Your profitable quote: Og Mandino on the urgency of now

"Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find 'tomorrow' on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, ''If I had my life to live over again.''

Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again."

-- Og Mandino

Your profitable quote: Bob Parsons on focus

"Take things a day at a time. No matter how difficult your situation is, you can get through it if you don’t look too far into the future, and focus on the present moment. You can get through anything one day at a time."

-- Bob Parsons (founder of GoDaddy.com)

Who built the gondola? (About Persistance)

“Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”
- Barack Obama

If I were to believe the popular media, I could understand why people see success as something one is "born to achieve", something magical and automatic. It's like if all you needed to do to conquer a mountain, was to step aboard a gondola for a ride to the summit, taking you there directly, comfortably, with no hint of blood, sweat or tears. Step right up, buy your winning lotto ticket, and dare to dream!

But who built that gondola in the first place?

Read the accounts of anyone who sets off to conquer a real mountain, like Mount Everest. To reach the top, you must make your way to a Base Camp, the first of several stops on your trip. At Base, you take the time to adjust to the altitude and the conditions. Then you set off to the next camp, from where you perform day hikes to train and to get familiar with the terrain, always coming back to the camp at night. Sometimes a team member has to return to a lower camp, whether for altitude sickness, frostbite, weather or one of many other medical or logistical issues. It is only when conditions are right, and that you have successfully reached the highest camp, that you can then aim for the summit.

You create results in your Big Project in a similar way. You build to a certain level of results, where you level off to give yourself the opportunity to regain your strength and your reserves, and reinforce your systems, standards and boundaries. It is only then where you make a push for the next level of performance. Sometimes circumstances force you to revert to a lower camp, because you run out of energy or resources or the conditions are not sufficient to progress forward. Sometimes on your trek to the next level you realize you face a big chasm or a dead-end, and you have to abandon the path and return to the previous camp. And sometimes the summit can seem so close, but you still need to abandon progress, come back to base, and postpone your dreams for another year or another decade. Such is life.

Beware of Cinderella stories, of success won quickly without any setbacks. Because an effortless win, without pain, or tears, or moments that provoke weak knees or tight stomachs, is a win that cannot last. There is no glory in failure, but there is no shame in it either, because failure does not exist unless we give it permission to paralyze or demoralize us.

The real lessons of life are understood when you develop the clarity, commitment, confidence and courage to overcome setbacks and transform your passion into something that makes a permanent and positive difference around you.

Persevere. The adventure is lived not at the destination, but in the journey.

On Resolutions and Resolve - Make Today A Model Day

Make this first day of the New Year a model for the kind of day that you want for each of the next 365.

I know that there are some things on my "To Get Started On" list that I have been delaying and delaying for several weeks, telling myself that I will get to it in the New Year. Well, the day has arrived, the excuse ship has departed.

Today, right now, I resolve to adopt three daily practices of personal transformation:

1. Let go of something - What is a habit, a situation, a task, promise or commitment, or even a relationship, that is not serving you? That is preventing you from expressing your full potential? Every minute that you tolerate something that is holding you back, you are paying a price, that of not living your full potential. So whether it is something simple such as tossing that unopened junk mail sitting on the side of your desk (okay, it's now done!) or something big like closing down a project that is going nowhere, do it now. You now have made space for the next step.

2. Transform something else - What is a something that could be improved? Many times what is holding us back is that our tools, systems or habits are not quite serving us. What action can you take today to improve your surroundings or your systems so that they work better? For me today it is finishing a writing draft that I started a few days ago but never finished, and getting it out the door, hence this blog post.

3. Adopt something new - This is the fun part for me, because I'm a forward-looking kind o' guy. What is a new habit, situation, tool or project you can adopt that will help you to move forward, faster? For me today the new practice I adopted this morning is do to my pushups and abs exercises as soon as I get out of bed (my goal is 100 pushups and the equivalent in abs exercises)

By adopting these three principles and making small adjustments each day, big changes can occur over time.

Why is this important?

I love the feeling when I go to bed at night and I know I have played to the limit, leaving all of my energy and my efforts, all that I had to give, on the playing field of life. That I did all I could do, no excuses, no regrets. That I've taken a step further along the path of "Creating the change I wish to see in the world".

Resolve to make this year the best. It may sound corny, but I mean it. All those great promises one makes to oneself, especially near the end of the year, well now is the time to live up to them. Create a physical, spiritual, mental and emotional environment that supports you to perform at your best.

The media are doing a great job at pushing people into an emotional depression. What the world needs more than ever right now are role models of people acting with purpose. You and I need to look forward, think and act big, to be irrationally and foolishly optimistic, for beyond that glass half full there is a whole ocean waiting to be explored!

May your 2009 be full of great adventures and challenges, heartache and happiness, humor and sadness, disappointments and accomplishments, and above all, growth towards your full potential, towards Who You Really Are. For you are the sum of your experiences, so resolve to make those experiences as real and as fulfilling as humanly possible. There is a message to be heard and a lesson to be learned from every one of those 86400 seconds we receive each day.

I look forward to supporting you on your journey to greatness, as you support me on mine.

Bonne année mes amis! Happy New Year, my friends!

A thought about intention

"It's not what's happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it's your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you're going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny."
- Tony Robbins

Each dream I dream, each vision I envision, each goal I set, is a challenge to the present moment, because I want to change or create something that does not exist in my experience up until now. The inertia of this change combined with the friction of the past creates a formidable opposing force, like Newton's laws of motion.

Success therefore becomes a choice, either to react or to respond to this force .

If I dedicate my energies to avoiding the loss of what I currently am experiencing, my game becomes "play not to lose": a sucker's bet that is always a loss. Fighting to get rid of what I do not like or what I do not want, is to create even more of the same. The "playing not to lose" strategy consumes me as I fight the growing friction, trying to overcome the inertia, exhausting me in the struggle. Reacting is playing right into the heart of Newton's laws.

The inspired choice is to meet the challenge of the present moment, to let go of the past and make a successful leap into the future, responding to the opportunity instead of reacting to it.

Instead of taking my bearings by referring to my past or my present, I draw a bead on what I want, aiming for a point on the other side of the chasm between the present and the future. This focus becomes a "glorious obsession," a constructive response, energizing me to align myself to whom I want to become.

So I am preparing my momentum, bracing myself on the mass that is my past, and I push off, running, faster, faster, using this present moment as traction ... and I leap off the cliff, sailing high, carried by my momentum ...

My past does not define my future. I am more than the sum of my training, my experiences, my diplomas, my resumé, my ancestors, my genetics. What all of this past is good for, is to serve as a springboard towards my transformation.

The moment I become conscious of my present reality, and that I accept this as it is, without fault or blame, I am finally free to leap towards the future that I really want.