The Changes That You Deserve

The Changes That You Deserve

Imagine your life on your own terms that you personally design and then creating it!

By Jim Killon

The Changes That You Deserve Copyright 2017.

Jim Killon All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by information retrieval systems without prior written permission from the author, except where permitted by law.

Other books by Jim Killon; A Gringo in Peru-A Story of Compassion in Action, 2013 The Best Damn Book About Sales That You Will Ever Read, 2015 Atheists Don’t Eat Their Own Children, 2015 Living Large Living Deliberately, 2016

This book is dedicated to the incredible people who have dared to dream big, and against all odds and obstacles, made their vision a reality for the betterment of humankind.

“Once a social movement has begun, it is impossible to reverse it. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress those who are no longer afraid� ~~ Cesar Chavez Mexican-American Activist

This book is being offered to you free of charge. It is the message and encouragement that I want you to receive and benefit from. It is my hope that sharing with you, without personal compensation to me, demonstrates the sincerity and passion that I have about the message. As your life is enhanced and you personally benefit from this offering, I would kindly ask that you make a donation, of any amount, to benefit the children of my humanitarian project, Changes for New Hope, who are living in destitution in the Peruvian Andes. Your contribution will purchase clothing, school supplies, vitamin supplements and anti-parasite medicine as well as other humanitarian necessities. Just go to our website at www.changesfornewhope.org and click on the donate button. Thank you kindly. ~~ Jim Killon

Table of Contents

Introduction Making Changes Excuses-Your Biggest Enemy Know your Why Passion Self-Talk Time for Action Self-Esteem The Foundation that Supports our Biggest Vision and Dreams Persuasion vs. Manipulation Getting What You Deserve Trading Is Not Sacrificing The Three Questions Your Default Mode Now it’s Up to You

Introduction Personal power is available to every person that inhabits this bright blue orb as we swish around the Sun every year. Few understand what it is, how to use it or even that they have it. We were all born as little blank slates, knowing nothing, having neither fears nor understanding.

Immediately, we began to gather our own lists of smells and sounds and tastes and feelings. After a while our eyes began to focus and we began to visually recognize people and things that became familiar to us. This became our reality, our normal. Everything other than our normal was strange to us and made us uncertain, uncomfortable and afraid.

By the time we started school, we had millions of sensations and bits of knowledge that we arranged into our framework of our sense of normal.

We had routines, a way to put things in order and developed our own way of life. We learned to trust people that fed and clothed us. The bigger people who taught us in their schools, guided us in what to believe in their churches, mosques and synagogues. We stared for countless hours at televisions and learned what the rest of the world considered normal. Louder voices, more colorful personalities, more passionate people seemed to attract our attention and became a dominate force in our learning processes. Whether we considered it persuasion or manipulation, we slowly began to lose our own sense of personal power. It faded like campfire smoke dissipating into a summer breeze. We were told what to feel about various things, how to accept or reject opinions and ideas of others and what is good for us and what is bad.

Our personal power was lost when consequences were injected into our learning processes. If you don’t pass tests, in schools that taught you what to think, how to believe and manage your life, you would fail.

Television taught us what is right, cool, sexy, and popular and what you should reject. It also taught you, under the guise of entertainment, what to wear, eat, drink, smoke, think, say, do in any number of situations, how to talk, dance, drive, work, what recreation is, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

There are a wide number of theories as to who those puppet masters were, and are, but as far as this book is concerned, we just are interested in getting our personal power back. I want to be able to make decisions for myself and my life that are good for me and not harmful to anyone else. If I am upset, I want to understand how to use my own personal power to regain my sense of calm and serenity without needing a pill that the television said would make me feel better. If I am happy and content, I want that to be because I know how to engage my personal power, my own energy sources that released the endorphins and serotonin that my own body chemistry creates for me. I want the best life that I can create for myself, my loved ones and for every other person whose life I can positively impact. I do this not because I was influenced by a man wearing robes promising some celestial reward in a few more decades after I die, nor did I fear becoming charbroiled in an afterlife pit of eternal torment if I didn’t. I rejected those manipulations many years ago and I am better for it. I am also grateful that my ideas do not relegate me to a “re-education camp”. As long as we are free to think freely, let’s do so.

As a humanitarian, I serve humanity here in Peru’s Andean mountains among thousands of indigenous children, because my compassion tells me it is something that needs to be done. Too few have the slightest concern for the destitution that they endure every single day. The puppet masters have distracted them with promises of new and improved products, instant popularity, wealth or acceptance when you buy and use this new lotion, gel, drink, cream, shampoo, pill, cologne, accessory and goo. People are cocooned in a comfort zone designed and force fed to us by Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Washington, London,

Hollywood, New York, Beijing, Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv and Disney. We became so self- deluded that we are experiencing the “Good Life” that the actual good life, the life that we were born to experience and enjoy, escapes us because it is now far outside of our “normal” that we were manipulated to believe was reality.

When you read this book, you are going to be joining me on a journey into a beautiful place. It won’t cost you anything more than the time to read and consider the words that I share with you. I wrote this for you because the lessons you will learn here have been massively transforming my life. I have gone deep inside of myself, my own consciousness and awareness. I have regained my own personal power to decide, choose and design my life on my own terms. I learned how to jettison the external influences that were essentially poisoning me. They are poisoning you too, though you may not be aware of it. The puppet masters are clever in masking their manipulations so that you would believe that it was your own idea to do, have, decide and think the way they wanted you to.

Though I refer to puppet masters, there are no good guys and bad guys. There is no good and evil, heroes and villains nor will there be anything for us to focus a fight against. I do not have a personal agenda, a political or religious persuasion to grandstand. I am not going to attempt to talk you into or out of anything. I am simply going to share my ideas and concepts with you that dramatically changed my life. I will share with you some ideas and thoughts that you might find eye opening, hilarious at times and in many cases will make you say, ”Why haven’t I understood that before?” If you believe that your life is yours, not anyone else’s to control and you want to regain your personal power to maintain a life of harmony and self-direction, then this is going to be a Very Good Thing for you to be reading. I do need to disappoint some lawyers by advising that what you read in the following pages is not intended to replace or act in lieu of any medical or psychological help that anyone may need or medication that was recommended by a

licensed medical professional or healthcare practitioner. You are assuming full responsibility for your own well-being and personal improvement. Lawyers, shhhesh!

The changes that will be taking place in your life as you read this, will only be the changes that you accept and decide are right and beneficial for you. You have the right and the choice to embrace or reject anything here. I consider this as a stroll, in print form, down my own path of enlightenment and whether you come with me, pause along the way, or decide to take your own path after learning some of these understandings is entirely up to you. This is a journey within. Let’s go!

Making Changes People are creatures of habit. We resist changes even when we know in our heads that certain changes are good for us. Sir Isaac Newton discovered that bodies at rest tend to remain at rest until acted upon by an opposing and stronger force. Human nature is such that, without some Very Good Reason, we will stay right where we are, doing exactly what we have always done and accept the results as “Just the way it is.”

Are you really ok with that? Your brain will tell you “Sure, absolutely, why not?” We will rationalize that we are eating ok, sleeping inside at night, we have clothes to wear and a job to go to in the morning, a car to drive and a little money in the bank. The same way it has been for decades, so why disrupt anything to make changes? If it isn’t broke, why fix it?

Your brain loves comfort. It loves to stay just as it is, in the familiar and functional setting that you are currently in. Your muscle memory causes you to move or stay in positions and movements that are routine and familiar to you. Don’t you get up at the same time every day? Don’t you sit in your same chair every night to watch television? That routine is our familiarity that locks us into a pattern and feels comfortable to us.

Change is discomfort and disrupting. It is abnormal, unusual and awkward. Subconsciously, we resist it. We don’t want to go to work taking a different route in the morning. We are not comfortable with a new routine at work or changes in policies or guidelines, even if it for the betterment of the people. We re-elect corrupt candidates because we know what we have as opposed to electing some new person that we are unsure about. We stay in relationships that are toxic and abusive

because we don’t know what is on the other side of the door. Maybe it is worse. We think people who jettison convention and go backpacking across the continent, exploring new and different cultures and places are strange. We are so deeply embedded into the groove of routines that we will watch re-runs of the same television programs before we would consider picking up a book and learning something we didn’t know before. Our brains like the “stability” of routine and consistency, even if it is boring, toxic or a complete waste of time/life energy. We are risk adverse and panic when anything or anybody “rocks the boat”. They are the weirdos, the trouble makers and the problem people which we must avoid and eliminate before they ruin it for the rest of us. Ironically, it is those very same people who make the changes in the world that save lives, advance humankind and blaze trails that eventually we all end up following as our new normal.

In my lifetime, I remember when color television came out. It was common knowledge that the radiation would cause blindness if you did not limit your time watching it. We were told to sit back at least ten feet.

Microwave ovens were going to give us all cancer. The Red Scare, the Soviet communist state was going to vaporize us with nuclear bombs.

People actually built fallout shelters in the event that it happened. No bombs ever fell, the Soviet Union did however. Our fears, we believe, somehow protect us from the dangers that are all around us. Those walls of fear got bigger and thicker with each passing year. Routine, consistency, status quo and clinging to our sense of “normal” is all that feels safe and secure in an uncertain and scary world. Boring and mundane as it is, life drones along with a dull humming sound that we are accustomed to, and that is just the way it is.

I challenge that way of thinking and living because it is actually 100% opposed to our humanity and the way life was meant to be lived.

Uncertainty is a way of life since the days when cave men emerged from the safety of their rocky lairs and ventured out to hunt the saber tooth tigers, uncertain of whether they would return back to the cave that

night. The notion that life is safe and secure because you have a great job, money in the bank or your doctor tells you everything looks fine is an illusion and more accurately stated, a delusion. A stock price drops and your 100 year old company gets bought out by a corporate raider.

Suddenly, after twenty faithful years, you are on the street looking for a job. Banks fail, and contrary to popular belief, FDIC does not guarantee every dime gets returned to you should that happen. Our health will fail one day, else we would live forever. It could happen in forty years from now or tomorrow, regardless of what the doctor says. What we do between now and when that happens is called Life and most people are so concerned about safety and security, routine and mundane regularities that they never start living and don’t realize it until the end is upon them. Ask anyone waiting out their final days in a hospice facility what they would change if they could have just five years back. I promise you that 100% would express regret and wish they had done it differently. Nobody ever said, “I am so glad that I was mediocre.” The cemetery is full of people who never quite got around to doing great things, expressing passion or creating what was within their power to accomplish. They wanted to, wished they had, dreamed of doing it, one day, but died before they ever got started. The routine was the incarceration that strangled their lives. Change was just too scary, too unusual, people might think they were strange. People might laugh.

Change is hard. Everybody tells me that. Is it really? If change is hard it is usually because we make it out to be nearly impossible in our minds.

Especially if you do not want to do it. Starting an exercise routine is hard because we all understand the pain of sore muscles and the discipline we need to get it started and maintain it. The time requirement and what we have to sacrifice to do it scares us. If you look at an exercise routine like that you will, no doubt, never start. If your focus was the slim and healthy body, muscles toned and strong, the motivation to do it

instead of sitting around eating potato chips, changes. How you perceive something is key.

Likewise with a diet plan. Tens of millions of people say that they want to lose weight either because their doctors have told them they need to or they just want to feel better about themselves. Both are motivating factors, wouldn’t you agree? So why are these same people still extralarge or even bigger than before? Did they not believe their doctor? Was feeling better about themselves at some later point in time not as real as that double cheeseburger in front of them? People will suffer the effects of obesity before they “suffer” the regiment of a healthy lifestyle and diet. Is diabetes, heart disease, deteriorated knees and hips more acceptable than changing one’s eating habits? Of course not, so why is change that emotionally repulsive? Is it because people focus on the sacrifice and struggle that change represents to them in their minds as so painful and uncomfortable that their “normal” as unhealthy as it is, is preferred? Normal=comfort Change=pain Nobody wants to feel pain.

We can fill anything in the blank. Smoking, drinking, drug use, whether recreational or prescription makes no difference, toxic relationships, gambling, watching hours of television, religious or political addictions, splurge spending, sexual appetites or the way that we treat other people. Many people do what they do with no intention of changing regardless of how it affects them or others around them. The seeing blind, is how I refer to these folks.

Then there are the people who want to change, wish they could and see that they need to. The slither of light shines through the crack in the door as they begin to open it. They will pray, wish, hope for, and consider the changes that they want to experience but they will never move to action. Why? It is because in each case they are waiting for the change to descend upon them magically. Some deity, social alteration, friend or happenstance should interrupt and make the changes for them. You won’t lose weight by wrapping a chain and padlock around

your refrigerator. You won’t stop smoking by tearing up your “last” pack of cigarettes and flushing it. You won’t stop drinking by sitting in a bar and telling the bartender you will just have a soda. These are all external efforts to change. You know within your heart and mind that you really don’t want to and as soon as will power diminishes, you will go back to doing what is your “normal”. Unless your habits change internally, you will be forever stuck in the old patterns.

All change comes from within. We all know what we should do. We stand on a scale and hear the springs creak, we read the Surgeon General’s warnings, we step out of our cars and walk heel to toe for the police officer, or we look in the mirror to see how badly the spouse’s punch hurt us. The ‘shoulds’ are screaming to us that change must happen. It is a matter of life and death.

But it is not yet our “Must”! When you realize in your heart that it is a must, absolutely, no matter what the price or consequences, you must alter your circumstances and life, does your thinking begin to change.

The longest distance in the world runs between your head and your heart. We know what should happen in our heads but only when it hits our hearts do we move to action. Sometimes that occurs when a medical report comes back. Sometimes it is when a spouse finally walks out the door. Sometimes the realization occurs when you wake up in a jail cell or a rehabilitation clinic. Whatever it takes, something triggered the fact that a change must happen. The brain, in its ever comfortable state of ease, is rocked out of complacency into survival mode and starts looking for options to stay alive. Now it is an immediate urgency whereas before it was just a good idea. Let me give you an example out of my own experiences. I want to share with you that I was not always the enlightened person that I am now.

I was married to a woman who initially represented herself to me as a recently divorced, sweet, soccer mom of a lovely and talented daughter.

We dated only a year before we were married on a beautiful beach in

the sunny Bahamas. In the year that we dated we only had one actual argument. I never saw her drunk or using drugs. After being previously married to a woman who knew no limits, this was a welcomed change.

