We found it, and last week, we signed the lease. We are remodeling and moving in over the next six weeks.

We’ve been planning to move christinesbooks.net from our home to a commercial bricks and mortar operation for years. The most perplexing question we had was:

How do we find the best possible location at a price that will allow us to grow?

The problems we faced:

High Taxes

Several years ago, we almost opened a traditional retail book store, and we wrote this post on negotiating rent. We never signed the lease. The rent was right, but the taxes were too high. In Minnesota, retail tax rates are out of control. In our case the taxes were 4x the rent. High tax rates keep small family owned business like ours out of the prime locations. The problem is, no one in government seems to care. When I recently mentioned the problem to a government official, she replied, “If you can’t afford the taxes, you can’t afford to be in business.”

How we solved this problem:

We decided against renting traditional retail space, in high rent areas (for now). Even in a recession, when the landlords reduce rent to attract tenants, the government doesn’t budge on taxes. The only viable solution for us was to rent a location zoned showroom/industrial where the taxes are 1/3rd of traditional retail.

Over Leveraged Commercial Property Owners

During the real estate boom, investors bought up properties under the false assumption that real estate couldn’t drop in value. Many made these investments using unsecured debt. During our search we found several owners sitting on vacant properties, but unwilling to negotiate a reasonable price.

In one instance, the owner had purchased an entire corner of a busy intersection. It included four buildings which all sat vacant. When we investigated, we learned that the owner had purchased the property at the peak of the boom planning to flip it to a national retailer. When the economy went sour, so did his plan. Christine and I and others tried to make an offer that would generate income for both us and the owner, but were flatly refused. Being over leveraged gave the owner no room to negotiate when tough times hit. I wish him the best, but the properties are still sitting vacant today.

How we solved this problem:

We had to be patient and keep looking. We sought veteran landlords who are likely to own the property outright, who have been through economic downturns and understand the current conditions, who have seen successful startups rise from the depths of a recession, and who understand the power of building long term business relationships.

Cities Are Bulldozing Low Rent Areas

In recent years, affordable commercial property became harder to find. Cities like to pick off older low-rent properties with eminent domain, bulldoze it, and replace it with new high rent/high tax property. It is another case of shortsighted greed. To grow, our economy needs low tax/low rent commercial property to serve as incubators for bootstrapping entrepreneurs.

How we solved this problem:

Persistence. After a while, we didn’t bother looking at the new developments, and focused our search on older areas. And the recession helped. While in recent years we’ve watched old retail and industrial parks knocked down and replaced, right now, there is almost zero commercial development.

Last Minute Lease Changes

For whatever reason, be it mistakes, disorganization, or outright chicanery, the lease terms you verbally agreed upon are different the day you sit down at the table, ready to sign. My father-in-law, who has negotiated dozens of commercial leases over his lifetime warned me about this. It is standard procedure - expect it. These last minute changes are NEVER in your favor.

How we solved this problem:

Don’t sign the lease. Walk away and keep looking. Think about it. Imagine, at closing you said, “I looked the lease over, and I made a mistake, it’s more money than I can afford,  and much of the square footage isn’t useful, so I adjusted the rates down 20 percent, and I need you to cover the utilities, so I wrote up a new lease for you to sign today.”

Leasing Agents Didn’t Help

I talked to at least a dozen of them. Some of them were great… others… not so much. But none of them represented us. They each offered a few properties out of hundreds of possibilities. Some gave us bad information, but mostly they gave us incomplete information.

How we solved this problem:

We had to do the search ourselves. We found property on Craigslist and other websites. The property we eventually rented was a property I drive by every day but I didn’t bother calling. I thought it was out of my price range based on information leasing agents had given me. One day, I decided to call, and the leasing agents were wrong, we could get 3000+ sq ft, at a price we could afford. Never quit searching and never accept the word of experts without finding out for yourself.

Keeping Costs Down

In business you need to make more money than you spend. If you can’t do that, you don’t have a viable business. And if you need a bricks and mortar location for your business, rent/mortgages can wipe you out.

But keep in mind it has to be a win-win for you and the property owner and finding the right location is going to take time. We have been passively looking for years, and actively searching for over nine months. When I first started calling leasing agents, I didn’t think this was possible. For a comparable space, agents were asking for 2-4x the rate we eventually negotiated.

It isn’t trendy, or hip, or pretty, or posh. But it’s functional and affordable

And we’re cleaning it up

We are going to remodel, knock down some walls, put in a new floor, and paint.

And it’s a great spot for a 4 year old to ride his bike.

Don’t miss a post, Subscribe Now!

The above is called self-will run riot and it is a sure recipe for failure.

But you’ve had the opposite experience too, haven’t you? You’ve had moments in business, or golf, or parenting, or marriage, when everything is perfect, the zen moment. It’s almost like the universe is running everything perfectly and you are just observing it in all its perfection. In these moments, you are experiencing something very close to the truth about reality.

What I’m describing here are two polar extremes. Most of us live somewhere in between.

On one side we have the misguided idea that we can CREATE BY FORCE, but clearly we can see in our own lives, that attempting to create our future by force results in the exact opposite, destruction and failure.

Why do we believe this nonsense about force?
Answer: We live in a culture where we are taught from our earliest days that problems are solved by the application of force. Popular culture action heroes and athletes delude us into thinking we can create a better world via physical strength, will power, and force.

But it is a lie. Force is only justified when someone else has initiated force against us, and even then it isn’t creative. It can only attempt to end the destruction so the natural state of creation can begin anew.

In truth, creation is a process you set in motion, but you can’t control. It’s like a magnificent story that unfolds before your eyes. You focus your thoughts and your actions on your goal and you seek acceptance voluntarily. Creation is the act of allowing. Acceptance and allowing require love and patience. They require humbling yourself to the immense creative power of the universe. It requires “getting over yourself” while simultaneously knowing “the only thing you control is yourself.” All the rest of creation happens on it’s own.

Most small businesses fail becuase they can’t handle debt, get buried by rent, or get pushed into risky decisions by impatient investors.

I’ve seen a lot of business fail taking the “Big Bang” approach to small business start up. They put together a fancy business plan and they execute it perfectly. They take out a bunch of SBA loans, have trendy digs, hire talented people with a proven record, maybe even build a building or two. Sometimes this approach works, with dramatic success, but more often than not, it fails.

The problems are:

1. They never tested the market, so when the sales don’t materialize immediately, they are under capitalized, and go bankrupt in a few years.
2. They spent too much on fluff. In the quest to look professional or hip, they overspend.
3. Instead of adding employees once demand is established, they add them before the first dollar is earned, banking on potential sales to pay the wages, and burn through too much capital too quickly.

Making mistakes is the secret to learning. You learn what you need to know about business through your pain and failures. Organic bootstrapping allows you to learn as you go without going broke, the “big bang” approach does not.

Christine and I are pushing hard this summer to grow Christine’s Books. We’re moving her store out of our house.

It needs to move because:

It’s taking over the kids play areas

And is creeping into every other area of the house

To expand, we need employees, and our house wouldn’t be a good place for others to work.

