@Randem

I just read this post at StrongLifts.com, linking to a video of Jamie Gallentine’s recovery after a massive spinal injury. Mehdi (the author) asks readers what they would do if they had suffered the same punch in the face.

I’m reminded of the book Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. The book’s recurring theme is simply that people are only successful when they refuse to accept failure. All of the most successful people have faced huge setbacks, but instead of accepting failure as their lot in life, they pushed on.

There are equally inspiring recovery stories in the NFL — one of my favorite topics. When you see a guy like Willis McGahee getting his knee destroyed, it’s easy to say, “well that’s it… he’s done,” but anyone who watched him run this season with the Ravens knows that he was far from finished. Some might say that any recovery is great, and that returning to NFL level is an astounding achievement. I disagree. I say that the achievement is just par for the course — typical of the kind of drive and commitment that made him a candidate for the NFL in the first place.

Vince Lombardi get’s the credit for saying, “winners never quit, and quitters never win.” But the idea has been known by successful people throughout history. Michael Jordan had more missed baskets than most players. Brett Favre holds a record for interceptions thrown. Thomas Edison had 1000 light bulbs that didn’t work.

Are you a winner? Or have you already given up?

I’ve been truly inspired recently by the events that have transpired for a coworker. (I’ve chosen not to mention names or link to pages, in case there’s anything he doesn’t want to be public yet.) The excitement and the passion that this guy brought to the workplace are what really convinced me to take this job, and it has been the most exciting and most rewarding job so far in my career.

He was already a senior manager at an international corporation before he was 30 years old, and this wasn’t his first prestigious job title. By many people’s standards, he’s already a winner. But instead of resting on his laurels, this guy still wanted more. He invested every spare moment into another project, working into the morning hours for his own successful venture whenever he wasn’t in the office, working for someone else’s.

Recently he was contacted by a major player in the industry related to his project, wanting to buy it out. But instead of settling for the easy pay day, he took what was behind door #2: an even bigger position (vice president) at the company in question, where he will oversee all their new efforts as they integrate his product into their line.

Most of us realize that if we want more we have to work for more, but few of us ever accept that we do, in fact, want more. It’s so easy to take the new position, or the new title, or the new pay raise, and then sit back with our feet up, feeling like we’ve lived the good life. If you want to get to the top, you have to keep climbing.

I consider myself fortunate to have seen someone set an example of what that looks like.

Everyone loves the rebel — guys want to be like him, girls want to be with him, authority figures want to change him. The rebel gets all the attention, and controls all the power. Let’s face it: rebels are cool. And it’s hard to find a cooler rebel than Cool Hand Luke, who is the latest subject of my ongoing blog series about how Hollywood helped to shape my life.

A natural born world-shaker
From beginning to end, there can be no doubt that Luke is a rebel. He bends to no authority but his own, and in doing so, he shakes things up. That’s what happens. When you go against the grain, when you walk against the crowd, when you don’t do what everyone else is doing, things get shaken up.

In this modern, overpopulated world, everyone works hard to “fit in”. People are sheep: they get their opinions from the same talking heads; they follow the trends, shop in the same stores, and wear the same clothes; they drink the same trendy beers and eat the same trendy foods.

When someone doesn’t fit in they stand out, and that’s what Luke did. That’s what Michael Jackson did, and Marilyn Manson, and Howard Stern. Copernicus, and Columbus, and Darwin went against the grain. The quickest and easiest (and often best) way to get noticed is to be different — to be a rebel.

Go to the mall some time in blue jeans and a sweat shirt, and walk in the same door as everyone else and ride up the escalator with everyone else, and see how many heads you turn. Then go back in some nice clothes, and walk in where people are walking out, and try going up on the down escalator, and see the difference. You don’t even have to do it, because you already know what will happen — everyone will be looking at you.

That’s how it was for Cool Hand Luke. Everyone in the chain gang lived vicariously through him. They all watched anxiously to see what he’d do next. They got their satisfaction from his willingness to do what they all wanted to but lacked the nerve. They fed off of him.

Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand
Luke earns his nickname “Cool Hand” after he wins a poker game by keeping his cool while bluffing on a losing hand. Even when he knew he was beaten, he never accepted defeat. And more, his confidence was never shaken.

In another scene, Luke got into a fight with Dragline, the prison yard bully. He is clearly outmatched by Dragline, who is much bigger and stronger than him, and who is repeatedly knocks him to the ground, but he keeps getting up. Even after being warned to “stay down, you’re beat,” Luke replies, “you’re gonna hafta kill me.”