Just a month after returning from our Bahamas paradise wedding, she began drinking heavily. Then she became abusive, verbally and physically. One night after getting drunk, she started making outrageous demands and ordering the family around in an effort to assert control over us. When I refused, she put a loaded .32 caliber pistol in my face and told me she was going to blow my head off. I wrestled the gun from her hand, called the police. She was arrested and taken to jail. There was a trial but because she promised to never go crazy again, I refused to testify against her, which freed her. She lied. According to her psychiatrist, she was bi-polar, a severe alcoholic and had anti-social personality disorder. She was incapable of actual human feelings and empathy but she could feign those emotions quite well. It was part of the disease of psychosis. The abuse continued as did the promises to get better. According to notes in my calendar, she had violent episodes every three days. She refused to stop drinking or take her medication. I believed that she could and would get better when she realized that her condition would eventually cost her a family, her health, her freedom and ultimately her life. My illusions served only to enable her to continue down her destructive path. More arrests and incarcerations only enraged her. I was told by psychiatric nurses, the police, her doctor and concerned friends to get out of the relationship before she killed me. I knew that I should. Only when I overheard her on the phone one night plotting my murder with a hit man did I make it my must. Death was eminent and I had no choice but to flee for my life. A change of heart and mind. No promises to get better, no promises to stop drinking or get therapy was going to persuade me again. I was not sure what the future was going to be like for me and I didn’t much care. Getting out of a relationship that was toxic and finally deadly, was my only concern. I would figure out the rest as I went along.

My ‘Must’ became the greatest opportunity of my life. I fled to Peru and within a year created Changes for New Hope, my non-profit organization that today has reached thousands of disadvantaged children. This was something I knew I should do ever since visiting Nicaragua a few years earlier and made it my ‘must’ when I arrived in Peru. Two birds with one stone, so to speak. When change is a must, not a should, not a great idea, not when you are going to do it for the benefit of others in your life, but for you because you absolutely need to get this accomplished, then you have the beginnings of a new life forming and the probability of success goes way up. I hope this short story helps someone in a similar situation.

Mark Twain said this about smoking, ”It’s easy to stop smoking. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” My dad smoked for decades. Growing up as a child I remember never seeing my father without a cigarette in his mouth. What he and my mother, also a lifelong smoker, spent on cigarettes could have put me through university a few times. Only after a doctor stood over his hospital bed, when he had a heart attack and bypass surgery, and told him, “Smoke again and you are a dead man” did it become a ‘must’. He never smoked again and lived another fifteen years in considerably better health and happiness. Everybody knows if you smoke you will shorten your life. Everybody knows that they should stop smoking. When they realize that “a shortened life” means this week, right now, it becomes a ‘must’. Changes are instant. People make changes when they must change. There is an urgent nudge to their “must” decision. Rarely are changes made when people simply consider it a good idea. Rarely permanent.

So there has to be a passion. An absolute conviction of the heart to make changes. A must, not a should. It is such a profound conviction that circumstances surrounding you are seen as minor obstacles that need to be stepped around to get to your decision. Suddenly, the opinions of friends and family no longer deter you. The fact that it is going to feel weird and unusual to you does not matter. You are ready,

willing and able to do the thing you need to do because no other option is sufficient. Nothing will stop you. It is not a matter of will power because what has been embedded inside of you for so many years cannot be changed with a thought process alone. You need to understand that choices and appropriate massive action will take place in your life and it has to come from you. This is because nobody can fully appreciate and understand your convictions with the same depth as you do. Call it an epiphany, an enlightenment, an awareness or a moment of clarity but when the realization goes from your head to your heart and nothing but progress is acceptable, you are ready to take that first dramatic step into Change. I am here to help you make it not so scary. In fact, I want to share with you just how enjoyable and wonderful changes can be. There is going to be some attitude adjustments and some new perspectives. Welcome to the New You!

Excuses-Your Biggest Enemy If you understand now that changes must happen within yourself, you have to know that excuses also happen within yourself. Nobody made you do something that was contrary to your new changes that you did

not allow. It is just that simple. This is where self- discipline comes into the show. Changes don’t happen instantly just because you now determined that they are your musts. There are going to be obstacles and stumbling blocks to try to dissuade you, interrupt you, block and threaten you. If you expect them they will not come as a surprise and knock you down. Many people allow these to become the excuses as to why their success did not happen. Excuses are internal viruses that you need to rid yourself of if success, progress and ultimate changes are to be a permanent part of your life. You can control these viruses, though you may think otherwise. I will share with you how to manage excuses before they become bigger than your goals.

First, let me ask you this; if you were allergic to animal fur, would you hang around pet shops? If you were an albino, would you vacation in Florida in August? Easy to answer especially if you aren’t allergic to animal fur or you are not an albino. Here is one that might be a little closer to home. If you were a recovering alcoholic, would you meet your other alcoholic friends at the same bar you frequented before you decided to change? If you have decided to become financially prosperous and become independently wealthy, would you still spend every weekend with your broke loser friends? If you are overweight, obese, would you still have lunch as fast food places? Of course not. You start looking for alternative places, people and choices. New choices, new activities, new friends and associates and new ways to experience life is what starts to eliminate the viruses that cause excuses. Your habits begin to change.

If you view any excuse that your mind tries to convince you of, as an alternative to the changes that you deserve, you need to jettison it immediately. Replace the excuse with a reinforcement and remind yourself of your ‘why’. Why was the change a ‘must’ in the first place? If it was a good enough reason to start then it is a good enough reason to maintain and continue. We are very clever at making excuses. Our brains love comfort and resists change so focusing on reasons not to change

comes naturally to us. The insidious fact is that your brain can not focus on two opposing thoughts at the same time. If you ignore your motivation and desire to change to instead focus on the excuses that will only derail you, you are exercising self-betrayal.

Here is a list of excuses, see if any of these are among your favorites; 1. But I’ve always done it this way.

2. What will my friends/family think of me if I do?

3. Ok, but this is the last time.

4. How can anything that feels this good be bad?

5. Nobody is perfect.

6. I’ll start tomorrow.

7. I don’t have the…Time, resources, right people, money 8. What if I starve to death?

9. I don’t know how.

10. I don’t know anyone who tried it and succeeded. What if it doesn’t work?

11. What if everybody laughs at me?

12. At least I am not out there killing anybody.

13. I’ve been here for twenty years, so I am stuck here forever.

14. They will be devastated if I make this change.

In every case you see the underlying factor of each excuse which is fear.

We are going to talk about fear in more detail in a later chapter. Fear is a wall that needs to be scaled over. Fear is a reason not to step any farther

and why your vision, your changes that you deserve are just out of reach. Courage is acting in spite of your fears. Every soldier feels fear in battle, every Olympic athlete feels the fear nipping at his heels before a race, and every speechmaker feels fear before standing up to address an audience. It is because the battle has to be won, the race needs to be ran and the speech needs to be made that compels the people to set aside fear long enough to accomplish a goal they know is a must.

Regarding excuses, whenever you have an excuse pop into your head, see if it isn’t borne out of a place of fear and not actually a reason. Fears create wonderful excuses. The “What if” factory in my head ran for years. Not any more though. My vision is more powerful than anything that wants to stop me. Fear is just another rung on the ladder that that I must climb.

There is a story I want to share with you. I do not remember exactly where I heard it first. A man goes to his neighbor’s house and asked to borrow his lawnmower. “I can’t let you use my lawnmower because I am making a pot of soup on the stove right now.” The neighbor was perplexed and asked, “What does making a pot of soup have to do with me borrowing your lawnmower?” The man replied, “Nothing really, but if I don’t want to loan you my lawnmower, one excuse is just as good as another, isn’t it?” Case in point.

If you must make a change in your life, no excuse will stop you. If you don’t make change a must in your life, any excuse will do just fine. An excuse comes cleverly disguised as a very good reason. Nobody says, “I just don’t want to.” Everybody has a reason. It is another form of lying, to yourself, or to others. I saw this fine-tuned when I was a sales professional. No one ever came right out and said, “I don’t want to buy your product.” I usually heard something that sounded like, “We have to think about it, sleep on it, shop around, pray about it, compare this and that and that and this.” We used to have something called the “Be Back bus”. All the people that promised to go to lunch and would be back to buy our product would all one day arrive on the same bus and we would

be rich. Of course almost no one who is ‘coming back’ ever does. It was just an excuse. Only when people realized that they must have my product and that they see the true value in how it would enhance their lives did the price shrink in importance. People buy what they must have. People make changes when they know that they must make them, not before. Once that awareness is an absolute in their hearts, nothing can shake them out of it. No excuse, no reason, no circumstances or conditions. When anyone asked “What are you doing?” You have no hesitation, you know and have a total conviction. You know your ‘why’.

Knowing Your ‘Why’ The animals in the jungle do what they do out of an instinct for survival.

Lions hunt antelope, frogs flick their tongues at insects, monkeys scatter through the trees when they hear a threatening sound. Searching for food, mating, caring for their young, setting up a habitation and fighting when attacked is what they do. It is inbred in their DNA from millions of years of development.

Does this sound familiar? Maybe we have less hair than a monkey and we can not run as fast as a lion, but at the end of the day, there is not much difference between the animals in the jungle and the guy working alongside you at your office or the next station in your factory, is there?

Or you for that matter. A buzzer goes off and you get out of bed, instinctively. Instead of killing an antelope, you open the fridge and get breakfast. You get your kids ready for school, making sure they eat breakfast, get washed up and get dressed. Routines. Without even remembering the sights along the way, you arrive at your office or shop

or site and with the sound of another buzzer or bell you begin your routine. Instinctively.

A recent report indicated that over 85% of people disliked or even hated their jobs. They dreaded going to work every day and found it dull and uninspiring. They show up for a paycheck which most consider inadequate to live the life they actually desire. Their ‘why’ is to simply maintain what lifestyle that they happen to have. Little wonder why people want to put a pistol in their mouths. I recently looked up some of my former co-workers from many years ago at my first job. At age eighteen I couldn’t find a job and the only place that would hire me was at a municipal sewage treatment plant. I was trained to be an industrial mechanic. I hated every minute of this filthy, disease ridden, back breaking job. I did it for the paycheck. I was there for a dozen years and finally left after the insanity of staying there for the rest of my working life seemed impossible. When I looked up the list of current employees, I saw the names of people I had known over forty years ago, still there.

Same job, same position, same location, doing the same thing day in and day out for over forty years. It almost depressed me.

A paycheck is not a sufficient ‘why’. Consider people whose lives are filled with new ‘whys’ and passion every day. Elon Musk comes to mind.

Here is a man who developed PayPal in his twenties which gave people worldwide a way to purchase items from others. It revolutionized marketing and purchasing online. Before he was thirty, he sold it and with tens of millions of dollars, he had his youth, wealth and options to do anything he wanted to do without restrictions. He in turn developed Tesla motors. The first non-fossil fuel car built out of Silicon Valley. There were challenges, ups and downs, risks and issues to deal with but he made a success of it. Then, instead of living the life of a hedonist globe trotter with millions of dollars to play with, he invested everything in his rocket program, SpaceX. His first two rockets exploded before they got to the first cloud. If his third attempt failed, everything he had would be lost. People who gamble a few hundred dollars in Las Vegas are sweating

bullets, try to imagine Musk watching the launch of his third rocket with his entire fortune on the line. The success of that launch netted a multibillion dollar contract with NASA which made him a billionaire. That is nine zeros, my friends. Elon Musk is a man who knew his ‘why’.

Why you make the decisions that you do is far more important than what it is you do. If you do not understand and have a clear and precise focus on your ‘why’, what you are doing is doomed to fail. Unlike the jungle animals, who act solely on instinct, we humans have reasoning abilities. We can imagine and create anything we want as long as we can conceive the idea in our minds. A monkey can only be a monkey, a horse can only be a horse. Humans can become anything we put our minds to, yet we do not do much more than wake up, punch a time clock, do a job collect a paycheck and go home. For forty years. To make exciting changes in your life, you need to understand your ‘why’. Why do you want to develop from where you are to where you want to go? I want to stop smoking because I love my family and want to be with them for many years to come. I want to lose weight because I want to live a healthy life and play sports again. I do not want to leave my family without a parent and spouse. I want to start my own business because I have ideas that I believe can revolutionize the way people deliver goods and services. I want to start an exercise program because I feel so much better when I move and stretch. Get your ‘why’ in order. Make your ‘why’ a positive reason. Stopping smoking, drinking, self-abusive thinking, for example is what you are leaving behind. You must have a why that focuses on the outcome and benefit. A healthy lifestyle, feeling good again, more money to give you a life of financial freedom and comforts, being a community leader to guide people toward a safer and more prosperous society. Whatever it may be for you, what you want to do it second to why you want to do it. It absolutely must be specific or else you will fail. Making more money is a prime example. When I ask many people about changes money seems to come up most of the time.

How much more money? What do you intend to do with it? Who should

benefit from it? Where will it come from and where will it go to? How will you manage the extra resources once you have obtained them?

They do not have the first clue. Just “more money”. So they have a ‘what’ in place, just not a why. This is why Jackpot Lottery winners are broke after a few years.

Consider university students. I ask many students why they are in university. They tell me their parents insisted that they attend, it was expected of them. They are floating through university lackluster until graduation in a few years. Then what? Get a job. Then what? Make good money, get married, and then raise a family. I suppress a groan as I think about the animals in the jungle again or the career sewage workers I used to know. There is no real why, even if they were eager to go to university and had a career path all lined up for their future. Why do you want to be an electrical engineer aside from the money? If I get any answer, it is as hazy as London fog. No sense of passion or true purpose.

There are no specifics, failure is a matter of time. People do not plan to fail, they fail to plan. Most have no idea what a specific plan is, not because they are ignorant but because nobody before them had any idea either. If you don’t have a specific plan and understand your ‘why’, then someone else, a manager, company owner, political leader or religious figure, will dictate to you what your why, what and purpose is and should be. You may not like what you hear. The lack of specificity is music to the puppeteers’ ears, regardless of who they are. They wait eagerly for those who are walking around blind without a cane in society which makes them easily manipulated. People with a solid purpose and direction in life, who understand what they want and most importantly, why they want it are the masters of their futures. No one can misdirect them or move them off course. You may not know exactly how to get there or what will encounter you along the way, but if you are determined that change and development is an absolute must in your life, the ‘hows’ will reveal themselves soon enough.

