Hope to start the day

By Zig Ziglar

Have you ever asked yourself any of these questions?

How do I get myself motivated?

How do I keep myself motivated?

How do I get out of discouragement and despair?

How and where do I find hope?

It seems that no matter where I travel in the world, these are common questions. Everyone has faced difficult circumstances in their life. Everyone wants to know how to get up when they get knocked down.

Today I was reading The One Year Daily Insights written by Dad. I discovered a quote of his I did not remember and it gave me incredible hope.

Here it is:

“The God Who made you can make you over.” Zig Ziglar

Now, that is an overflowing bucket full of hope!

Think about the quote for a moment – to believe anything else is telling the Creator that He is not big enough to handle your problems.

If you are not happy with who you are and where you are right now in your life, that is OK. You are not done yet! You can do something right now to improve your life.

And if you are looking for hope, well, you are not on the journey of life alone. The Creator of hope wants to share.

You are Born To Win, so go ahead and Live To Win!

Tom Ziglar

P.S. Quote of the Day: “The God Who made you can make you over.” Zig Ziglar

13:25:00 - By Vincent 0

How to Be Grateful Every Single Day

BY Harleena Singh 

How can you be grateful every day? Do you find it easy to be grateful or express your gratitude? I think being grateful is an attitude that we need to cultivate daily.

You can learn to be grateful for just about anything that comes your way. Begin with the small things first, or things that happen every day that you appreciate.

Such things to be grateful for can be like waking up to a new day. Or being grateful for your health, kids, home, parents, job, phone, nature, birds, comfy bed, laughter, and having each other.

Being grateful helps us grow, evolve, and feel better. Even research reveals that gratitude improves well-being, mental and physical health, and helps you get on in life.

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” ~ Marcel Proust

Why Do We Need to Be Grateful and Give Thanks

We give thanks to acknowledge someone else’s goodness and express our gratefulness.

We thank others when they do good things for us, though even the bad ones teach us lessons in return.

Hey! It’s Thanksgiving! Just as the word indicates – “Thanksgiving” has two words, ‘thanks’ and ‘giving’, and that’s what we need to do – thank others and learn to be giving.

Thanksgiving is a time when family and friends gather together to enjoy. They share a meal, and take time to reflect on the things they are thankful for.

I love the spirit in which it is celebrated, and I wish all my friends who celebrate it – a very Happy Thanksgiving.

I personally like every day to be full of gratitude and giving. Not to mention that you need to instill gratitude in your kid’s too!

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” ~ William Arthur Ward

How to Be Grateful Daily

You too can cultivate the habit of gratitude every day by learning to be grateful, and make it a part of your daily life and routine.

Try the following ways:

1. Gratitude Journal

I know many of my friends keep a gratitude journal, though some write it daily, while others maintain a weekly one.

Just write down what you feel thankful for. Also, mention the benefits that come from writing things you appreciate. It’s kind of a visual reminder that you can reflect back on often.

Some of you might prefer writing a gratitude letter to a person. It might be to someone who has had a positive influence in your life, but whom you’ve not thanked properly.

2. Facing Problems

There are times when you come across problems or issues in your life. You need to re-frame them by keeping an affirmative attitude. Just remain grateful and positive even for such times.

Take such problems as challenges and opportunities to make you better. Don’t fear your failures; instead be grateful that you are given the chance to make them stepping stones to your success.

3. Remain Positive

Sometime you might tend to compare your life to others, and feel you aren’t lucky or you don’t have the LUCK factor in your life. You need to make positive comparisons instead.

Think about what you have in your life that others don’t have, and be grateful for those things.

4. Set Reminders

Initially, you would need small reminders to start cultivating an attitude of gratitude. Things like alarms in your phone, post-its on your mirror, or family and friends can remind you what is it that you want to be thankful for.

Learn to be grateful daily and make it part of your life.  You need to integrate it into your daily schedule till it becomes natural or second nature to you.

Besides these, just learn to relax and make your life easy. That’s because you cannot be grateful when you are angry, anxious, or frustrated. Love the life you live.

Take each day as it comes by living in the moment, without going back to your past or thinking about the future.

Be grateful for such life’s moments, and learn to treasure and value them because such moments will never return.

Value your relationships, and bring in more of affection, laughter, and joy into your daily lives. These are the things to be grateful for every single day.