In 2003 when she first started selling books on the internet, she invested $500.00 in inventory, and kept it on a 6 ft table. By 2004 we had run out of space in our house, and bought a new house that was triple the size. That gave us five more years. Now we plan to lease a showroom and warehouse space that is as big as our entire house. We are hoping that will last 3-5 years and allow us to quadruple sales and add several jobs to the local economy.

While looking for the right location, I’ve had the chance to meet a few entrepreneurs who have grown the same way we have, by organic bootstrapping. Roger at Business Systems International sells refurbished phones. He started in his garage and now owns multiple commercial properties, and has branched out into the software business. Opportunity begets opportunity and success begets success. Roger said, “Every time I moved to a larger location my revenues doubled.”

I talked with Brian at Sunlite Windows and Doors and he had a similar story. He started in his garage, then built a bigger garage with the profits, then leased a shop and warehouse. He said, “When we rented our first shop, I said, we’ll never use all this space. Three years later it was time to move. Now I have triple the space and we own 50% of the window market in this area.”

If you are interested in how small businesses start and grow organically, you’ll be interested in the coming series of posts.

Next post: we’ll talk about finding the right location at the right price.

The idea that living dangerously enhances life is a conundrum that rolls around in my head frequently.

I understand AppliePieMom’s point that simply taking a few economic risks isn’t the same fighting in a war zone. No doubt. The difference is one of degree. Are you risking your life, your job, your money, your marriage, your freedom, your health, or your reputation? We clearly put different values on each of these things.

But that doesn’t get at the fundamental question…

Is Living Dangerously and Risk Taking Critical to Your Happiness and Success?

It is to me, but it is nuanced and complex.

Almost everything worth doing is risky.

I was driving down the freeway and my son yelled, “Dad the speed limit is 70 and you’re going 78. The policeman is going to take you to jail.”

I thought about it a minute and I said this to my son…

“First, no one is going to take me to jail. If I get caught I’ll have to pay fine. Second do you notice how everyone else is going even faster? If I drive slower we will be in more danger than if I keep up with the flow of traffic.

One of the most important things to learn about life isn’t to obey all the rules. It’s to learn the rules, know when you’re breaking them, and what the consequences are if you get caught.”

Risk taking and danger doesn’t always involve breaking the rules, but more often than not it does.

The need for risk and challenge can manifest itself  in harmless ways…

When a golfer first plays a clean round of golf, they can find it isn’t what they thought it’d be. They thought it’d be exhilarating but instead it was boring. Why? It is more interesting to get yourself into a mess and get yourself out than it is to execute near perfection.

Or manifest itself in incredibly destructive ways…

Claude Steiner writes about this in The Games Alcoholics Play. He states alcoholics and addicts don’t find “normal” life interesting. They are caught in an destructive obsessive form of risk taking, consistently digging themselves into a hole and recovering. This is why they are more likely to relapse when life is going well than when they are having problems. They crave not only alcohol but the risk that goes with it.

Some people climb mountains, others jump from airplanes, and some put their life savings down on a startup. These activities make them feel alive.

What do you think? Is living dangerously critical to your hapiness and success?

For me it is. Too much safety and comfort bore me and lead to apathy. But there are a couple of caveats…

• The risk must be calculated and intelligent, not a blind gamble or reckless endangerment.
• The likely result of my risk taking should be constructive and positive.

ApplePieMom shares her experience as the mother of a 26 year old soldier on the ground in Afghanistan.

Today I have one to add to his list.

Respect can be achieved through the purchase and acquisition of status symbols.

Let me explain.

I work with a guy who has two teenage boys in a large suburban public high school. Parking in the school lot is by permit only and costs $180.00 per year.

However, students can park in the lot across street for free but few do.

Why?

Student culture has labeled the free lot the “loser” lot.

I would think that the intelligent kids, the entrepreneurial kids, and the healthy kids, would park in the free lot. It’s good exercise to walk a hundred yards more to school and you’ll save almost $200 a year. Why would you throw your money away?

Simple, kids believe having a parking permit makes them a ‘winner.’ Why? They, or more importantly, their parents, can afford to throw money away on a piece of paper. Only ‘losers’ can’t or won’t spend money on a piece of paper that gives them membership in a herd. The parking permit isn’t a parking permit at all, it is a social status symbol and a subtle symbol of conformity.

When I was 18 I made a decision. I decided I never wanted to be under financial stress. I have lived that decision my entire adult life and have never experienced financial stress. How did I do it? I saved 50% of my take home income without exception. I’ve had months I’ve made $100, and other months I’ve made $100,000. But regardless, I still saved 50% of my income. My income has fluctuated but my saving percentage hasn’t. This has enabled me to purchase several business and a large ranch without incurring debt. I hear people say ‘I couldn’t possibly live on 50% of my income.’ Oh! baloney, you choose not to. Sure it’s harder once you have a 400K mortgage and kids in private colleges, but you decided to live that way. You don’t need to live that way. And if you had decided when you were younger to live differently, you could have your 400K home and private college today without a dollar of debt.

I’m not trying to preach. I don’t save 50%. But I know everything this man said is true. I could have saved more, and if I had, I’d be much better off today.

I’m aiming the following list at the 18-25 audience. Why? Most older people are already working like slaves to pay off debt and can’t imagine living on 50% of take home. A huge percentage of people are living paycheck to paycheck by 30 with college loans, cars, credit cards, and mortgages. Once you’ve accumulated your debt, living on 50% will become impossible due to the choices you made earlier and your financial stress may never subside. Creating financial freedom starts young, requires disciple, and must become a habit.

Here are some ideas you could use to help you save 50% when you are just starting out in life:

(Keep in mind that these lifestyle sacrifices would be temporary - delayed gratification)

1. Live in a small apartment with roommates
2. Avoid buying a car. Cars are money pits. If you must purchase one, buy a cheap used car with cash. Never buy a car on credit
3. Don’t indulge fashion trends. Instead wear practical durable inexpensive clothing. If your friends say you look like a dork, find new friends
4. Avoid high-maintenance boyfriends/girlfriends
5. Avoid expensive vacations. Instead make them local and cheap. Maybe go camping or biking.
6. Don’t eat out
7. Warning - this one is blasphemy - Avoid student loans. Pay cash (Community College) or learn free on the internet
8. Don’t upgrade your home, your car, your education, or your clothes until you can pay cash

You may not want to live this way, but you certainly could live this way, if you chose to.

Most people say they can’t live on 50% of their take home. When in reality, they mean they won’t live on 50% of their income because they aren’t willing to make the trade offs. Or maybe they don’t think the trade offs are worth it.

I genuinely want to discuss this with you. Is saving 50% reasonable? I don’t know if it is. That depends on who you are, right? But for many people it is possible. What would happen if your income was cut 50% right now? Would you go bankrupt? Would you die? Would it destroy your marriage? Or could you survive for years?

Today’s post was inspired by Episode 63 of The Focus Society of Overachievers podcast.

After my mother-in-law watched our interview with Jonathan Fields on Career Renegades she mentioned to Christine, “I wish Steve wouldn’t talk like he was this regular ordinary guy. Why does he do that? We know that he isn’t ordinary at all.”

Let me explain why I describe my past that way.

