Life is a matter of choices, and every choice you make, makes you. 

JOHN C. MAXWELL 

What choices have you made that define you?

We literally make hundreds of choices, every single day, and yet only a tiny handful of them ultimately define us on a large scale. What is it specifically about any particular choice that makes it cause and reason to become one of the defining variables of our lives? 

When we opt for some form of significant choice in our lives, we are metaphorically hitting a fork in the road in which we are opting for one of several paths at our disposal. 

The choice that we make in opting for any one of these paths literally relies on the outcomes of numerous choices that we have made prior, each of which have further empowered us to make the new choice at hand. 

When we look back from our respective vantage point and see the depth of opportunities at our disposal, we are perhaps more readily capable of discerning how, and why, specific options that we have leveraged, are coming to play in this next chapter of our existence. 

When earlier choices have armed us with knowledge, experience, understanding, technical wherewithal, or other critical variables, we are in an increased position of being able to take full advantage of next opportunities that have arisen, potentially as a direct result of the earlier choices we have made. 

In many cases, people become convinced that having made a specific choice previously could potentially be decreasing their ability to make some of the new choices they would like to make at this moment in their lives. 

In a majority of cases, prior choices do not in, and of themselves, rule out all opportunity to make some of the new choices that a person would like to opt for. When someone is sitting on the fence metaphorically, trying to determine whether or not, they have ample cause and reason to take full advantage of new options at their disposal, they are more likely to reflect on outcomes of prior choices, and potentially allow those outcomes to weigh heavily on their determination of whether or not a new choice is best suited for them. 

Our continuous ability to remain liberated, and fully engaged in life, starts very specifically with each of the choices that we have made at landmark moments in our lives. 

I think perhaps one of the best resources an elder statesperson might opt for becoming, is a sounding board for younger generations, who are facing similar choices to those that the elder statesperson might have made at an earlier juncture in their lives. 

Allowing a younger party to hear the thoughts and reflections on those choices could not be potentially more important if they are being proffered with an open heart and desire to help that younger participant prevail in whatever decision, they are ultimately ready to make. 

Make your choices wisely, they add up to everything in your life, long-term.

Happy Wednesday!

https://brianweiner.com

How to stop time: kiss.

How to travel in time: read.

How to escape time: music.

How to feel time: write.

How to release time: breathe. 

MATT HAIG 

What exactly is your relationship with time? 

Is time your friend? Or your adversary? 

Does it force you to hone your skills? 

Or does it preclude you from having sufficient resources to fully build your arsenal of opportunities? 

Are you continuously seeking more time? Or are you trying to stop time in its tracks? 

Every one of these variables are critical to your ability to navigate your place in the world with efficiency and poise so that you will make the very best use of the time you have as a three-dimensional creature living in this three-dimensional illusion, we call Life. 

What is it specifically that makes time so elastic? If you are doing something that is relaxing and distracting from your normal daily fare, time sometimes expands exponentially in your favor. 

Whereas, conversely, you may find yourself in a quagmire of short time constraints that are entirely limited by an insane deadline.

When we are sensitive to the construct of time, we find ourselves inextricably caught up within its rhythms. The sun rises and sets, the moon  waxes and wanes, the seasons revolve through their cycles, and collectively we are marking our own respective experiences in relationship to these natural metronomes. (Unless, of course, we rise off of planet Earth and become subject to the space/time continuum.)

How is it that time is such a valuable, if not, perhaps when paired with our health, the most valuable, of all of the assets we might have in life? 

Given that we are finite beings, we are ultimately forced to recognize and value time as our collective currency, upon which each of us must draw. 

In order to experience learning or participate in anything terrestrial, it is only through our own perceptions of this experience that we are not only aware of this variable, but also respectful of how and why it is so imperative that we come to terms with the realization that, regardless of any other limitation that could come our way, time is the inescapable constant that binds all of us into a collective global experience. 