“Let us rise up and be thankful; for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.” ~ Buddha

What Am I Grateful For

Ah…my list is quite endless though I will try to keep it short. When you want to be grateful, you can – for anything, whether it’s big or small, good or bad.

I am grateful to the Almighty for everything. I need to express my gratitude to my family and friends who have always been supportive and there for me – all the time.

Most of all for being healthy, having a roof over my head, and being financially stable. Besides, I remain grateful for having food to eat, and to be able to help others.

I am also grateful to everyone I’ve come across because I’ve learnt more about life and being a better person myself. And it’s often the rough or tough ones that teach you the best – isn’t it?

We tend to be grateful for things that make us feel good, but we need to also learn to be grateful for those that don’t.

So, I am also grateful for:

• Pain because that has taught me to love life more.
• People or things that hurt me because then I am able to learn more about patience, tolerance and compassion.
• Obstacles that come my way because they are opportunities for me to get better.
• People who make me angry because that gives me a chance to grow. I learn to accept others and myself better. It reminds me to find peace within myself. It also reminds me that I am the only one who can put out that anger, and I learn more about forgiving.
• Tears for they bring out my emotions. And when that part of me is touched, I evolve into a better person.

 “There is always, always, always something to be thankful for.” ~ Author Unknown

Grateful to ALL of YOU

With Thanksgiving just round the corner, it’s the perfect time to thank all of YOU for being a part of this blog.

I need to especially mention Holly Hanna of The Work At Home Woman for nominating my blog for the Fourth Annual, 50 Best Blogs by Women – 2012.

Being grateful everyday isn’t tough, but it requires effort on your part. If you learn to look at what you have in your life, instead of what you don’t, you will learn to be grateful and not complain.

“Be thankful for what you have and you will end up having more. But if you concentrate on what you don’t have, you’ll never, ever have enough.” ~ Oprah Winfrey

Over to you –

What are you grateful for? How do you express your gratitude? What suggestions would you give to be grateful every day? Share in the comments below.

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13:30:00 - By Vincent 0

THE SIMPLE JOYS ARE THE MOST MEANINGFUL

By Mark Manson

The cute Brazilian girl in the cell phone store looks up at me and sputters a series of syllables in my general direction. She’s been fiddling with my phone for 15 minutes now, the phone I just bought for twice as much as I would have paid in any other country. Now she can’t get it to work. Explanation is pending, at least until I decipher the Portuguese syllable soup she continues to vomit at me.

I’m frustrated, if you didn’t notice.

“Não entendo,” I reply, for probably the twelfth time. It means “I don’t understand.” One of the only Portuguese phrases I know.

The coy smile she had given me the first few times I said it are now replaced with an aching impatience. She frowns at me, then at the phone, and then sighs. She pulls out a Post-It note, scrawls some Portuguese on it, hands it to me along with my dysfunctional new phone and slowly instructs me to go to another store in the mall and have them deal with it. She has to repeat these instructions three times before I understand them. This is the fourth cell phone store I am being sent to. Apparently there are a lot of bureaucratic procedures involved with buying a cell phone in Brazil, the details of which are obviously sailing clear over my head. And since none of the store clerks speak English, they’ve all eventually reached a breaking point, lost patience and sent me down to the next store to be somebody else’s headache.

The entire process has taken close to three hours… and it’s still not over. The mall cell phone nightmare continues.

(Although to be honest, it should have only been about an hour-and-a-half, I fell asleep in the Claro store waiting for a customer service rep to call my number. I awoke 45 minutes later to find they had proceeded to half a dozen customers beyond me. I strained to convince the rep to take me next since I had been there an hour. But my Portuguese persuasion skills weren’t very effective… OK, since we’re being honest right now, they were non-existent. I couldn’t say a thing, and therefore I hardly raised a fuss. Thus I took a new number and sat my ass back down, this time forcing myself to remain awake for the ensuing 30 minutes I would wait… again.)

I never resolved my cell phone issue that day. I finally found an old man in the mall who spoke English and was kind enough to come translate for me — yes, I walked around a Brazilian mall randomly approaching people to find someone to translate for me. It turns out that Brazil requires an identification number to activate any cell phone bought within the country, the equivalent of having a Social Security Number in the US to buy a cell phone. There’s a formal process that’s required and if you’re a foreigner and don’t work for a Brazilian company, then you’re screwed (unless you can get a friend to come in and register your phone under their name). As is probably obvious, I did not have any Brazilian friends with me. So almost four hours after arriving, I left the mall, having paid too much for a phone I still couldn’t use.