For the first 30 years of my life I viewed myself this way:

I grew up in an ordinary family, in an ordinary middle-American city. My dad had an ordinary job. Just like every other boy I knew, I did shitty in school and I hated it. I was told by authorities that I’d never amount to anything, that I’d be lucky to get a job that could pay the bills, and that my generation was the first generation who would have it worse than their parents. I worked jobs I hated so I could come home, sit on the couch, drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and watch TV. I wasted my weekends watching televised sports. I was in debt and I couldn’t see myself getting out.

I was told that without a higher education I would never amount to anything. I saw myself as working class. I accepted the social sorting our schools and institutions had applied to me. I became what I believed I was. I felt like I was an ordinary working class guy and that’s all I would ever be.

I felt guilty when I wanted more. I should be happy, right? At least I had a job. I had a cracker box to live in. I had a wife who loved me unconditionally. I had so much food I was getting fat. When I’d dream for more, I’d hear a demon in my head shouting “What do you want more for? You ungrateful little bastard, you’ve got everything you need. Quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

Was I ordinary? Yes, I was ordinary because I thought I was ordinary. Who am I to presume I am extraordinary?

If you listen to the news and the lessons taught in our schools you’ll hear the same message again and again. Ordinary people are helpless victims.

Do you want to know the truth?

It’s a lie. There are no ordinary people. You are all extraordinary. You are all gifted creators. Everyone of you has amazing things to offer.

I’m a slow learner. It took me almost 30 years to learn this.

It is my story and I am compelled to share it with you in the hope that it won’t take you 30 years to figure this out.

I was what I thought I was. And now I am what I think I am. And that’s what you are too.

We talk mostly about Christine’s home based business, Christine’s Books and we also talk about entrepreneurship, family life, social media, and the current economy.

We’re grateful for the opportunity to talk with Jonathan, a published author who has interviewed web superstars like Gary Vaynerchuk.

Here’s the interview:

As some of you know, I grew up in the Red River Valley where the flood of the century is happening. Three of my brothers are still there.

My brother, Paul is a photographer and hasn’t had time to document as much of this historic event as he would like. He has been sandbagging for days on end.

He posted some pictures of the area where he was volunteering today:

The family who owns this house is winning the battle for now. What you can’t see in this picture is the makeshift sandbag dikes which run for miles and miles on each side of the river. What these folks have done is absolutely amazing. I was told that if the average citizen hadn’t volunteered to save this city, 80% of the city would be underwater right now.

They have 18 inches of snow on the ground and are praying for cold weather so it doesn’t melt. Another blizzard is on the way early next week and that’s better than rain.

What you aren’t hearing in the media As Bob Collins is reporting at MPR, these makeshift dikes leak and need to be manned 24/7 with pumps. As the water leaks in they pump it back out.

To win this battle they are going to have to keep this up for another week.

The city has built contingency dikes outside the the dikes pictured above.

The National Guard patrols the streets, but looting and anarchy aren’t a problem. These people have come together as a community to fight for their property and their lives. You can’t imagine how miserable these conditions are, how hopeless the national weather service told them it was, and they refuse to quit. There’s no whining and no complaining, only smiles and a little gallows humor. No one knows if they will win, history will be written after the snow melts and the floodwaters subside. And still, able bodied men and women are going door to door offering their help to anyone who needs it. The biggest problem is - too many volunteers.

If you’d like to see more photos from Paul E Olson’s coverage of the Fargo Moorhead flood of 2009, visit his website.

He’s taking a walk downtown this evening to capture more scenes, and if they have a story to tell, you’ll see them here.

I saw this news clip earlier today, and the impact of it didn’t hit until now…

You can’t get ahead by hanging on. Clinging to where you are or what you had will never lead to growth, it leads to a slow painful death.

If you want to grow, you need to have faith, you have to let go and trust the bottom won’t kill you, that maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll bounce when you hit.

It’s the same reason drunks have the uncanny knack for surviving car accidents… they are relaxed at impact while sober people tighten up trying to avoid the inevitable and their own desire to survive helps kill them.

It’s like the football team playing the prevent. They aren’t playing to win, they are playing not to lose. The greatest comebacks in history were made against teams that had given up on playing to win and decided to try not to lose.

Clinging to what you have is an act of desperation. It isn’t creative, it isn’t helpful, and you won’t like the results.

The secret to creative growth is the opposite of clinging, it is the act of letting go.

• Illustrate a root cause of procrastination
• Show a simple way to improve your emotional state
• Stress the importance of action, regardless of inspiration

This post doesn’t address all the complexities involved in procrastination, but it does get to the root of one major cause.

Tell me if this story sounds familiar to you:

You need to work on a project. It could be any project, for school, for a customer, for an employer, for your spouse, or for yourself. Maybe it’s new software, a blog post, negotiating a lease, developing a brand, or getting in shape.

Your logical mind knows the project is within your abilities, that working on the project will be interesting and rewarding, and that you’ll find satisfaction upon completing your project.

But knowing the above doesn’t matter—you procrastinate anyway.

Why do you procrastinate even when you know taking action will be rewarding?

You have an emotional hang-up. It feels like a tightness in your chest—like a cross between fear and guilt. It’s an emotional dam in your creative stream. You want to bust that dam and get the stream flowing before you act.

So you tell yourself, “I don’t feel like doing this right now.” You aren’t lying to yourself—you feel sick about it, so you blow it off until you feel better. You find a distraction that gives you immediate relief, a video game, a night out, food, television, surfing nonsense on the internet, or even drugs and alcohol.

You’re hoped “a little fun” will make you feel better so you can get motivated. But now you’ve taken a night off, and when you face your project, that same ugly feeling returns, only more intense this time, and you escape into another distraction.

But you remember working on projects in the past, and it wasn’t bad. In reality, working on the project made you feel great. So why don’t you do it?

It comes from years of mental programming. As a child you started saying “I don’t feel like it” to your parents, other kids, and your teachers.

You’ve made it a habit to avoid things you don’t feel like doing.

You came to believe you had to feel a certain way in order to take action. Somehow your learning process was interrupted. You began to look for stuff “you felt like doing” and did only that.

But you got it wrong. You judged the worthiness of an activity based on the feelings you had before you acted. Emotional health is developed by acting and thinking in a way that is likely to result in a positive emotional state despite your feelings at the moment.

How you feel right now doesn’t matter. If you want to feel happy and free…

All that matters is the likely result of the next action you take.

I am not asking, “Is it likely to make you feel good for the next five minutes?”

I am asking, “Is the next action you take likely to result in confidence, pride, esteem, and happiness in the long term?”

Live in the now. It is the only place you can live. But use your thoughts and actions to build a better tomorrow. You were born to create tomorrow. Don’t leave it to chance.

One more time…

If you feel unmotivated and uninspired, act anyway. Get moving and motivation and inspiration will follow.

Did you know most people never do this? If you ask the average person what they want from life, they can’t tell you anything specific. You can’t have everything, so you need to make a decision. If you don’t, others will make the decision for you. Don’t hunker down and wait for life to come to you.

Engage life and decide what you want to do with it!

