirely selfish aim - to enjoy more of life's pleasures tomorrow. I want to be very clear on that point. Many religions preach that you should deny yourself pleasure because it distracts you from your true task which is to sacrifice yourself for others and for God. Your reward, they say, will come when you die. Sorry, but that's just too long to wait, and too late to collect it. For example, I consider the savings habit to be an absolute give-away sign of success or potential success. To save takes discipline - the discipline not to spend every penny you earn, but instead to put a little by. Most people do not save. They cannot manage the trick of postponing the gratification that the immediate use of their money would bring, consequently, they are always broke and struggling for cash. Disciplined people don't save money out of altruism or because they are being good little boys or girls. They do it from a position of 'enlightened self-interest' or selfishness, by another name. It's important that you realize this. You're doing it for you, nobody else. They know that if they take some pleasure now (spend some money), then postpone the rest of the pleasure for a later day, they will get far more pleasure in total than if they spent all the money in one go. Everyone knows this. It's something we all learn at about age eight. It's part of the curriculum taught at the 'University of the Obvious!' Disciplined people apply this knowledge - it takes will-power not to spend the lot right now - undisciplined people just can't keep their hands out of the cookie-jar, and that's the plain truth. Modest saving - just 10% of your wealth - means you can retire with a quarter of a million in the bank. Nice. Not saving means you retire penniless and with about five hundred dollar's worth of useless junk. What a difference! All successful people score highly on their ability to delay gratification, and research backs this up as illustrated in Daniel Goleman's remarkable book, Emotional Intelligence, if you're interested in further reading. It's time to become your own drill sergeant.

Your-Anti-To-Do-List

Your Anti-To-Do List By Craig Ballantyne The other night I had a dream. But it was not a good one. Perhaps it was my restless legs and weary body from the hours of exercise video filming I had done earlier in the day that brought upon this devilish dream. In the dream I was giving a seminar. It wasn't a very big seminar as there were maybe one hundred people in the room, and all of the attendees were there to learn about building their business. As I finished my presentation, the group discussion turned to heated debate on politics, and suddenly a fight broke out amongst the audience members. The dream flashed forward to a colleague informing me that a video of the seminar brawl had been posted on Youtube and that I now had a PR nightmare on my hands. And that was it. Like I said, pretty strange, even for my weird dreams. The morning after this dream I woke up and started thinking. In our Early to Rise business, we had been in talks to participate in a seminar in March of next year. Suddenly I realized there was no good reason for us to participate in the event. Not only did I not have a good reason to speak at the event, I quickly found five good reasons NOT to do the seminar. And so later that day after discussing this with Matt Smith and our Chief Operations Officer, Jeff Schneider, we decided to cancel our involvement. Thank goodness that my subconscious brought this to my attention. This decision to cancel the seminar has taken a large load of stress off my shoulders. After all, 2013 is already shaping up to be my busiest year ever with the ETR $100K Transformation Contest and other big projects in my fitness business. I didn't need an unnecessary seminar adding to the workload - and trust me, if you've ever tried to fill, film, and deliver a seminar, you know that they take an extraordinary amount of work. So I've added that to my NOT To-Do List. That's something that you should have, too. After all, chances are that you are like me, driven and ambitious, wanting to grab the world by its tail to meet your greatest potential. But that attitude can get us into a bit of trouble sometimes. We