Personal growth (self development, personal development) and success often require learning. Learning can be expensive, but some of the things needed for success we can learn from cats, for free.

Stretch

Cats are so much more advanced, stretching-wise. Humans, myself included, if they stretch at all, don't stretch enough. Stretching is free and therefore doesn't have commercial appeal. Imagine watching as many commercials for stretching as for drinks and cars - there would be a whole lot more stretching going on. Well, in the absence of commercials, watch the cats, and before long you'll stretch more.

Breathe Right

Do you know among mammals, humans are the only species that breathes through the mouth at the slightest effort? Horses, cheetahs and, yes, cats still breathe through their nostrils even at full stretch, such as when racing at top speed. But many humans switch to breathing through their mouth at the slightest effort, such as when lacing their shoes or climbing a flight of stairs. If you want vibrant energy, take a hint from your cat (or from your neighbor's cat), breathe through your nostrils. Make deep breathing exercises an integral part of your habits. Rediscover there's more to your nose than to serve as support for seeing glasses.

In A Heartbeat

Cats' ability to go from sound asleep to ready to pounce in a heartbeat, is amazing. As if they had their paw permanently on an on-off switch somewhere inside. Don't you just wish you knew their secret? To sleep a lot? Hm-mm, something to think about.

Hold No Grudges

Like people, cats have great talent for showing disapproval when upset, but unlike some people, cats do not hold grudges. To forgive and move on is easy for cats because cats are not upset with people, only with peoples' behavior. Behavior is much easier to forgive than people. Cats know instinctively that people are not their behaviors - an important lesson we can learn from cats.

Do you know other stuff we could or should learn from cats? Please let me know - I'd be happy to post an expanded "Life Enhancers We Can Learn From Cats" with your comments.

You are no doubt reading this article for one of two reasons. Reason one, you feel stuck in some way – in which case you can bank on it, the Beattitude System will help you to “destuckify” – or reason two, while happily cruising along you’re proactively looking to turbo-charge your life, or some aspects of it. Either way, you will we glad to have found your way here.

Sometimes you’re in the zone where good things just happen naturally, and detours and bottlenecks are nothing but temporary setbacks. But other times things don’t go your way, you feel lost or are stuck without a paddle up the famous creek.

Take your cellphone. You're not really interested in how it works (provided it does its job), but when it breaks down you suspect something wrong inside. So it is with learning. As long as it produces hoped-for results, you're okay. But when a pattern of disappointments appears - abandoned dreams, broken promises, missed exams, unfulfilling work, relationships gone bad, living paycheck to paycheck, etc. - you conclude something is wrong inside. Should it ever get thus far, here is how it works inside. Everything you learned, you learned in one of three ways.

The Instinctive Way

The “instinctive” learning we share with “lower forms of life” such as plants and animals. Equipped with instinct only, plants and animals, sometimes in cooperation with each other, perform feats that puzzle the snobbiest of scientists. Instinct is a tremendous force in humans, too, but it is also vastly underrated and under-utilized. Creation does not short change man. In fact, man is especially blessed with the capacity to learn and know.

The "A Little Asleep At The Steering Wheel" Way

The "subconscious" learning we also share with animals, to a degree. As indicated by the label, subconscious learning takes place while you are a little asleep at the steering wheel. It has the potential to lead you to enlightenment, as well as to superstition, or to love, as well as to fear, or to happiness, as well as to despair.

Conscious

Conscious learning leads to knowledge for the sole purpose of getting you to the object of your imagination (regardless of the object itself). It is a uniquely human feature to be created with the ability to emulate creation itself and freely create in turn. Think about it, every book, chair and chewing gum – everything mankind created and takes for granted – was created in imagination first, before it was created by whatever process subsequently chosen. Ironically, but key to the creative process, conscious learning is also the door to understanding how to still consciousness. When I speak about stilling consciousness - equivalent to giving up resistance and struggle - some resist the idea. In doing so they add more resistance to their lives, not less, and struggle even harder than before. Only in stillness, when the "noise within" is reduced or switched off, are we open to receive.

The learning covered here at the Beattitude blog, is the “conscious learning.” It is aligned with conscious living and thus fits into the scope of Beattitude and The Beattitude System. Given the complexity of the topic – learning styles, methods, materials, etc. – we’ll chunk it up into article-size pieces. The typical learning pattern (ref. illustration) will serve as the template for the series of articles on learning, starting with today’s “Learning To Learn.”

