But, in the end, this is why I succeed.  I succeed because I raise my head up high amidst failure — because winning is stepping up in failure and success.  It’s moving forward in tribulation and triumph.  It’s never stopping.  Pace yourself.  You’ll get there.  Just always remember that no failure should keep you out of the game.  And, acceptance of failure is okay.  Everyone fails, everyday.  There’s no shame in it.  Einstein failed. Edison failed.  And if anyone tells you to stop because you made a few mistakes and accepted them, then show them these people.  We all fail.  We grow up wanting to be actors, athletes, lawyers and doctors.  We change course when it ‘s not that important.  This is our natural vetting tool deciding our MITs (most important tasks).  My vetting tool told me to leave to make some money and focus on my life’s goal.  So this is what I’m doing.  Will I change course?  Maybe.  But I’m cool with that.  Flip-floppers are looked down on sometimes.  But, my fellow readers, don’t let the public dictate your feelings and actions — do what’s best for you.  Sometimes that means to change course; sometimes it means to move to Warp Speed.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

1. Sustain oneself
2. Be happy

Subsequent questions appear to arise from satiating what makes us happy.  For instance,

1. Will having fun make you happy, right now?
2. Will exercising make you happy, right now?
3. Will making love make you happy?
4. Will an intellectual conversation make you happy?
5. Will nurturing a child to adulthood make you happy?
6. Will making an impact in the world make you happy?

The funny conclusion to our purpose is a fundamentally selfish world centered around our own sustenance and happiness.  We’re selfish at our core – we can deviate from this selfishness, but whether it’s good or not is highly questionable.  Additionally, everything we do can be deconstructed into a current desire burning within us or an unconscious habit (in which case, such an action is pretty irrelevant anyway).

Given the fact that the entirety of our lives can be summed into these two goals, the conclusion is utterly simple for those of us living in a wealthy society:   1) Get a job, 2) Choose to do whatever makes you happy (sometimes this might be nothing).  Eventually, we’ll get tired of just having fun.  Eventually, we’ll get tired of simply learning and understanding things.  Eventually, we’ll get tired of programming, writing, sports, etcetera.  And, eventually, we’ll realize that happiness is a choice.  We can tweak out minds to happy with whatever we’re doing.  This is the wisdom most older folks know.

The wisdom is:

Happiness doesn’t have to be determined by your situation — it can be a choice.

The Campaign

The INSPIRE Campaign is where each of us dedicates ourselves to inspire one person, each day.  That’s it — one person, one day.  We’re not asking for everyone to make grandiose speeches, lead marches on Washington, or start Teach for America.  All we’re doing here is striving to inspire 1 person each day.

But (oh, yes, there’s a BUT), the goal isn’t simply to inspire.  It’s to spread inspiration throughout the world like an epidemic. Inspiration an epidemic!!?!? Crazy!  I thought so myself…

But it”s not.

We can do it.  We’ve seen it happen.  Like all epidemics, they and we must trudge through the barracks and fight through countless failed attempts, days of apathy and inaction, and countless additional challenges, all before inspiration takes flight.  With continued effort to 1) be an example and 2) share our inspiration, we might just achieve extinguishing a few small sparks of these feelings of desperation, sadness, and fear — replacing debilitating emotions with inspiration, in one person’s heart at a time!  Together, the effects will be greater.

How this can Happen

To create a world-wide epidemic of inspiration, we’ll need to be an example of inspiration.  We will also need to spread our campaign throughout our social sphere (work, private, and to strangers).  By doing these two simple actions, 1) being an example and 2) spreading inspiration, we might just brighten one person’s day.  We may just spark a person from on the verge of suicide to fighting through one more day to see life’s opportunities.  And, with much, much effort, we might eventually achieve our goal of making inspiration a world-wide epidemic!

My effort

I’ll be attempting to inspire people on Twitter, during in-person conversations, through videos, and presentations.

In an attempt to unify our effort into a potent fireball of inspiration, I’m using the #inspireCa hashtag when I share inspirational messages and examples.  You’re welcomed to join in on the fun!

Let’s get this party started

#inspireca

=D  Thank you focused professionals!

It was a succession of various events and the world selling me on a few of life’s lesson which I had long since forgotten.  Fortunately for me, I spent my entire life trying to improve myself.  With this history, it’s not as hard to jump back into this mindset.  However, it amazes me that I’ve fallen aback for so long, as well the serendipitous and unplanned return to a life of extreme positivity and improvement.

Life is amazing.  Period.  I’ve learned SO much in the past few years that I never EVER thought I’d come to understand and/or internalize (love that word! thanks Steve).  I’ve come to realize that life is 100% what you make of it.  If you want to live in a dreamworld, go for it.  If you want to be positive, that’s your choice.  And, guess what… it’s your choice to choose!  Ultimately the world is what we make of it.

Becoming force of positivity and focus

In the past two years, I became very cynical about the world and how much life is about sales and pitching yourself and the notion that logic doesn’t convince anyone, etcetera.  However, what I’ve learned and internalized (through a succession of experiences and choices) is to play the game.  It’s the fact that, while we can change these seemingly “facts” of life that we may dislike, we have to pick and choose very carefully what we wish to change.  This is because change is hard.  If you want to change something, you have to be very very specific on what you want to change.  You can’t get caught up in anything else.  What this means is that you must accept all the other things, AND be happy about it!  To make the choice to embrace and enjoy the world, and the challenges it involves has been crucial to changing myself into a positive person.  There are reasons for this, which I can explain to you if you’d like.

