The following blog post is an excerpt from my book, Circuit Train Your Brain, in honor of National Chocolate Day. Fernando Pessoa was on to something. Scientifically proven to elevate your mood, chocolate is a fantastic treat that boosts your brain power and may protect your heart health. I am not talking about milk chocolate or white chocolate (which, as any pedant—like me—can tell you, technically isn’t chocolate). While I will have a square of milk chocolate occasionally, the true…..
Clarity about money attracts wealth. One of the central skills essential to having an abundant life is financial literacy. There are many practical reasons for this: investing, budgeting and managing a household or business rely on understanding how to allocate money for different costs. However, wealth is at once beyond and related to everyday expenses. I include this post because it’s common for many creators (artists, writers, consultants or other expertise-based types) to under-represent their skills and to ask too…..
I wonder how many people reading this watched the original television series MacGyver when it originally aired? Aside from being Selma and Patty Bouvier’s celluloid object of desire and the inspiration for SNL’s Will Forte creation MacGruber, this TV character is that rare proper noun that has been “verbed.” To MacGyver something is to bootstrap and/or apply a life hack that transforms something from nothing to save the day. If you are starting anything from scratch, be it a business,…..
Do you believe in luck? According to Joyce Carol Oates, “The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.” Lots of folks who haven’t achieved the success they say they hope to achieve blame their situation on luck. They ascribe their circumstances to “bad luck” and dismiss the success of others as “good luck.” This attitude keeps them from reaching their full potential. As long as you are in any way guilty of blaming someone else for a situation in your own…..
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Your ability to let go determines your level of success. Whether positioned as an ability to deal with flux or operate within the theoretical, the essential element that successful, independent people share is an ability to suspend their need to control situations or outcomes and to trust in the process. Almost every time I think of the phrase “let go,” I am reminded of the whale scene from the Pixar…..
Even if you are not particularly religious or attend a church, you are probably familiar with the scripture, ‘seek and ye shall find.’ What if you don’t know what you seek? Would you recognize the answer? From early childhood, I have been driven by the need to know the mysteries of the universe. Dogmatic conversations of a definitive truth aside, my specific religious teachings from childhood left me with the assumption that upon death, one would be privy to the…..
“How much longer will you go on letting your energy sleep? How much longer are you going to stay oblivious of the immensity of yourself?” — Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh The significance of this quote and its meaning really hit me between the eyes when I first read it. There are a couple of societal programming factors that contribute to my specific reaction: First of all, I was raised to feel as if “tooting my own horn” was boastful. Delivering results,…..
I am one of the few people who actually reads the dictionary for fun. To celebrate National Dictionary Day, I am sharing with you a childhood memory. Pictured above is the dictionary my grandmother gave me for my eleventh birthday. I’ve made reference in other posts that as a result of spending a lot of time in hospitals as a child, I learned how to read by age three. My grandmother was a driving force behind that. She and I…..
How do you express love? Emotions about love and partnerships (or absence of them) occupy the thought clouds of most people for much of our time. After most of us have spent over an entire year spent either alone or in a pandemic bubble limited to very few people, those thoughts can bounce around your head to the point of distortion. It can be difficult to sift out what’s real and which thoughts are skewed through the lens of a…..
Pictured above is the V-Tech “laptop” that my oldest daughter used to bring with her when she’d join me at the newspaper while I was working on deadline. Trips to newspaper offices were part of her entire life, almost from the moment she was born. I pursued a journalism degree at a community college, beginning when she was four months old. My first role at the college newspaper was as a features writer. Two semesters later, I would serve as…..