January 8, 2023 by Brian Weiner No CommentsChanging The World One Thought At A Time., Lessons From The Mountain

The smile on my face does not mean my life is perfect. It means that despite my challenges, I choose to focus on my blessings.

The smile on my face does not mean my life is perfect. It means that despite my challenges, I choose to focus on my blessings.

Is your life perfect?

Have you ever met anyone whose life was/is perfect?

I believe that perfection starts with frame of reference. If you understand that life is fraught with many twists and turns, and that you will unquestionably have to weather all of them along the way, you are one step closer to making your life as close to perfect as any life can possibly be.

You will not get everything you want. In many circumstances, life will not go your way. You will be thrown substantially off course and left coping with the outcome. Many of your dreams may remain only dreams.

So, then what?

Well then… want a lot of things, so that when many of them do not come to fruition, you still have plenty of others come to fruition, that you did want.

When life does not go your way, then opt for another way (there are many great ways in life, and if you are stuck on only one, you are clueless to the potential you leave on the table by feeling like this).

When you are thrown off course and in uncharted waters, navigate a new course and keep going.

And… (this is the most important one)… Have so many dreams, that the fact that many of them will not come to fruition, is because of conscious decisions you are making to weight the value of other of your dreams higher, such that they find their path to fruition.

It takes a lot to keep smiling while rolling through the travails of life. I believe the formula to most of it is in in the preachy paragraphs above. If it sounds trite, it is because so many before me have seen the same and called it out for others to embrace.

Fascinating (to me) is that so many of life’s answers are hiding in plain site, ensconced in tired aphorisms that are painful to review, for no better reason than overexposure.

We are not the first to have experienced these problems. Countless millions before us. have long weathered all of this, and considerably more.

A smile is one of the most contagious things on planet Earth. Find your smile and wear it straight from the heart. It will light up those around you, and you will discover that if you give a complete stranger a heartfelt smile, you will almost always get one in return. Try it in the supermarket one day. As you pass someone in the aisle, look them square in the eyes and smile from the heart. A smile is the most celebrated, nonverbal linguistic option, in our entire planet. With that smile we can tame most humans and animals. Of course there are exceptions.*

*The author does not advise jumping a fence at the zoo and crawling in with alligators or crocodiles and opting for a smile encounter. Your choice to do so is entirely at your determination and the author shall not be legally construed as having suggested any such behavior. Do so, at your own risk. This also goes for lions, tigers, bears, sharks and piranha.

Happy Sunday!

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Written by Brian Weiner

When I was 5 years old, I discovered that the lemon tree in the backyard + dixie cups + water and sugar and I was in business. I have been hooked on that ever since. In 1979, I borrowed $14,000 to create a brand new product... photographic greeting cards with no text on the inside, called Paradise Photography. That was the start of The Illusion Factory. Since then, The Illusion Factory has been entrusted by all of the major studios and broadcasters with the advertising and marketing of over $7 billion in filmed, live, broadcast, gaming, AR, VR and regulated gaming forms of entertainment, generating more than $100 Billion in revenue and 265 awards for creativity and technology for our clients. When I took a break from film school at UCLA to move to Hawaii, my mother did not lecture me. Instead, she took 150 of her favorite aphorisms and in her beautiful calligraphy, wrote them artistically throughout a blank journal. That is the origin of the Lessons from the Mountain series. Since then, on my journeys to the top of a mountain to watch the sunrise, I have spent countless hours contemplating words of wisdom from the sages of all races, genders and political persuasions, constantly accumulating the thoughts to guide me on my life path. I hope you enjoy my books. Please let me know your thoughts, as I highly value your feedback!