You must find numerous important ways to spend your time, because it is truly the most relevant currency with which you are transacting in life.

Given that truth, make certain that the choices you make for your expenditures of time, are ones that are truly the most valuable to you.

Happy Thursday!

When is an apology insufficient to quell the issue?

All relationships, personal and professional, come with a price tag.

The price expended for such, is most usually measured in time.

Through the time we spend on any relationship, we are investing. The investment may be invested for numerous motivations, but at the end of the day, the more we expend towards something, the greater the expectation we have that it will pay off for us in countless ways.

While we are making such an investment, we come to expect certain rewards for that expenditure. Those rewards are equally diverse in their substance, but whether the rewards are apparent and obvious, or subtle and only we can explain them, they are the reason why we are willing to put forth our energy towards such.

What happens when we are making this investment and the reward is not forthcoming, as expected?

In some cases, that answer is so nebulous, as to defy a true definition. We make choices predicated upon what we believe are reasonable expectations. Sometimes those expectations are based on substantive facts, and other times, we are saddened to discover that we were completely offbase in our assessment of what we were hoping to receive. That is the nature of life.

In many cases, we have every reason to believe that someone will act in accord with our projected expectations of them. This may be based on accurate facts, direct assertions or promises made by them, upon which you may hope to rely.

It is a sad experience to awaken to the reality that they are not either willing or capable of performing as they may have stated. In that moment, we are left in a quiet zone of choice. Our choices may be to either understand the extenuating circumstances which have caused them to not act or behave as expected… or we may instead, have to come to the realization that they are either not willing or not capable of engaging with you as you might have hoped.

What then?

Here is the moment of soul searching. Predicated upon the myriad variables that may have caused that circumstance to transpire, we must dig within and decide whether it is excusable and forgivable, or it is not.

When we evaluate all aspects of our relationship dynamics with the other party, we must search our soul for an answer. In many cases, we brush it off and let it go.

But if the transgression is too far astray from that upon which we have relied, there unquestionably comes a time when we must own our feelings and respond in a manner that makes it clear that this breach of faith, confidence or promise was not acceptable.

When we come to that intersection, we are left with countless possible replies.

Make absolutely certain that the reply you opt to provide, is one that will deliver you the long term outcome you are most desirous of achieving, or your blurted out response may come back to haunt you for years to come.

Happy Sunday!

https://brianweiner.com

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in that recognition.

ALEXANDER SMITH

Have you ever wondered what it is specifically that makes you fall in love with another person?

We might be quick to say that it is a physical attraction that enables us to feel a yearning to be with the other person, but that, in and of itself, is not love. 

We might say it is the elusive chemistry between two people that gives way to these feelings, but underneath that elusive chemistry, what specifically is driving this? 

Is there a definition of what is really transpiring, as our love grows for another person? 

When we explore a bit deeper, we are quick to recognize that the elusive chemistry is predicated upon variables that are both physical, mental, as well as emotional. 

This chemistry is formulating in your mind based upon observations that are giving way to assumptions. The more that we are able to observe, the more that we are able to assume specific details. 

It is said that opposites attract, but even if there is an attraction between the opposite parties, there are certain qualities about ourselves that we are seeing in the other party, that are causing the attraction to formulate. 

In this attraction, we are evaluating myriad variables that are important to us, and seeing where there are similarities in perspectives, lifestyles, interests, dislikes, approaches, intelligence, personality, and so much more. 

Our core recognition that the other party attracts us, is the foundation upon which all relationships are based. 

In our exploration of another party, we are exposed to many of the details that are both apparent or discoverable, and through this exposure, we are looking to find alignment and commonality that will give us a foundation upon which to build. 

This is equally true in non-romantic relationships. When we find a friend whom we grow to love, we are sensing within them, many of the things that we treasure, and in that discovery, our delight in learning more about them, spending time with them, and sharing philosophies with them, all flourish. 

