Freedom On Toast

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I found this great article at www.GetMotivation.com It’s written by Gary Ryan Blair and summarizes many of the “rules” for creating a wonderful life. I hope you enjoy the article.

Seven Maxims for Creating The Ideal Life!
by Gary Ryan Blair

It all begins with a vision, a vision of creating an ideal life.

The relentless pursuit of that vision will eventually give birth to the picture in your mind. An ideal life born from the unwavering dedication to doing whatever it took to become successful.

Creating the ideal life obviously requires intelligence, but that’s just the start. What’s most important is having a positive set of values, attitudes and habits necessary for your vision to become reality.

The following are Seven Maxims for Creating The Ideal Life:

1. Create a Bigger Future! - Make your future bigger, brighter, and bolder than your past. Your past is history, however your past offers great insights for creating the ideal life. Your past is rich with experiences that are worth thinking about in new ways, and these valuable experiences can become raw material for creating a masterpiece.

Approach your past with this attitude, and you will have an insatiable desire for even better, more enjoyable experiences. Use your past to help you create the ideal future, and you will separate yourself from situations, relationships, and activities that can trap you in the past. Continually use your past only as a foundation for what lies ahead, and you will move closer to your personal north star.

2. Create Contributions Into Other People’s Lives! - The ideal life must include a commitment to serving others. Create a habit whereby your contributions are bigger than your personal gain.

As you become more successful, numerous rewards will come your way: increased income, praise, recognition, reputation, capabilities, status, resources, and opportunities.

As nice and as enjoyable as these rewards can be, they can also become an Achilles heel. Be careful as to becoming too fixated on just the rewards, rather than on making still greater contributions.

To create the ideal life, concentrate continuously on making ever greater contributions into the lives of your family, friends, associates, community and the world at large. Look for ways to empower the human spirit, help others eliminate limiting steps, demonstrate honor, discipline and good character, and look for opportunities to teach and share what you have learned with others.

3. Create a Learning Environment! - The creation of an ideal life is dependent upon your commitment to growth, learning and implementation. You may have a great deal of experience and sit at the front of the class intellectually, but still be no smarter for all of the things you’ve done, seen, and heard.

Experience alone is no guarantee of intellectual growth. To create the ideal life that you envision, you must continually transform your experiences into new lessons, and you will make each day of your life a source of growth, maturity and beauty.

Every experience in life offers an opportunity for learning. The smartest people are those who can transform the smallest event or situation into breakthroughs in thinking and action.

4. Create Higher Standards! - Raise the bar high, higher than you think possible, astound yourself by your performance. To ensure that you have more in life, you must first commit to being more.

Be more committed, focused, disciplined, and relentless. Be the authentic person you are and were meant to be. Be more, do more, demand and expect more from yourself and those around you, and you will be creating the ideal life.

No matter how much acclaim you receive, keep working to improve. The opportunity for growth is unlimited. Continually work to surpass everything you’ve done so far, by continually raising your standards.

5. Create a Greater Appreciation for Life! - Gratitude is essential to creating the ideal life. Over the long run, the few who are continually successful have this in common, they recognize that success springs naturally from the assistance of many other people — and they are continually grateful for this support.

Short-term successes cut themselves off from everyone who has helped them. They see themselves as the sole cause of their own achievements. As they become more self-centered and isolated, they lose their creativity and ability to succeed.

Continually acknowledge others’ contributions, and you will automatically create greater success and a greater quality of life. You’ll continually be motivated to achieve even more for those who have helped you. Focus on appreciating and thanking others, and the conditions will always grow for your increased success.

6. Create Enjoyment and Playfulness! - A greater sense of enjoyment and playful spirit, will automatically create a greater quality of life.

Distressing emotions and humor cannot occupy the same psychological space. A sense of humor helps you to find the lighter side of deadlines and conflicts. It’s a tool for letting go of frustrations and upsets of the moment. A growing conviction that stress levels are running high makes a sense of humor a mandatory condition for the creation of the ideal life.

Fun is the fabric of happy memories, the icing on the cake of life. A life filled with mirth is one well lived, approach everything you do with this sense of enjoyment and playfulness.

7. Create Discomfort! - Of all the maxims advocated, none is of more fundamental value than your willingness and ability to create discomfort. In a very real sense, it is a precondition to all the others.

Always make your goals and dreams greater than your comfort. Recognize that every act of creation, is also a simultaneous act of destruction. The more positive, intentional, and comfort challenging the better.

Many successful people start off with big, bold, breathtaking dreams and ambitions. They take risks, and some on occasions have bet the farm in the process, but the moment they become successful, they start seeking greater security and comfort as their main goal. They begin to play not to lose, rather than playing to win!

They fall asleep at the wheel motivationally, and quickly lose the confidence that made them so successful. Security and comfort are desirable by-products of goal achievement, but when they become the goal itself, they quickly work against you.

Treat any increase of comfort in your life as only a temporary stage for establishing bigger goals. Continually strive for higher goals and achievement, continually place yourself in a position where you have to grow, learn and perform and life will always be an adventure.

The relentless pursuit of the ideal life must continue throughout your life as you pursue the goal of just not meeting, but exceeding even your wildest expectations.

Incorporate these maxims into your life, and share them with others so that you and they might be able to enjoy all that life has to offer.