Be specific. Don’t say…

• I want to be “happy and rich”

It’s too vague. “Happy and rich” isn’t a destination or a goal. It’s too abstract and subjective. Instead say…

• I want to lose 40 lbs and save $100,000 in cash

But it doesn’t have to be about health or money. Your goal could be anything specific. It could be…

• I want to build a 300 HP, 225 MPH, V-8, P-51 replica kit plane

Now that’s specific!

Be realistic. What does realistic mean? It means something different to each one of us. For me, becoming an NHL All-Star isn’t realistic. I don’t have the natural talent and I’m too old. But for you it could be realistic. Only you know for sure. The best way to know if your goal is realistic is to ask yourself “Do I really believe this is possible for me?” If you can honestly say yes, then it is realistic. I’m not talking about delusional thinking here. I’m talking about BELIEVING NOT WISHING you can accomplish your goal. Don’t lie to yourself.

2. Decide what you are willing to give to reach your goal.

Deciding on a specific goal is only the first step. Next, you need to give value in return. You can’t get something for nothing, even stealing requires some effort.

Examples:

• If you want to lose 40lbs, you might need to spend more time in the gym and spend more money on healthy foods.
• If you want to save $100,000, you may need to give more attention to the people you serve in business, your customers or your employer. You may need to spend time acquiring specialized knowledge so you can give more value to your customers.
• If you want to build a 300 HP, 225 MPH, V-8, P-51 replica kit plane, you may need to volunteer your time and services to help someone else build a kit plane first, that way you can learn the specialized skills required.

Often it isn’t only what you need to give, it is also what you need to give up.

Examples:

• If you want to lose 40lbs, you may need to give up soda pop, sweets, and lazy evenings on the couch.
• If you want to save $100,000, you may need to give up expensive vacations, a big house, or a new car.
• If you want to build a 300 HP, 225 MPH, V-8, P-51 replica kit plane, you
  may need to give up watching football and NASCAR on the weekend.

Once you know what you need to give (and give up), be willing to make the sacrifice. Everything has an opportunity cost.

3. Develop a plan.

Planning is essential to reaching your goal. Goal setting without planning is like trying to reach a destination without directions - you’ll end up someplace you didn’t intend to be. Your plan doesn’t need to be perfect, it doesn’t need to be the most efficient (although it helps), but it does need to layout specific actions and steps toward your destination. Your plan also needs to be flexible. You will meet unexpected obstacles along your journey, you will find flaws in your plan, so you will need to alter your plan.

4. Set a date you plan to reach your goal.

Someone once said goals are dreams with a deadline. That’s partially true. But I don’t like the word ‘deadline’, I like ‘target date’ instead. It’s flexible. A target date makes your goal and plan real. Leaving your goals open ended leaves no sense of urgency for action. Open ended goals are rarely achieved.

You need a target date, but things do change. I’ve worked in software for over 10 years and I’ve rarely hit a target perfectly. Sometimes they move in but more often they move out. Expecting to hit your date every time is like expecting to put every golf shot in the hole. You need to aim for the hole, but you’ll rarely hit it, so when you miss, you asses the distance to the hole - the obstacles and hazards, shoot again, and repeat until you sink the shot. Do not quit simply because you didn’t meet your first date, reorganize, set a new date, and keep going.

5. Put steps 1 - 4 in writing.

It is essential to write everything down. Writing them down shows commitment. Don’t use a computer. I prefer to write my goals by hand with a pen and paper and carry them everywhere I go. It has more psychological power when you see your goals in your own handwriting. Hand written goals have an almost magical property. When I reflect back I realize the 90% of the goals I have written down I have achieved.

6. Read your written statement aloud at least twice a day.

People have a hard time with this one. I did too. As a kid, I watched Al Franken as Stuart Smalley stand in front of the mirror and say, “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!” To me reading goals aloud always felt a little… well… weird.

When you make a mistake, have you ever blurted out, “I’m so stupid” or when frustrated, “this is never going to work?” That’s called negative self-talk, and most of us do it habitually. And unlike positive self-talk, negative self-talk is socially acceptable. For some of us, negative self-talk is all we say about ourselves out loud.

If you have the same hang ups I had, you need to get over it. You need to learn to talk about your goals and your dreams aloud, both when other people are present and when you are alone. If you still can’t talk about your goals with yourself, get a personal coach, have regular meetings, and go over your goals aloud.

Why is this important?

Reading your goals aloud several times daily will program your subconscious mind to act on your goals and plans. When you make a habit of reading your goals aloud daily it becomes nearly impossible to procrastinate. Your subconscious mind will begin handing you new ideas and fine details and it will nag you when you’re lazy, if you you follow this step habitually.

7. Take action toward your goals every day.

Persistent action is critical. Every day make a habit of taking action. Dreams are not realized sitting around imagining the future, dreams are realized by taking planned calculated action. Massive action yields massive results, tiny action yields tiny results, no action yields no results.

Remember you don’t have to get it right, you just need to get going!

Hat Tip to Dr. Scott McLeod and his outstanding education blog Dangerously Irrelevant. I wish him much success is his effort to revolutionize education.

There’s a lot of us that got absolutely shredded by the current school system. End it, please!

Sometimes people rob us. Sometimes bad stuff happens to us, sometimes to people we love.  But wallowing in resentment and self-pity is self-destructive, and vengeance and violence create more injustice. The only good answer is… deal with it (however you must) and move on.

We’ve become a society of whiners who panic at the slightest setbacks. Things are happening right now that may change that mindset for many generations. One of the best things that came out of the Great Depression were ethical business leaders who were grateful for the opportunity to add value to the world.

Today, too many people are focused on what they can get, not what they can give.

I was talking to my father last night. He grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota during the Great Depression. He said many times during the 1930s his family went months on less than 25 cents. Roosevelt sent agents out to slaughter their cattle without compensation (the government wanted to reduce the supply of cattle to increase prices - it didn’t work). Eventually the government took their farm because they couldn’t pay their taxes.

Many years before the government killed my Grandfather’s livestock and stole his farm, he was drafted into the First World War and gassed on the battlefield. He survived, but it almost killed him. His lungs were reduced to 50% capacity and all his teeth fell out. He had recurring bouts of illness over decades where he spent months in the hospital while my Grandmother ran the farm and raised four boys.

You know what? They lived to be over 90 and I never once heard them complain about how hard they had it. In fact, they thought that life was amazing.

I recall my Grandmother’s first airline flight and how she couldn’t stop talking about how amazing it was.

When we open our eyes, we see that life is truly amazing, how blessed we are, and that happiness is a choice.

This video brings that message home:

I found this video via Mark J. Perry who publishes the economics blog CARPE DIEM. I love economics. But what I love most about Mark J. Perry’s blog is how he consistently finds economic news that is POSITIVE. Thanks for the good news Mark!

There are times in life where we get ‘wake up calls’ to the harsh reality of what is out there and realise we need to make changes to our current situation. Whether it is the death of someone close to you or seeing other people make something of their lives, until these happen we don’t notice we’ve probably been doing nothing productive with our time.

I’m a big believer in the concept of making the most of what we have, so today I wanted to share six truths about life that should hopefully help inspire and motivate you to make a difference. Some of these may help you a lot, some…not so much .Either way, I hope you get something out of this that inspires you to make a difference and apply change to your life where necessary.

