Needing to Worry About Things

“The future influences the present just as much as the past.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Worrying is pointless. Worrying about the past, doubly so.

The moment something occurs, it has occurred. It’s not going to occur, it already has. That places it in the past. You can’t influence it, you can’t change it. Sometimes you can take action “in the now” to mend something that is broken, or affect a better situation for the future, but you can’t alter the fact that what was done, was done.

I know people, people I talk to every day, who spend a lot of time being concerned about things they have no ability to influence, because they were in the past. They had a “bad day” where many things didn’t go right, and they are spending their “now” fretting about it, being downtrodden about it. If I may be so bold, this is not a particularly productive approach to looking at the past.

Now, what I don’t mean to imply is there is no value in considering the past. There is a great deal we can learn from the past so that we can apply that knowledge to bettering our now and our future. Whereas you cannot influence the past, there is little else you can do with the future but to influence it so that when it influences you as it approaches your present, it does so in a way more in line with your passions in life.

Let me share a rule I live by. If you desire something more than everyone else combined desires the opposite, then your desire is significantly more likely to come to pass. By desiring it, you are influencing the future. But others can do the same. So your desire has to be strong, and it has to push you to take action in the now, learn what you need to and can from the past, and apply your desire as much as you are capable of to the future. Live this way, keeping a positive attitude while avoiding wasting energy on negative thoughts about things you have no ability to control (like the past), and you will find your future filled with more and more of the kinds of things you wish to reap.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

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Weaknesses Are What You Should Focus on Improving

“Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses” – Marilyn vos Savant

So much amazing material has been written about how to become extraordinary at whatever you choose to do, all I will likely be able to do here today is summarize it, give you some incredible references for more information, and perhaps provide a few interesting frames of reference to look at the concept in.

As “The Extraordinary Leader” (by Zenger & Folkman) and “Now Discover Your Strengths” (by Buckingham & Clifton) explain with convincing clarity, the key to unlocking your talent and abilities to their fullest extent, to create and do amazing things with your work and efforts, is not to focus on getting better at the things you are not particularly good at (your “weaknesses”). At best, all that will do is bring you up to “average”, and do you want to spend your whole life striving as hard as you can towards the goal of being average? Alternatively, spending your energies and efforts on identifying and then enhancing those things which you enjoy, have a knack for, and are inherently good at to begin with can lead to transforming your strengths into amazingly powerful tools. Imagine wielding such tools when you are working towards achieving your dreams, big goals for your life that might seem out of reach now, but will certainly be out of reach if you keep focusing your energy on the things you aren’t particularly good at.

“No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit.” – Andrew Carnegie

Once you have a strong awareness of those things you are inherently good or great at, that you enjoy doing and are almost just natural extensions of yourself, then you can start choosing better tasks to spend your time on. Sometimes we all have tasks in school, at home, or in the workplace that we just have to do – no one is particularly fond of them, or there is no one else available to do them but yourself. However, when working with a team of people, there are probably people who not only would be better suited for some of those things that you aren’t good at or dislike doing, but they might actually LIKE doing something you absolutely can’t stand.

One thing I know about myself, is that I am a horrible note taker. If I am in charge of taking the minutes of a meeting, or I have to make sure to capture what a professor says for later, I better hope there is some other reference to the same information available. Not only will my notes not be sufficient for everyone else’s needs, they sometimes don’t even make sense to me – and I wrote them! So asking someone else to take notes in a meeting, or if I could photocopy a classmate’s notes (who actually takes solid ones) and do something for them in exchange like help with homework or studying, that’s a better solution. I know people who are not only great note-takers, but LOVE to do it and feel like they are contributing when you give them the chance to take them.

I used to think of delegation as “passing the buck”, not taking ownership of the things I felt responsible for. But I am doing no one any good by taking on tasks and doing them poorly, and I might really be doing someone a favor by giving them a task they will succeed with, enjoy, and will be able to shine for their manager, professor, etc. as a result. Delegation, when done for the right reasons, is in fact a gift and an opportunity to help yourself AND others succeed.