Learning To Learn

In the arts, in sports and in sciences learning starts with the basics. Bet when it comes to learning itself, we tend to bypass the basics and go straight to "the real thing." Because learning about learning is generally considered an oxymoron, it is mostly taught in ways akin to learning to swim where the student is thrown in at the deep end to see what happens. It saves time, but is not very effective as, clearly, many later "drown" in divorce, indebtedness, addiction, drugs (legal and not), loneliness or worse.

What Would You Teach Yourself?

What if you had the knowledge and the skills of the world’s best teachers, what would you teach yourself? Sit back for a moment and imagine yourself the teacher. Do you see a hungry, highly focused student? Does the student’s body language shout interest and participation? Is there joy, harmony and anticipation? Do you look into the eyes of a student eager to learn and explore? It might be reality, or a distant dream, but for teaching yourself and propel student performance, your task is to make it real.

Learning Involves Teaching

When you boil it down to essentials, the best teachers are Authority, Repetition, Intensity and Timing. When all four come together, the lesson is learned for life. As a youngster I ran after a ball onto the road and into the side of a passing taxi. A fraction of a second earlier would have had me run into the front of the taxi, with potentially fatal consequence. As it was, I simply bounced off the vehicle’s metal frame. Stunned, reduced to the sorry mistake-maker I had just been, I was about to regain my footing by the time the taxi driver had made his way out of his vehicle. I expected him to enquire, in a concerned tone, whether I was alright – as anyone in my known world would have. Instead, he smacked a good one onto the left side of my face, yelled “Never, ever, ever, ever do this again!”, turned, and left. In teaching terms, the perfect storm – authority (grown-up, driver), repetition (in my mind I repeated the man’s words over and over), intensity and timing working together. Five minutes later, coming from another person, the smack and words wouldn’t have worked as well, if at all.

The Perfect Teaching Storm

The story illustrates the awesome power in teaching when it's done right. The trick, of course, is to create perfect teaching storms "at will," rather than sit there and wait for it to happen. In learning at will the teacher and the student are the same person - you. It requires you to be a great teacher and eager student at the same time. A tall order, for teaching is complex.

Right To Teach Is Earned, Not Given

To begin with, you don't "have" the right to teach, it's a right that must be earned. It requires a bridge, as it were, between you and to the student. Your goal is to create an environment in which both the teacher and the student are learners. You want to teach, and the student wants to learn, not for knowledge, but for action.

At Will Learning Eliminates Waste

Much education never grows bigger than the brain cells it briefly occupies in the mind of the student, and is wasted. But with conscious "at will" learning - where you are both teacher and student - authority is high and confidence reigns. In this way what's learned can be directly applied to everyday life and work, and waste is eliminated.

Note: remember learning is important, but from whom you learn is even more important (ref. earlier article).

Coclusion

For true success in life, simply reduce the amount of stuff that enters your mind while you're a little asleep at the steering wheel, while increasing the amount of stuff you truly know by conscious learning. Good luck and happy learning!

If you would like to talk further about your own learning style, just post a comment. I’ll be happy to write back and get a dialog going.

QUOTES

• "Ideas are changed not by will, but by other ideas." – Maxwell Waltz
• "Imagination is the preview of life’s coming attractions." – Albert Einstein
• "Imagination rules the world." – Napoleon Bonaparte
• "The world is but a canvas to the imagination." - Henry David Thoreau
• "Maybe reality isn't all I imagine it to be." - Anonymous
• "I see no dividing line between imagination and reality." - Federico Fellini
• "We can live out of our imagination instead of our memory." -  Stephen Covey
• "Everything you can imagine is real." - Pablo Picasso
• "Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein
• "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." -  Henry David Thoreau
• "There are many ways to be free. One way is to transcend reality by imagination." – Anais Nin
• "All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others." - Cher
• "Saddle your dreams afore you ride ‘em." - Mary Webb

Learning Is A Big Part Of Life.

All problems could be solved if only we bothered learning how to.