Even when he’s got nothing, Luke never gives up. (It reminds me of Captain Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru.) He never accepts defeat, and he never loses his cool. It’s that persistence that earns him the respect of everyone else in the prison.

A rebel without a cause
For all the admirable qualities we find in our protagonist, the funny thing is that Luke always loses. It seems clear that this is because he never had a goal. During his last big escape attempt, when asked how long he was planning it his response is “I never planned nothin’ a day in my life.”

Had he ever turned all that charm and all that perseverance toward accomplishing a specific goal, Luke might have been unstoppable. Imagine those same qualities applied toward training for the Olympics, or being an entrepreneur, or running for office. But without a goal, all that charm and persistence and rebellion only fueled his impulsive mischief.

Luke was an agitator. He landed in prison for cutting the heads off of parking meters. When asked why, his response was, “small town, not much to do in the evenin’.” Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, as they say. A man needs to have a purpose.

Life isn’t fair
When Luke’s mother died, the warden had him put in the box just to prevent him from trying to get to her funeral. After a torturous week of hard work, while everyone else got a day off to rest, he was forced to spend the entire time digging a hole and filling it in, just to dig it again, all without sleep or rest. And in the final scene, he dies unjustly.

Everything bad that happened to Luke was unfair. And that’s life: it isn’t fair. But Luke’s whims were his undoing. You have to pick your battles. There are times when there is nothing to be gained from being the rebel.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about mind control. Mind control is the ultimate power; you can use it to influence others, to alter your own reality, and to make personal gains or profit. The possibilities are endless.

Now let’s be clear, I’m not talking about some ESP or other hocus pocus that you might see in a movie. This isn’t some Jedi mind trick, and it’s not hypnosis. It’s much simpler, much more down-to-earth, and yet much more powerful if you learn to use it.

In other words, I’m not talking about controlling other people’s minds, I’m talking about controlling your own. Frankly, yours is the only mind that you have the power to control anyway.

Why So Negative?
Considering all the facts and evidence may be the most logical course of action, and may lead to the most accurate and reasonable decisions, but it takes time. When a prehistoric human was faced with a new threat — for instance, a hungry lion — considering all the facts and evidence would have taken too long and he would have been eaten. Thus, our brains are equipped to take shortcuts. We have the power to assume. We developed the ability to make quick, loose judgment calls without considering all the evidence, because the ability to assume proved to be beneficial to survival.

We humans are biologically evolved to favor negativity. As a simple survival trait, natural selection favors pessimism because those who are too trusting or too nonchalant would not have survived, while those who were cautious or skeptical were likely to live to tell about it… and to reproduce.

So, to greatly oversimplify the complicated topic of evolutionary psychology, that explains why it is so easy to see the bad in a situation, or to assume the worst about something someone says. It’s built in to our DNA! We humans are natural skeptics. We are natural pessimists. Murphy’s Law is a product of evolution, and so is the “why me?” attitude.

Unlike our ancestors, however, we don’t face daily challenges to our survival. We’ve learned about man-eating tigers in school so we don’t have to guess at their motives… but moreover, the odds of encountering one in daily life are inordinately low!

There aren’t many threats to our survival lurking around the corner. Civilization has provided us with governments and laws and hospitals and health care. We’ve learned about germs and disease and all-in-all, modern civilization has made it pretty easy to survive. Yet we still have that evolved propensity for negativity, and now it’s working against us!

The Power of Positivity
Caution and skepticism work because our brains have evolved to use shortcuts, but those same shortcuts can be exploited to favor positivity and optimism. Instead of assuming the worst in a situation, you can make the conscious choice to assume the best. And doing so repeatedly will make it a habit.

I hear people all the time talking about fear of failure. They’re afraid to try something because they might not succeed. But failure when trying something new, like investing in stocks or starting your own business is a far different thing than the failure our ancestors would experience if they weren’t able to escape that hungry predator.

All the most successful people in history have understood this same concept: failure is not a bad thing. Instead of fearing failure, successful people welcome it. They see the positive, rather than the negative: they learn from failure, rather than sulking in it.

Perception is Reality
The power of our evolved ability to assume is that we are not consciously aware of the difference between an assumption and a fact. It truly is a shortcut, leading to the same place: belief. What you perceive becomes your reality.

If you believe that you are cursed, you will find the evidence of it everywhere you look. If you believe that people are out to get you, you will see yourself as the victim in every interaction you have. If you believe in Murphy’s Law, things really will go wrong at every turn.