1. This is Life

Quite possibly the most obvious but most eye-opening advice I can ever offer people is the statement: this is life. We may have more than one shot, but nobody knows that for certain so we have to make the most of what we have. This is it. Right now. This is life. More likely than not you will never get this opportunity again.

Let go of all the grudges you hold against others, make sure all the people that are important in your life know how you feel, and don’t waste another minute complaining about something petty. Could you honestly say that if you knew you were dying tomorrow you’ve made the most of the opportunity you have?

If not (which I’m sure applies to most people), then look at areas that instantly popped into your mind when asking yourself that question. What is holding you back?

2. Happiness isn’t Found in Possessions

Some of you may agree with me on this, some may disagree. For those that disagree, would you still be happy through your possessions if nobody else in the world ever knew about them? We can be fooled into thinking that possessions bring happiness due to the Ego boost or feelings of self-esteem we get from new purchases.

It was when I first heard this concept that I started to look to see if it was true. It was a few days before Christmas and I thought “No way! Possessions (games consoles in this case) can make us happy”. Yes, they can…for a limited amount of time if anything at all. True happiness is found in freeing yourself in life, going for the things you want and not letting others hold you back.

3. Caring What People Think will Hurt You More Than any Benefit

Even writing out that title I’m thinking “What are the benefits of caring about what people think of us?” Of course, when I say this I’m not suggesting you should go out, beat people up and break into shops. No, I’m referring to the judgements of others and the way we worry about how people will react to our decisions, our goals or even the way we dress.

If you spend your life worrying about what people think of you, you’re never going to find your true self. Your actions will be largely dictated on your assumptions of the opinions of others. Recently, when I showed my ~20 year old malefriends about my blog, I really thought they were going to judge me, and think “Why are you writing all this self help rubbish?”. Well, guess what? They actually loved what I have to write and fully support what I do.

Of course, not everyone will think like that, but if I had of worried from the start I would have never started my website in the first place, and I wouldn’t be writing this article today. What other people say about you is none of your business. Internalise that.

4. To Get Over Fears, Face Them

Fears come in many forms, but it’s rarely the fears of our current situation that bother us. When we fear things the most we fear the future, instead of focusing on the present moment. I’m sure some of you can relate to being nervous about driving when you first started to learn, but do any feelings of anxiety even cross your mind now that you drove so often? Probably not.

One of my biggest fears has always been public speaking, I can be very social but it was only until I knew a person that I started to show my real self. Despite having this fear, I decided to join a local speakers club and actually had my first speech yesterday.

My finishing line went something like this: “I’ve always been afraid of public speaking. However, I want to be the kind of person that fears public speaking, then signs up to a club and goes and speaks“. What about you?

5. Tomorrow May Not Come

With each day, my aim is to have been as productive as the one before. There are my off days where I take time out, relax, go out with friends, but on a usual Monday to Friday I always want to be as effective and efficient as possible. With each day I want to be proud of my accomplishments, I want the people around me to know how much they mean to me and I want to accept my mistakes and let go of any negative feelings.

People make mistakes, all of us do. Don’t waste your time worrying about what has happened. If you can take action then do so, otherwise just let go. Accept all that is, having things on your mind is going to stress you out more than the actual problem itself. As I demonstrated in point 3, worrying isn’t even worth it most of the time, things don’t turn out how we expect.

6. Only You Can Make These Happen

Hopefully some of the points here have motivated you somewhat to look at your life and see if you are on the ‘right’ path. If so then excellent. There’s just one more thing you need to know: only you can take action and make things happen. Friends can encourage you, your family can push you out there to do things, but at the end of the day, it’s up to you to make changes into habits, then habits into your lifestyle.

The support of others, the words in this post, your own beliefs…they are all great, they’ll help you get to a certain position. But ultimately it is you that has to look at your own situation, work out whether this is the life you want to live or whether you need to make some changes. If you do see that changes are necessary, go make them, show others what is possible rather than needing them to show you.

Thanks to Steve for the opportunity to post here.

Glen Allsopp moved to South Africa at the age of 18 where he didn’t know one single person. In that time he started a blog on Personal Development, and now aims to help people live the life they want to live.

Marc Andreessen is brilliant in this interview with Charlie Rose about the future of business.

• The future will bring more opportunity than ever
• How business will evolve over the next decade
• Why hyper-connected kids will build a smarter society
• How video games are making the life better
• How to fix the banking crisis

I share my favorite content on twitter. Follow me on twitter.

I also discuss and share my favorite content on friendfeed. Follow me on friendfeed.

What you really are, can’t be classified by anyone but you. Your social status is a mental abstraction. It may be collective, but it is still an abstraction.

When you were in high school, you weren’t a jock, a burnout, a punker, a wannabe, a jell, a freak, a geek, a nerd, a preppie, a brain, or any other classification.

Social sorting happens early and often in our government schools. They were designed as a factory sorting system using scientific management. While the people have changed and the cosmetics have changed the base system is no different. It starts with the first pre-K screening and never ends. My file was paper and is probably long gone (I’ve asked for it and they can’t find it), but today the labels assigned to you will stick in a computer forever. The problem with this system is breaking free from the labels that bind you. The place you break free is in your own mind.

I find forms that ask for race particularly offensive. I usually check “other” and write in “human.” That really pisses off bureaucrats. They think I’m being a smart ass when I am being honest.

You aren’t what someone names you. You aren’t what you’ve done. You aren’t a diagnosis or a disease or a disorder. You aren’t how much money you have. You aren’t your test scores or your wins and losses. You are what you choose to do next.

Safety watches re-runs. Risk writes the next smash hit.

Calculated risk turns mediocrity into excellence.

Life reminds me of crossing the Missippippi headwaters on stepping stones when I was a kid.

First you must decide to get to the other side.

Then you size up the risk. How far is it? Can you make the leaps? Are the rocks slippery? What’s the worst case scenario? Do you know how to swim? If you fall, do you get wet or do you drown?

You make the first first leap. You land safely. The water’s rushing by. You make a few more leaps. You’re halfway there. The next leap is much farther than it looked from the shore and the rock you need to land on is covered in slime. The water is deeper than you realized. You look back at where you came from. You look forward again. You focus. You find faith. You leap. Your foot lands on target, but slides out from under you and you fall backward into the water. You grasp at a boulder and catch a ridge in you finger tips and crawl back onto the rock. With bruised pride, dripping wet, you look back again, you look forward, you find that same faith, and make the same leap again. This time your foot sticks. From here the rest of the leaps are easy. You stand on the other shore, knowing you’ve accomplished something difficult looking for the next challenge.

Andy Liu inspired this post today.

Life is so much more refreshing and invigorating when there is risk involved.

Hop over and read his post.

Great leaders face down our enemies and attack them relentlessly.

What enemies I am writing of?

The enemies of all mankind, fear and resentment.

Fear and resentment are the only things that stand between us and a better tomorrow. Sure our problems are complex, but we will overcome our obstacles only after we face our fears and let go of our resentments.

