There is not much in common. It is not talent. It is not ethnicity. Not personality. Not schooling. Not religious affiliation.
The one common characteristic I have found is books. People who become worth a damn are readers.
Even more importantly than being a reader: the most important commonality is when they started to read.
I just read in Wikipedia about Howard Zinn:
Both parents were factory workers with limited education when they met and married, and there were no books or magazines in the series of apartments where they raised their children. Zinn’s parents introduced him to literature by sending ten cents plus a coupon to the New York Post for each of the 20 volumes of Charles Dickens’ collect
Given that I am recommending the 12-week Mastery program, I am keeping my finger on the “pulse” and watching the videos of the 4-video series…
Two reasons:
I am watching for flaws… either in the program or in you… so I can warn you against spending your money… again… on something that won’t make a difference.
I am watching to see if I should do the program myself…
I have just got a glimpse of a flaw that most everyone I know has… including myself… at least in some areas.
Pleasure that is immediate, impulsive, and requires no or little sustained effort and
Pleasure that is the result of work… sustained effort.
No matter what pleasure you seek, what makes it pleasure is the contrast: there needs to be pain for pleasure to exist. ((Hunger makes food pleasurable… lust makes sex pleasurable… tiredness makes sleep pleasurable…))
Although I could write about pleasure that you earn through hard and sustained work, and I have written hundreds of articles about it, people with too small capacity for pain rarely turn around and become people who want to earn their pleasure.
To my surprise, people have no idea that their worth a damn factor has been neglected since they were little babies.
They get “encouragement” to not know that there is such a thing… and then they grow up to be seriously not worth a damn, and they suffer.
How does it work?
If you are consistently praised for being a good girl, a pretty girl, a smart girl… you’ll think that that is what there is to it. That is your ticket to the good life, to paradise.
The most popular page on this site, www.yourvibration.com, is my Mind Movies review page.
So I decided to add a few words to it… I added this today:
Bad news: no matter what program you buy, if you remain the same inside, small, arrogant, and fearful, no program will do anything for you… For most people there is a schasm, a big divide between what they want and what they do… And that big divide needs to be bridged by small purposeful actions. But the problem I see with any results based goal setting program: most people are incapable of designing the small actions, let alone doing them. So the success rate of
Most people’s health number is at or under 10%. Same is the hydration number… at or under 10%. The more you know about your nutrition, the lower is your number.
I know a “star” nutritionist whose number is 5%. Both the health and hydration numbers.
I have found only a few exceptions with higher numbers.
I mean a few… People who are working with me on their health… plus a long time student, plus a long time friend, plus Dr. Joel Wallach.
Download the pdf version of this article at the end
Living in the three levels of value, the systemic, the extrinsic, and the intrinsic, lived fully, and balanced, is the secret to the good life.
The Indian sages, including the Buddha, skipped the extrinsic. They taught people not to live there. They had a disdain for it.
But work is on the extrinsic level, making money is on that level, so skipping it means living a life of charity. Living a life where you cannot value another person on all levels… because you don’t value the values of that level.