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Seeking the World for Answers to Your Problems

“The reason I talk to myself is that I’m the only one whose answers I accept” – George Carlin

I’ve read several personal development books and self-help guides over the last five years. Some of them I could not put down until I devoured every word, others I would slowly work my way through and digest. There were a few, however, that I could barely get through one chapter of without losing all interest in continuing. I wanted to minimize the number of times this happened to me, so I began seeking out a pattern to the books I found difficult to go far in.

As it turns out, the books I found the least accessible had one thing overwhelmingly in common. These intolerable works all took the approach of trying to tell me “the” answer. They tried to tell me what to do or how to think, instead of giving me helpful tools or asking me insightful questions to enable me to come up with my own answers. How could any other person possibly write some answer down in a book about how to live life, and have it apply to every potential reader? For that matter, who is any other person to think they can possibly know what is right for me, in my life, at any point of my life? They can’t. I am the only one who holds those answers.

Similarly, you are the only one who can truly uncover or decide what answers are the best for your life. So many of us are seeking externally for answers to many of life’s challenges, but really what we ought to be on the lookout for is someone that can ask us the right questions, or give us a way to look at things differently so we can have a better chance of finding the right filters for how we would choose to see the world. Finding the sorts of mentors in life that can help provide this sort of guidance can be challenging, but you might be surprised at the number of people in your life who not only have important perspectives to give you, but would love the opportunity to help.

This is, in fact, how counseling works as well. If you go to a professional to talk through a problem you’re having in your life, what they will do is get to know you and understand what you are really trying to achieve, then ask you questions and assign homework between sessions that will help you discover the answers to your life’s dilemmas. Again, I’m not saying that’s an easy thing to achieve, but if you’re looking for answers, there’s only one possible true source for your own life, and it lies within you.

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Saving or Spending Are the Only Two Options You Have When it Comes to Money

“Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.” – from “The Matchmaker”

Most of the time, when we think about money, we consider it in terms either of spending or saving. Have you ever pondered what you would do if you won a few million dollars? Many people say they’d pay off their mortgage, buy nice new cars, travel, or experience other luxuries they otherwise couldn’t afford. Some consider putting some of it away for a rainy day or retirement (or a rainy day during retirement, I suppose).

What if I asked you to ponder a different question though? If you had five million dollars to give away, what would you do? Would you donate it to a charity to support research or awareness about an illness or disease that you or someone you love has been affected by? Would you start a foundation to provide an after school program in your neighborhood? Is there someone you know whose life would be utterly changed for the better if you could just invest fifty thousand dollars to resolve some desperate need they have – a life saving surgery, an expensive piece of medical equipment, etc.?

Giving is a phenomenal third option we all have with our money, and the best part is it doesn’t really matter how much money we have – we all have the capacity to give a small percent of it to help others, our loved ones, our neighbors, our communities. In fact, studies have shown that those who give more of their money actually tend to be wealthier as a result! I know that sounds a little questionable, a nice idea but without a lot of real substance or hard data behind it. However, a study conducted in 2000 called the “Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey” finds that, though seemingly paradoxical, having more wealth tends to lend itself to giving more AND giving more tends to lend itself to increased wealth! I would encourage you to read the full study about giving making you richer (and then using the interactive charitable calculator provided to gauge your own giving impact (just pretend the graphic says 2008, not 2006)), but here are a few key quotes:

The S.C.C.B.S., which takes into account differences in education, age, race, religion, and other personal characteristics, shows that people who give charitably make significantly more money than those who don’t. While that seems like common sense, it turns out that the link in the data between giving and earning is not just one-way. People do give more when they become richer—research has shown that a 10 percent increase in income stimulates giving by about 7 percent—but people also grow wealthier when they give more.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have identified several ways that giving makes us more effective and successful. For example, new research from the University of Oregon finds that charity stimulates parts of the brain called the caudate nucleus and the nucleus accumbens, which are associated with meeting basic needs such as food and shelter—suggesting to the researchers that our brains know that giving is good for us. Experiments have also found that people are elevated by others into positions of leadership after they are witnessed behaving charitably.

My personal experiences would certainly lead me to recommend giving a set percentage of your money away as one of the most shrewd investments you can make. You’ll see it come back to you and then some, on top of which you’re helping loved ones, neighbors, and community grow. But just in case you aren’t convinced, here are a few other reasons you might find giving to be a rewarding experience.