There is nothing more dangerous than a “leader” who uses fear and resentment to get what he wants. Great things happen when people act with passion, vision, and courage. Destruction happens when people act in fear and anger.

The first measure of great leadership is courage. However, having courage oneself isn’t enough. A leader, after all, is only one person. A leader can accomplish nothing without many people willing to act. So a great leader must have the ability to instill courage in others.

As you listen to leaders around the world speak about our current situation, do they have vision, passion, and do they inspire courageous action? There is a leadership vacuum just waiting to be filled, isn’t there? Who is going to step up?

Can you imagine what a great leader might say right now?

We are at a crossroad, one way is the path of fear the other is the path of courage. Which way will we go?

Christine’s Books is proud to announce our weekly Twitter giveaway.

If you don’t know what Twitter is or how it works, learn about Twitter here, then join twitter and follow @christinesbooks here.

Every Tuesday is Personal Development Tuesday at Christine’s Books where we will give away a book from our Personal Development/Self-Help library. (If it goes well we may add more! We’re thinking about Fitness Fridays and maybe more!)

Here’s how it works:

• Follow Christine’s Books on Twitter.
• Every Tuesday we will send out a tweet in the morning that reads, “Personal Development Tuesday @christinesbooks, RT to enter to win a free copy of selected PD books <link here>”
• Retweet the above tweet to enter. If you don’t know what retweeting is, it’s simple, you can learn about retweeting here.
• Around 10 PM Central Time each Tuesday we will select a random retweeter as our winner. We will send a tweet naming the winning retweeter.
• The winner can select one book from the list of books below. We will ship the one selected book, free of all charges to any location worldwide.

The books we are offering this Personal Development Tuesday — 2-10-09 are:

40 Days to Personal Revolution: A Breakthrough Program to Radically Change Your Body and Awaken the Sacred Within Your Soul Baron Baptiste
Fireside 2004-01-06 074322759X / 9780743227599 First Edition Hardcover New Hardcover
In 40 Days to Personal Revolution, Baron Baptiste — one of the world’s most beloved master yoga teachers — inspires us to transform more than body and mind: He gives us the tools we need to set ourselves free to live the healthful life we’ve always imagined. In the next 40 days you will create a whole new way of being and living. Tapping ancient wisdom and his own personal experience, Baron has created a relevant and completely practical program that will lead you to the clarity of mind, body, and spirit that awaits on the other side of your revolution.

Soul to Soul: Communications from the Heart Gary Zukav
Free Press 2007-10-23 0743237005 / 9780743237000 First Edition Hardcover New Hardcover
With the publication of his revolutionary work The Seat of the Soul, Zukav emerged as an important leader in the world of spiritual development, and it became one of the all-time successful books of its kind. Each of Zukav’s subsequent books, all of them bestsellers in their own right, has explored different aspects of that seminal work, offering detailed explanations and practical applications of his original vision.Soul to Soul represents a giant step forward in the expression of his work, providing penetrating insights that illuminate our lives. It is divided into two sections. Part One, “Soul Subjects,” consists of fifty brief, perceptive, and compelling chapters that encourage us to examine our own experiences in new and perhaps life-changing ways. Part Two, “Soul Questions,” is different from anything Zukav has written before. Combining profound spiritual and psychological insights, Zukav answers nearly one hundred important questions about life. Each chapter ends with a challenge to readers to experiment with the insight that has been given and make it their own.

Trust Your Gut: How the Power of Intuition Can Grow Your Business Lynn A. Robinson
Kaplan Business 2006-10-31 1419584405 / 9781419584404 Hardcover New Hardcover
In businesses big and small, making decisions comes with the territory. But how do you routinely make decisions that enhance, not diminish, the bottom line? According to major thought leaders like the authors of Blink, Megatrends and Winning, “intuition” is the answer. But those books are all about the “what” of intuition. In Trust Your Gut and Grow Your Business: How to Listen to Your Inner CEO, business consultant Lynn Robinson gives us the “how” part of accessing this incredibly valuable inner resource to make quicker, stronger, better decisions on a regular basis. Offering the same strategies that Robinson’s Fortune 500 and small business clients call upon, Trust Your Gut and Grow Your Business teaches those looking to succeed how to make winning decisions about their work, business and life through the following techniques: -Why enthusiasm is a message from your intuition that can help you nail the sale. (Hint: It’s not as obvious as you think!)-The five questions to ask your intuition when you’re making a decision.-The 90-second activity you must do every day to achieve your goals easily and effortlessly.-How to motivate prospects to take action.-How to recognize the “power hunches” that will direct you to success and add to your bottom line.

Addicted to Hurry (Spiritual Strategies for slowing down) Kirk Byron Jones
Judson Press 2003 0739439499 / 9780739439494 Hardcover New Hardcover
Book Club Edition — Author Kirk Byron Jones has written a much-needed resource that debunks the “need for speed” mentality that so many people have embraced as a part of their everyday lives. This book goes beyond social and psychological analysis to include spiritual perspectives on the dangers of letting hurry become a chronic condition. Jones presents a well developed three-pronged response to the problem of addiction to hurry. Included in each chapter are helpful questions that allow readers to identify their current pace of life and assist them in cultivating their own sacred, savoring pace. Addicted to Hurry is ideal for anyone desiring to lead a more calm and satisfying life and a great gift for those who seem to be burning out from the frantic pace at work or at home.

The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything Stephen M.R. Covey; Foreword-Stephen R. Covey; Contributor-Rebecca R. Merrill
Free Press 2006-10-17 074329730X / 9780743297301 First Edition Hardcover Used: Like New Hardcover
From Stephen R. Covey’s eldest son comes a revolutionary new path towards productivity and satisfaction. Trust, says Stephen M.R. Covey, is the very basis of the new global economy, and he shows how trust—and the speed at which it is established with clients, employees and constituents—is the essential ingredient for any high–performance, successful organization.For business leaders and public figures in any arena, The Speed of Trust offers an unprecedented and eminently practical look at exactly how trust functions in our every transaction and relationship—from the most personal to the broadest, most indirect interaction—and how to establish trust immediately so that you and your organization can forego the time–killing, bureaucratic check–and–balance processes so often deployed in lieu of actual trust.

You’ve heard “buy low, sell high,” right? Sounds easy enough, but how do you do it? Most people buy high and sell low.

This is why the rich are rich and most of us aren’t.

The rich…

Sell when everyone else is buying. Buy when everyone else is selling. Save when everyone else is spending. Spend when everyone else is saving.

I just met an entrepreneur who positioned himself perfectly for this economy. He said,

“This is great, I just bought a 2.5 million dollar building for 800K. I
hired a dozen unemployed construction workers off craigslist to gut it
and remodel it. I just hired 5 .NET developers for half the price I
would have paid last year.”

What will you do next time? Mark my words, this will all happen again.

That’s how you build wealth. It’s simple, but most people won’t do it. The social pressure to spend when the Jones’ are spending is too great. Most people can’t bear to show up at hockey practice in an old mini-van, when everyone else has a shiny new Denali.

Then when the bust happens, they are broke and paralyzed by fear of unemployment and they miss out on the cheapest prices in a decade.