But the opposite can be true, too. You can choose to believe that people are inherently good, and you will find that they will prove you right. You can choose to believe that there is no such thing as a lose-lose — that every choice has a positive outcome — and you will benefit from that attitude as you go through life.

Success is a choice. Popularity is a choice. Happiness is a choice. It’s all in your mind. No one else can make you unhappy if you choose to be happy. No one else can take away your joy. Only you make the choice.

The power of mind control is choosing how you will perceive the world, rather than defaulting to those negative assumptions.

Coincidence — the noteworthy alignment of two or more events or circumstances without obvious causal connection, according to Wikipedia — is the theme of the day when considering one of my favorite films: 1999’s Magnolia. However, it is no coincidence that this film is the topic of today’s post, because I will be discussing how Magnolia was one of the vehicles through which Hollywood has made me a better person.

While the introduction — a nearly 30 minute story that seems almost fascinating as a movie by itself — sets us up for a story of coincidence, I have to be honest in saying that I really didn’t detect any coincidence whatsoever in the actual movie. The story was filled with noteworthy alignments of characters in the plot, but their connections were made obvious and far more than casual. In fact, I don’t think it’s about coincidence at all, so much as it is about the hidden truth underneath of coincidence: that sometimes things just happen, and there isn’t always a reason.

This happens. This is something that happens.
We pick up in the film with nine individual stories, each already a crisis in progress, and spend the course of the three-hour movie learning how each present-day crisis is the product of some unresolved issue from the past. This core theme is summed up in the quote, “we might be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.”

These nine interwoven stories start out tense, and the tension only builds and builds until we reach a breaking point, where the entire cast sings Wise Up by Aimee Mann. It’s at this point that the point of the story shifts, stopping the focus on who did who wrong, and starting the focus on the fact that they’re just details people hang on to.

In a deathbed rant, we have Jason Robards saying, “Don’t ever let anyone ever say to you, ‘You shouldn’t regret anything.’ Don’t do that, don’t! You regret what you fucking want! And use that, use that, use that regret for anything, any way you want. You can use it, okay?”

It’s dangerous to confuse children with angels
A major part of this theme is how children are so often the victims of the mistakes adults make. Though present with all the characters, this is echoed loudly in the correlation between the young quiz kid and the adult quiz kid. But nowhere is the theme spelled out better than in the womanizing workshop being put on by Frank T.J. Mackie (played by Tom Cruise).

Mackie, we learn, is the unlikely son of tv mogul Earl Partridge (Robards), and has grown up to be every bit of the misogynistic on-air persona as the father he hated for doing the exact same thing. It’s this overflowing source of wisdom who continues the theme with his quote, “the most useless thing in the world is that which is behind me.”

That, of course, pales in comparison to the far more realistic and useful — though certainly less hopeful — advice he gives in the line, “in this life, it’s not what you hope for, it’s not what you deserve — it’s what you take!” We’re getting from Mackie a glimpse of the cause of all that regret being spoken of by Partridge.

Can you learn from a womanizer?
It all reminds me of last week’s movie, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, where we learn about hanging on to pain and regret. Only this time we have a different, yet equally monumental, quote to live by for our response: “I will not apologize for who I am. I will not apologize for what I need. I will not apologize for what I *want*!”

Look. Throughout the film, it’s quite clear that Frank T. J. Mackie is a pig, not someone to be idolized. But I think it’s also clear that he’s a hypocrite, saying all the right things without actually believing them himself. When Mackie refuses to apologize for who he is, it’s rhetoric to get into women’s pants, but this line carries with it a beautiful irony in that it contains the answer to his problems, if he’d only take the time to believe in what he’s saying.

Frank Mackie, for all of his good advice, is faking it. He’s seeking validation through sexual experience in the same way that Earl Partridge seeks it through money, Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore) seeks it through martyrdom, Claudia (Melora Walters) seeks it through drugs, and Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) seeks it through answering trivia. But all of them could move forward from their past if they would just accept who they are. We should not apologize for who we are.

We met upon the level, and we’re parting on the square.
Words are nothing without meaning, and only one character in the film seems to have the authenticity of believing the things he says. It’s that authenticity that makes Officer Jim Kurring (John C. Riley) the character we attach to as the hope-bringer in the story. And it’s fitting, then, that the movie comes to an end on his words, “The law is the law, and heck if I’m gonna break it. But if you can forgive someone… Well, that’s the tough part. What can we forgive?”