And if it weren’t for the fact there's variety - without which the world would be a most boring place. Variety makes that while some are busy learning how to solve problems, others are busy learning how to make them. Everybody is not interested in learning the same thing at the same time, which is a good thing! Luckily for us all, the problem-solvers learn faster than the problem-makers.

In the park I saw someone kick off the head of another flower with every other step he took. There were more flowers than steps and there will be new flowers again next year. I tell the more-flowers-than-kicks story because it illustrates the underlying principle that force always eventually succumbs to power, status quo always eventually succumbs to progress. Talking of which, I take comfort in the fact that progress is the great tendency of human kind that has survived all other tendencies combined. With gloom and doom the darlings of mainstream, I understand everybody does not agree. But what the heck, even giant Louis Armstrong got plastered for recording “It’s A Beautiful World.” The human kind is making unbelievable progress, but at the level of individuals, it’s a different story.

Does Learning Work?

While society as a whole is able to overcome any challenge, for many individuals of said society, life sucks. Some rise out of the ashes because, at some point, they are invested with a belief in the possibility of triumph over seemingly impossible odds, but by and large, learning doesn’t work too well for everyone. You cannot win them all, but some aren’t winning any of them. Relationships are marked by high divorce rates, personal finances by indebtedness, health by skyrocketing consumption of an ever-increasing variety of drugs (legal and otherwise), and spiritual-emotional wellness by addiction, crime, suicides, wars and skyrocketing consumption of sleeping aids and anti-depressants. So …

What If You Could Learn, With Less Effort?

How to get the most out of your learning? How to make progress the dominating tendency in your life? What if all of your problems could be solved if only you could learn how to? The study of how we learn has been instrumental in the development of the “Beattitude System Of Thinking And Doing.” Hence I know firsthand, learning is too vast a topic to address in a single blog post. Until such time that the book version is available, today’s “learning post” will be followed by many more posts. By all means, please visit again.

To get the greatest mileage out of what you learn, the first rule: Even more important than learning, is from whom you learn.

Learning is critical to your success, but who you learn from makes all the difference in the world. Closely related, the fastest way to success is learning  from someone who is doing successfully what you’re seeking to do with success.

Easy Said, Easy Done…

“More important than learning, is from whom you learn” is easy to apply in practice – if you know what you’re learning for. How to identify the right person to learn from, implies you have a clear learning objective. But when asked about the importance of learning, most people initially respond with generalities – to be able to read, write, hold a conversation, speak languages, travel, or to get jobs. If pressed, they realize these are but means to an end. The end might be to take care of their family, make the world a better place, make a contribution, volunteer, or to fulfill a lifelong dream. When pressed further still, it becomes evident there’s an even bigger end. The real end – the ultimate ambition – in most peoples’ lives, is fulfillment or completion of their purpose.

The hierarchy of means and ends can be important to understand. If your reason for learning is at the level of generalities, change can be fast and furious. You risk to find what has been learned has been replaced by technology, transferred to another location, regulated beyond recognition, or made illegal. In this case, the loss of work can mean the loss of end, and can result in despair. By contrast, if learning for work is but a means to a greater end, the end remains and will likely result in the search for a different means.

Much Learning Remains Just That

There is vastly more learning happening, than action resulting from it. Every bookseller and seminar provider knows a large percentage of books sold and seminars attended never grow bigger than the brain cells they once fleetingly occupied in the minds of the clients. Peoples’ uncertainty in purpose leads to uncertainty in whom to learn from and what to learn. When the time comes to put the learned into action, understandably trust is not present, and the process aborted.

What's Your Reason For Learning?

If you know the answer, you may want to skip this paragraph. If not, learning how to find your purpose is actually rather easy. Just remember the first rule of learning: more important than learning, is from whom you learn:

If you desire to find your purpose, seek to learn how from someone who has.

If you need help to recognize or locate someone with purpose, contact me via comment or email. I’ll do a special post or answer directly.