My neighbors are doing a major remodeling project right now. As I write this, I am looking out the window, and there are four pickups parked outside and even more men inside working. So in this economy, how can they afford it? I don’t know, but I can guess they saved during the boom and they are now paying half the price they would have paid two years ago.

Booms and busts are as certain as night and day. They are the natural cycle of economic life. Trying to rid the economy of booms and busts is like trying to rid the world of night and day.

This is simple if you build self-discipline and refuse to be herded into the latest stampede.

2006 was the top of the last boom. Most people I knew were buying new cars, buying new homes, remodeling, and spending like the good times would never end. About that time I had a conversation with a real estate agent about investment properties that went like this…

“Sooner or later the price of homes will drop.”

“It isn’t going to happen. It hasn’t happened since the 1930s.”

“Doesn’t mean it can’t happen again.”

“It’s happened in a few localized markets, but not one like ours.”

“What goes up, must come down. The higher it goes the farther it has to fall.”

“Unemployment would have to skyrocket and I can’t see that happening, not now. They are projecting a million more people in the metro area in the next 10 years.”

“Hmm, so buy now, it’s only going up?”

“If you buy this house (600K), it’ll be worth 30K more by the time you close. You can’t lose. You don’t want to get left out. Don’t leave money on the table.”

“I’ll pass.”

The words “you can’t lose” were the trigger.

You see, if I had done what I knew was right, I would have sold him my home and rented an apartment.  I didn’t sell because it would have been too disruptive to my family and Christine’s business. In retrospect I
should have, I would have made a pile of dough, and right now I’d be buying the 600K house for 300K.

But no matter what you do, you can lose, and you should be willing to accept responsibility for your loss. Take calculated risks, not blind gambles. Responsibility for the results of your actions, good or bad, is the foundation of freedom.

Sometimes I ask, “What am I going to do?” But I wonder if that’s the right question. Maybe it is “What do I need to stop doing?”

You can’t focus on everything that has potential. If you try, you’ll spread yourself too thin and you’ll get nowhere. So maybe it’s another way of saying, “Indecisiveness/procrastination is a major problem for most of us.”

We all choose something to do, but most of us choose what is easy, what is comfortable, what is known, what we feel is predictable, and what we were taught to do in school. But it’s a trap, isn’t it? As many of you are finding out right now, what you thought was safe and predictable, isn’t. The go to school> get good grades> get a cushy cubicle job path is as risky as any other path.

That’s the silver lining in a bad economy, it educates us about what is important, it shows us new opportunities, and it forces us to grow. Some of you may not want to hear this right now, but we need recessions in the same way we need forest fires. They are as natural as birth and death, necessary parts of growth and regeneration.

Christine was at our accountant’s office last week getting our business taxes done, when the subject of the economy came up.

Our accountant said he lost his job in a bad recession and he couldn’t find a new one. He was forced to start his own accounting firm from home. It was difficult, but he eventually grew into an office space and hired employees. He said losing his job was the best thing that ever happened to him.

His son went through the same thing during the dot com bubble. He lost a 40K per year job, and couldn’t find another. He eventually gave up on the idea of ever having a job, and instead went freelance. Today he owns his own company and makes 300K a year.

A friend’s father was an engineer and lost his job during a long ago recession. He had three kids at home, a house payment, and a wife who didn’t work. He couldn’t find a job, so he started freelancing and grew his practice into to a respected local engineering firm that lasted decades.

Not one of these success stories is internet related. Two of them happened before the personal computer had been invented. Today, with the internet and social media, your opportunities are exponentially greater than ever before.

So what are you going to do with all your opportunities?

I’ve been to the edge, and there I stood and looked down. I lost a lot friends there baby, I got no time to mess around - Van Halen - 1978

I’m going to give you another glimpse into my soul.

As I’ve written before, there are at least a dozen experiences that should have killed me. Today I’m going to share one.

(FYI, I began writing this a couple of weeks ago)

This has been one of the coldest weeks in 20 years. And here in Minnesota it gets really frickin’ cold. This morning it was -26 F and it’s been below zero every morning for about a week. Life is difficult when it’s this cold. Things break, cars don’t start, the roads are hell, and traffic comes to a stop. Whenever you go outside you’re weighed down with heavy clothing, mittens, boots, hats. Everything takes longer and requires more energy. The cold aggravates Christine’s arthritis. A week or more of this stuff drains you.

But I’m grateful for the cold, and the colder it gets the more grateful I become. Let me explain with a flashback.

21 years ago, in January of 1988, we were just coming to the end of a frigid Minnesota cold snap. It had been -20 for days.

Let me set the scene, it’s 2 AM, the moon is full, and let’s just say, for the sake of brevity, that I was driving a car that didn’t belong to me down this road…

I probably had an Old Milwaukee longneck between my knees, a Marlboro in my mouth, and Kill ‘em All blasting on the tape deck. I had a beautiful 16yo girl riding shotgun and I was doing over 100 MPH. Well, I can’t be sure because the digital speedometer blinked as I accelerated past 85. She had her feet up on the dashboard, painting her toenails, uninterested, as if she rode with psychotic juvenile delinquents everyday.

In an instant, I felt a sense that I had lost control. I don’t know what happened. The next few seconds are gone from my memory. I probably hit some ice or a pothole and lost control of the car.

The next thing I remember, I was upside down, the roof crushed. I squeezed out of the shattered window, and looked at the car. It was flipped, headlights beaming into darkness, taillights glowing red against the ice of the Minnesota River.

This is near where we landed.

Shit, I was on a river! Where was Shannon? I ran to the other side of the car shouting, “Shannon! Shannon!” I got down on my knees and peered through the slit that used to be a window. She shook and cried in terror as I helped her crawl from the wreck.

We couldn’t find her shoes, so there she stood on the ice, bare feet, in -20, a mile from the nearest traveled road. I was a selfish arrogant SOB back then, some people said I was black inside, that all the lights were out, many had given up hope, but I must of had some soul left, because I took off my shoes and gave them to Shannon. We left the car upside down on the ice, and climbed the 30 foot embankment back to the road.

The cold tasted like steel as the moon lit up the snow. Shannon whimpered as we walked. I told her we were going to make it because we had no other choice.

My memory of us walking down that empty road, her in my big floppy shoes, and me in my stocking feet, plays like a black comedy.

I never recalled the actual accident itself, even in the moment immediately after the crash. I know neither of us had seat belts on. We sailed off the embankment right between to ancient cottonwood trees. If we would have hit one of those, we would have been hamburger.

The part that really gets me is… not 200 yards from where landed, this power plant dumps hot water into the river…

And the river was open… as it was today…

When we got back to safety, Shannon’s mom picked her up. I expected anger, screaming, hatred, maybe violence. I’ll never forget her mother’s reaction when she saw me, because it surprised me so. She hugged me and kissed me with tears in her eyes, and said, “I’m so grateful you two are okay.”

I still wonder what happened in that instant. I can’t remember. My mind conjures up ideas like…

Was it just dumb luck? Why was I so lucky? I have two friends lying side by side in a nursing home room, vegetables, from a similar accident. Other friends are six-feet under because they caught a bullet being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Maybe God stopped time, and this wasn’t how it was supposed to end. Maybe he guided the car with a giant ghost like hand, between the trees and set it gently on the ice.

