A Few Years Ago
Many years ago, maybe more, a few years after I was in college anyways, I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in about 5 years. I had met him when I was in high school, knew who he was but never got to know personally till my summer before college started. I remember that it was right around the time I had read the book called Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.
Cybernetics
This 1960’s classic had at the time, a large impact on my life and even before college started I was earning some pretty good money, well more than I’ve ever had up to that time. It gave me perspective and at the time I was able to easily convey and teach some of the principals in the book. This individual didn’t know I had learned most of this from a book but I did talk about the concepts in it and after five years after I spent time with him, he told me how what I talked about had changed his life. He said he changed his life around, got focused, got rid of some of the demons that held him back, things were going good, and now had a chance to thank me. There was one problem…. Ah… what did I tell him five years ago? Even as I write I’m not sure. But I’m sure it was along the lines of that there are always going to be things that no matter how much influence you might have you have, you really have no control over.
Letting Go
Now this certainly sounds defeating, but what he then told me is that once he knew he had no control he learned to let it go. He learned to control his stress. He didn’t get mad at things. He made a conscience decision to ENJOY life, and at the time he was happy, optimistic about his future, and looked forward to tackling anything that got in his way. I eventually fell into back into the trap of the 40-40 plan (40 hours a week for 40 years), and commenced to go to college. I was re-conditioned to what we are taught where getting a good education, then job, would make us happy. I later found I would like to learn the lesson back from him but I haven’t seen him in 30 years. I suspect he took what he had learned from me and took action. If I only would have…
Today
Fast forward to today, now even though he was just one person I knew those many years ago, we had made differences in each others lives. His experience with me at the time, to me, was inconsequential. He was just another person I met, spent a little time with, and we then went our own ways. I really have no idea whatever became of him, nor me to him. Back in those days we where limited by the number of people we could meet. Of course this is much more in a larger city than a rural city but you were limited by the physical ability to personally meet. Enter the age of the internet. We are going to have the possibility of not only meeting people from our own local locations but globally as well. You have the ability to meet new people who you can influence with your knowledge and experience and likewise with theirs.
Questions
So the only questions are how many new people are you going to meet online? How many are you going to influence? How many are going to influence you? Are you going to share something life changing with them? Who’s the next consequential meeting going to be with? What is the message you want to share?
I’m going through a list of things that will help make your life less stressful. By New Year’s Evening you should be prepared to have a much more relaxed and successful 2010. So let’s get started. You know the old cartoons that depict good and evil standing on your shoulder having a conversation with your conscience? I have a third entity that hides behind my head and coaches one of those. He is known as Mr. Procrastinator. You can only guess which one he is helping. He is making sure that you can find all 101 reasons not to finish something you start. Yes Mr. Procrastination is robbing you of your sense of accomplishment, your success, and giving you lots of unneeded stress!