The Giving Passion

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” – Winston Churchill

Giving your time, energy, and resources to others is a rather magical act, in that you personally will reap huge benefits as well. You might think that working for a day on, for example, a Habitat for Humanity house is just going to help those who will someday live in it. I’d like to suggest that there is a myriad of things you’ll get out of the experience of giving.

• You’ll feel good doing it.
• Most giving opportunities involve working your physical muscles, your mental muscles, or both. One way or another, you’ll become stronger.
• You will learn to look beyond your own self and begin to see more ways in which we’re all connected.
• You’ll figure out where your “giving strengths” lie.
• You’ll make the world better.

I encourage you to spend a little time today thinking about what your strengths are, where your passions lie, and what sort of opportunities might exist in your community to use your strengths and passions in a way that will help others.

Good From Giving

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” – Anne Frank

There was a Friends episode in which Joey was determined to show Phoebe that there was no such thing as a truly selfless deed, because when you do good things for others it makes you feel too good to be counted as totally selfless. As you know if you watched the show, Joey was a wise man.

Giving your time, energy, money, and other resources to someone who could benefit from them just about can’t help but make you feel great inside, even if you don’t actually see the eventual outcome of your generosity. Like the butterfly effect concept, you never know what monumental effect a simple act of kindness can have on an individual, a family, or even a community.

Interestingly, the more you give, the better you’ll get at it. Giving of your time or money forces you to become a better steward of those resources, increasing your time management skills and your awareness of your finances. In fact, most leading financial magazines I read have endorsed giving ten percent of your income to a cause you are passionate about, because the increased awareness of your savings and spending habits usually reaps enough personal benefit to offset the ten percent donation in the long run.

Yep. Giving of yourself, however you choose to do it, can be a downright selfish act. So go treat yourself by sending a check to your favorite charity, or indulge yourself by spending the day serving food to the homeless.

A Source of Strength

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Most giving opportunities involve working your physical muscles, your mental muscles, or both. One way or another, you’ll become stronger.

Giving can be a very small thing. When you smile at someone who opens the door for you, chances are you put them in a better mood. You’ve used your muscles in your face and arms in the process.

I recently spent a morning opening about a thousand cans of fruit cocktail for individuals and families that need a charitable source of good meals. I don’t know that there were muscles in my body I didn’t use by the time I was through!

Being a part of a charity walk some weekend doesn’t just provide a good opportunity for physical exercise, it also provides an educational event for you to learn more about whatever cause you are walking for, what research is being done towards a cure or solution, and how you can get more involved if you are interested.

There are museums, libraries, theaters, zoos, schools, and other institutions striving to provide positive learning experiences to the public, and are yearning for people to support their efforts through donations of money, resources, or your time. Think about the potential knowledge you could take out of working one day a week or month at a museum. Think of the positive change you could make in a child’s life by talking to them about the animals they’re looking at, or the play they just watched.

My examples focus on helping humans, but there are certainly other causes out there! Giving to a local animal shelter, working to preserve a historic building or landmark, or somehow improving the environment – the opportunies are out there, and plentiful enough that there is surely something that you could get involved with tied to your particular interests, and make a positive contribution to.

Connectedness

If you have a chance some day, I encourage you to take the StrengthsFinder exam from Gallup. It is an exam that enables you to identify your strengths, then work on action items to utilize and keep growing those strengths.

I bring it up, because I took the exam, and my number one strength was “Connectedness”. There is a lot of explanation and discussion about what that means, but I think this quote sums up perfectly how someone with this strengths filters the world.

“Sometimes I just look at my bowl of cereal in the morning and think about those hundreds of people who were involved in bringing me my bowl of cereal: the farmers in the field; the biochemists who made the pesticides; the warehouse workers at the food preparation plants; even the marketers who somehow persuaded me to buy this box of cereal and not a different one sitting next to it on a shelf. I know it sounds strange, but I give thanks to these people, and just doing that makes me feel more involved with life, more connected to things, less alone.” – Rose T., psychologist

Through giving, you can learn to look beyond your own self and begin to see more ways in which we’re all connected. I come back frequently to the idea that giving can be a very small act, or a very large one (or, ideally, some combination of all sizes of giving, intertwined into your daily life). You’re likely giving throughout your day and not realizing it.