Or maybe, the moment hasn’t ended, and I am still in that moment and the life that could have been is flashing before my eyes, like some real life replay of An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge and at any moment I am going to wake up, with the crash of the car smashing through the ice, and the 33 degree water filling my lungs.

But I don’t believe any of that. They’re just crazy thoughts. The fact is, I don’t know what happened or why we lived.

I can’t even explain why I didn’t get frostbite. I walked two miles in stocking feet that night. When a man finally picked us up hitchhiking, my feet felt like stumps, but I still have my toes.

But I do know that that ice wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been -20 for a week. So today, when it gets that cold, I don’t bitch. I thank God for it.

And when I commute past that powerplant everyday.

I’m reminded to be grateful for every moment, for the gifts I’ve been given, and to give back more than I take.

If you can’t get up again — or you’re dead — you’re done.

I’m not done yet - Daniel Brenton

******

I will not die! - Dereck Coatney

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post I’d appreciate it if you’d share it on StumbleUpon or bookmark it on delicious. Don’t miss anything, subscribe to this blog.

Thunderbirds DVD Set auction on ebay

I am a late bloomer.

I don’t feel particularly old, but I must acknowledge that I was born in the second half of the Twentieth Century — with a little room to spare. And I must confess it has taken me more years than I’d care to admit for me embrace the idea I had abilities that could free me from a life of the mundane, and give me a life of excellence.

We all do, of course. Some of us are born knowing who they are or what they have, but most of us have to put in the work to find these things.

My mother, I think, somehow knew, perhaps instinctively, what my unique abilities would be. Early on she began to encourage me in the creative arts — specifically, drawing, music, and writing. With what was clearly far too much coaching on her part, I won an essay contest in second grade, and — without her help at all — wound up being on the staff of my junior high school’s literary magazine.

At the age of fifteen I was sitting at my parents dining room table one weekend afternoon and I was scribbling up some notes for what looked like something that could turn into a pretty extensive story. At that moment the idea hit me that I could actually write a novel, an idea that was followed shortly afterward by the concept that I could become a successful novelist.

Over the years I dabbled in writing fiction and collected a slowly growing stack of rejection slips for short stories I had submitted to magazines. Finally, frustrated that the doors to the publishing industry seemed to be welded shut specifically against me, I gave up.

Have you ever heard the expression “jumped the shark?” I only first heard it a few months ago and, because of the internet, I was able to find out what it meant almost instantly. “Jumping the shark” is the moment in a television series when you know it’s pretty much lost any spark it once had, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s sent off to the great rerun network in the sky.

The phrase itself comes from a Happy Days episode in the fifth season, where Henry Winkler’s character Fonzie, in a demonstration of bravery, has challenged an opponent to literally make a water ski jump over an enclosure where a shark has been captured. He does, of course, while wearing his trademark leather jacket.

Color us all surprised that he succeeds.

Even though the show went on to produce 100 more episodes, this was the moment it started the downhill slide.

Just as I grasped this concept, a thought popped into my head: when did my life “jump the shark?”

(Talk about our harshest critics …)

There have been, unfortunately, a number of events in my life where, in the immediate aftermath, I thought it had jumped the shark. When I bungled the relationship with my first real love. When I went though a grievious financial setback about a decade ago. When my wife had discovered lump in her breast. (Fortunately, this last item reversed itself fairly quickly when the lump turned out to be benign.)

I’d have to count, as another of those moments, that period in my life where I pushed aside my dream of becoming a successful novelist.

However, the desire didn’t want to cooperate. It was still in there. Dreams like these don’t go away — we do something with them or we are forced to deny a part of who we are. And if we do deny it, a little piece of us slowly dies inside.

Fast forward to the early 1990s. My life-long friend Dave (David S.) Michaels, best friend from that junior high I mentioned above, broke one of those periodic hiatuses in our relationship and contacted me. He was interested in writing a screenplay based on a short story I had written while I was with that junior high literary magazine staff.

The story was built around the Moon Race, and Dave had his memory of my story erupt into the forefront of his mind as the result of a chance encounter.

Dave is a professional numismatist, and during a break at an auction at Sotheby’s in New York City, he stumbled upon another, almost surreal auction in the basement of the same building. Pieces of actual Soviet space program hardware were being auctioned off by the cash-strapped Russian government. Dave and I had both been following the revelations in the wake of the fall of the USSR on the true nature of the Soviet manned Moon program — the existence of which they denied as soon as the Moon Race was lost to them. Having authentic Soviet-era spacesuits, spacecraft close enough to touch — and having on hand the living, breathing cosmonaut Alexi Leonov, the first man to walk in space, no less — transformed the sketchy little story I had penned so long ago into something as tangible as the Cold War vehicles and equipment surrounding him.

Working with the title Red Moon, we first developed a screen treatment … that didn’t go anywhere. Then, with Dave taking the lead, came the novel, which wound up being a print on demand item created by Dave’s agent for the purpose of marketing it to a real publisher.

Despite glowing responses, nearly forty publishers passed on it. The doors to the publishing industry, alas, were still welded shut. After this limited edition of Red Moon went out of print, my life again felt a little like it was sailing over that shark enclosure.

Usually when a television show starts its downhill slide, there’s no turning back. With a person, thankfully, it’s different. Unlike a television show, human beings, when they fall on their faces, have the ability to pick themselves up.

For a human being, the moment we’ve “jumped the shark” is the moment we’ve chosen to give up, and not one moment before.

Oddly enough, shortly after I’d heard the phrase “jump the shark,” I recognized that if I didn’t tell my stories before I died that they would die with me.

I had been blogging for a while, but when I heard this, I became more determined to make a name for myself.

Writers write.

This, actually, could be the end of my message, but as it happened, a few months later an opportunity fell into Dave’s lap for a second shot at success with Red Moon. There has now been a second edition, and better, a third edition is now waiting in the wings that will actually go into brick-and-mortar store distribution.

It’s a humble start, sharing a byline on a small-time novel that still hasn’t made any real money, but it’s a start.

Did I manifest this?

If we buy the premise of the Law of Attraction, I must have.

* * *

Professional speaking coach Darren LaCroix burst on to the speaking scene back in 2001 when he made the point that when you fall on your face, if you have fallen forward — you’ve still made progress.

If you can’t get up again — or you’re dead — you’re done.

I’m not done yet.

If you can read this, you’re not done yet either.

Get busy.

* * *

Daniel Brenton is the author/publisher of The Meaning of Existence (and all that): The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Spirituality, a sometimes tongue-in-cheek weblog that focuses on practical spirituality, on finding underlying purpose in our lives, and on the tremendous value of the practice of gratitude.

He openly admits that he is not a psychologist, a minister, a chaplain, or a lettered Philosopher; and he concedes that does he does not even play any of these on television. He does cite a number of life-changing events that have pointed him at the profound value to be found in both the personal search for meaning and the practice of gratitude.

Daniel is also the co-author of Red Moon, a space race thriller about a Soviet spacecraft found after half a century that holds the darkest secret of the Moon Race and, possibly, the hope of all humanity. More about Red Moon at Luna15.com.