We are always a work in progress and unquestionably, as we mature, we are continuously seeking to find the proper stimuli in our world that both reinforces the qualities about ourselves that we admire, as well as seeking role models in others whom we wish to emulate. 

Happy Thursday!

Man is like steel. Once he loses his temper, he collapses.

What happens when you get pushed to the end of your limits?

Do you explode with fury or do you absorb it within, so that you can make a measured response?

We are so quick to enable external stimuli to trigger reactions deep within us. These are reactions that most certainly will not make us proud upon reflection hours, days or weeks later.

We are given an opportunity at the inflection moment of anger to either take control of ourselves in the moment, or to satisfy an internal desire to explode at the tiniest of stimuli.

What is it exactly that gives some people the self-control to internalize and review under quiet circumstances, whereas others feel necessity to blurt out whatever negative reaction that crosses their mind at such a moment?

If you have become a good student of life, you have almost certainly discovered that at a moment in which you indulged yourself with an angry overreaction, you have most likely witnessed the negative ramifications that come along with having made such an immature decision. A lost friendship, relationship, business opportunity and other outcomes are the traditional casualties of such a reaction.

Presumably, one or more of these incidents may begin to condition you to cease your temptation to yield to your internal anger, and instead recognize that while something might be absolutely irritating you in ways that you are most desirous of reacting to, that reaction is unquestionably the wrong chess move for you at that moment in time.

This lesson about controlling our anger is one of the great lessons that inevitably arises from empirical experience. We must suffer those ramifications before we will ever truly understand how and why we are best served by putting our anger and our overt reactions Into an internal compartment and allowing our resolution of those feelings to transpire on a personal basis, rather than flailing around under the watchful eyes of others and experiencing the negative repercussions of having done so.

True strength is absolutely derived from the continuous evolution of this, and several other core principles combined.

Losing one’s temper is a luxury that most of us truly cannot afford.

Happy Tuesday!

A bad system will beat a good person every time. (Or will it?)

Do you believe this to be true?

I was at an event yesterday, in which somebody said this to me as an absolute truism in their world.

I questioned them about why they saw the world through this filter, and they remained steadfast in their explanation that, “if the system is horribly bad, no matter how good the person is, that system will always defeat them.”

I immediately thought of Margaret Mead who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

As I started to explain this alternate thought process, I was met with a rigid perspective that seemed unshakable from their point of view.

The truth is, this is not accurate at all.

You can delineate all sorts of examples, be they corporate, political, institutional, athletic or otherwise, in which a person was feeling thwarted by the constraints of a restrictive system and opted to rise up above that system, and either escape, institute change, or completely overthrow the system.

History is littered with continuous examples of empires that have been extremely restrictive to certain parties or organizations. At the end of the day, there is always a person like George Washington, or group of people who have seen the flaws in the world that are being imposed upon them. They recognize that this empire is restricting their liberties and their cumulative actions, which ultimately gives them the necessary stimuli to rise up and pursue the liberation from such constraint. Witness the French Revolution.

There may be countless individuals who have found themselves thwarted by “impossible to deal with” organizations, and as a direct consequence, they might perceive today’s aphorism as a truism.

I choose to write about it, because I am an avid believer that if there is a set of circumstances that are unfairly restrictive, and which preclude individuals from achieving their highest achievements, then perhaps the only best solution is to either extricate oneself, from such a quandary or collectively work together to ensure that such repressive policies are overturned in favor of a more fair establishment.

A good person will beat a bad system, using the right game plan, resources, strong will and determination.

Happy Friday!

A truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged.

Oh what a tangled web we weave….

If there is one thing that becomes ever more apparent, the older we get, it is the truth. 

Perhaps that stems from life experience. Or perhaps it is due to intuition and the overall vibe we receive. It might come from having weathered the consequences of another’s lies as to leave us far more aware of the potential downfall of accepting what is said to us without consideration.

Whatever the cause, as we age, we sense with more accuracy, the likelihood of something being true versus some alternate flavor of reality that suits the originator’s greater purpose.