Your understanding of ‘why’ you want to make changes in your life will move you from the negative, looking over your should to see what you are leaving behind, to a forward focus and this is encouraging, motivating and positive. If you happen to want to stop wasting several hours a night watching television, that is a great ‘what’. It is your ‘why’ that will make it your new reality. Why? So I can send more quality time with my children, so I can write that book that has been burning inside of me for years, so I can learn how to cook gourmet meals for my friends, so I can learn woodworking in the garage with all those tools I bought years ago. If you are looking over your shoulder at what you are leaving behind without looking ahead to the new and improved life you want, you will be directionless and drift back to what you are staring at back there.

When I ditched watching television, I read so many books and Googled so much new information I became much more aware and enlightened about life and a myriad of new things. I wrote several books and articles for magazines. I was much more effective in my project and my thoughts and creativity came from inside of my passion and not a carbon copy of what I saw on television. My opinions were mine, my direction was solid, my ‘why’ and specific intention was without hesitation and question. Am I any different than you? Don’t we have the same brainpan? If I can do it, in a country where I arrived without knowing the language, culture or customs and created a successful organization that now helps thousands of disadvantaged children, publish a magazine and books like this one, created an international humanitarian award program and exhibited my art in museums, then what is stopping you from reaching your wildest dreams? If I can do it, you can too!

Determine what you want to accomplish and specifically determine your ‘why’ you want to do it. Make sure it is a passion, not just a hobby or mild interest, else you will quit as soon as you hit your first obstacle.

So now we come to the idea of living with Passion.

Passion We now understand that, if we want to make positive changes in our lives, we need to do it as an absolute must, with a specific ‘why’ we want the change, in spite of fear and jettisoning every excuse. Check, check and check. So that is it? Changes are on their way? Oh Hell No! Not to fast young Skywalker.

You already know that, even if you erase any possibility of an excuse in your own mind, there are other obstacles which will either directly or indirectly inhibit your progress. You have your ‘why’ in place. You are not making excuses to derail you. This mission is your absolute must and success is the only option.

Leap forward ten years, how are you going to feel about your goal? Is it still going to be a dynamic and vibrant feeing that gets you out of bed every morning? Is the goal a living, breathing, dynamic part of what you do every day? Or did it somehow fade in its emotional joy for you? Now it is just an occupation that you do because you have been doing it for so long it is a part of you? Many people lose joy and passion for, what once was their ‘musts’. One example is marriage. You marry the “love of your life” and the first few years are incredible. You feel sorry for others because no one has ever had the depth of love and passion that you and your spouse have. Ten years. Ten, long, dull, watch television again tonight years. Ten, aren’t you putting on a little too much weight” years.

Why does passion fade? Why does the dream job become just another “Place to go to work” occupation? Why does that motivational drive get sidelined for other pursuits that now are more exciting? People lose their passion for what they once thought was the end-all, be-all experience. As passion fades, excuses and reasons begin to replace it. It becomes why you think that you should call it quits and divorce. Who else is hiring a person with my skills and talent because I just can’t face this office another day. Does any of this sound familiar? It used to be my own demise years ago. I got bored easily. Relationships, jobs and projects. I came to understand that I was not passionate about these things. I was just filling in the blanks of what I thought I should be doing.

Once it lacked challenge and I did not have a ‘why’ anymore, I was looking for the exit sign. Then you start filling in the void with alcohol, drugs, affairs or other distractions that you never thought would ever become a part of life.

Passion is not something that you put on, like a jacket. It has to come from inside of you and it has to be part of the fabric of who you are.

When you lack passion, 1000 whys will not be enough to sustain your purpose. Do you know why most relationships fail? Some would say, sex, alcohol or money issues, but these are all effects, not the root cause.

Failure in anything happens when you begin to take it for granted. You no longer put the love and effort into it that you once did when it began.

If people treated their mates like they did during the first years, imagine how great their lives together would be. If people looked at their jobs as more than a paycheck and wanted to dive in to see just how effective and productive they could be, the job would be fun still and rewarding.

After a few divorces, I realized where my ut-ohs were and how to avoid them from reoccurring again. I am now with a woman who, after four years, we are more in love now than ever before. It just keeps growing and getting stronger all the time. We have our challenges like anyone else, but they pale in the face of our love which overshadows any obstacle. We both make this relationship our ‘must’. We understand and

are committed to our ‘whys’. If those should ever fail, we both understand that the relationship would fail too. We respect each other’s opinions and sensitivities. We both understand that neither of us is a clone of the other. We accept each other’s imperfections as part of who the other is. If we are angry, we are angry at the issue not at the person.

We forgive quickly because if we don’t we know what consequences look like. We are individuals first and complete, then as a couple, we can blend into one. We are as unlikely a couple as you would ever find and different as night and day. We are from very different cultures, I speak Spanish in the home because she doesn’t speak English yet. She is from a third world perspective and I am from a modern United States life of opportunity and convenience. But it is our passion and commitment that makes it work.

It is the same with my project, Changes for New Hope. I was told I did not have a chance in the world to get this organization off the ground.

The language barrier alone was reason enough. I was told that many people also tried and failed before I came along who had far more talent and funding than I brought with me. But I had what they didn’t. A passion that could and did overcome every obstacle. Like my relationship, this project is more a part of me with every passing year.

From fifteen curious faces in 2009, we have reached over 3000 Peruvian children since then. I am always looking for new ways to improve what we are doing here, new partnerships and new communities to introduce our programs to. It is also because I took a page from successful generals in history. Alexander the Great told his men to burn their ships, leaving them no alternative but to conquer and win, or die. After I arrived in Peru, I determined that this project would be a success. I had no idea what exactly it would morph into but I knew my ‘why’ as well as I knew my own name. I was determined that the children who lived in such destitution and despair would have a chance in life. Thousands of children are better off today because of this project and some selfless

people who also helped to make it a reality, believing in my vision, my passion and compassion in action plans.

Passion is a feeling, an emotion. By itself it is lifeless. How do you know someone has a passion for something? By their actions. Tinkering around at something does not represent passion to anyone. Massive, deliberate action does though. Throughout history passion has been manifested by the words and actions of great men and women, whether they were people we respect and revered or despised and hated.

Winston Churchill inspired and motivated his people of the United Kingdom especially during the darkest days of the Second World War. John F. Kennedy inspired the United States toward selfless community service among other achievements. The Wright brothers inspired their shop full of bicycle mechanics to assist them in designing and flying the first airplane. I am a history buff and one of the things I was curious about was how dictators motivated their people to action. The name Adolf Hitler leaps to mind. How did this guy get his own shadow to follow him around let alone millions of devoted Germans? I watched his speeches and read his stories from other perspectives than the ones I learned in school. Primarily, it was his passion and he knew his ‘why’. He was able to articulate it with speeches with such devotion and complete conviction, that people were mesmerized by his passion. For the use of good or evil, passion is a powerful and totally motivating tool to accomplish goals when they are your ‘musts’. Obstacles seem unimportant and easily sidestepped when you have an absolute conviction in your ‘why’.

If you set your goals with an exit strategy, a Plan B, then you are setting yourself up to fail. That Plan B gets to be very attractive when the going gets tough. Elon Musk is an “all in” kind of guy who invested literally every last cent he had in his space program. Do you think he had his finger on the pulse of everything that was happening? Do you think excuses were acceptable at any point? Do you think he gave one second of attention to people who suggested doubt or alternatives to his

success? Absolutely not. And he won. Your habits change when you want to see a result and you will accept nothing but the obtainment of that success. If you continue in the same habits you always had, no change is possible and if you get a result, it will be accidental and short lived. You cannot create a new life filled with happiness and contentment if you are habitually around the same toxic and negative people and circumstances.

I arrived in Peru and was looking forward with great excitement to what my new future held for me. I was swarmed, almost immediately, by people who had horror stories for me. The water is fouled, boil it before you drink it, don’t eat street food, you’ll get food poisoning, don’t stand still at street corners, the pickpockets will rob you, the altitude will drag you down. Good advice initially, everybody should exercise caution but when these people had nothing but these kinds of stories to tell me, I had to get away from them before I burst into tears just listening to them.

Change your habits, alter your patterns to affect a different result.

Sometimes that will mean change the people you associate with too.

Einstein said it best, “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.” The Wright brothers crashed more times than they succeeded. They took five sets of parts out with them each time because they needed to try different ways to fly before they came upon the winning method. Passion kept them going out every day. Their ‘why’ was to build an airplane. Their ‘hows’ were yet to be seen. Their passion made them a success, world famous, wealthy and because of their initial accomplishments, today we have space stations and plans to colonize Mars. But when one habit is not getting you the result you need, change your habit and make no apologies for it. Your passion will drive you through your obstacles and any negativity. We all see heroes and people who are successful whether in business or entertainment or sports figures. We see the success, the final results, but we rarely hear about the back story of the series of brutal failures they had to endure to get

to that success. Some of the greatest movies of all time, in my opinion, are the Star Wars episodes. It has entertained billions of people around the world and made billions of dollars at the box office as well as merchandise. If you read “The Making of Star Wars” you would see how close George Lucas was to failing. Just about everything that could go wrong did. If George lacked passion for his project, we would only know him as just another Hollywood director who made some pretty good films. Today George Lucas is a legend in his industry. You just can’t stop someone who won’t be stopped. Passion wins.

Self-Talk Admit it, you talk to yourself. Everybody does but nobody will say they do for fear of sounding like they are crazy. I am not talking about the homeless guy raging at invisible demons and swatting imaginary flies buzzing around his head. What I am referring to is self-talk, the thinking out loud and reinforcing the ideas and thoughts that sound just fine in silence.

Self-talk has many benefits. My ideas sound brilliant as thoughts but as I vocalize them, my ears hear what I was thinking and I am very glad that I did not introduce the ideas to my team. It is a way to get clarity and a sense of feeling for thoughts as they become actions. Self-talk can be a healthy thing. I say ‘can be’, because it can also be incredibly destructive.

It depends on how you use it, just like any tool, you have to use it correctly. So let’s explore self-talk in deeper detail and see what we come up with.

First, you need to understand how you are led to accept anything as fact and allow it to become part of your belief system. You hear and see

thousands of images and ideas every day. You accept some and reject others. Why? Because there is a base of perception, comprehension and understanding that you developed since birth. Parents, teachers, siblings, friends and society taught you what you now accept as normal.

Your views of the world and values are based on everything around you.

If you were raised in a predominately Christian country, the Buddhist or Islamic religion may seem strange to you. If you grew up in a politically democratic society, communism or a monarchy may seem bizarre to you. If you were raised in a society that wears bathing suits to the beach, the nude beaches of Europe would be quite an interesting change for you.

So self-talk, what we say to ourselves, is very important. Equally important is how we say things to ourselves. Our thinking has two parts, the conscious and subconscious minds. They are at war with one another constantly because of the contradictions we experience. We understand that our parents are always right because they told us so since we were born. When we see them doing what we know is contrary to what they told us to do, we are confused. “Do as I say not as I do� does not fit into our subconscious perception of our parents. Teachers gave us a grade we felt was unfair, managers on our jobs passed over us for a promotion to give it to their golfing buddy or your political candidate who stood on a platform of honesty and integrity got arrested for corruption. Unfairness and hypocrisy confuses us. Inside our own heads we feel a conflict between the way it is and the way we feel it should be. You want to feel happy but you feel depressed. You want to have a life of progress and prosperity but you feel trapped in a cubicle that you think you will never escape. You know you deserve better but you endure the routine you live out each day. So how would self-talk change that?

What we see and hear is what we become. We are a product of all of our experience. If that is true, then it is within our power to create the experiences we want to accept as our reality and environment. What

kind of music do you listen to? What kind of living space do you create for yourself? How do you talk to yourself? It is all part of the changes that you want for yourself that no one can prevent you from having. You control the controllable. Your voice is the most familiar that you will ever hear. You trust your own voice as truth, no matter what you say to yourself. It comes from deep within your subconscious and each word reinforces the feeling and reality that is your world. How do you think some of the most powerful people in the world speak to themselves?

How do you think the suicide victim spoke to himself as he leaped from the tall building? Quite differently wouldn’t you think? Your actions are nothing more than manifested thoughts. What you see others doing, great things, inventing new products, developing better ways to communicate to the world, organizing groups to pick up trash around the neighborhood, feeding the homeless with sandwiches, all came from the thoughts they had that this was a good idea. They told themselves this is something that must be done. Again, their ‘must’ generated their actions. Negativity works equally as powerful. People that burn crosses on lawns of minorities, painting swastikas on synagogues, beating innocent pedestrians because of their sexual preferences, and gossiping about your co-worker around the water cooler, all come from expressed thoughts and beliefs that this was a right thing to do. World leaders somehow formulate in their thinking that the wars that exterminate millions of civilians is justified to preserve a particular way of life. They sleep just as well as the humanitarians because they believe they are acting correctly.

So as you can see, your thoughts become action and those actions affect others around you. If you have many people all with the same agreed upon thoughts and subsequent actions, you can change the world. It starts with self-talk.

On the conscious level, you have affirmations. Positive words and reinforcing these words and thoughts out loud can push aside any negativity or opposing thoughts because you simply do not make room

for them. I consider any and all efforts to make positive changes beneficial. Some methods are better than others. To tell yourself that you are a beautiful human being, that you deserve the best in life, that all good things are due you today and wonderful things will come to you because you are open to them, is great. Do it with total conviction. The brain chemicals, endorphin, dopamine and serotonin, secret into your bloodstream and you actually will feel good. What’s not to like?

One drawback, if there is one to positive affirmations, is that there is no co-relating action to accompany and reinforce this. Great ideas, beautiful plans, positive thoughts that are never acted upon may feel good but are a temporary high. Positive self-talk must be the first step, action and hence, inevitable progress must follow. The graveyard is full of people who had a lot of great ideas, unrealized. I believe that affirmations are one of many methods to begin making positive changes in your life. I also believe that it is necessary to post these affirmations everywhere so that you can see them and be constantly reminded of them. My laptop screensaver has a phrase that reinforces my attitude about abundance which is important to me. It simply says, “You have enough.” Seeing it every day when I turn on my laptop immediately reinforces the thought that I have enough already to make positive changes on the lives of those whom I serve. When I wake up every morning and my feet hit the floor, the first words I trained my brain to say are, “Thank you”. Out loud. Why? Because the next thing my subconscious does is run a program to look for things to be thankful for.