bite off more than we can chew, as the old saying goes, and we end up more stressful than successful. But it doesn't need to be like that. From big commitments to every day time wasters, our lives can become a lot more efficient and productive when we follow the rules on our Not To-Do List as strictly as our To-Do List. Let's start your list by eliminating time wasters that you must cut out from your daily schedule. Here the activities that have made my Not To-Do List. First, I don't check email before lunch. Not only does this help me get more done during my morning "magic time" hours (the period of the day when I'm most productive), but it also prevents me from having my day ruined. When I was younger and much more addicted to email, I would often start the day by checking my email - sometimes before I even rolled out of bed. Most days the email news would be good, but on the odd occasion there would be trouble. Perhaps someone hadn't liked an article of mine, and had written in with some negative feedback. Listen, no matter how strong your mental make-up, it's hard not to get riled up by criticism - particularly email criticism, because upset people can really fire off some nasty comments. Reading that email would ruin my day. I'd be forever fuming and constantly thinking of smug replies and witty retorts (that I would never send, of course) and my brain would be taken down a rabbit hole of wasted energy and unproductive hours. One of our Virtual Mastermind Members, Dr. Kevin, found this out the hard way recently, and posted this to the forum: "I just realized WHY you should NOT check email first thing in the morning. Yes, part of it has to do with being productive, but there's a much bigger reason. I made this discovery after checking my email one morning and getting a not-so-nice email. This email messed up my mental state for the rest of the morning. It was very hard to snap out of it, leaving me unproductive. You live and learn - now I know why (checking your email in the morning should be on your NOT To-Do List)." Be very careful with what you let into your mind in the mornings. You might need to add "Checking the News," "Answering Voice Mail," or "Having Meetings" to your morning Not To-Do List and move those all to a later point in the day after you've finished a big task. Now I understand that won't work for everyone, but you simply must control what you can. In addition to checking email, other behaviors on my daily Not To-Do List include: Getting into online confrontations Sleeping in Skipping workouts Mindlessly surfing the Internet Gossiping All of these are unacceptable behaviors and they are not to be done at any time. Since formally adding them to my Not To-Do List, I've managed to be much more successful at avoiding them. Just important as the daily Not To-Do List are the long-term Not To-Dos. For me, these include: Entering into unprofitable, time-consuming projects and relationships Scheduling unnecessary travel Getting involved in the technological work on my websites Hanging around negative, gossiping people Once you make yourself aware of what you want to avoid, it becomes much easier to do so. Unfortunately, most people make the mistake of filling their day with wrong activities. It's almost like an addiction. Perhaps that's why Dan Kennedy once said, "People's problems are their hobbies." But if you want to be productive and successful, you can't let your worst behaviors become your habits. If you find yourself in a rut, doing the same wrong things over and over again, then you must take on the task of spending a good deal of time in introspection. An hour or two of self-reflection on how you spend your time can save you months of frustration. And it often starts with building a Not To-Do List. While you don't have to write down a Not To-Do List every day, it sure helps to have one in your mind. That's also why creating the "Rules for Your Life" is so important. You need a personal philosophy to keep you on track. By having a well thought out, clear and concise Not To-Do List, you'll have a better chance of sticking to the right things on your To-Do list and thus making the exponential progress you are capable of. Choose your work wisely.