Everything Counts!
Gary Ryan Blair

You know, with all the gloom and doom that is spewed, it is easy to fall into the “oh why bother” mentality. Why bother calling leads, nobody has any money anyway. Why bother learning something new, there won’t be anyone to share it with anyway. Why bother calling distributors, they aren’t doing anything anyway.

First of all, that is all a bunch of hooey (that’s my grandmother speaking!) Of course people have money to start home businesses - in fact they can’t afford to NOT start a home business. Of course you should learn something new everyday. I love Michael Clouse’s saying that “if you can read and you choose not to you are illiterate by choice.” And of course it matters that you contact distributors and they ARE working their business.

But if you listen to mainstream media, all that is portrayed is the economic gloom, the daily layoffs, the business closings and if you don’t keep your own attitude in check it sure can be easy to feed into that mentality.

As often happens, I have learned this lesson from watching the kids at Circus Juventas (a circus arts program for kids - it’s very, very cool by the way.) These kids come here every night to try and try and try again. I watch them perform some acts and KNOW that if they can do what is virtually impossible, then it truly is our beliefs that shape our future. For example, as I sit here waiting for my daughter’s flying trapeze class to begin, I am watching a group of teenagers literally climb a pole. These poles are 30 feet tall. These kids are climbing them with their bare hands and feet. Impressive enough I know - these are slippery buggers. But add to that the flips that they perform off of the poles and it is an incredible sight. I am POSITIVE that not one of these kids believed they could not only climb these poles but do elaborate aerial stunts from these poles as well. But their coaches believed and over time the students’ beliefs began to change. And what a transformation it has been.

So as you go through your days, consider what beliefs you are bringing to the table. Are your beliefs helping you grow or are they sticking you in the muck along with mainstream media? If you are stuck, start believing that you can “climb the pole” and watch what happens.

Like it or not, we have become a nation that demands, yes demands, instant gratification. We want to instantly be thin. We want to instantly be rich. We want to instantly be there. We want to instantly have information at our fingertips. Have you used dial-up lately? Try it, if you can find it, and then tell me you don’t want instant gratification.

I’ll admit, I am no different than anyone else. If there were an instant diet pill I would be the first in line. If there were an instant cash card that didn’t depend on my bank balance I would quickly insert it into the ATM.

But in our instant world, we miss something. We miss the joy of the journey. And okay, if there isn’t joy on the journey, at least there are lessons to be learned.

Take my business. I LOVE my business and the freedoms it affords. But it has been, and will continue to be, a journey on many levels. I have had to learn about myself. I have had to learn about patience. I have had to learn about sacrifice. ALL have been good things to learn and worth any amount of effort I put forth.

But it IS the journey that has been so utterly gratifying. It’s the people I have been honored to meet along the way. It’s the successes, small and large, that give you that rush of excitement. It’s the process, the step by step actions, which bring increased freedoms. It’s all been a big WOW!

And in the end, I KNOW it will be the journey that I look back on. When I am retired in Tuscany, Italy, I will reflect on what it took to get there. I will have a much deeper appreciation for what has been accomplished knowing what it took.

So for all the frustrations, barriers and challenges that I have encountered or will encounter along the way, I say thank you. The journey will be more exciting with you.

“Success is not a place at which one arrives but rather the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey.” – Alex Noble

I have a bias. I don’t really like TV.  I know, that’s almost un-American to admit that, but it’s true.  I do, however, sit down to watch something now and then.

Having my own home business actually allows me a lot of freedom in which I COULD watch TV.  But as I sat down today, I was reminded why I don’t like TV.  Some of the premium choices I was faced with included multiple news channels (do they ever report anything happy?), paid programming (huh? watching 30 minutes of commercial?), Snapped (a show about female murderers), Hawaii’s Best on a Budget (I figured this must be a comedy show since I have been to Hawaii), Cheaters (a show on infidelities), lots of music video channels, 8 stations with College Football, 6 stations with Golf, Martha’s Sewing Room (probably SHOULD watch this since a simple button is a challenge – hey – we all have our weaknesses), Drug Years (about the crack epidemic), the Stanley Cup Finals (which must have really ended about 6 months or so ago), and Star Trek II – Wrath of Khan (what are we really on, something like Star Trek LXXXVI?) So you see the dilemma.

So, I turned to one of my favorite pastimes – the internet.  I figured I could use something that might actually get my brain cells to do something, so I typed in achievement.  And lo and behold, there is a site called The Academy of Achievement.  http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/pagegen/index.html  Now we are getting somewhere.  I ALWAYS want to achieve something – this seemed like a great place to start.

There are names of people who I have never even heard of so obviously the TV hadn’t been teaching me anything. They even had a “Find a Mentor” section.  Hmmm…who would be my mentor?  Well, I was closely matched with 15 achievers.  In what can only be a twist of fate, Martha Stewart happens to be one of the fifteen.  But the list of mentors was impressive! Stephen Case (Founder of AOL), Michael Eisner (former head of Disney),  Jeffrey Bezos (founder of Amazon) and Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay) were some of the achievers who were tagged to be my future mentors. Geez, I am in good hands!

A quick peek of Pierre Omidyar’s profile reveals similar business start ups. “I started eBay as an experiment, as a side hobby basically, while I had my day job.” He and his wife Pamela have vowed to donate all but 1% of their wealth within 20 years.  Mind you they have already given 20 million dollars to Tufts University. Now this is a guy who’s about freedom.

So you see, my resolve to turn off the TV and be free of…garbage, has resulted in a new mentor. Sure beats sewing with Martha!