It really comes down to that. So in summary… You may be done with the past, but the past ain’t done with you. You shouldn’t regret anything. I will not apologize for who I am. What can we forgive?

You’ll probably call me a nerd (and you’ll probably be right) but I grew up on Star Trek. I’m not a Trekkie, nor am I a Trekker, but I’m nerd enough to know that there’s a difference. Personally, I just like the shows — old shows and new show, but not all shows. (And no conventions for me, thanks!)

But this isn’t about the show, it’s about the movies. Specifically, we’re talking about this week’s example of how Hollywood made me a better person. We’ve already covered Yoda (yes, it gets higher billing than Star Trek), and Tyler Durdan. Today’s wisdom comes from our old pal Captain Kirk.

I don’t control minds, I free them
In a nutshell, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier introduces us to Spock’s half-brother Sybok, a Vulcan who has embraced emotion. Sybok uses his mind-meld ability to help someone relive their painful experiences in a sort of Church of Scientology meets Freudian therapy kind of way.

Once a person shares their pain with Sybok they feel free of it, and in return they follow him with a blind loyalty that brings to mind comparisons of Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite. Sybok takes control of most of the crew of the Enterprise, and puts the ship on a course toward The Great Barrier, with Captain Kirk locked in the brig.

Then comes Kirk’s turn. After watching Spock and McCoy share their pain with Sybok, Kirk is invited to do the same. But Captain Kirk refuses! Seemingly he’s the only person ever to say no, but nevertheless, with all the conviction (and melodrama) that Shatner can conjure as an actor, he declares:

Damn it, Bones, you’re a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken away! I need my pain!

And suddenly we’ve transcended from bad, overacted science fiction into philosophical realms. We all have pain. Some of us carry grudges our whole lives, crass and jaded. Others easily forgive and forget. But no matter where you fall in between the two, we all live and learn, and it is our pain that teaches us. Yes, I learned that from James T Kirk.

In that moment, I learned to stop holding a grudge about my parents divorce. I stopped being upset about the conditions in which I grew up. I let go of the self-pity over missed Christmases, and being homeless as a teenager, and found a way to accept my brother’s suicide. Yes, before this moment I had always thought pain was bad, but now for the first time I could see the positive. These are the things that make me who I am. Like Kirk said, I need my pain.

Little did I know this was just the tip of the philosophical iceberg that the Enterprise was going to hit…

Where no man has gone before
With the ship under his control, Sybok leads us through The Great Barrier to Sha Ka Ree, where he intends to see God, first hand. And he does. The crew has disturbed the great and powerful Oz, and we get a little fireworks show to prove it. Then, God starts asking about the ship and once again our Captain takes the side of reason and logic:

Kirk: What does God need with a starship?
McCoy: Jim, what are you doing?
Kirk: I’m asking a question.
“God”: Who is this creature?
Kirk: Who am I? Don’t you know? Aren’t you God?
Sybok: He has his doubts.
“God”: You doubt me?
Kirk: I seek proof.
McCoy: Jim! You don’t ask the Almighty for his ID!

Hell yeah! It’s like the astrologer’s magazine that closed due to unforeseen circumstances. (Not to mention, Genesis 3:8-9, where God - the omniscient and omnipotent creator of everything - is incapable of finding Adam in the garden.)

Basically, if you’re God, you don’t need my ship. And you don’t need to ask who I am. I’m outtie. So how does “God” respond? Why, by zapping Kirk with more fireworks, of course! Then he threatens, “Do you doubt me?” To which Bones objects, “I doubt any God who inflicts pain for his own pleasure.” (Yeah, I gotta admit, that reminded me of the bible, too.)

Phasers set to stun
The moral of the story seemed to be that nobody can take you to see God and cure all your pain. At the end of that yellow brick road, you find out that the Wizard of Oz is a fake, and the tin man had a heart all along.

Our lives are the sum of our experiences, good or bad as they may have been. What makes us special is not what we avoid or rid ourselves of, but rather what we learn from the bad hands we’re dealt, and how we play them out. That’s the overarching lesson in Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. And it’s a resounding theme with everyone who reaches great heights, like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and Michael Jordan.

Which leaves us with the closing thoughts, as Bones is pondering whether or not God really is out there, and Kirk responds, “Maybe he’s not out there, Bones. Maybe he’s right here,” pointing to his chest, “In the human heart.”

I hear, all too often, about how movies are too violent. But frankly, I just don’t agree. Why? Because this week’s example of how Hollywood has made me a better person comes from the movie Fight Club.

