Book Excerpt

Hey everyone,

Sorry I missed last week...I'm working on
a book which I will publish in the coming months. I decided that for the next while, instead of writing a blog that is separate from the book itself, why not just publish excerpts from it as I go along. 

The book is called 'The New Golden Rule'.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction.

Let me know what you think.

See ya next week... (promise)

"Somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty years of age when we can ‘see’ thirty coming, it begins to occur to most people that we aren’t as young as we used to be. We begin to evaluate or re-evaluate our lives and by then we are often so ‘set in our ways’ that real change beyond career or marriage ‘seems’ virtually impossible.

In many societies, we will have at least one child by then which means that we will have also done our part to pass on the distorted understanding of the way life should be.  

We have been passing this distorted understanding from one generation to the next since we began to be shaped by society instead of leaving our individual mark on it.

Most of us are such passive participants in our own lives that unless some major catastrophe befalls us, it takes these milestones (30, 40, 50) for us to look up and seriously consider these basic questions:

What have I done in my life up to now?

Why do I behave in the way I behave?

What am I going to do with my life from now on?

And (God forbid) why in the world did I do so little with my time up to now”?

Even after we ask those questions (if in fact we are unhappy with the answers), we often completely lack the necessary skills to effect any real change in our lives.

We get overwhelmed (a condition I’ll explain shortly) and we go back to living by default.

Living by default means a lot of things but here are a few of the major ones.

Staying with someone you don’t love because it’s easier than leaving.

Taking a new job because you were let go from your old one and you have to work somewhere.

Allowing habits you don’t like (smoking, alcohol, drugs, sex, food) to govern your life, because the thought of fixing them seems so hard to do that next week seems like a much better time to start."

OK, this excerpt thing is harder to do than I thought...I don't know where to stop when it's out of context like this... so, I'll just stop there and you can let me know if you want to come back and see what next week has to offer :)

Happy 2011

I wish you a brilliant year. A year created by you, for you, built with the end in mind. By that I mean,
it's tough to build a house without a blue print... it's much tougher to build a dream without one. At least with a house there are only so many materials you can use, you have to have a particular kind of foundation and such. With a life... the sky is the limit.

If you are the New Year's resolution sort of person, you've probably figured out by now that those things tend to lose steam and dissolve like the whim on which they were made.
Why is that do you suppose?
Because you have to start with the end in mind; what do you walk towards otherwise?
Want to quit smoking? Stop trying to quit smoking and start becoming someone who doesn't smoke.
Know where you are, know where you're going... and keep going there. The longest journey may start with a single step, but it won't be too long a journey if you stop after the single step... you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other... and it's simply too daunting a task to keep doing that if you don't know where you're going.

Decide what you want for 2011. Write it down. NOT on a computer...in a journal in your own handwriting. Write it clearly and concisely... if it isn't that clear... refine it until it is... take an hour a week... but when you have defined your goal(s) for the year... write them down and visit them daily... walk towards them a little each and every single day... little by little, no matter how unattainable they may seem at certain points (that's another blog) every time you look up you will be closer... how could you not?

Success is a collection of habits. You have habits now don't you? If you have habits that you don't like, understand that the very fact that you have them, shows you that you can make new ones... just make ones that get you where you want to go instead of impede your progress. One thing is for certain though... all the success habits in the world won't get you where you're going if you don't know where that is.
Se ya next week