Learn from everyone and anyone

I particularly LOVE Galileo Galilei’s realization that there is no person whom we cannot learn from.  (his famous quote being, “I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.“)  I find this enormously true.  I’ve come to learn that no person is smarter than any other person.  We’re just different.  We all come from different experiences.  In fact, it is impossible for us to experience the exact same thing as each other (based on what I currently know).  Moreover, who is to say the janitor doesn’t have an awesome lesson or experience that is pertinent and valuable to you at this given point in your life.  I cannot tell you how many random conversations with random people which have had a profound effect on me.  I find that sharing what’s going on and talking with anyone and everyone is amazingly beneficial.  To be candid with people is standard and a prerequisite to these conversations.  Everyone in the world experiences a unique set of situations their entire life, and looks at things differently, imagine if we could share what we learn with each other through discussions in an effort to come to a greater truth and to expand ourselves in every way possible!

Spreading knowledge

“Life at the top of a ladder is lonely.”  Oh  how true this is!  Guess what?!?!  If we hide all that “knowledge” we have, are lucky enough to make it to the top, and DON’T share it, we will have climbed a ladder but will have no one with us.  Instead, we should set up a system where we are climbing with others.  When we climb with others, it is easier for us to keep climbing because we are motivated, can talk with others, and can party with the world when we make it!

This is one of the most awesome things I’ve learned — to share the knowledge we think we have!  Why do I say, “the knowledge we think we have”?  It’s funny… the world is so crazy, dynamic, and our emotions run so much of what we do that the only real objective way to see if something is true is to perform excellent statistics.  It is to test a hypothesis in an objective manner (good stats).  To form better hypotheses and come up with awesome ideas, it’s important to combine our creativity and experiences.  The only way to do this is to talk.  When we spread our apparent lessons and apparent knowledge, we all grow.  A world where we all grow, we can never lose.  In this spirit of learning, I’m a fan of listening to others intently, sharing our thoughts, and debating/conversing fervently.

Being Humble (and Keep Learning)

Gosh, have I learned to be humble.  I used to be so scared that the information I garnered was going to leave my mind.  I was so scared that I didn’t want to learn anything new.  I felt as though anything anyone told me was frivolous and irrelevant, and tuned people out.

Later, somewhere down the line (after a few failures, and random people told me whatsup) I realized my cynicism, fear, and cockiness was fruitless.  We have to be always learning, and the plasticity of our brains is meant for the useful information (stuff we USE often) to stay, and the stuff we don’t to leave.  It’s that simple.  Moreover, as stated earlier, we are all unique and bring value.  Ron Artest, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Babe Ruth, Albert Einstein, me, Steve, Ricky, you, your mother, your sister, the stranger you haven’t met yet, we all are AWESOME in our own way!  We all have profound lessons to bring, and are amazing.  Sometimes we don’t see this; but it’s just the cloudiness of the world today.  However, as the storms of media and pitches fade, it’ll be evident that we are all awesome.  It will be evident that we are all noteworthy.

At the moment, I’m done praising the world as I must get back to work.  Already behind, and 1:16am.  However, patience is a must.  <3 life, and leave nothing behind!

For those who start to get paranoid about how different society is getting, especially when innovations are coming as fast as they currently are being developed, it’s scary.  To think that we are on our computers for most of our lives now.  To think that we go out to eat with our friends, and are on our phones…  Moreover, to think that we might live forever, be even more engrossed in our computers, and have even different and better technologies in the near future, makes life very uneasy.  This uneasiness is because of a natural aversion we have towards change.  And, experiencing a slew of changes, is all the more uneasy.

This is why I like to take a step back every now and then — ditch my smartphone, forget about augmented reality, and realize that the world is the same world it was before.  We are still alive.  Yes, we are moving fast — very fast.  But, if we take a step back, the haste of our innovative developments, as a society, seem bearable.  I’m not sure if this emotion is something others are facing, but I suspect it is – hence the public nature of this post.  My suggestion to everyone experiencing this feeling is to take a big step back to help you realize that this will keep going on with or without you, and you might as well be in the scenery — if you think you can handle it.  This is what I am telling myself, right now.  We have a choice on being causal agents of change and innovation, or watching it as a spectator.  I prefer to be involved, but that is a personal choice, that you as a reader will have to make (or have made already).

Have a good rest of the day and enjoy your readings!

“(how do we decide) What is right?

Despite which ideology you currently believe, the answer seems to be situational.  Sometimes it appears to be right to take a life (e.g., self-defense); sometimes it is immoral to call an elder by their first name (depending on what culture and ethnic background you grew up with).

I suspect the truth of what is right, in every situation, is up to our own individual sense of morality, if we let it be.  What this means is that our moral decisions are likely up to us, and thus relative to our upbringing.  However, it seems that if we break down situations and each of our beliefs, our answer to “what is right” is often the same (irrespective of upbringing; and respective of pure logic and compassion).  This begets the possibilities of Reflective equilibrium?

Take any argument or dispute you have with anyone, it seems that one can fundamentally break the discussion at hand into logical components, and eventually discover what is agreeably the morally-just/right thing to do (irrespective of cultural upbringing and belief in the divine, but rather respective to our moral beliefs as individuals).  What do you think?  Do we, as humans, have an underlying shared moral compass — which can guide us to the right decisions, if we let it?  Or are we morally ruled by the relativism of our upbringing or our religious doctrines?

Related links:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/#HumGooFunArg

http://philosophy.lander.edu/cgi-bin/mwf/topic_show.pl?tid=529

*interestingly, another important question to ask ourselves is “Is it our end goal to act in a morally correct manner?  Is our goal to simply accomplish blanket goals, with morality at the expense?  How much can ethics be sacrificed for the end results (if morality isn’t our ‘end goal’)?”