I drew a blank line in my mind by saying thank you and now, without having to deliberately think about it, thoughts of why I am thankful flood my awareness. A beautiful way to start the day. It flows throughout the day. It is part of my self-talk and a morning routine I never neglect.

Ok, now let’s consider how people talk to themselves. What is going to happen if we tell ourselves?

a. I can’t do this, it is just too hard. b. I am too old or young. c. How could I have been so stupid? d. I’ve never been good at math, I always make mistakes. e. It’s raining again. What a lousy day this is going to be. f. I guess I am just unlucky g. If only I had their…. (Looks, brains, family status, money, education, opportunities, friends, connections, job, spouse, location, available time…etc.) h. I am at mid-life and at this stage, where ever you are in life is where you’ll stay until you retire and die. If it was going to happen for me, it would have happened by now. i. I am screwed. I am a loser and I always will be.

People actually say this to themselves, sometimes they wake up thinking these thoughts. In many cases it is like an endless loop replaying over again and again. You may be saying some of these things to yourself too. Do you? These same folks wish things were different.

Wish they were happier, better at their jobs, sports, in their relationships, and life in general. It will never change for them because they have self-incarcerated themselves in a prison of their own thinking.

Escape is impossible because they hold the only key and will never put it into the lock to free themselves. In the circus elephants are tied to a small stake in the ground. They can easily pull it out but since they were born, they believed the rope and stake were too strong. As infants that was true. As adult elephants, they still believe it and so they are forever enslaved to their old thinking. How many of us still accept our antiquated, useless rules and snares that once held us down and still trap us because we have not allowed ourselves to accept a new way of thinking?

Consider now, these ways of self talk. How would talking to yourself using these words, out loud, change the way you enter each day? a. I am an incredible and unique human being. Nobody is like me, nobody can be. I am one of a kind and I have a lot to offer the world today. b. Obstacles? They are mere challenges that I eat for breakfast. Bring it on. c. I have only a little money right now. But there is more where that came from and I will find out how to honestly acquire it. If they can earn more, so can I. d. What I see in the mirror is a hero, a champion, a winner, I see someone who deserves love, the best in life, abundance and prosperity. e. Today, someone is going to have it a little better because I am here. f. If I cannot find the solution, I am open, solutions will find me. g. I am loved, appreciated, respected and I am due these things. h. I am worth it. I deserve it. I am open to what comes to me, I earned it. i. I refuse to subject my emotional state to the opinions of others. They may be toxic or have issues I am not aware of. My happiness is not for sale. j. I can lift others up around me with my attitude because I am strong and loving. Others benefit from my creativity. I look for those opportunities. k. Of course not everything will go my way all the time. It is all just part of the adventure called life. Life is a long distance marathon not a sprint and I will win l. What I see and hear becomes my reality. I will fill my environment with greatness, success oriented and positive messages. I am worth it.

m. I have built a wall around my thoughts so that the negativity of others cannot ill influence or poison my contentment. n. I have enough time, it is now just a matter of priority. o. People have done great things with a lot less than I have right now, nothing will stop me, nothing can stop me. p. I jettison even the first thoughts of self-pity or defeatism as poisonous. I am a value to myself, my family and community. Whether large or small, I matter and what I am serves myself and others well. q. I accept that not everyone will embrace me nor can I embrace everyone. We are all different and not always each other’s ‘cup of tea’.

That is perfectly all right. I am a unique person to the world, just as everyone else can be too. r. I find beauty in the world around me because that is what I focus on and look for. s. I do not have to be right every time. I accept that when I am not right I am learning something which is equally beneficial. t. I will design my days from the time I wake up until the time I go to bed. My life will be on my own terms and what needs to happen for me to be my best self will be my focus and determination. u. My opinions, views and perspectives are equally as valuable as everyone else around me. v. I will fill in all the blanks in my day. I find answers to what I am unsure about. Regardless of how old I am, I can learn new things every day.

Life is exactly what you think it is. You are exactly who you think you are. Raise your perceived value of yourself and watch what happens almost immediately.

Time for Action There is no difference between someone who had a great idea and never acted on it and the person who never had a great idea in the first place. In both cases nothing happens. There is more exercise equipment in more homes being used right now as a place to hang clothing than has ever been used to launch fitness routines. Books are purchased on weight loss, self-help, stopping smoking, career advancement and relationship advice than will ever be read past the first chapter. If you have gotten this far in this book I commend you, you are one of those who believes you are ready to be a winner in life.

The fact is that for all the greatest of intentions, all of the motivation that one may have to start a program of self-improvement, every belief that they should do it, probably less than 1% actually follow through.

We already know that you must have a solid conviction and know your ‘why.’ We also understand that passion is necessary to get you in the right frame of mind. Lots of people get that far. Why do they still fail?

Action. Purpose without action is like buying a Rolls Royce automobile and park it up on cinder blocks in your back yard. It may be a beautiful car, but left unused, it begins to rust in the weather, the paint fades in the sun, gasoline in the tank turns to lacquer and the tires dry rot. It is still a Rolls Royce, arguably the finest car ever invented, but until it is used as it was intended, it is no different than any other car sitting in the junk yard. People are much the same. To get from your best idea for selfdevelopment and making those positive changes that you absolutely know will enhance your life beyond your wildest dreams, from ideas to reality, you need to put them into action. The hardest part and where

most people fall down is right there at step one. They never get started.

Whether they lack motivation, they don’t believe that a better life is possible, fear of success or failure, negative influences of friends and family or they were not serious in the first place is all irrelevant. They never started.

One of the things that I found to be a hindrance to me was that in my mind I fathomed the task at hand as this massive undertaking beyond my comprehension and capabilities. It was bigger than I was and looking at all the pieces of the puzzle was intimidating, though I wouldn’t admit it to myself. There was no doubt that I wanted the changes to take place in my life and I was more than ready to do it but the “doing it” part was the wall too high to climb. The secret was to take a look at the wall of inhibition again. Nobody can climb over their walls if they are perceived to be impassable. So the next step to success is to tear down the wall.

Brick by brick, your first task is to dissemble the wall. If it is an excuse you are making, get to the root of your excuse and eliminate it.

Remember why your goal is important to you. If it is because you may not know how, rest assured that your positive action toward your goals will cause you to stumble into the ‘hows’, almost like magic. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “It is not important to see the whole staircase to take the first step.” Imagine how different the world would be right now if he allowed himself to be stagnated by his inability to see how he was going to accomplish a successful civil rights movement. The fact is that no great inventor, scientist, medical advancement, technological brilliance or business genius knew the end from the beginning. The may have known what they wanted to do but how to get There from Here was a mystery that they had to figure out. In fact, they end result that they were looking for in some cases was abandoned because they found something even better along the way. Did you know that Post-it notes that adorn every office in the world was invented by someone who was trying to invent a glue that was absolutely permanent? Medical advancements fell into place when bread mold morphed into the

invention of penicillin. What happens along the way, for or against your efforts, aids in your development. In my project, Changes for New Hope here in Peru, it was the resistance against my efforts that built in a deeper determination to succeed. I had no idea how I was going to succeed or even what success in my project was going to eventually look like. I knew that I wanted to create a project that would benefit and help destitute children. That was the broad stroke. It was as unspecific as anyone could imagine. It was my starting point. The wall that I was facing was enormous. I did not speak Spanish upon my arrival in 2009.

The culture and customs were equally unusual to me. The altitude was 3200 meters or comparatively, twice as high as Denver, Colorado. The water had to be boiled before you could drink it. Food poisoning was common as sanitation was not as strict as in Baltimore. The streets were a parade ofpickpockets. Everything seemed to be uphill. As a metropolitan living sea level, office dwelling guy, that in itself was a challenge. People who offered to “help” me in my development of my project were actually attempting to line their pockets with my dollars and the children were of no consequence to them at all. When I resisted their corruption, they counter accused me of corruption to cover their tracks. I was threatened with violence more than once. At one point I contacted the United States Embassy to advise them of the situation and where to find the culprits should I ‘disappear’. How’s that for a big wall to climb? Still, I slowly filled in the blanks, I became more specific and colored in my vision day by day. The ambiguity of ‘helping the children’ developed into creating art projects to build self-esteem. The lack of basic manners, values and honesty developed into our ‘Do the Right Thing’ theme and core value of the project. The ubiquitous prevalence of anemia caused by parasite infestation and malnutrition was addressed by anti-parasite medicine and multiple vitamins. People appeared with bags of used clothing. People heard about Changes for New Hope on our website and the ubiquitous articles, blogs, stories and networking efforts that I always put out into cyberspace. I could not look at what it was at the moment but acted upon what I envisioned it to

become. Then I needed to allow it to flow into the direction that served the cause best. It was the determined action that made it a success. All the plans and ideas in the world, without action, would mean the children would continue in destitution and despair. My ‘why’ was an absolute for me. Those who had originally stood in my way, pulled against me, and whether well intentioned friends or jealous adversaries, advised me to give up, go home and quit, faded out of my mind and memory.

Action toward your progress need not be some massive, ‘Has to be accomplished by Thursday’ accomplishment. If you happen to be a baseball fan you know that you can win the game by small base hits. Get a man on first base is the initial objective. The next objective is to get another man on base, advancing the first man to second base. Every small step is progress. So many people miss that point. Progress is success every bit as much as the final and finished product. Getting there is as important as being there. Give yourself credit for each step you take as long as you are taking steps each day toward your goal.

Action is getting you there. The Nike slogan is terrific about this, “Just Do It”. Most people never take the first step, which is why graveyards are full of people who had wonderful ideas that nobody ever knew about.

But that won’t be you will it?

You need to also understand that your actions will not always, in every case, produce your desired results. Knowing what does not work is as important as knowing what does. Thomas Edison knew a thousand ways how a light bulb did not work. Sales professionals know thousands of people who do not want their product. Ford Motor Company knows that the Edsel, despite their best efforts was a dud of a car. Did they stop producing cars? Of course not, they just readjusted their efforts toward a more appealing and practical car.

Never be discouraged by what doesn’t work. This is not failure, this is a measure to show you what to readjust and do differently to get you to

your best results. In our drive through, instant gratification society that we have become, we are deluded to believe that success should be a matter of just swiping our debit card and the result comes out of a slot below. Progress is usually slow and rarely instant. It comes from trial and error. It is a continuous action and focus that blends together with our persistence that causes positive changes we want to see finally materialize. Failure is an illusion and in most cases used as an excuse to abandon your cause. You are better than that.

Action is not haphazard either. When you want to create something in your life, you cannot just go out and wing it hoping that the desired result will fall out of the sky upon you. When you use your self-talk, your determined “musts” and ready perseverance, ideas will start to flow toward you. Some ideas will be immediately available to initiate, others will require more planning and time. I write down every thought and idea regardless of how insane it seems. I try to be totally uninhibited when doing this so my brain won’t have a chance to attempt to nix it before I get it onto paper. I can always scratch it off but if I limit myself to the things my brain says, ”That will never work”, I would end up with a very short list, and a self-fulfilled prophecy that it didn’t work because I never tried it. Some of my best ideas that morphed into my greatest successes were the craziest of ideas that took shape and color which ultimately helped thousands. What is crazy is never giving it a chance to grow. If it did not work, I could always chance it or discard it but only after exhausting the possibilities of its success.

The changes that you deserve will unfold when you allow opportunities to come to you, whether it germinates in your own mind or you are open to new opportunities that are offered to you by others. What action are you prepared to take to make your dreams come into reality?

Ask yourself the questions that create your brain to search for the answers is one great way to trigger the changes you want. The gap in your mind, in your thinking gets filled. Nature defies a vacuum, even in your thoughts. Questions seek answers. The answers lead you to your

hows which, while unknown at the moment, soon reveal themselves and you have a path to enlightenment that you did not have a day ago.

Believe it or not, most of my progress and continuing success came to me by staring at a large sheet of paper filled with hundreds of questions that begged for specific answers about what needed to be accomplished next, who it would benefit, why it was urgent, where resources could possibly come from and which areas I could possibly address first. The ‘hows’ I always leave open because rarely does a ‘how’ in my head match the ‘how’ in reality. How it will happen will reveal itself in time. If I am currently unaware of how it will get accomplished, then I may see that as a roadblock and ultimately, subconsciously, sabotage myself to consider it impossible. Make your lists, act upon them, in small ways initially, giving yourself the confidence building experience of small wins and grow toward bigger achievements every single day. Like working out, if you take a day off, you have to start from scratch the next day. You will want to stay in peak performance condition in your mind toward your goals and dreams every single day. Success does not take holidays.

Passion to reach for the impossible has no punch out time. You start to see every person as a possible partner in your success. They may have something to share that advances your goals. You start to see every circumstance as an opportunity toward your progress.

Let me share this story. Margarita had been inviting me to her pueblo of Tinco for quite some time. I had not heard of Tinco except from her and was reluctant to consider a project so far from our base and in such a small pueblo. She was persistent and assured me the trip would be well worth my while so I took a day and went out to Tinco. As it turned out, one of my “hows” became fulfilled. This little pueblo of Tinco has about three hundred children, all without the assistance of any other NGO or government aid. The teachers in the schools there met us with open arms and eager acceptance of our project and what we could bring to the children. Margarita now taches English classes there, we distribute vitamins and anti-parasite medicine, share our “Do the Right Thing”

message throughout the town and as the neighboring town of Carhuaz heard of our efforts, asked us to do a similar project among their people numbering about nine thousand. We have plans for recreational activities, art exhibitions and the continuation of our vitamin and antiparasite programs there. We anticipate reaching several thousand children and adults there with a positive message and progress that has been lacking simply because of their location being so remote. Always be open to opportunities and circumstances that avail themselves to you. The “How� will present itself at the most unusual of ways and so often seems to sneak up on you if you are not watching carefully. Many people miss it because it is so simple, instead they are looking for the complex and convoluted answers. But when those opportunities appear, be prepared to take action, else it flows away from you.

Self Esteem Here it is my friends. I could write an entire book on self esteem exclusively. In fact, there has probably been thousands written already.

So why is self esteem still such an elusive character trait to so many people? Perhaps because we all want to live with self esteem oozing out of every pore but are we willing and ready to do what it takes to develop that self esteem? Or are we allowing every obstacle, every tug of the strings tied to superfluous distractions to make us feel we are not adequate enough, not worthy of the rewards we see others enjoying?

