“You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
– Zig Ziglar
Tag: opportunity
Someone Once Said…#1
“Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at will change.”
— Dr Wayne Dyer
A New Found Appreciation for Trees
You can learn a lot from a tree.
As children, we excitedly spoke of what we’d like to be when we grew up. Doctors, firefighters, baseball players, teachers. I don’t recall anyone ever saying that they’d like to be a tree.
I can honestly state that I never wanted to become a tree. Even today I have no desire to radically transform myself into trunk and branch. Even if I did want to, I’m not quite sure how I would even go about it. Trees have many great characteristics that we’d all love to possess. They are tall, strong, self reliant, patient, and can weather the extreme changes of seasons. The thing that inspires me about trees, though, is their attitude.
Nothing Will Ever Make Me Happy
One of the happiest days of my life was when I realized that nothing will ever make me happy.
Nothing. As in no thing.
Things used to excite me. I would feel so much better by having things rather than when I was just wanting things. I have surrounded myself with all sorts of things, all designed to make me happy. Or at least that’s what I told myself when I bought them. Somehow I expected the things that I possessed would give me the happiness and joy that I was missing in my life. How could I be happy with a 32″ TV? A 54″ TV is 69% larger, and therefore must contain 69% more happiness! How could anyone be happy using last year’s iPhone? Driving a two year old car? You must be miserable!
“Have an Adequate Day!”
Maybe it’s me. Perhaps I send out some sort of signal, some sort of message to those I come in contact with that lets them know that I settle for mediocrity and have low expectations. Maybe people just don’t think I’m capable of having a great day. Because they always only tell me to have a good day.
These people who talk to me each day are talking to you, too. You see them at the drive-thru when you get your morning coffee. Or when you pick up your dry cleaning. The waiter at lunch. Even when you’re buying new shoes.
Who Are You?
“I was with a friend of mine in an airport and a stranger came up to me and said, You’re tall. Are you a basketball player? and I replied, No. Then another person came up to me and asked, Are you a basketball player? And I said, Nope. So my friend asked me, Bill, why do you keep telling them no? And I told him, Because basketball is what I do, but it’s not who I am.”
The quote above is from Bill Russell, perhaps the greatest basketball player in history. An 11-time NBA champion, Olympic Gold medalist. Two-time NCAA champion. The evidence strongly suggests that Bill Russell was, in fact, a basketball player. But I just love the wisdom of his view of his real self: “basketball is what I do, but it’s not who I am.”
The Space Between
If I could only live my life in slow motion.
Life is a series of responses and reactions, and the quality of the responses and reactions determines what happens next. There is a space – a moment – between what just happened and how I deal with what just happened. Sometimes I am proud of my response, sometimes I’m rather embarrassed. The responses, good or bad, just seem to come out of me automatically, the classic stimulus – response scenario. When I suddenly become a mature adult again half way through an overreactive ballistic tirade and realize what I am actually doing, I wish life would grant me a mulligan and I could relive the whole event all over again, this time producing a more favorable response.
Of All Things Great & Ordinary
You get to a point in life when some long held opinions, once indisputable truths, start to show some cracks.
Wisdom imparted by life experience somehow leads you to challenge and re-examine. I am at that point with greatness. What exactly is greatness?
Greatness used to be defined as something of spectacular magnitude. Something beyond conceivable attainment by someone as “ordinary” as me. The wealth of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the passionate intensity of a Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar solo, the graceful fluidity of hockey legend Wayne “The Great” Gretzky, the architectual scope and scale of the Great Wall of China. All are awe inspiring in their own right. But I’m at a point where I find true greatness lies more in the vast philanthropic fortune that Messrs. Gates and Buffett are now giving away, as opposed to the creation of their massive wealth in the first place.
Peace, Happiness, and Living Half Full.
What a concept. Peace. And happiness?
I am amazed at the pace of my life. One day seems to morph into the next day. If the days weren’t numbered on the calendar I don’t think I could tell them apart. I have three phone numbers, three e-mail accounts. Let’s not forget the Blackberry and the old-fashioned fax machine. A “day off” has become a day in which I simply don’t work as much as I do on non-day off days. I wonder if the pace of life is actually getting me some where, or is it simply blurring the view?
So who has time for this peace and happiness stuff?
Living Half Full…defined.
So what, exactly, is Living Half Full? Actually, it’s more of a mindset. A mindset that is a foundation of true peace and happiness. It is living a life based upon what is, a life based upon gratitude and appreciation for what you are and what you possess right now. We are all an accumulation of all that we have gathered and experienced, both materially and immaterially. The stuff, the relationships, the life experiences…we are all sum totals of all that has happened so far. Yet there is a real tendency to focus on what isn’t, on what we feel is missing. Still looking for the “right” stuff, the “right” relationships, the “right” life experiences. All too often we base our happiness upon the achievement of obtaining what it is we feel is missing, as if what we currently have could not possibly become a source of true happiness.
Peter Mis LivingHalfFull.com 