Some examples of how I have given recently – watch for a few you recognize in yourself:

• placed my empty cardboard cereal box into the recycling bin instead of the garbage
• smiled at the clerk at Target, thanking her and telling her what a great job she did
• turned the lights off in the house before leaving to use less energy resources (thus reducing pollution and my electric bill simultaneously!)
• bought a calendar for a friend because she likes cows
• said hi to my neighbor and asked what he had planned that day

All of these actions helped me to connect with my environment and/or community, all of them took minimal effort relative to the potential benefit, and all of them are examples of giving.

Look around in the world around you as you go about your day. Think about your interactions with people you come in contact with, and how you can improve someone’s day with just a few extra words and/or smiles. When you walk into a store, think about everyone that was involved in making your shopping experience there possible – clerks, managers, shippers, suppliers, manufacturers, and far more. When I was returning an item the other day to a store, I watched as the clerk took care of the transaction with ease, and thought about the people who were involved with creating a system of technology, ideas, and policies that enabled the clerk to so quickly and efficiently take care of me. I thanked her, but as I walked away thinking about some different sorts of experiences I’ve had at return desks, I also said a silent thanks to the establishment that made both my experience and the job of the clerk so easy and painless.

We’re all connected, to our environment and everything that exists in it, in ways we’ll never realize. By giving your time, money, and resources to something you believe in that is bigger than yourself, you extend your awareness of what is beyond your self, and increase your opportunities to learn more about the ways in which you are connected to others.

Giving Strengths

“The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.” – Charles Dudley Warner

By actively giving, you’ll figure out where your “giving strengths” lie.

As Mark Sanford puts it, “Giving is an art. That requires practice.” If you don’t feel you have money to give, you can give of your experience, your skills, your time, or other resources you may have. Experiment with getting involved in different kinds of giving, with different kinds of organization involved in your efforts. Maybe you’ll go volunteer on a Habitat for Humanity project and find out you excel at bashing your thumb with a hammer but not much else when it comes to home construction. That’s okay, the next day you can go teach high school kids how to manage their money when they get older. The day after that, you can read to children at your local public library. Eventually, you’ll find something that matches your skills and interests with a place you can do the most good with them.

I don’t like to think of people as “tools” or “resources”, but consider the old adage about chopping down a tree with a sledge hammer. You might get it done, but you’d have a much easier time of it and be able to chop a lot more trees down if you used an axe or a saw. By finding something you’re a great fit for, where you can thrive and be passionate and use your strengths to accomplish big feats, you’re maximizing your giving potential.

Change Your World

“If we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love’s reach.” – Margaret Cho

By giving, you’ll make the world better. Maybe not always “the” world every time, but certainly “your” world. And since we’re all connected (see above), that starts becoming one and the same, see?

Leadership is said to be about serving others, so it stands to reason that by giving to others, you are in fact becoming a leader in your community. The more you give, the more you begin to understand inherently what it means to be a great leader. The world needs leadership, perhaps today more than ever.

In the book Good to Great, one of the absolute keys to a “Great” leader is that he or she possesses, somehow, near limitless amounts of both confidence and humility, simultaneously. By learning to go outside of your self and learn ways in which we are all connected, finding what your strengths and interests are and how they can be applied to charitable acts, and activily going out and giving in the ways you are passionate about, chances are you will encounter situations and people who will encourage and hone your confidence and show you reasons to be humble. Chances are if you are reading this blog post, you’re far better off in life than most of your fellow mankind, and it is hard to truly understand how fortunate you are, how much you have to be thankful for, and not be humbled as a result.

How you perceive reality creates your reality. If you perceive a reality in which you can make positive changes, you’re well on your way to changing the world you live in.

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Succeeding Every Time is Critical

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.” – George Bernard Shaw

Whether you will fail at some point in your life is not in question – you absolutely will, and for your sake I hope it happens often. We all love the feeling of succeeding at something, but too often we overlook the wonderful opportunity that our ability to truly, embarrassingly, and utterly fail at something.

In Dan Pink’s book “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko”, the fifth rule that Johnny learns on his career guidance path is to “make excellent mistakes”. Note the key word here – “excellent”. Failing because you just didn’t even try is foolishness, and there is little to be learned from such mistakes except to actually try next time. Assuming you actually tried to do something, and then failed – even when you gave it everything you felt you had in you at the time to give – the growth you can experience from such an experience is immense.