Are we allowed to believe that we can be great? To feel that surge of accomplishment after a struggle to get there? Are we entitled to look in the mirror and absolutely love who we see looking back? I say yes, totally, an unqualified, without reservation, YES! I do every morning. I will do that every morning until my last dying breath. I am no different than you. Not in any way, shape or form. The only thing that is different are my habits, the way I choose to see myself and how I internalize what surrounds me. My attitude is one of expectant victory. My obstacles are part of the game I play to win and the wonderful things that come my way are also expected and not a matter of luck or surprise. This comes from a profound sense of self esteem. Not arrogance, not pride and not self-delusion that I am something I am not.

Thoughts become things. There is nothing that you have done or tried that you have not thought about first. Your actions are manifested thoughts. The results of your actions create the feelings that you have whether positive or negative. Therefore, how you feel is up to you. So, let’s back up. If you have a positive outlook on life and yourself. If you believe that you deserve all good things in your life, all happiness and success, then your actions will follow the course your mind has already laid out. It is just a matter of dancing down the path toward the awaiting joys. Obstacles are stepped around. They have no real significance. They are there for everyone but, while some trip over them and cry, others pass them and smile at the success that is getting closer every with step.

The power of a solid sense of self esteem will hear the word, “No” and tell themselves, “That’s one down, let’s go ask someone else until we get the answers we are looking for.” Those lacking self-esteem accept ‘no’ as the final answer and reason to quit. Self-esteem is the gasoline in your engine, your fuel that makes race cars out of junk yard rejects.

Without powerful self-esteem, a million dollar a year professional slowly decomposes inside until money is no longer enough to prop up their lives. Look at superstar entertainers whose lives seem to be exploding with success on every front. When you read that they are in rehab

clinics, again, or incarcerated, again, or committed suicide, you wonder what went wrong. They are on a pinnacle where everybody wished they could be too. External success without self-esteem inside is worthless.

Money, fame and success does not make a person. Personal wealth and esteem is not measured in cash reserves, luxuries or Facebook “likes”.

How you feel about yourself sets the stage for everything that will happen to you, what will come your way and what you will do with your opportunities. So we better take a closer look at building self-esteem as a major part of achieving the changes that we deserve.

What I share with people is to take it from the top. What do you do when you first wake up is massively important. Why? Because your brain is most vulnerable to influences around you at that time. What you feed your head before breakfast is going to stay with you throughout the day, perhaps subliminally, but it is there working like a submarine under the surface of the water, you may not see it but it is there nonetheless. The people who wake up dreading the day, dreading the routine, hating the drive to work, anticipating another barrage of problems and drudgery will have an uphill climb all day and climb into bed exhausted and miserable. Contra-wise, the people who step out of bed with a sense of purpose and expectation will launch their day on their own terms and regardless of anything else, their day will be happening on their own terms. They feel great about themselves and they attract great opportunities to themselves. They see the world as a happy place and they make it so. This may sound over simplified and perhaps it is, but every oak tree was a simple acorn, right? Maybe starting with simplicity is a good place to begin. What do you think?

When I wake up every morning the first thing I do as my feet hit the floor is say, “Thank you”. Why? I haven’t experienced anything to be grateful for yet. Some people say, “Because you are still alive…” I do not consider that a bona fide “accomplishment”. Unless I am dead I will inevitably wake up every morning. Setting the bar that low is like shooting fish in a barrel. I do this because my brain has a piece called

the Reticulating Activated System, R.A.S. for short. I am not a neuroscientist but I read enough to understand that this part of my brain will look for things in an almost indistinguishable manner to fill in gaps, the blanks and the answers that I ask of it. Thank you is not said to any deity or specific direction, it is said in anticipation that before the day is out, I will have many things to be grateful for. I am just grateful, future tense. In advance. I am sincere in my gratitude and each day I am not disappointed. I launch my day knowing that good things are not just going to happen for me, but that good things are actually due to me. I believe that good energy attracts good things just as negative energy attracts negative things. It is a physical law of the Universe. It is as real as the law of gravity. What do you think this attitude does for my selfesteem? I deserve good things to be in my life. What does not serve my happiness will fade and fall away from me like leaves on a tree in the autumn time. I smile a lot. Intentionally. Then my brain looks for things to smile about. I see the world, even with its overwhelming odds and deficiencies, as a beautiful place that needs to be shared with those who lack the vision of happiness and joy. I live in a third world country and see misery and suffering everyday as a challenge that I must find a way to relieve. I could shrug it off and say that they are not my family and their problems are not my responsibility, but that is not who I am. I have morphed into a man who believes that we are all one human family, one tribe and the suffering of one is the suffering of us all. I help those who want to help themselves and come short. I teach them how to adjust their attitudes and see their circumstances in a different light so success for them is the brighter and more focused vision. My gratitude becomes their gratitude. When I leave a village after bringing clothes and shoes, vitamins and anti-parasite medicines, school supplies and recreational materials, I say, “Thank you� as I leave. It confuses them and I explain why. My passion, my love and my compassion has had an opportunity to multiply by sharing with them. Action intensifies the motivating thought.

What I can do to advance their situation has enhanced me as a source of light and love even more profoundly than before. My own self-esteem is

growing. Physically, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins and the other feel good chemicals produced in my brain surge into my body. I feel good about my thoughts, my actions and subsequently, my life. I am a good person. I know this because I see my actions, motivated by my thoughts and my passion for living and sharing. It is not external, that is the result, it is internal first and foremost. The seed sprouted into the tree that birds nest in, squirrels scamper through and loving couples have picnics under.

How unique of an individual do you have to be to experience this life altering change? Not unique at all, every one of us have the ability to start living with passion immediately. Self-esteem develops when we do.

It is undeniable who and what we have become when we act on a positive and selfless path.

There are some factors to consider when developing your sense of self esteem. Here are a few thoughts I want you to think about; 1. Self-pity is the enemy of every possibility of growth, progress and selfesteem. It is a fire that devours everything leaving only itself. Take a lesson from the blind who will tell you that the last thing they want from anyone is your pity. Feeling sorry for yourself releases the chemicals in your brain that leads to depression and physical fatigue. You actually shut down and getting back up is a long hard road that you can avoid by refusing to allow yourself to consider how unfair life is, how bad everyone is treating you and how bitter you are that no one seems to care about you. In actuality, your self-pity repels people away from you and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

2. If you look for problems you will see them everywhere, but if you look for solutions they also will pop up out of every corner for you.

3. No one can give you a sense of self-esteem that is more than superficial. If you tie your self-image to what others think of you and their opinion changes, your self-image collapses as well. To call you a

kangaroo does not make you a kangaroo, does it? What people call you may be out of their own pain and emotional vacancies and has nothing to do with who you are, your true value or what you are capable of accomplishing.

4. Give yourself credit for your accomplishments and personal successes regardless of how small or seemingly insignificant. In a very enlightening conversation with a Belgian psychologist whom I met with some years ago, I was told how he boosted his patients’ ability to develop selfesteem by giving them a houseplant. I wondered how that worked. He shared that it gave them something to take care of, a sense of watching something develop and grow as they watered and tended it. I thought back to my own days raising a forest of Bonsai trees in my house years ago and how nurturing that was for me too.

5. Take an attitude of “If they can do it, so can I.” You are as good as anyone else out there. You are as much of a child of the Universe as anyone who has ever lived before you. Regardless of what others tell you, think of you or do to derail your self-esteem, you are everyone else’s equal in every respect. Others may have had better opportunities than you but that does not make the better than you. Build your own opportunities step by step. They did, you can too.

6. What you see and hear is what you become. We are all products of our environment. Surround yourself with positive uplifting music, people, programing your mind toward uplifting information and influences. The gossip and blather on television and magazines can wear you out in pretty short order. You wouldn’t knowingly drink poison would you? Why allow toxic voices and sights enter your body and mind through the negativity of others?

7. Keep a journal. A life worth living is worth recording. Look back on your writings every thirty days or so and see your own thoughts and

consideration and the direction that you are moving in. Make the necessary changes that you feel are important based on the patterns that you see.

8. List a dozen things that you like about yourself. You may have a shorter list of self-esteem is in short supply but start creating a focus on why you are a valuable, beautiful and important person who is inhabiting this planet, deliberately.

9. Realize that self-esteem is a dynamic growing and living thing inside of you as real as your heart and lungs. It needs to be nurtured and cared for and it will grow and develop. Once you have a foothold on your own sense of personal value, you act upon it and it deepens day by day.

10. Remember your self-talk. If you are not where you want to be, always add the powerful word, “Yet”. I am not able to jog five miles….yet. I don’t have that promotion….yet. I am not a fantastic artist….yet. Turn negative thoughts into positive and potential for your inevitable bright future with the simple word…yet.

11. Many philosophies teach us to “Love our neighbors as ourselves.” It is impossible to love those around you if you do not first have a love, a powerful sense of self-esteem within yourself first. Have you ever wondered why some people are always miserable and have nothing good to say about anyone? How do you think they feel about themselves? Their self-esteem well is dry. I love those around me. I have a passionate love for mankind and those in foreign lands where I may never be able to travel to and I am designing a program to get help to those in need there too. Love is limitless. It has no defined dimensions or confined space. Love and compassion can reach around the world at the speed of light. First however, you have to feel it within yourself and self-esteem is a self-love that allows you to influence millions.

12. The past. We all have situations and circumstances that we wish never happened. Everybody has had bad break-ups, divorced,

terminations from jobs, money shorts, sicknesses and childhoods that wasn’t quite a Disney movie. These memories can literally rot your sense of self- esteem. You are no longer tied to the past. Remember that. The past does not equal the future. Did those unfair, ugly things actually happen? Yes they did. Are you entitled to be angry and upset about it?

Sure you are. However, is that the best use of your energy and time? Is it worth your sacrifice of self-esteem and self-value to denigrate yourself all over again by remembering the bitter battles of the past? Oh Hell No! You are no longer a victim. You have exploded out of that to a victor. The past is over.

I get it, it was a Very Bad Time for you. People treated you without dignity, respect and possibly with violence. No one is minimalizing that because it was very real. It actually happened and people may have gotten away without consequences for their actions against you. Take it from me, you are not the only person in that club. Now it is time for healing. Letting go is hard, I understand because for many years, I woke up every morning fighting it myself. I woke up after a night of persistent nightmares that were very real and had to fight past the memories of abuses, deliberate oppressions, unfairness imposed upon me by sadistic people and extreme violence. I rarely even think of them now because I have launched a campaign in my mind which says, “Forget to remember.” Whenever the past creeps up on my blind side, I sidestep it by deliberately forgetting to remember the incident. Was it ten or twenty years ago? Let’s keep it there. The memories come floating close and without me grabbing onto it, they float on by and I fill my head with the victories of my ever present, NOW. Love and bitterness cannot occupy the same space. Choose love.

13. Positive affirmations. Some may see this as a self-delusional convincing of yourself that things are great just by saying that they are. I agree in a qualified sense. Without action to reinforce it, they are only words. I am telling myself, out loud and with a strong convincing voice that, “I am stronger than anything that could possibly bring me down.”

“I am valuable and worthy of respect” “I am a wonderful person and wonderful things are due me today.” “I feel loved by those around me. I appreciate the opportunities to grow and find a deeper sense of purpose today.” To complete the circle I need to put the words into action. If I want to feel strong, I must act with strength. If I want to feel love, I must act with love. Self-esteem will be the result. It is like day following night.

14. Do the Right Thing. Nothing chips away at your self-esteem faster and more completely than living contrary to good and decent values. I am not a religious figure nor your moral compass. You already know what you are doing and whether it is compatible to being a good person.

Your self-esteem is the price you pay to pursue selfish endeavors. When you are a “Me-first, Me-only” type of person, it is hard to face yourself in the mirror. You may get what you were after and may have deprived someone else of their deserved earnings but the cost to your personal dignity and character dings your self-esteem into oblivion. If you live honestly, lying is never necessary. Conversely, doing the right thing support and reinforces you are a decent and good person, worthy of love and honor, respect and the friends that you have. In Peru, “Do the Right Thing” is a core value that Changes for New Hope is based upon and we have used it to move and influence hundreds of children into a path of honesty, integrity and mutual respect for each other. It was so successful that the mayor of Huaraz Peru made it a city-wide campaign with incredible results reported.

Self esteem fortifies you against unexpected misfortune and the barrage of circumstances that would give most people a bad case of the wobblies. I was once verbally attacked by a man who berated me as arrogant, proud, a fraud, dishonest, sneaky and deceptive. He was a valuable asset within the community because the mayor heralded him as a Harvard medical doctor who had promised to treat thousands of children for free, secure funds for a new hospital, and donate expensive medical equipment to schools and clinics. I thought he was too good to

be true. His attack was to jettison me from getting any closer to his secret. I listened, smiled and the bullets from his assault literally bounced off of me like it was Superman’s chest. My only response was, “According to you, and only you.� It only served to further enrage him.

My self-esteem, self-confidence could not be penetrated. What he was hoping his attack would deter me from was a simple Google search that revealed that he himself was everything he accused me of. His medical license was revoked in two U.S. states for fraud, malpractice, gross negligence, gross incompetence, lying on his medical application, misdiagnosing patients and other related charges. He had not been a medical doctor in over twenty five years. I was one step behind him to advise the mayor and others from whom he was amassing funds, donations and prestigious accolades, that this man was a complete and total charlatan. Had I not had a solid and powerful sense of self-esteem, I would have cowered with my tail between my legs, and avoided any further confrontation with him. That would have given him the ability to mal-treat children and other patients, possibly poisoning them with his ill-advised medical recommendations with severe consequences. Know who you are and what you are and never let anyone convince you otherwise. In case you were wondering, at the time of this writing, the man is currently under criminal indictment for practicing medicine without a license, criminal deception and charity fraud.

You are a person worthy of love, respect and to live a life of dignity regardless of your humble surroundings or struggles. No one can deny you of that. People may try but, like your education or good name, no one can interrupt your self-esteem if you nurture it every day, accept it as part of your make up as much as the air that your breathe and build upon it by actions that fortify your self love. What goes out from you does come back to you. The energy of the Universe supports this in every philosophy and ideology. Trust it.

Visualize the Changes that You Deserve One of the most powerful things that you can do to launch the changes that you desire in your life is to visualize them. In your most vivid imagination, using color, sound and motion, create the result as thought you have already obtained it. Feel the sensations that you would actually feel when you are in the place you want to be. This part of dreaming big, living large and living deliberately.

Have you ever watched a movie and became so engaged in the plot and characters that you feel you are right there in the scene with the actors?