QUOTES

• "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you learn to do it well." - Anonymous
• "You don’t learn so that you can then do. That’s an anxiety reaction and an avoidance behavior. You learn by doing, or I solemnly declare, you’ll never learn at all - or worse, you’ll abandon your calling altogether." – Nick Murray
• "Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they're given wings." - Rumi
• "Kids - they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music." - William Stafford
• "Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." – Winston Churchill
• "The learners will inherit the world. The learned will be beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists." - Anonymous
• "The wise learn from personal experience. The happy learn from the experiences of others." - Anonymous
• "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." – Benjamin Franklin
• "Experience helps you recognize a mistake when you make it again." - Anonymous
• "Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils." - Hector Berlioz
• "Experience is a hard teacher. She gives the test first and the lesson afterwards." - Anonymous
• "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." - Anonymous

Time - it is your most fundamental resource for just about everything. Which explains why the whole world is crying out for "More time!" - particularly when "there isn't any." Every strategy for success - whether in sports, science, or anywhere else - sooner or later catches a case of "We need more time," "Give me just a minute," "There's not enough time," "We just don't have the time (for this)," "Time is running out," "Can we have more time?"

Man's Search For More

Man's search for more time has resulted in an entire industry of time keeping and time management. Time "keeping"? Are reports of "more time" myth or fact? The answer is at the same time "Yes" and "No" - which can be confusing. Yes, you can experience time more. No, there is no such thing as more time. You already have all the time there is. No-one has yet figured out a way to manufacture time (or to keep it).

Because time is so fundamental, it is sometimes overlooked and under-appreciated (not unlike the air we breathe). If it didn't exist, it would need to be created. But time being a most democratic and fair institution that benefits everyone in equal measure, regardless of geography, age, gender, possessions, IQ, religious and political views, lifestyle, merit or nationality, it makes you wonder whether it could be done. It would have to overcome ridicule and opposition, to say the least. Fortunately, time doesn't require our consent and is faithfully there for us to receive each new day.

Does Time Really Fly?

Time is frequently described along the lines of wasted, lost, found and saved. "Time flies" and "I don't have the time" - how many times have you heard it said, or said it yourself? This language would have you believe time is a commodity that can be stored, kept, transferred, set aside, bought and sold. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We have arrived at this curious view of time by our habit of chopping time into chunks of time - years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds and fractions of seconds. The smaller the amount of time, the more precious or important it becomes. It's the old forest & trees thing all over again. We don't see the forest for all the trees. We don't see time for all the chunks of time. There will never be enough time to do everything, but there's always enough to do the most important.

Curse Or Gift?

Is time a curse, or a gift? How you view it doesn't impact time itself, but it significantly impacts you and your quality of life.

My own views of time changed radically during my early travels in Africa. I was waiting at a bus stop for a bus that was several hours late. I was upset, angry, impatient and stressed. Everyone else had a smile on their face, in conversation, reading or writing or otherwise "busy." It was my first inkling of time beyond society's attempt to manage, control and own it. It took many more years to truly experience the gift of time. The more you experience time as a gift, the more will be gifted to you. For extra inspiration I recommend the exquisite short movie at http://www.thetimemovie.com/

Time is perceived as to exist in three dimensions - the past, the present and the future. To access the past we use our memory, the present opens through knowledge, and the key to the future is our imagination. (You remember breathing yesterday, you know about breathing now, and you imagine about breathing tomorrow). A first step to experience more time is recognizing there exist different modalities to access time, and to choose wisely. To remember the past and imagine the future can  only be done at the expense of the present. For more time, spend more time in the present, less in the future, much less in the past.

On a lighter note, time is simply nature's device to keep everything from happening at once. Is it not cool that we receive time in a neat succession of new mornings!

True Time Management Equals Value Management

In truth, time management is value management. The door to more time is more time for the things that are truly important, to you. Traditional-conventional time management is all about getting more done in less time. The rush for getting more done in less time, pushed by multi-tasking to new heights of sometimes grotesque outcomes, mainly blurs the distinction between the efficient and effective and between the urgent and the important. You could be super-efficient urgently running South, but it would not be effective if your life's purpose is North. As surprisingly as it may sound, the key to more time is less time management. The way to more time is through the experience of time - which can only happen in the now. Make the focus of your time management to spend more time in the present - on people and things present.

5 Easy Steps For More Time

• Don't do well what needn't be done at all.
• Spend your time on love - things you do with love, or love to do, or for people and things you love, etc.
• Live consciously in the present time, as often as possible.
• Add a sense of urgency to everything you do. Time is infinite, but there is no way of knowing when your time is up. Do not move along as if time were not a factor. You will be amazed at how much you can accomplish in a short time, if that's all you have.
• "What is the most valuable use of my time?" Stop and ask the question several times a day (or several times a week). It may be your best question ever.