So when we lose, do not lose the lesson. If we are victim of someone’s desire to alter the truth to serve their own selfish needs, then it is incumbent upon us to wake up and smell the roses. To recognize that we project a vulnerability in the area that someone has opted to exploit, and to reinforce those aspects of our being so that the next one is incapable of doing the same.

We are living in troubled times. The truth is being massively distorted on a scale heretofore unknown. Humanity is susceptible to large media and those who are really adept at utilizing large media to service their own selfish agendas are leveraging every aspect of the persuasive nature of media to propagate those lies into the minds of more simple people who are less likely to take the time to research the matters at hand and discern the truth from fiction.

The great thing about telling the truth all the time, is you are never caught. You can discuss and answer any last question and so long as you are remaining within the boundary of what is true, there is never a moment of weakness that is revealed. 

Conversely, a lie may make its way around the world five times over while the truth is still tying their laces, but a lie has trapdoors that can be exposed through the intelligent diligence of asking all of the right questions, surfacing the facts and confronting that lie with inconsistencies that eventually cause the house of cards that are supporting the lie to crumble. The entire world of crime dramas are built on this simple procedure. People are heavily addicted to this form of entertainment because subconsciously they want to see the liar get their just deserts. 

The truth, and nothing but the truth could not be more important now than it has ever been. In the next couple years, the truth will play one of the single most important roles in the evolution of humanity. Everyone would be wise to recognize that truth is a luxury that is afforded to us in a free society. Our obligation to protect the right to access the truth is one of the most important of all of our obligations as citizens of planet Earth. 

Happy Monday!

The way you love is magic in its purest form.

LORELAI

What is love? How does it happen? Why does it happen? What is the internal mechanism that changes when we love something? Is it purely emotional? Chemical? Neural? What physical proof do we have that love even exists?

Do you want to witness a magic trick?  Fall in love with something or someone.

One of your favorite artists releases a new track, and from the moment you hear it, you know you absolutely love it. Why?

Your baby is born, and all through the womb, you are falling in love with it, but something incredibly potent happens as the baby takes its first breath and cries. What exactly has happened in that transformative moment in time?

You are walking through an art gallery, and turn the corner, and suddenly, there it is. The one piece of art that absolutely takes your breath away. One second earlier, you did not know it exists, and in the next second, you know you cannot live without it.

Is that not magic?

We romanticize love taking place in the heart, but in actuality, it is all in the brain…

A few notes from Harvard on the topic of what is love: Love can be distilled into three categories: lust, attraction, and attachment. Though there are overlaps and subtleties to each, each type is characterized by its own set of hormones. Testosterone and estrogen drive lust; dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin create attraction; and oxytocin and vasopressin mediate attachment. Lust is driven by the desire for sexual gratification. The evolutionary basis for this stems from our need to reproduce, a need shared among all living things. Through reproduction, organisms pass on their genes, and thus contribute to the perpetuation of their species. Meanwhile, attraction seems to be a distinct, though closely related, phenomenon. While we can certainly lust for someone we are attracted to, and vice versa, one can happen without the other. Attraction involves the brain pathways that control “reward” behavior, which partly explains why the first few weeks or months of a relationship can be so exhilarating and even all-consuming.

Dopamine, produced by the hypothalamus, is a particularly well-publicized player in the brain’s reward pathway – it’s released when we do things that feel good to us. In this case, these things include spending time with loved ones and having sex. High levels of dopamine and a related hormone, norepinephrine, are released during attraction. These chemicals make us giddy, energetic, and euphoric, even leading to decreased appetite and insomnia – which means you actually can be so “in love” that you can’t eat and can’t sleep.

Last but not least, attachment is the predominant factor in long-term relationships. While lust and attraction are pretty much exclusive to romantic entanglements, attachment mediates friendships, parent-infant bonding, social cordiality, and many other intimacies as well. The two primary hormones here appear to be oxytocin and vasopressin.