Every other sensation and reality around you fades and you are actually feeling, experiencing the pain or excitement or action the characters are experiencing in the movie. That is called suspension of disbelief. It is why movies are an escape from reality for an hour or two. It is why we enjoy movies, to step out of our real lives to experience something different.

Depending on the movie you want to see, you can experience pretty much anything you want to feel. You can get that same experience from reading a good book. The images in your mind become as real as anything else you see or experience in life.

Why let this just be in a movie? Why not use that same suspension of disbelief to your advantage and create your reality as you want it to be for yourself? If you want to be a famous singer performing before thousands in a packed theatre, why not become that in your imagination by creating the entire scene just like in a movie? Just close your eyes and forget that you are not that superstar just yet. Imagine

the theatre filling up with fans anticipating your performance. Your team of prep people are all around you making sure you look exactly right.

The lights dim and the curtain goes up. As you stand there a spotlight splashes down upon you as you grab your microphone and walk forward to thousands of screaming fans applauding your first song. Hear them, feel the sensations of being there and look around at the thousands who came to hear and see your show. Sounds silly? Who cares, it is your fantasy, your dream, your imagination. When you were a small child you imagined all the time, didn’t you? Remember playing with dolls as a girl or playing army or cops and robbers as a little boy? Your play acting was real at the moment. Your imagination was vibrant and so very alive all the time. You could imagine yourself a superhero or a rock star or anything else that suited you at the moment. What happened to that little girl or boy? What happened to our ability to imagine anything that we wanted to dream up so easily? Why can’t we do it today? Could it be because people, adulthood, “normal” the perceptions of other people and their mockery of our dreams got in the way? We became intimidated and afraid of not fitting in or being considered “weird”.

I love being weird. I love being the misfit, the out of the ordinary, the dreamer, the guy who thinks he’s going somewhere one day. I love coloring outside of the lines and thinking outside of the box. I love the ability to use huge numbers that are unrealistic and make them realistic.

When my project Changes for New Hope had a mere fifteen children in a small adobe room, I was already imagining five hundred children being served in one way or another by our fledgling little project. When Vitamin Angels in California was kind enough to approve our grant application for vitamin A to abate the results of anemia, they asked how many children I wanted supplies for. Without hesitation I wrote 5000 on the line, and multiple vitamins for two hundred pregnant or nursing mothers to secure their health and well-being also. I created the number and my reality grew into it. Three thousand children have received vitamin supplements and in areas where we are consistently,

anemia has fallen to their lowest levels ever. At the time I was unaware that Ancash, the region of Peru where we work, had the highest incidences of anemia in all of Peru, at over 50%. If I wasn’t the dreamer, if I was marching to the same drummer’s beat as everyone else, I would have accepted a shipment for a few dozen children and considered myself playing it safe. Playing it safe, however, does not solve challenges.

Nor does it get you where you want to be in life if you are dreaming big.

Steve Wozniak could have played it safe and kept his job at Hewlett Packard making a decent salary and relatively secure job status. Instead he partnered with Steve Jobs to develop Apple computer and brought technology to the world that had never been seen before. Sir Richard Branson certainly didn’t need the money when he created several of his Virgin brand companies. He did it because he dreams big, he reaches into the unknown and develops what others never dared to imagine. He sees the product, the company, and the results into existence. You can too. If you simply allow yourself to step out and past the limitations of the incarcerating ‘here and now’. I absolutely cringe when I hear people describe the ‘way it is’ ignoring the concept of ‘the way it could be’.

Whatever you want in life, as long as it does not violate your sense of ethics or hurts others, dream it as big as you can possibly dream. Then dream it a little bigger. What color is it? What does it look like, whatever it is for you? What does it sound like? Fill in as many details as you can about what you want, want to become, want to create or want to do.

Melt yourself into a sense of suspended disbelief. Never allow yourself to think that it is not remotely possible just because it does not exist today. When I was a boy, self-driving cars were a futuristic cartoon on Saturday mornings called The Jetsons. Today, they are a reality. We all gathered in the cafeteria to watch John Glenn orbit the earth in a small space capsule on a black and white television and applauded as he splashed down in the ocean safely. Today, people live in space for months in space stations doing experiments that are advancing science.

Portable phones were all James Bond high technology in the 1960s, now every kid on the street has a cell phone the size of a candy bar and all

the public information in the world is available to them on it. Do you know why these things now exist? It is because somebody decided that ‘the way it was’ was not good enough anymore and regardless of who thought it was a crazy idea, invented something better, different, and unusual. They were dreamers and stepped outside of reality and created their own reality. Now we all enjoy that reality and we can dream outside of the box into the next fantasy. Suspend your disbelief long enough to make the impossible, possible in your life.

You read about the self-made mega millionaires. Did you consider that at one time they were not worth a hundred thousand dollars? Some were broke. The incredible Olympic track star that you see running a record breaking time for a mile at one time couldn’t break an eight minute mile. They envisioned themselves better than they were the day before. They dreamed their reality into existence. They refused to accept that what they were at the moment had to be the way it would always be for them and what they made themselves, through hard work, determination and vision, became their reality. The fact is that you cannot be anything more than what you believe yourself to be or capable of. If you see yourself as ordinary, run of the mill, and average, then that is exactly what you are and will always be. Drift back to the time when you were a little child and were capable of dreaming and fantasizing about great things without inhibition. Become that little child again, allow yourself that luxury. Forget, suspend your disbelief that greatness is out of reach for you. See yourself sitting on the fantail of a yacht with incredibly successful people like yourself. People who never punch a timecard, people whose only boss is their ability to create and design things that will enhance the lives of millions of people. They do not always sit on yachts drinking champagne congratulating each other on successes. They are too busy focusing on improvements to their ideas, their products or services and themselves. They have mentors.

They read self-improvement books, attend seminars and workshops, they watch inspiring videos and each day make the small changes that

result in huge personal developments. They are never satisfied with the way things are. They visualize where they want to be, in their relationships and personal growth. They see challenges as invitations to keep trying in another direction because this one wasn’t the answer they were looking for. They are limitless.

You can be limitless too. Did you know that? Did you consider limitations as the resistance that will build mental muscle to become stronger as you break through each one? If you can visualize failure and defeat, you can visualize anything positive instead. Worrying is a form of visualizing.

You just know the outcome is going to be disaster. You can almost hear the supervisor going ballistic in the office at you. You can already sense the feelings of rejection when you arrive at that restaurant to hear your girlfriend’s words because she called early to say, “We have to talk.” Why is it so easy to imagine the worst possible scenarios but we fail to use that same brainpower and energy to imagine, visualize and create in our thinking amazing new developments? Is it because we were all born in a negative world and everything we heard in the first few years of our lives was “No” “Don’t touch that, you’ll break it” “You are in the way again.” Perhaps. That was then, a very long time ago. Let it go, it’s time to dream.

We are not tied to the past. We are not our past efforts, failures, insecurities and we are not what we once were. There is no such word as “Always”. You are not always a failure, loser, klutz, or a (fill in your own blank here.) You can now create design and re-make your life, your future and begin to realize your dreams by simply closing your eyes and visualizing yourself in the body, house, car, job, lifestyle or relationship that you choose to see yourself in. No one can tell you ‘no’ ever again.

Before it can be a reality, it starts as a fantasy, a dream and thought. It gets colored in and the shape gets defined. It seems to make more sense as possible the more you focus on it. It lifts out of your mind and into your plans and goals. You see and understand that if other people did it, even after perhaps hundreds of failed attempts, then you can too. Every

successful person was a failure again and again until he broke through and persisted until he or she became a success. Successful people were just the ones who wouldn’t quit when the situation looked bleak. A failure simply means, “Find another way”, nothing more. Failure is not a hint that this isn’t for you. If it made sense to start a journey in life then it makes sense to continue to its beautiful fruition of victory. But it all starts with the vivid and persistent visualizing, seeing the unseen as yet, desired result. Then we took action, asked questions, tried new things, developed an insatiable appetite to see it accomplished. We looked for reasons why it is very possible and we were willing to take risks because we understood that nobody is going to kill us and eat us if it did not work out the first time. Or the second. The massively successful people that we read about in Fortune magazine and grace the cover of Time and are featured on the news are today, what they dreamed of becoming years ago. Only after many years of hard work, effort and tenacity in the face of adversities did they become who they are today.

The story that people want to believe that they were somehow lucky, in the right place at the right time or it was their destiny is pure fiction. We make our own “luck.” We stayed on a project and tried new things until we came upon the solution that worked. We jettisoned distractions.

People’s negativity interrupts our vision so we jettison them, not our vision. We were not lucky, it just seems that way when we show the finished product of out years of hard work and persistent efforts.

Nobody wants to hear about how you are trying. Nobody wants to read about how many times you failed, so nobody writes about that part of someone’s amazing journey. Maybe they should. So that no one with a dream is deluded into believing that there are shortcuts and secrets that others never saw. I am encouraged when I read about victorious people struggling against all odds and almost gave up but something inside of them said, “Just a little more, a little farther, we will make it.” Then they achieved their victories. Only in a Disney movie does the story start out as a victory and the princess dances with the prince until dawn celebrating how wonderful life always was for them.

In my first book, “A Gringo in Peru-A Story of Compassion in Action”, I initially wrote about my struggles to come to Peru, suffer through the first few years here dealing with false friends, a parade of pickpockets, third world desperation and destitution, food poisoning and altitude sickness, along with many more tribulations that would have made the most diehard survivors quiver and quit. The story was significantly happier after the first few chapters and ultimately I write about the victories and beautiful life that I now enjoy here. I was asked by a friend why I shared such depressing accounts and trauma-ridden experiences first. I thought it was obvious. I am a humanitarian. My hope is to create more humanitarians and altruistic individuals who dream of making the world, especially the third world, a better place. I had no idea it would be as hard as it was. I was completely blindsided by what I was not expecting. I wanted to share those hardships with people so that they would not be of the false idea that I somehow stepped off a jet in Lima to a cheering crowd of grateful Peruvian children, tripped backwards into a pile of money that I used to save the world. I had no idea what I was made of and the struggles that led to an amazing victory and success for the children was well worth the effort, tenacity and years of trial and error again and again. I could endure the worst of it because I had already visualized the outcome that I would not rest until I saw it in place. Only a handful of people ever helped me, even to this day and I am very grateful for each and every one of them who shared my vision.

When I stood on a stage in a university auditorium and spoke to the students and teachers about my vision for the project’s future, I mentioned that I want to reach, somehow, ten thousand children. They looked at me like I just told them about my pet unicorn. It doesn’t matter. It is my vision, as outrageous as it is, just as thousands children being reached was outrageous when I was only serving fifteen in the beginning.

Only you can write the story for your life. No one can write it for you and no one can erase the parts that they think sounds too farfetched. If you

can allow your imagination to suspend reality for a moment, and dream of the absolute great things that you can accomplish, that right now might seem impossible, then you too can join the ranks of the brilliant, accomplished, talented and the superstars of life that also had the confidence and courage to dream big those impossible dreams.

Design the world that you want to live in.

The Foundation that Supports our Biggest Vision and Dreams You have a dream, a vision, a goal. Let’s call it a “castle in the air” for now because until you decide to take the first step toward it, it is no different than all the dreams that people currently in cemeteries had and never act upon. Those rotting corpses all listened to others who told them that their dreams were ridiculous, unrealistic or worthless. You will not allow yourself to be one of them. We all will end up as worm food one day. You will lay beside them too, just as I will. The difference is that you and I will go into that deep dark hole completely empty. We will

have given our 100% all to the benefit of the world who needed our dreams and vision to become a reality for their benefit and advancement. We will be leaving greatness, a legacy, a benefit behind for others. If your dream is to write a book, write it! If your dream is to become a singer, sing it! If your dream is to become a community leader and create a social movement that changes lives, do it! Whatever it is, let’s get it done. Do not go into that forever place with greatness unrealized and lost because you never allowed yourself to create it.

How will you support your dream? Imagine a series of building blocks like a pyramid. One block upon another. If this seems simple, it is because it is. People try to make everything such a complicated process to their own stagnation.

Getting There from Here is a series of steps. There are no shortcuts, there are no hidden back doors. Everyone has to take appropriate action, step by step to accomplish the goals and dreams. So here we go.

Building block number one: Hard Work.

This knocks out most people right here. Work hard or work smart but either way you will have to accept the fact that you cannot wish anything into actual existence. Visualizing is the easy part. Once you know what you want and want it bad enough to do what is necessary, hard work is what comes next. Our brains love easy, contentment, the familiar. The brain’s job is to protect us from discomfort and unfamiliar things. The new, radically different, exhaustive effort and uncomfortable changes in our reality is resisted by our brains. We have to break through that natural urge to resist change. Our hearts might say yes but our heads say no. Let’s get our heads and hearts on the same page. Just do it, like Nike commercials tell you. Everything that would lull you into a state of comfort, move it out of your way. You will never become the success you want, make the changes that you deserve a reality if you come home every night and snap on the television and watch four hours of blather. Movies and television shows are designed to be addictive.

Millions are spent by producers to learn how to keep you in front of their programs. Viewers equals ratings and ratings equals millions of dollars in revenue. For them. Not you. Do you think Hollywood producers care that they are distracting you from your vision? It is a zero-some game, they win you lose. This is your time to start winning.

Turn off the tube and get off your butt, now.

I had a brilliant mentor many years ago who believed that I did not belong in a sewage plant pulling wrenches on machines. He did not know he was a mentor but I listened and wrote down the things he said that made an impact on my thinking. He told me I could be great and much greater than I was giving myself credit for. I was afraid to leave the “security” of my municipal job at the time though. Another mentor, who also was unaware how powerful his message was to me, was more blunt. He told me, “It is too late for you. At age thirty you waited too long to make the changes necessary for any sort of appreciable success.

You will be stuck in this job for the rest of your life. Maybe your son will have a chance but not you. It is such a shame because I see in you a greatness that could have been.” I wanted to leap out of my chair and shout, “Oh really?! Just watch me you defeatist son of a bitch!” Both of them said the same thing to those of us who would listen, “What are you willing to sacrifice to get to your dreams?” Most of the mechanics in my class had a dream of becoming a higher grade mechanic. Maybe even make supervisor one day. To me that was being like the smartest kid in school with Downs Syndrome. I wanted out. I knew I wanted to do something in the field of meaningful social work but had no idea what it could or should be. What was I willing to sacrifice? Well, the first thing had to be working in a sewage plant that much I was sure of. As Tony Robbins says, “You have to raise your standards if you want to grow,” When you are a municipal sewage plant mechanic, the bar is not all that high in the first place. Was I willing to do what it took to do more to become more? I tried many things in an effort to develop a new me and career. Somethings worked to some degree, others failed miserably.