Practice Makes Greatness

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

That little green Muppet Yoda said it best, “Do, or do not. There is no try.” If you want to really excel at something, you have to start by simply doing it at all. In most cases, being great at whatever you want to do requires doing it a lot, over and over again. As you go through this process, you will very likely stumble upon a few things you do well right away, and you can certainly learn from those experiences. Think, however, about when you take an approach that clearly isn’t working – do you keep repeating the same approach until it somehow does work, or do you attempt to learn from what isn’t working, make modifications and tweaks to your method, and see where improvements happen and successes occur?

All this might seem to sound obvious, but I believe it is important to grasp that this is the same process as experiencing bigger failures in life. If you see them not as insurmountable setbacks, but simply as significant opportunities to learn how to achieve better results the next time around, then not only does failure become disarmed in terms of a negative emotional response, but we can perhaps even learn to embrace the failure for what it is – a huge opportunity to grow and ultimately succeed.

Automatic Doors

Imagine if you walked around through life assuming every door you came up to – at home, school, work, shopping, etc. – was an automatic door that would just open for you. Your nose would be in a permanent state of being bandaged from smacking into them! But more importantly, the only doors you would actually go through would be ones that people were willing to open for you.

In life, we use the phrase of “opening a door” for someone because we’re giving them an opportunity to experience what is on the other side. Sometimes you’ll find kind people who want to open a door for you because they hope you’ll succeed or find some benefit on the other side. But think about the places that tend to have doors that automatically open for you – most of them are trying to sell you something on the other side, and have only their best interest at heart! Yet so many of us let others open doors for us and hope they have our best interests at heart (possible but unlikely).

If you choose instead to open doors for yourself, you take control of your life. Your best interests are much more likely to be served, because you’re the one serving them! The opportunities available to you aren’t limited to what others would choose for you, but rather on your ability to identify them. Once you identify them, you can take a risk and see if you can turn those opportunities into vehicles that let you achieve your goals and dreams in life. And yes, absolutely, sometimes you’ll fail. But while failing, you’ll pick up experience, and you’ll learn what to do differently to make a success of whatever lies behind the next door you open.

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Today’s Misdirectional Compass Point:

“Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.” – Cavett Robert

Resolution: finding a solution to a problem

Resoluteness: the trait of being resolute; “his resoluteness carried him through the battle”; “it was his unshakeable resolution to finish the work”

While it makes sense that people have a sense of starting over around the first of the new year, it has always seemed dangerously arbitrary and limiting to tie resolutions strictly to a New Year’s activity. May I humbly suggest that resolutions might make a lot of sense, perhaps even more sense, if they were made in conjunction with other holidays or events?

Can’t figure out what to get someone on Valentine’s Day? Get together as a couple and come up with Valentine’s resolutions! They’re like New Year’s resolutions, except you do them as a couple, they are about how to be romantic for each other all year long instead of one day a year, and you stick to them. It might sound silly, but maybe you’d discover things about what each other wants or needs, or make it a point to go on a date each week even though you’re married and rekindle your relationship every weekend.

Have you been wanting to visit a local museum or art gallery, but you never seem to find the time to do so? What better day than to resolve to visit such places at least four times a year, than on Columbus Day (essentially a holiday about celebrating “discovery”)?!

Even less traditional or well recognized holidays might well be good cause to make a resolution. National Pie Day could inspire you to take up cooking a home-cooked meal more often, or spontaneously go on a date with your spouse to eat pie at your local diner once a month (or week, or whatever). The point is, we always change as people through the whole year, so why only set goals to try to achieve at one semi-arbitrary point during the year? Why should New Year’s have all the fun? The Resolution Revolution is about expanding our minds and getting creative about how to spur ourselves into action in fun, interesting ways.

October 30th is Haunted Refrigerator Night – take this opportunity to clean out the fridge and find those scary things that might be growing in the recesses of your vegetable crisper!

November 21st is World Hello Day – Say hello to five people you have never met before, and if possible strike up a conversation. These could be people at work you’ve passed a hundred times and never met, or a customer at the same store you’re shopping at.

(The Brownielocks site has a great list of additional obscure holidays.)