…And then got lost going home.

This was my first day in Sao Paulo. And I would be lying if I said days like this were rare. They don’t happen that often, but with enough regularity that the seething frustration, the awkward self-consciousness, the mental exhaustion, and the unavoidable sense of isolation, they’ve all become familiar to me now.

Today, internet entrepreneurship is the latest rage. Attachment-free mobile living is the new dream. And you don’t have to look much further than the 4 Hour Work Week to see the romanticization of such a post-modern lifestyle.

But as with any lifestyle, there are strengths and weaknesses to it. It’s not all a bed of roses. You sacrifice some things to gain others. And don’t worry, I’m not here to complain about every trying moment I’ve come across in two-and-a-half years of traveling. There have been far, far, far more good days than bad. And I would not take back a single life decision I’ve made.

But I do want to paint a realistic picture of what this lifestyle entails, the highs with the lows. And posit that perhaps the biggest difference between this lifestyle and a conventional one, is simply that the highs are higher and the lows lower, thus reorienting what one values spending their time on.

Because this is what you don’t hear, and that Tim Ferriss would never tell you: that day after the Brazilian cell phone debacle, after finally finding my way back to my hotel at dusk, I went and sat in my room by myself. Without TV. Without Wifi. No movies. No friends (not like I’d be able to call them anyway). Nothing to do. I went home and laid in bed for most of the evening. Physically and mentally drained and miserable.

And alone.

There’s nothing new about a bad day. We all have them. And we all have our own strategies to unravel our negative emotions. Sometimes we call up a friend and unload on them, perhaps over beers. Or we call up mom or dad and look for a little reassurance. Maybe we put on a movie with our significant other and just forget about everything for a few hours. Or maybe we hit the gym or take it out on a basketball court.

But life on the road, it’s quite often that you don’t have any friends to have beers with, you can’t call a parent and lean on them for some support, you don’t have a movie to watch or someone to curl up with, no gym membership, no basketball court. Often you have to take the brunt of your emotions alone, with nothing to distract you from them.

And it’s hard. But it makes you stronger, more mentally resilient, more centered. When you do eventually bounce back, life feels much lighter. And those joyous experiences you feel in contrast to the dark and lonely ones become that much better. In fact, I’ve found that the stark contrast between highs and lows has actually begun to redefine what those joyous moments are.

Some of my happiest memories from last year were going out and just having beers with some friends. Nothing more, nothing less. Something which I did weekly for years and years prior to this new lifestyle and that was always available to me.

It’s a bizarrely paradoxical effect on one’s emotional life: the extreme highs and novelty of experience render certain “exciting” activities to feel meaningless, and the extreme lows of isolation and frustration make many “normal” activities feel exciting and fulfilling. A Fourth of July parade looks a lot different after you’ve been to Carnaval in Brazil (twice) and stayed up three days straight partying in Ibiza. And I’ll give you a hint: it becomes really boring.

A road trip to the beach back home seems silly in comparison to living on the beach in Thailand, or taking surfing lessons in the swells of Bali. In many ways, you become jaded to your former life.

But on the other hand, the dark times of loneliness, depression, frustration, and isolation make other routine daily events of life — events which you and everyone else take for granted — that much better and more significant.

Last year, I got terribly sick in a rural town in India — possibly the last place on earth you would want to be sick. I had a scorching fever, cold chills and a headache that jackhammered the inside of my skull. I ran out of potable water at about 10PM, and the only stores in town had closed down for the night. I laid in bed through the entire night, unable to sleep due to fever and sweats. No medicine. Dehydrated and incredibly thirsty. And just to make things more interesting, a few hundred bugs swarmed into the room and were now crawling and buzzing around the walls, and occasionally on me.

Mom’s Christmas dinner tastes a lot better after an experience like that.

Which I guess is what the paradox resolves into: a devaluing of superficial pleasures and a greater appreciation for simple, authentic ones. I don’t really enjoy the presents at Christmas anymore, the fireworks at fourth of July, or even the parties on New Year’s Eve. I’ve seen bigger parties, been to more beautiful places, and already own everything I’ll ever want in this life. But unlike before, I appreciate every day spent with those who mean a lot to me. A quiet beer on a patio. Watching a basketball game together. Going to a birthday party or a barbecue. These are the events I look forward to now and get excited about, days and weeks ahead of time… And that’s probably the way it should be.

12:28:00 - By Vincent 0