I guess it’s hard for some people to imagine how anyone can get any philosophical value or learn any life lessons from a movie about grown men beating each other senseless in basements and parking garages. As it turns out, though, the fighting was just a detail in the story. The real story was about mediocre men discovering themselves while cutting through the crap of modern society.

Hitting rock bottom
The movie gets going when we see the main character lose everything he owns to a mysterious explosion in his apartment. With only the clothes on his back, he finds himself staying with his friend in a condemned house. Left without the mind-numbing qualities of television, playstation, and the Internet, these two decide to get out and feel life. That’s when they start their fight club.

But it doesn’t stop at the creation of the fight club. They build an entire empire, manned by people who, like them, have nothing. They gain power over businesses, politicians, and even the police, all because they stopped numbing their minds and instead set out about doing something. As the line from the film goes, “it’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.”

The things you own end up owning you
In a consumer-driven society, we are taught that it is our civic duty to spend. And no matter what ails you, there is something you can buy that will temporarily relieve you from your self-loathing.

We become garbage collectors, and our homes become our prisons. Soon enough, we’re keeping a $20,000 car in the driveway, in the rain and snow and wind, because there’s no room for it in the garage where we keep a few hundred dollars worth of junk nobody uses any more. Over the last 10 years, I’ve watched one of the fastest growing businesses in America — mini storage — popping up everywhere. We have more stuff than we have room for, so we’re paying other people to keep it for us!

We’re buying newer, bigger shelves to hold more and more CDs and DVDs; new dusting gadgets and disposable toilet brushes, and more injection-molded racks to hang them on; one blanket for the bedroom and another for the living room… for each person in the house… and then we complain that it’s too much work to keep it all clean! We want to travel, but we’re afraid of leaving our houses unoccupied for too long.

And everyone I meet is anxious to tell me how they’re not as materialistic as everyone else. Everyone is frugal. Everyone is economic. Everyone hates clutter. Nobody is part of the problem. So why is it a problem? As they say in the movie, “sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.”

Day after day, becoming a little more like Tyler Durden
After watching Fight Club, I was immediately inspired to break out of the materialist pattern. I bought a black leather CD case, capable of holding 200 discs, loaded it with my DVD collection, and took two enormous bags of DVD cases out to the trash. I had a big garage sale and sold off all knick-knacks, the tools I didn’t need since changing careers, the guitars I didn’t play any more, and all the clothes I didn’t wear any more.

But I didn’t stop there. When a friend needed a tv, I gave her mine, and since that day, I have not owned a television. (Seriously, almost five years!) Without the tv to keep me complacent, I get out more, I read more, I travel more, I do more. And I snack less, too.

The same year, I gave another friend my microwave, and haven’t had one since. That’s one of the best things I’ve done. Now that I have to cook, I’ve learned to do it pretty well. I eat healthier food, and it tastes better… and usually it costs less! And the cooking time isn’t an issue… after all, it’s not like I’m missing my favorite show…

At this point in my life, everything I own fits neatly into one small room. I have some clothes, some books, a few cameras, and a computer. But more importantly, I have a life. Perhaps I haven’t lost everything, but for the most part, I really am free to do anything.

The most profound sages and gurus in my life have not been religious leaders, intellectuals, teachers, leaders, bosses, or even parents. In my lifetime, the real sages have been fictional people — moving images dancing on a projection screen inside the cinema. With that in mind, I’m starting a new series of posts, discussing how Hollywood made be a better person.

Yoda. You seek Yoda.
The first fictional character to influence me came into my life when I was only five years old. It was a lovable green muppet who spoke in cryptic zen koans with poor grammar. Yoda was famous for saying “Do, or do not. There is no try.”

It was a fictitious, mystical religion invented to sell movies, but to a five-year-old kid, The Force was the most awesome idea ever conceived. And in spite of being rather ugly and scary-looking for a muppet, all kids knew that he was the master, and if we understood what Yoda said, maybe we could be Jedi knights, too. Ah, the power of a kid’s imagination. What fun.

But one little phrase from Yoda has stuck with me my entire life: “Do, or do not. There is no try.”

They may be words from a fake religion invented for a fantasy movie, but they’re so true! When you say you’ll try, you are already accepting the possibility of failure. But more than that, Yoda isn’t just telling his student not to leave room for failure… he’s telling him to take control of his life. What he’s really saying is: either choose to do it, or choose to not do it; saying you’ll try is only copping out.