The point is, if you tie a resolution of achieving some goal to an event or holiday that is more directly related to it, you might find you have a better chance of following through with it.

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“Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.”

Change is always happening, but lately it seems to have accelerated and magnified. The economic future of the United States, and in fact the world, seems to be shifting in profound ways. American economic institutions are closing doors, being bought out or merged, and/or being bailed out by a government that needs a little bailing out of its own. The National Debt Clock in New York City has run out of digits, and will be replaced by one capable of handling enough digits for the debt to reach up to a quadrillion dollars. Companies of all sizes are having trouble getting loans to cover payroll and expenses, and hard decisions about how those companies will make it through today’s struggles may impact your own career or the livelihood of someone you care about. Without a doubt, the road ahead looks to be difficult.

The normal response to such difficult challenges may be anger, panic, sorrow, or fear. You may simply not quite know how to feel – all of this just seems so BIG, how does one begin to understand what a sensible reaction might be? I certainly don’t have the answers, but I might be able to provide a few helpful questions, and perhaps even a few words of encouragement, that you can apply not just to these big, monstrous changes, but to change of all shapes and sizes that might seem, at first, like something to fear or dread.

Change is inevitable. It is constant. It simply is. To say that change is good or bad is to only look at it from a particular viewpoint, no matter who you are and no matter what the change may be. If a friend loses his or her job, your initial reaction may be to console or worry. But what if the loss of that job was the spark necessary to start an amazing new journey in your friend’s life? A loved one discovers he or she has cancer, and instinct might call for grief. But what if the cancer inspires making more of the years remaining than all the other years before, touching lives in ways they would never have dared to otherwise?

I don’t mean to indicate that job loss or cancer are good things by any stretch of the imagination! I am suggesting that judging whether such changes are “good” or “bad” is irrelevant – the changes have happened, they exist, and all that remains to be done is determine the attitude we each take with us into whatever the future holds next.

I also don’t mean to suggest that you shouldn’t show empathy for the plight of your fellow man when they face difficult challenges. They need your caring support and encouragement more than ever in these times, just as you would were you in the same shoes. But part of that support is letting them know that they still have a choice about things in their lives, they still have a chance to make amazingly positive impacts in the lives of those around them. Your best days and theirs can easily still be ahead, and it just requires facing challenges and peering deep into them for the gems of opportunity and growth that exist within.

“Change is the essence of life. Be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.”

Some changes are, of course, far more difficult to face than others. It may be that the path ahead cannot be traveled by the person you are today, that the challenge is simply insurmountable. Most, when faced with such adversity, may walk away and live with the opportunity cost of taking a path that, while acceptable, will not take them where they desire most to get to. What if, instead of choosing a different challenge or path to face, you choose a different you instead? If you were to grow in such a way that the previously insurmountable challenge seems less impossible, the result could be an arduous but worthwhile journey to everything you dream and hope for. It would require the ability to adapt, and the courage to let go of some of the control you perceive you have in order to face the unknown. It may not even work, at first or even ever, but consider the alternatives (a life less than you desire) and that even in this worst case scenario, you’ve grown as a person and are much better equipped to face the next challenge that dares cross your path!

“Growth means change and change involves risk, stepping from the known to the unknown.”

To fear growth is, in a sense, to fear change. After all, you literally cannot have growth without change. But there is certainly risk involved, as my 401K will readily attest to these days! Some days by doing nothing, you will end up temporarily in a better position that those who chose to embrace change and take on the challenges of the day. To perceive that as a reason for inaction, though, is a trap, for there will be another day, and another after that, and change will come in each of them. Each time you don’t take the opportunity to grow from change, you lose the chance to grow into the person you have the potential to be. Who do you aspire to be? What is the version of you that would make you amazed and exhilirated to be alive, regardless of what challenges may come? What kind of husband, father, wife, mother, son, daughter, or friend do you want those you care about deeply to have in their lives? By embracing the inevitability of change and making the most of the day’s opportunities to grow, you can not only enrich your own life but also the lives you touch.

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” – Maria Robinson

Is change something to fear, or something to eagerly await? Will you just weather the storm, or will you steal some of its power as your own? Are you going to let change happen to you, or will you embrace change and enable it to happen for you?

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- Mahatma Gandhi.

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