Passion - the most essential ingredient for success, at least in anything truly worth living for. To go through life without passion would be like one hand clapping. It wouldn't result in much to write home about. Without passion, why even bother? Come on, get off the fence.

What exactly is passion? For starters, it's often seen in the company of love, enthusiasm, inspiration, desire and vision. Enthusiasm comes from enthused, en theos, i.e. in God. Inspiration has its origins in inspired, i.e. in the spirit. Desire's roots are "de sire," i.e. from the father. It doesn't make passion new-agey or spiritual. Rather it confirms Beethoven's words, and of course his music: "What is to reach the heart must come from above." Bottomline, definitions of passion can be found in books and libraries, but you'll never find passion there.

Passion is within you, and in the now. You cannot be passionate tomorrow. By the time tomorrow comes around, it's today again. The decision to be passionate is made in the now, in a heartbeat. Sure, it'll take time to practice and strengthen your passion, the same as with physical strength and endurance, but the decision itself requires neither time nor practice. You go from not, or maybe, or thinking about it, to "Yes!", in a heartbeat.

Passion is about the future. The past is present only in the rear mirror. With time, passion becomes your very eyes, looking out for you and guiding you beyond where your eyes can see. It makes you think first of the right thing to do, before thinking of doing things right.

Passion is the dream that never ends, as well as the course you follow to make that dream a reality. Put differently, everybody ends up somewhere in life, but only few end up somewhere on purpose - those are the ones with passion. You know youhave passion - or passion has you - when it's all-consuming. Ideas swim in your head awake and asleep. The distinction between the two is blurred. You are grateful and full of energy every new day, for every new day brings with it the opportunity to think, speak and write about the thing most important to you. Work, play, fun, entertainment, relaxation, recreation - they're all the same to you. You're not longing for a vacation. Gone are the days when you worked, grudgingly, for rewards that could only be enjoyed away from work (salary, bonus, vacations, weekends, retirement). You now work for the sensation while working. Money is part of the picture, of course, but it's not center field.

Passion and money are not related. To believe otherwise is understandable, given that people without passion are frequently also without money. But the connection between passion and money is an illusion. The richest people - in finance, business, sports and entertainment - are all working their asses off. They don't need the money. They could have stopped working long ago. All the money in the world couldn't make them stop - precisely because it's not about the money.

Having passion means you are ready to pay the price - whatever it takes. In the context of passion, to suffer does not imply a negative mindset. If you're passionate about climbing the mountain, the hardship of the steep long climb is suffered ... with joy and passion. Remember the scene in "Slumdog Millionaire" in which the kid passionate about getting near his idol must first jump, literally, into a pile of shit? The boy jumps, without hesitation, because he had already jumped earlier. Or the scene in "Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid", in which Paul Newman and Robert Redford's choice is between being made captive or to jump of a high cliff to an uncertain future, with little chance of survival. Of course, they jump, the decision having been made long ago. When you have a clear passion, many decisions are already made for you. Passion is so powerful it becomes your DNA.

My passion is growth. I equate growth to life itself. Growth signifies movement. The absence of movement is death. If you're not busy growing, you're busy dying.

What's your passion? Are you passion-less? Open the window, or look into someone's eyes, or listen to your favorite music, or hit the outdoors and connect with nature and creation itself. Still not sure? To identify your current passion is easy. Check where you have been spending most of your time and money on and, bingo, your current passion. Not happy with what you found? Draw up a list of things you could be passionate about instead, then select one. Best choose a dream or a vision that appeals to your temperament, then embrace it - with passion. How about giving yourself the chance to live life completely on your own terms? If you think or insist that you have no special talents to be passionate about, simply start being passionately curious, or passionately loving. You will be surprised by the results.

Time is too precious, life too short, to sit on the fence. Jump into life, open your heart, be open for passion. Don't miss the train for massive change for the better. Never before in the history of mankind have there been this many opportunities. You don't need lots of money or elobarate technical skills to get started. Building your business and your brand has never been easier. Go online, check it out.

If you think you need guidance, or help, just holler. I'd be happy to. If not, all the better.