What I took away from every experience was an inner development that was automatic. I was developing a sense of trying and trying and persevering until I found out what did work and then how to improve on that. I learned how to fight off the office politics, the negativity and the great friends who held onto my arm at the water cooler. I learned how to prop myself up when sales were sluggish and how to keep a sense of reality when sales were falling into my lap like some magic wand was waved over my head. With every victory and failure I was growing and learning what worked and what didn’t and what to do about it. Hard work. It wasn’t digging a ditch with a dull shovel but some days I wished it was. Other days I saw how, with a few tweaks in my performance, I was able to accomplish twice the results with half the expended time.

One thing I did learn was to serve my clients first to the best of my ability. Excellent service was in such short supply that clients who were served with top shelf talent, were customers for life. Money followed excellent service. Those who chased money, using clients to line their pockets with dollars were short lived and hard work got even harder.

Sales was a great job for me. I developed my presentation to be the performance of a lifetime, each and every time. While most sales people focused on closing the deal, I focused on giving a $20,000 presentation for a $10,000 product. My close of a deal was usually a matter of just handing the pen to the customer and showing him where to sign. Hard work gets easier when you love it. There were no short cuts to success.

Neither is there short cuts for you to acquire your dreams. Sales was a default career. I was not going to retire from sales at sixty five years old with a gold watch and a pension. I was sure that I was going into Latin America to serve destitute children one day and saved my money, investing wisely for that ultimate goal. ‘How’ was still as elusive as when.

But the first building block was laid in place. Hard work.

Building block number two; Courage.

Courage is the learned ad practiced ability to act in the face of adversity and fear because your dream is just that important to you. Courage

says, “I am worth much more than I am right now. My talents and abilities, while currently being developed, will create a life I am dreaming of. I can do amazing and extraordinary things because I have the courage to try what I never accomplished before. Courage is your building block on top of your hard work. Courage does not care that friends will stop calling you to go out with them because you are busy working on your plan. You have a goal, they have pass times. You have a project to accomplish, they have hobbies. Courage takes calculated risks toward accomplishing your goals. Courage takes action and stays on top of the project even when failure seems imminent.

Consider the world as it is right now because people had the courage to pursue their dreams. Every single thing that you can touch, drink, eat, listen to, look at, drive, fly in, sit on, wear, live in, go to, swim in, talk on, entertain yourself with, read or experience, someone had the courage to invent or create. Usually in spite of the fear and adversity that faced them that it might not work. Think about the singer who thought she was good enough to perform and audition in front of harsh critics and stayed with her dream to become a superstar performer whose music now entertains millions of us. Consider the international chef that studied and learned in hot kitchens under demanding teachers to perfect their craft until they became world class who now serve the finest meals in the most prestigious restaurants in the world. Every building you have ever walked into was the courageous work of someone who believed that his construction company was excellent and bid on the job to make the blueprints a reality. Courage makes advances in technologies, medicine that develops cures, fashions that we wear with style and pride and courage writes books, like this one, to reach out to folks like you so that your own sense of courage can be developed into your greatest dream. Someone had to push aside their fear and every previous failure and discouragement to design their dream into reality for the benefit of us all.

Do not be deluded that they did it just for the money. Money is a poor motivator. People that do things for money are tinkers in life. They never have enough money because after making a million dollars, they see people on bigger boats, eating at fancier restaurants and driving nice cars who make five million dollars. Money is a gauge of progress, nothing more. Money is a result, not a goal in itself. When you think about the Apple Company’s ipod, invented by Steve Jobs and his team, ask yourself if he did it for the money. He was already a multi-billionaire, so why be concerned about another device to market? It was a pursuit of greatness. It was his dream to make devices and products that serve millions and make our lives more convenient. He came back to Apple after a ten year departure and worked for a dollar a year. He had a dream to see greatness restored in the company that he started many years earlier. That took courage. Courage to do the seemingly impossible. To create what no one has ever seen before. To go deaf to the negativity of those who cannot share your vision and never moved off of square one in their own lives, takes courage. Those who created social movements, social changes, stood in the face of adversity and drilled their heels into the ground to stand firm for a cause they believed in, had courage.

Courage is developed, it does not come in a small cardboard box from Amazon. You cannot swipe your debit card to purchase it. Courage is a deep inner core value so few have because in our modern drive through, instant gratification world, it is easier to drop what does not work for us immediately and go to something else. It is an attribute that will carry you on the crest of a wave when others are drowning beneath you in the surge of their own fears. It is a maniacal focus on your passion for great results that blur the common sense urge to give up when things get tough. You will find that after a while, courage is an innate, second nature characteristic within you. That guy who was told that he had no talent by a newspaper editor became Walt Disney. Those four musicians that were told by a record label that guitar bands were on the way out

and would not give them a contract became the Beatles and the actress that was told she was too ugly to ever be considered star material became multiple Oscar winner Meryl Streep. Courage is what they had that quitters lack. We see the end result of courage as though they always had it but everyone had to develop courage by taking scary steps into the unknown just like you must do. On the other side of fear, uncertainty and insecurity is your victory. Fear is a limit and you are limitless.

If you believe that your victory is over there with its arms outstretched waiting to embrace you instead of eluding you like a frivolous butterfly ignoring you, then you will be miles ahead of the rest. Great things happen to great people who believe that they are great, that their endeavor is great and that greatness is due them.

Notice the difference between the word “due” and “owed”. I believe that great things are due me. I believe that the best in life is ready to embrace me based on my hard work, effort and tenacity. Nothing is owed to me, absolutely nothing. I expect to be compensated for my effort, but I do not believe that anything comes to me just because I want it. That is the difference.

Building block number three; Confidence Isn’t that just another way to say courage? No, not at all. Courage is the quality of champions who smash through every obstacle until the awaiting victory on the other side embraces them. Confidence is the settled quality and characteristic which is that stillness of just knowing everything will work out as it should. Confidence steps into a new project and allows you to feel assured of the outcome you are looking for. When you are seeking the changes that you deserve, confidence in

your actions, confidence that roots you into a course to take, confidence that you are not reinventing the wheel every time you try something new, is the assurance that separates success and those that dabble to see what happens next. Courage says you have the ability to do what needs to be done in spite of fears. Confidence is on the other side and arms you with a clear understanding that your efforts will produce results each and every time. It is like flipping a light switch. You are not amazed when lights come on are you? You turn a faucet and water pours out. Nothing unusual there either, right? (Unless you live in third world Peru like I do then it is a little happy dance when water comes out because you can never be sure if it will) Your sense of confidence, that is building stronger in you every day, is equally certain.

I will share this example. I wanted to build the self-esteem in the children of my project, Changes for New Hope. Their self-image was in tatters because of their living conditions and desperation of a life that was not in their power to control. I developed art programs and praised them each time they finished a work of art. I thought that we could exhibit their art in a local museum, they would understand that their true value was not contingent on their present circumstances. I wanted to approach the director of the museum and ask him for space and time for this project. This was in a national museum and the artwork exhibited there was quite good. Our kids’ art was, well, kids’ art but I was quite proud of their intense effort and was willing to push the idea into the mind of the director. My Spanish at the time was not what it is today as far as fluency was concerned, so I took my assistant at the time, William. William was terrified, he made every excuse not to go in and thought we should abort this crazy notion before we thoroughly humiliate ourselves. It was like dragging your dog to the vet to get vaccinated. “What if they say ‘No’?” I had to give William a pep talk, “Buddy, what if they do? Can they kill us and eat us? Will I get deported?

Do we have space for an exhibition right now? No? Then we have nothing to lose, let’s go!”

The director was one of the coolest guys I had ever met in Peru. He had seen some of our work in another smaller venue, and had heard about this project and what I was doing with the children. He said he would be delighted and honored to have us exhibit in the main gallery of the national museum. And we did. My attitude was to walk in like it was just a matter of scheduling a time and making sure the space we needed would be sufficient. Years of confidence built upon sales experience.

Present your product as though they are already purchasing it and you just need to show them how it works. Assume the sale. Ask for the order with full knowledge that the respond will be positive. Any rejection is just a request for more information. What I had learned years ago using courage had given me the confidence to ask for what I wanted, and expect a positive result. The children were wide eyed and excitedly showing their parents their art on the walls of a national museum. They were no longer little destitute children living in cold adobe houses. Right now, they were artists! Their hard work and courage to express themselves morphed into a confidence that anything could now be possible for them. And if they can do it, so can you my friend.

Confidence can be as sure as flipping on a light switch.

Building block number four; Failure I can hear you from here, “How in the hell can failure be a building block?” The very best baseball star I ever saw play the game was Cal Ripken Jr. When Cal walked up to the batter’s box, you just knew something was about to happen worth seeing. When he hit the ball you wondered whether the cover was going to peel off of it. That is what everyone remembers about Iron Man Cal Ripken Jr.’s baseball career.

Almost nobody knows or cares that he struck out more than 70% of the time. His “failures” were forgotten by his incredible performance, game after game for over twenty years in the sport. His failures were a building block to tweak his performance, to try a little harder and to

perfect his game. On his last day to wear a Baltimore Orioles uniform and step onto the field before he retired he was reportedly at batting practice that morning. Failures happen but they serve to make us even better, greater, more focused and to teach us where we need improvement. We should embrace our shortcomings as powerful tools to teach us how to develop our very best selves. Our failures show us what changes we need to make. Who wants to go through life never knowing what we need to do to adjust for maximum performance and progress? We don’t deliberately drop the ball but we accept failure as an inevitable part of our growth and development. If we know that sometimes we will not achieve the result that we anticipated, then when this happens we won’t be blindsided and devastated by it. Out attitude becomes one of, “Ok, that didn’t work, what was missing, what did we lack, what can we do better next time?”

Remember every champion sports team lost games. Every world heavy weight boxing champion lost bouts. Every general lost battles. Every sales professional lost deals. Every politician lost elections. Every business entrepreneur failed somewhere along the line. It is those individuals that tried again, after learning what to do better that succeeded and we read about. Winners are just failures that kept trying.

Winners see failure as the invitation to take another route. To step into the changes that you deserve you must fail, pick yourself up, try again, fail, try again and fail until you finally find the course that is right for you.

Failures are necessary and unavoidable as a building block for your Big Dreams.

Building block number five; Humility Being humble does not mean you are a pushover, feet shuffling, take whatever people dish out to you, doormat. That has been a

misconception for ages. Humility is the absence of arrogance. It is being able to have a teachable attitude, accepting that you do not know it all.

The more I learn. the more I realize that there is so much more to learn.

I am proud of who I am and what I am doing but I am always careful to maintain an attitude of humility. I listen to others who have something to teach me. I still go to conferences about leadership, time management and I listen to YouTube videos on subjects that I feel could enhance my own performance and help me to become my best possible self. If you park this building block under your Big Dream, information will come to you, be offered to you and books will suddenly appear at your fingertips to help you get to where you need to be. If your changes are your “musts.” then everything that can help you is welcomed even when the information may not be what you wanted to hear. Let it serve you anyway.

After eight years developing Changes for New Hope I woke up one day and said to myself, “There must be a thousand people who know how to do this better than I do.” Those that were watching television or selfinvolved I immediately discounted. Those who were in my field, humanitarians with boots on the ground, I wanted to connect with and learn what they were doing. Perhaps we all could help each other. I was sure there were things I had learned and experienced that would benefit others as well. Many emails to organizations went unanswered. My phone only works in Peru so calling people directly was out. Solutions.

What I decided to do was formalize my idea and created The Changes for New Hope Humanitarian Awards Magazine. A digital magazine that would ask for the ideas, stories and struggles of NGO and non-profit leaders who would be spotlighted in our pages. I was also writing articles that I thought would benefit others as well. I offered a humanitarian award to ten project leaders each year who demonstrated exceptional altruistic service to those in destitution and despair. I also invited corporate sponsors and philanthropic individuals to join our confederation of leaders as we share ideas and positive energy. Our

project, which started in 2009 with just fifteen little children, is now reaching around the world to humanitarian groups, leaders, corporations and other interested individuals who want to read about micro-charities like ours each month. It is heartening to hear from these leaders that their struggles were not much different than my own. Their victories and developments were also to some degree similar. Together we discuss how we can take our projects to the next level.

What if I decided that I knew everything that I cared to know? What if a few hundred kids was all I cared to reach out to because, looking around, nobody else seemed to be doing anything nearly as encompassing? My ‘musts’ would be downgraded to ‘should’ and my excellence that I am always reaching for would become merely my ‘good enough’. I begin my decomposition into average, mediocre and ordinary.

My humility, ironically, had become the reason for my greatness. Yes, I said it, greatness. If you accept that you can only become what you believe that you are, consider yourself great and your actions grow you into that greatness. If anyone asks you if you are great, as long as your actions support it, your immediate response has to be, “Damn skippy, I am!” Extraordinary people do extraordinary things, and they are extraordinary.

There are dozens more building blocks every other successful person will share with you which helped them support their dreams and vision.

I encourage you to read, listen and learn from as many giants as you possibly can. When you jettison distractions like television, constant texting and social media, you will have hours to self-improve and develop your ability to start living your dreams which will make your visions your realities. Be limitless. Be persistent. Be teachable.

One quality that seems to be consistent with every giant who teaches self- improvement, life enhancement and motivation is that they are always learning. They never consider themselves quite there yet. They believe that they can always tweak their activities to reach a little higher.

They believe that they also deserve the changes that will get them there.

A word of caution. The foundations that you build will support you every day for the rest of your life if you reinforce them and build upon them.

However, you will face challenges still. There will always be people, circumstances and misfortunes that will deliberately attempt to rattle your confidence and make you call upon your courage in ways never before experienced. Be prepared for this. Some folks feel that once supports are in place nothing can move them ever again, that somehow they crossed some invisible finish line. You will be challenged because you are reaching higher than most ever would try to. Jealousies, animosities and ridicule are part and parcel of greatness. People suddenly feel insecure around you because you are going somewhere in your life. Your brilliant life shines brightly upon their dull existence and instead of following the example you are exhibiting, it is easier to try to tear you down. Many times these people are the ones closest to you.