The words we say reveal a great deal about the way we think. They also affect the way we think. One of the hidden powers of the mind is our ability to convince ourselves of things by using words. The subconscious doesn’t know the difference between reality and imagination.

Napoleon Hill
In his book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill describes the qualities of successful people, and he should know… he spent a lot of time around some of the most influential people of the early 20th century, including Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford. He spent two decades learning from rich and powerful people what made them successful.

Hill dedicates an entire chapter to the importance of decision making. He describes two kinds of people — leaders and followers — and suggests that 98 percent of people go through life as followers, taking what life gives them, while the rare two percent of people who make decisions and empower themselves go on to be successful at everything they do.

When Andrew Carnegie approached him and asked him to write the book, he thought about it for 30 seconds before saying yes. Carnegie told him that had he spent 30 more seconds, the offer would have been rescinded because a man who can’t make decisions and take action will never be successful.

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
In her book Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers writes about the pain-to-power vocabulary, which encourages the reader to take responsibility for their life rather than leaving it to fate.

She says to replace the words I can’t with I won’t. Instead of saying I hope, say I know. The idea was important enough to her that she made a half-page chart to illustrate the importance of changing ten common cop-outs into empowering statements. But all she’s really saying is Do, or do not. There is no try.

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. They’re counterproductive. You start something new on the first day of the year — lose weight, quit smoking, etc — and hope it will stick. In the majority of cases, the first time that new thing meets a setback, it gets marked as a complete failure, and the whole plan gets abandoned. Why waste the time?

It makes more sense to quantify progress and set target dates. For instance, instead of setting a vague goal of saying you want to “get in shape”, only to give up after you’ve had a week or two where you couldn’t get to the gym, why not set real, tangible goals with numbers and dates? Why not plan to lose 20 pounds by June 1? At least then, if you have a setback, there’s no reason to give up!

This year, I am setting real goals. Instead of imagining my life as I want it right now, and then giving up when I realize that’s impossible, I’ve put a lot of thought into where I expect to be in one year, and I will spend 2008 working toward reaching that place.

These are my goals for 2008:

1. Be 100% free of all credit card debt by November.
   After this year, I never want to carry another balance on any revolving credit account. Without debt, I will have financial freedom to do whatever I want. I have chosen November as my target because I also want to have a debt-free Christmas.
2. Move to the city by summer.
   I’m not a suburban kind of person. My heart is in the urban lifestyle. Living in the city will be better for my photography, as well as more convenient for commuting, traveling, and meeting new people. I have chosen summer as my target because there is so much happening in the city during summer.
3. Relocate my father by summer
   My father is one of the unfortunate victims of the high cost of medical care. His prescriptions alone cost more than his income. Without my help he would have to choose each month between a roof over his head, or being (somewhat) healthy, and eating isn’t much of an option. And this is in a poor, southern town in a $40,000 house! Bringing him to a city would give him access to better medical care as well as many aid programs that could reduce his costs and give him access to the care he needs, while also giving him the chance to spend his later years near family.
4. Form a corporation
   Making investments and building assets makes more sense when you have the protections of a corporation. I don’t have a specific target date for this goal because there are many other implications to consider, but I do know that I need to do it, rather than talk or think about it, so I’ve made it a goal for this year.
5. Add 100 lbs to my benchpress
   Specifically, I want to raise my benchpress 50 lbs by summer and another 50 lbs by Christmas, but these increases need to be marked by similar improvements in other strength training areas too, including squats, curls, deadlifts, etc. In other words, I want to increase all my weights, I have simply chosen the benchpress as the measure for reaching my goal.
6. Travel out of state at least once every month
   This is pretty self-explanatory. I want to travel out of the state, whether visiting friends I’ve left behind or going someplace I’ve never been, at least once every month this year. I also want at least one of those trips to be out of the country.

So there it is. Those are my goals for 2008. I look forward to writing about their completion!

Wow, I’m noticing a follow-your-dreams theme in my writing today.

I picked up this little book last night called It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be, by Paul Arden, and read the entire thing on my train ride home.

Arden instructs readers to aim high, set lofty goals, and accept nothing less. He says to be who you want to be, instead of who you are: talk big, and make it happen. He talks about how to please your clients and earn their trust. Most importantly, he encourages you to take responsibility for yourself, and constantly push forward, rather than becoming complacent and settling for less than what you truly want.

The book is filled with zen-like truth that applies to today’s world. It’s straight to the point, and brutally honest. Some of the advice is obviously related to advertising and creative endeavors, but the wisdom in this book is universal. I’ll read this again and again.