Just do it. With passion.

Welcome to the "beattitude" series of videos. "beattitude" is all about growth - growth in your personal life (health, relationships, finances, emotional, spiritual), growth in your business and growth in blogging (just in case you happen to be a blogger, too).

What is growth? First and foremost, growth is what happens when what is preventing it is eliminated. Growth is the natural state of things. Expressed, growth leads to happiness, while suppressed, it leads to frustration and despair. Growth is your most versatile key to a better life for yourself, the people around you and the world at large. Growth means progress, and progress of course is the great tendency of human kind that has survived all other tendencies combined. When you grow - when you eliminate everything that is preventing it - you realize what you get as a result of growth is not nearly as important as who you become in the process.

First off, let it be clear, there’s strictly nothing wrong with thinking per se! In fact, thinking is the greatest thing since instinct. Many things are greatest since sliced bread, but thinking is the greatest thing since before we could think. Opinions differ as to when we changed from non-thinking to thinking, or whether we have in fact ever made the transition, but even the staunchest supporters of non-evolution theory agree, it must have been before sliced bread.

If thinking as the greatest thing has been around for such a long time, what can we possibly do wrong with it?

Well, I know some people - some of them I know personally very well :-) - who relied on thinking to improve their lives. They tried for a long time, even years, without much to show for it. They tried thinking this and that, learning new ways of thinking and spending good money in the process. All to little or no avail. The need to think about improving their lives had gathered momentum through a series of events loosely referred to as life accidents – divorce, illness, accident, financial ruin, addiction, etc. -  but by and large it happened in the manner of a warning light on a car dashboard.

When a warning light appears on a car dashboard initially, typically at an inopportune time, most of us choose to … ignore it. As if the purpose of a  warning light were to think about it. Subsequently, each time the car is started the light shows up again, only to be pushed back to where it belongs again – to the back of the mind. Hoping for the best, never quite knowing what will happen and when, until when happens and hope is not enough anymore.  At long last the car’s owner manual is consulted, in the hope to fix the problem without the help (and cost) of a mechanic.

However, ignoring a warning light on the dashboard is in most cases but a symptom of the underlying problem of overthinking. For most people who are consistently unsuccessful at changing their lives for the better, the real issue is they are thinking too much, at the expense of not acting enough. It may sound counter-intuitive. How can you do anything too hard? Conventional wisdom teaches the harder the better. Well, conventional wisdom can be wrong, too. Thinking by itself only ends up in overthinking, and overthinking actually prevents change. The primary purpose of warning lights is not thinking, but to act!

7 Steps To Stop Overthinking And Start Doing

1. Replace Ready-Aim-Fire by Ready-Fire-Aim. Do not overthink the possible consequences of your actions before you take them. Life is not the Olympics Game where the opportunity to excel and show off comes around every four years only – and only if you’re perfectly healthy, fit and in the prime of your life. Life happens now. There are many “now” in a day. Just do it - fire, then use feedback from the shot just fired to aim the next shot. Then do it again. Taking aim is okay, but correct your aim only after you go along, not before you even start.
2. Act. It doesn’t matter whether you end your (over)thinking with a big or small action, provided you act. Start with anything. Don’t think of size, think only of action. Allow yourself to act on even the smallest part of the idea you’re thinking about. Act, act, act. Taking massive action is your miracle cure for overthinking.
3. If you’re still only thinking, you have not really decided. You need bigger motivation or greater discipline, possibly both. Start with bigger motivation. Is the idea you’re dreaming and thinking about truly important, to you? Would you live a thousand years on water and bread, rather than leave the dream unfinished? If not, find yourself a bigger dream. Don’t just think about finding yourself a bigger dream, take action. Remember, to find is a verb.
4. Good is good enough. An okay plan consistently acted upon and executed works miles better than a perfect  plan executed whenever the time is right. The time to act is always right if the dream you’re dreaming is right.
5. Every morning take the time to visualize your dream, as well as your current situation relative to the dream. Visualization involves intense feelings and emotions. The every morning routine is not about thinking your dream, it’s about living it, visualized in your mind. Picture your dream as you would picture yourself at the beginning of a long trip across the country. Know your destination and your starting point, then choose the best route for you  to get from here to there. Locate yourself on the mental map of your dream, relative to where you are and to where you intend to go.
6. Share your dream with your best friends. Are they touched, moved and inspired by it? If not, improve your dream … until they are, until YOU are, truly touched, moved and inspired by your new, improved dream.
7. Choose your environment. Make sure the people you spend most of your time with are as action-oriented as you, or more so. Rather than choose your friends, choose the environment(s) within which you move. Your friends will come from within the environments you make yours.