The Problem With Happiness

The Problem With Happiness By Alex Green Our nation has a happiness fetish. Each year, publishers print thousands of books on the subject. Talk show hosts offer advice from psychologists and therapists. Magazine covers promise "The Short-Cut to Happiness" or "The 7 Secrets of Wedded Bliss." You might reasonably wonder why the market is so large. A Pew Research Center poll reports that almost 85 percent of Americans say they are happy or very happy. Yet millions want to be happier still. And they feel they could be, if only they pursued it a little more ardently. Except... that won't work. Happiness is a by-product. It is achieved indirectly, by producing something beautiful or useful or by making someone else happy. The search for happiness, it turns out, is one of the chief sources of unhappiness. Take a look around. Much of the economic misery we see today is due to the unbridled pursuit of bigger houses, fancier cars and more exorbitant trips. The lure of consumer culture and an obsession with more is precisely what keeps so many from contentment. The Stoics argued that happiness results not from pursuing affluence and status but rather virtue and wisdom. Pythagoras, the sixth-century BC philosopher and mathematician, asked that his followers take time, before going to sleep each night, to pose three questions: What have I done? Where have I failed myself? What responsibility have I not fulfilled? If we fixate instead on gratifying all our desires, we become superficial, acquisitive, deluded or foolish. The headlong rush for happiness can also blind us to serious problems or numb us to the pain of others. After all, every life is lived between the poles of joy and sadness. Laughter and love are part of it. But so are pain and suffering. To deny the tragic aspects of the world is to suppress a large part of what it means to be human. Playwright Tennessee Williams understood this. Asked in an interview to define happiness, he replied, "Insensitivity, I guess." Great artists often try to awaken us - or stir our conscience - by reminding us of the more doleful aspects of life. In response to the 16th Street Church bombing in 1963, an attack by the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham that killed four girls, saxophonist John Coltrane wrote Alabama, a blues-based instrumental that expresses anguish and sorrow more eloquently than words. Poetry, too, can inspire us with its sorrowful realizations. Seventeenth-century British poet Robert Herrick famously wrote, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may/ Old Time is still a-flying; / And this same flower that smiles today / Tomorrow will be dying." Shakespeare captured the same sentiment in Cymbeline: "Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust." History shows that men and women of genius are often melancholic. Consider writers like Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. Composers like Rossini and Mahler. Statesmen like Lincoln and Churchill. Artists like Michelangelo and Gauguin. Philosophers like Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. In 1890, Vincent Van Gogh, overcome by feelings of worthlessness, walked out into the southern French countryside and shot himself in the gut with a pistol. Just 37, he died from the wound two days later. Yet in the previous two years - and despite his bleakness - he completed more than two hundred paintings, many of them masterpieces. Handel, after years spent at the top of the musical world, fell into terrible poverty, ill health and deep depression. Yet from the depths of profound despair, he completed his greatest work, The Messiah. Beethoven raged against advancing deafness and his own finitude, yet created immortal works during this period, including his Fifth symphony, his only opera, Fidelio, his late string quartets and the Ninth symphony with its triumphant Ode to Joy. Not all innovators are melancholy, of course, and not all melancholy souls are innovative. And I don't mean to romanticize clinical depression, an often-debilitating illness. But there can be no joy without sorrow. No sunrise without the night. Periods of unhappiness are natural and even valuable. How are we to measure our best moments except against those that are not? Plus, contentment often saps our motivation. Dissatisfaction is the great spur to progress. Imagine the innovations we would lack today if we were satisfied with quill pens, horse-drawn carriages, or the "evil spirits" theory of disease. Today millions equate happiness with money. But studies show that once people are lifted out of poverty, their happiness is not dependent on income. More often reported levels of well-being are a combination of genetics, health, circumstances and coping skills. Happiness results when our aspirations are being fulfilled and we are optimistic about the future, when we are developing our capabilities or helping others develop theirs. In short, we are happiest when happiness itself is not the goal. Contemporary philosopher Robert Nozick writes that "We want experiences, fitting ones, of profound connection with others, of deep understanding of natural phenomena, of love, of being profoundly moved by music or tragedy, or doing something new and innovative, experiences very different from the bounce and rosiness of the happy moments." Of all the prescriptions for happiness, perhaps the least helpful one is the now-fashionable idea that you can defeat the blues by "paying attention to yourself." Nothing could be further from the truth. The happiest individuals are invariably those whose ordinary, everyday mode of living is being busy and unconcerned with self. That doesn't mean sacrificing your interests for someone else's. It only means asking not just "what would it take to make me happy?" but also "What limits should I set on this pursuit?" "How should I weigh my own happiness against that of others?" And "What else matters aside from happiness?" Life is also about education, work, courage, honor, empathy, and resilience in the face of hardship. Real contentment comes from a feeling that your life is worthwhile, that it is dissolved into something meaningful and great. That leads to gratitude. And gratitude, it turns out, is an indispensable part of happiness.

Making of Politician

Hi….I will be away till 26th …but before I do that I send you a chuckle!! A Country preacher......had a teenage son, and it was getting time the boy should give some thought to choosing a profession. Like many young Men his age, the boy didn't really know what he wanted to do, and he didn't seem too concerned about it. One day, while the boy was away at school, his father decided to try an experiment. He went into the boy's room and placed on his study table four objects.. 1. A Bible.....? 2. A silver dollar.....? 3. A bottle of whiskey.....? 4. And a Playboy magazine.....? 'I'll just hide behind the door,' the old preacher said to himself. 'When he comes home from school today, I'll see which object he picks up. If it's the Bible, he's going to be a preacher like me, and what a blessing that would be! If he picks up the dollar, he's going to be a business man, and that would be okay, too. But if he picks up the bottle, he's going to be a no-good drunken bum, and Lord, what a shame that would be. And worst of all if he picks up that magazine he's going to be a skirt-chasing womanizer.' The old man waited anxiously, and soon heard his son's foot-steps as he entered the house whistling and headed for his room. The boy tossed his books on the bed, and as he turned to leave the room he spotted the objects on the table.. With curiosity in his eye, he walked over to inspect them. Finally, he picked up the Bible and placed it under his arm. He picked up the silver dollar and dropped into his pocket. He uncorked the bottle and took a big drink, while he admired this month's centerfold. 'Lord have mercy,' the old preacher disgustedly whispered. He's going to be a politician! -- Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.