Katherine Wu, the student at Harvard whose material I have shared, writes more extensively on the topic. You can read it here. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/love-actually-science-behind-lust-attraction-companionship/#:~:text=High%20levels%20of%20dopamine%20and,eat%20and%20can’t%20sleep.

Wishing you a loving Saturday!

I don’t trust words, I trust vibes. People can tell you anything, but a vibe tells you everything.

Do you ever get “that feeling” when you are speaking with someone? That feeling can be a complete range of energy across the full spectrum of positive to negative. 

That’s a vibe.

Filmmakers are especially good at creating the appropriate vibe during a movie, as are authors, musicians and any other form of artist. The vibrational energy that something emotes is unmistakeable. Given that our beings are just a massive conglomeration of vibrational energy, it is no wonder that our vibrations are sensitive to those from external sources.

Collectively we encounter countless vibrational forces throughout the day. They come through feelings and emotions, conversations, what we see, what we read, watch, listen or concentrate on. These vibrational packages intercept our internal vibrations in unique ways.

Da Vinci observed that if two pebbles are thrown into still water, each creates concentric rings that emanate from the point of entry into the water. As these waves encounter the waves from the other pebble, they do not flatten out, but rather, briefly intersect and continue in their original course of direction. From this, he reasoned how both sight and hearing work and vastly changed our understanding of the human body.

Given our understanding of wave form dynamics, it would stand to reason that when a different wave form, such as a vibe coming from another person, encounters the waves that are coming from our own being, that the outcome might be similar. There is a brief intersection of the two and then each vibration continues on their own path. 

As a direct result, the resonant frequency of the uncomfortable vibe that has passed through you, leaves you feeling uncomfortable because the wave of that entity has literally passed through your own vibrational field.

Some call it a 6th sense, and perhaps that is exactly what it is. Others just call it intuition. By any name or explanation, there is unquestionably an overall feeling that is cast by others. Finding our own personal sensitivity to such, facilitates our own ability to navigate through life with greater confidence and security.

Next time you are getting the wrong vibe, pay closer attention to why you might feel that you are sensing this and increase your overall internal alert to possible problems ahead.

Happy Thursday!

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Have you ever met a real genius? They are incredibly few and far between. 

Many of them do not even realize they are a genius. They clearly know they are very smart, but usually it ends there.

In contrast, there are those who are self-proclaimed geniuses and they are (almost without exception) far from the mark, and more likely malignant narcissists. 

Deepak Chopra says, “This is the nature of genius, to be able to grasp the knowable even when no one else recognizes that it is present.”

The deeper I studied da Vinci, the more clear it was to me from his own notes that he clearly did not think he was a genius. He had a a healthy ego and thought very highly of himself, but his doubt that he could know and understand everything leaves me believing that even he did not see these qualities in himself. And yet, he is one of the only humans in history to test as genius in all 7 measurable metrics.

As life evolves, those of us who are working to invent the future, stand upon the shoulders of the giants who came before us, so that we may have a better glimpse of what could potentially lay ahead. 

In the path to climb upon their shoulders and assimilate information and experiences that they have amassed before us, we are treated to a connected dots experience of watching how they did it. It appears very linear and obvious (after the fact), yet with a genius like Edison, we get a greater glimpse of what it took…. In response to a question about his missteps, Edison once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

Steve Jobs explained  his attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s personal computer this way, “So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.'” 

When Bell telephone was struggling to get started, its owners offered all their rights to Western Union for $100,000. The offer was disdainfully rejected with the pronouncement, “What use could this company make of an electrical toy.”

Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express, received a “C” on his college paper detailing his idea for a reliable overnight delivery service. His professor at Yale told him, “Well, Fred, the concept is interesting and well formed, but in order to earn better than a “C” grade, your ideas also have to be feasible.

Genius is such a rare find on this planet, but it is omnipresent and most of them do not even see it in themselves. 

Happy Sunday!