Good luck in your new life of thinking AND massive action every day!

You're a baby boomer with more time than money. You dream of being debt-free again, and financially robust. Throughout your life you followed trends - from jeans to long hair to disco to investing in the stock market - but  now you realize it's not about trends and fashions anymore, it's serious business. Your money is decreasing at the rate your predicted longevity is increasing. Every other day science is adding another five years to your predicted life span. You need to be making money again. Not just for a month or two, but for many years. But the landscape has changed. What you've learned is nearly worthless, and what you must learn seems like a mountain. You worry. You Can Do Better Than That!

Many of the things you now take for granted were once impossible. Luckily, your mind didn't conceive of impossible back then. Learning - your very survival depended on it - occurred naturally rather than memorably. It's what allowed you to upgrade yourself from the sippy cup to the cocktail glass.

Therein lies your answer to today's challenges. Simply return to your roots. Reclaim your right and freedom to learn the way you were meant to, by trial and error, or as I like to call it, by the awesome power of zigzagging.

Learn From Kids. It's Easy. You Once Were One Yourself.

The best minds for learning are the minds of children. When kids are beginners at anything they ask questions at the beginner level. They make mistakes - not deliberately, but naturally as part of the process. They don't mind not knowing, they only mind not learning. Always looking for people who already know what they are in the process of learning, they spend time around them and ask them questions. Kids instinctively know there's no need to (re-)invent the wheel each time a wheel is needed. If a child were to build a telescope, s/he would look for some with telescopes, hopefully someone who understands people love to learn much better than being taught. Kids, like grown-ups, can make much progress when mistakes are made, best in rapid succession. Kids just know, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you learn to do it well. Why, they even learn to dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.

You don’t learn so that you can then do. That’s an anxiety reaction and an avoidance behavior. You can't get wet from the word "water." The doer alone learns. Birds are given wings by falling. You, too, learn by jumping, or you’ll never learn at all. Or worse, you’ll abandon your calling altogether. When you learn, if you "fail," you cannot learn less.

Thanks to Chris Brogan over at http://www.chrisbrogan.com/ I stumbled upon a little big video on the topic of sharing. The people at Red Hat don't just share in an everyday kind of way, they've made sharing the cornerstone of their business model. With impressive results, which they happily share with - you guessed it - their shareholders. Indeed, sharing their product (for free) has allowed Red Hat to become a billion dollar company – billion as in a thousand millions - proving again, as if proof were needed, sharing your passion can be profitable business.

Sharing is a good idea any time. For example, share your dreams of an own business or for a career change with a couple of friends and see whether it touches, moves or inspires them. If not, revise. Sharing dreams and passions leads to spending more time with people who share your desire to succeed. Focus on the sharing, leave the marketing at the door, see your business grow. See your happiness grow, too (the state of mind in which your thinking is pleasant a good share of the time). For a stark contrast to sharing, try keeping it to yourself. Travel alone to a wonderful location that offers breathtaking scenery. You're by yourself, so the scenery only takes your breath away. No-one around to share it with. How does it feel? Makes the Red Hat people look even brighter, doesn't it?

Bob Dylan just might be fixin' to return to the recording studio soon again - without his guitar this time. He’s contemplating satellite navigation, in talks with car companies to be the voice of their GPS systems. "I think it would be good if you're looking for directions and you heard my voice saying something like, 'take a left at the next street, no, a right, you know what, just go straight'," he said. "I probably shouldn't do it because whichever way I go, I always end up in one place - on Lonely Avenue."

Beyond its newsworthiness, reports of Dylan doing GPS begs this question: if we were looking for directions and heard your voice, where would it take us? Where is your voice taking you?

PS. If you've ever experienced Dylan in Theme Time Radio Hour - thanks to a friend I'm lucky to have the full recordings - you'd know he'd make a memorable GPS.