Betrayal never comes from an enemy but always someone you trust, don’t you find that to be true?

A few years ago I went through an outrageous personal battle between myself and just about everything and everyone I was engaged with. I had to make the tough decision to part company with people whom I had trusted and believed in. I had to make necessary changes that were uncomfortable to assure that this dilemma would not reoccur and I had to shore up my own devastated feelings of disappointment. I wrote in my journal, “Fly higher than they can reach.” Don’t get into the fight, just rise above, outshine and remember why you are on this journey in the first place. It is yours, not theirs. Stay strong.

Persuasion vs. Manipulation

One of the most powerful thing I can teach anyone is the difference between persuasion and manipulation. The difference is so subtle that it can be almost indistinguishable. I taught a class in a language center where I asked the students to tell me who or what can or would persuade them of an idea, a decision, a philosophy, a career path to take or a product to buy. I asked them where they get their information from.

It was pretty simple to tell me what persuaded them. Their list was something like this; 1. Parents or close family members that they respected.

2. Churches or religious leaders 3. Teachers and professors.

4. Community leaders such as political figures that were charismatic.

5. Friends who thought or believed much like they did.

6. Television commercials and media advertising various products.

7. Social media sharing what everyone else was doing, buying, listening to etc.

8. Personal observations of things and people around them based on their own preconceived ideas, value systems and upbringing.

Influences were all around them. Naturally, the first influencers that we all had were our parents or guardians as children. They told us what was safe and dangerous. They told us what food was and what was poison.

They taught us how to walk and talk. They taught us everything from how to tie our shoes to potty training. Our mannerisms and early beliefs were completely based on their total influence and guidance. As a small child, that was fine. Then something happened that changed everything.

We grew up.

Suddenly we began to question the ideas and direction of our parents and family members. “Because I said so…” was no longer reason enough to obey. “Do as I say not as I do” equally smacked of a hypocrisy that we questioned silently if not aloud. When I was a child, if I openly questioned my parents, I could well end up needing dental work. We no longer felt that our parents were infallible. In school, we talked among each other and found out that no one’s parents were infallible either.

Some things were right. If we stuck our fingers in the fan they could be cut off, but what about the more abstract ideas? What about values that worked for them as children but were outdated by time we became adolescents? Now there as become a tug of war, a battle of the minds between the children and their parents, and teachers. Teachers, as part of that conspiracy, were teaching us what to think but rarely, if ever, how to think for ourselves. This is when things started to get serious.

In my parent’s generation, for example, the Second World War was the biggest thing that they had ever experienced regardless of what part they played in it. Whether they were soldiers fighting Nazis in France or the Japanese in the Pacific or they were too young and were enduring rationing of food staples and buying war bonds to win the war. The threat that the world was going to dramatically change if the Allies did not win the war was terrifying. By 1946 it was all over and the “Good Guys” won. People who came home were heroes in the U.S. In Europe it depended on where in Europe you were coming home to, but everybody was glad it was over. I remember my Dad telling me how upset he was that he was just a little too young to enlist and go save the world with the other heroes who did. Patriotism was what made everybody proud in those days. Their country called and they answered and fought bad guys.

Then came Viet Nam. If anything ever tore apart the American people and underscored that, maybe their parents were more wrong than they had ever been, it was this war. Fathers who served in “The Big One” expected their children to go fight those “Little Commie Bastards”

before they make it over to San Diego, California. If we were too young to fight in the war we were at the very least expected to support the American cause. Not this time. Draft aged people came out by the millions against dying in “Another Rich Man’s War.” Families were torn apart, sons fled to Canada or Switzerland who gave refuge to “draft dodgers.” The levy walls of society broke and a flood of other causes, ideologies and thought became the anti-establishment movement.

Women’s liberation which flew in the face of their mother’s generation of dutiful obedience to her husband, Black Panther, Black Power movements demanded civil rights for everyone as well as Martin Luther King’s non-violent movement also supporting civil equality for everyone.

The birth control pill opened the door to the “Sexual Revolution” free love, and experimentation. Hippies, Yippies, anti-war activists of all stripes demanded everything from the right to vote at eighteen to bringing the troops back and ending the war. University students protested on campuses and police aided by national guardsmen troops stood to “keep order.” Drugs were part of the rebellion too.

Was this persuasion to take legitimate action or were people being manipulated by counter-culture Svengalis? It depended on whether you agreed or disagreed with who you were following. I asked my students what would be considered manipulation. What people, institutions or influences could be tools of manipulation? This is what their list looked like; 1. Parents or close family members that they respected.

2. Churches or religious leaders 3. Teachers and professors.

4. Community leaders such as political figures that were charismatic.

5. Friends who thought or believed much like they did.

6. Television commercials and media advertising various products.

7. Social media sharing what everyone else was doing, buying, listening to etc.

8. Personal observations of things and people around them based on their own preconceived ideas, value systems and upbringing.

Identical list? Absolutely. If it was something that they considered good for them, it was persuasion, such as a parent telling them that if they eat all their dinner they can go to the park afterwards. Understanding that proper nutrition was important, they acknowledged that they did what they did not necessarily wanted to do but the reward was worth it and in the end eating a good dinner was equally important. They were as adamant to acknowledge that parents can be manipulative as well as persuasive. “Why can’t you be as smart as your sister?” “You are giving me a heart attack” and assorted guilt-laden tactics are clearly manipulative and transparent. They all expressed resentment about it.

They were also equally adamant about their religious upbringing.

Religious leaders who taught them about love and heaven and a heavenly father who would support them was acceptable and embraced. The same churches and religious leader who also roared about how they will burn in hell forever at the hands of that same heavenly father for thoughts of lust, drinking, sexual deviance and pretty much everything that the priests were doing when they thought no one was looking. “Do as I say not as I do?” “Because I said so?” This is getting old real fast. Most people were going to church as a religious obligation since childhood but had long since discarded it as obsolete, irrelevant in today’s society and blatantly hypocritical. What once persuaded them as children became manipulative to garner obedience, forced loyalty and massive funding under some sort of threat of eternal crispiness. They instead chose to forsake their religious leaders and churches and instead follow their own value system of right and wrong on their own terms.

Teachers and professors were the ones giving out grades for passing tests. If anything was ripe for manipulation it was the molding of young

minds into the form and shape that the government, who owns the school systems or mandates what is passable to private schools for state diplomas. The tests were based on lessons learned in several subjects.

Math, language and social studies were all pretty standard. You can be Einstein or Hitler, one plus one is always two. Regardless of who said it.

What schools teach is how to follow orders. How to be good workers, get a job, pay taxes obey superiors and others in authority. If I was the head of a state and owned the school system, I sure as hell would be teaching exactly that. Of course without the rule of law and order societies would be in utter chaos. If we all could drive in any lane on the road we thought was good for us, people would be killed. Limits keep us from going over the edge. When those limits stagnate free thought, in fact prevent independent thought of any kind aside the mandated permitted guidelines, then you have a manipulation of the people. We see how well that works in China. Resistance for the sake of resistance is ludicrous. However, what if parents and teachers were wrong about “The way it should be?” Should those who want the changes that they deserve be sanctioned and ostracized? Jailed? I personally support personal changes necessary to develop our very best selves, providing, what we want is peaceable change, consistent with reasonable laws and order and causes no harm to anyone else. People have suffered for demanding and insisting to have the changes that they deserve when it “rocks the boat” and causes others to say, “Me too!” Martin Luther King Jr. was a non-violent activist who wanted all people, of any color to have equal rights. In his day, people of color could not vote, drink from the same water fountain as white people. They were served ‘to go’ in restaurants and were forced to sit in the back of public transportation.

Things changed. Laws changed. Society changed. Sometimes persuasion overwhelms the manipulation and people see beyond what their teachers and parents told them. People who cut the strings that manipulated their actions make those who pull those strings Very Angry.

I carry a pair of scissors with me wherever I go because I am not one to accept, “The way it always was.” I invite changes. When persuasion

becomes manipulation it may be too late to turn back and recapture our choices.

The students also understood that if they wanted to buy a product, they believed the advertising was persuasion to buy one brand over another.

However they saw the naked manipulation of ads that suggested that a shampoo would make them sexier, more attractive and get more dates.

Products with popular music during the commercial, famous people using the product and endorsing it is all clearly manipulative. The determining factor was clear; is this product or service good for me, a benefit to me or is it going to be another piece of junk cluttering my house in a month’s time?

The same question can be asked about religious, political, university classes, friends and parents suggestions and urgings. The title focus of this book is the changes that you deserve. I want you to consider what changes you deserve. How did you decide that these were the changes that were beneficial and advantageous for you? Notice that I have yet to tell you what to change in yourself or what changes that you need to make for yourself. You have to decide that for yourself. I will not be one of those that manipulate you to believe, trust, follow, endorse or embrace anything just because I do. The changes that I have made for the best life I can have for myself and others is my own decision, for me, for those I serve and love. It may not be the path for you. I have had many people ask me if they also should sell everything and drop off the grid, joining me here in the Peruvian Andes to help the destitute. It is a beautiful life, challenging but beautiful and I have no regrets for the decision that is right for me. It is, however, a personal choice and I made it. It would be disastrous for another person whose bonds with friends, family and community would make it impossible to follow my course and journey.

Whatever your own changes that you feel are your “musts� happen to be, I am sharing the steps that works for me and many others to obtain

those changes so that you can live with maximum peace, joy and happiness.

I use persuasion every single day. How do you know it is not manipulation? The “acid test” if there is one is simple. Ask yourself “What is in it for the person telling me this?” Just because a sales professional is getting a commission based on your purchase does not necessarily mean that they are manipulating you. If you drove your ten year old, smoking rattle trap into a car dealership, you are sure to be told that you need a new car. If our taste is a plain vanilla, no frills, economy vehicle to get you back and forth to work and your salesperson is urging you to buy a luxury, fully loaded, glow in the dark special that is three times what you expected to buy, Red Flags! Run, do not walk to the nearest exit. As a twenty year veteran of professional sales, I learned what my customer wanted, why they wanted it, how it was going to be used and what price was considered affordable for them. In almost every case I could find something that was right for them. At the risk of my own termination, I have advised a customer not to purchase my product because it was not going to be the benefit for them that would best serve them. There are subtle words that people, not just sales people, use to persuade other people of things they want them to do.

Suggesting in assumptive manners, “Wouldn’t you love to see that place in the evening?” “How do you feel about going here and enjoying the experience with me?” “Imagine how much you are going to get out of this experience once you get there.” If it is an experience that you feel would be good for you, great hop in the car and you are off. When there is some ulterior motive for them asking, let your radar take over. This is not to suggest that anyone with an ulterior motive is a serial killer, con artist or deviant that should be locked away. People who ask you to make comparisons set off red flashing lights in my head. “What do you love more, me or that table?” “We can go to the beach or your nagging mother’s house again, it is your choice.” Is it?

No one who cares anything about you would ever use guilt as a tactic to get you to do what is good for you. The lists of examples are endless. If you need that list my ex-wife currently has it and uses it regularly on whoever came after me.

In the very beginning of this book there is a paragraph that I imagine many of you thought was rather unusual; This book is being offered to you free of charge. It is the message and encouragement that I want you to receive and benefit from. It is my hope that sharing with you, without personal compensation to me, demonstrates the sincerity and passion that I have about the message.

As your life is enhanced and you personally benefit from this offering, I would kindly ask that you make a donation, of any amount, to benefit the children of my humanitarian project, Changes for New Hope, who are living in destitution in the Peruvian Andes. Your contribution will purchase clothing, school supplies, vitamin supplements and antiparasite medicine as well as other humanitarian necessities. Just go to our website at www.changesfornewhope.org and click on the donate button. Thank you kindly.

Persuasion or manipulation? This whole offering was given to you for absolutely free. I wanted you to understand and trust that I was not most interested in the royalties from the purchase of the book but the message that I wanted to share. You could focus on the Changes that you deserve as opposed to having that gnawing thought the whole time you are reading it, “Am I getting my money’s worth?” If you feel this has been a value to you to get closer to your life’s vision and goals, remember the kids of our project. Make a donation and make a difference.

Getting What You Deserve

The key word here is “Deserve”. Yes you absolutely deserve what is coming to you. Karma? Fate? Blessings? Come uppens? Reaping what you sowed? Anyway that you care to put it, what goes out from you will absolutely come back to you. That is not to say that good things don’t happen to bad people and bad things don’t happen to good people.

There are hiccups in the Universe that are unexplained and frustrating as hell. I get that, however, by and large, you put out good energy, good energy is attracted back to you. Attitude is key. Mark Twain said, “The miserable man sees the world as a miserable place the happy man sees the world as a happy place. Same world!” In reality, the world never changes. It is a giant rock covered with grass and trees and animals and people, mountains and deserts and lakes and hills and oceans. Your perception of people, circumstances and situations is what changes How you see things is what matters. You perception is based on whether you are benefiting or being hurt by what you see and are experiencing.

I was travelling through rural Kentucky one night and smelled the most disgusting petroleum smell which made me think the car engine just erupted in twenty places. The next day I drove past the same area again and saw for the first time, oil wells pumping away in fields near the highway. I was explaining to my hosts how horrible the smell was and they agreed but added, “If those oil wells were pumping on our land, and we were making 10% every month from what came out of the ground we owned, we would have to say that it smelled pretty good.”

Perception.

Your self-esteem helps you to accept what great things that lie ahead of you are what you deserve based on making the changes necessary in your life to have them. You deserve them. So many earn the right to claim great things in their lives and just as they are ready to embrace them, they choke. Why? Somehow they feel they are not ready, or deep inside a sense of secret worthlessness. How will your friends and family see you? Differently? Yes most likely, because you are different. What if you cannot handle the success that becomes the new you? I would say,

give yourself a chance to grow into it. Don’t let success and a few victories go to your head. Remember that we are all human. We come with an expiration date. One visit to the doctor who sees a white spot on your x-ray and it is time to get your final affairs in order. Just like the person who never dreamed big. Fear of success is a real thing in some people’s heads.

You deserve to be happy, content and to live in greatness, prosperity and without limitations. Your personal power is being used to benefit yourself to be the best, the most creative and successful self that you can possibly be. You use your personal power to share with the world your talents for the benefit of others in the world. Your contribution to the world is your gift back to the Universe and mankind. You have learned to live with purpose and intention. Few actually ever do. You have determined to fill in that dash on your tombstone between the dates of your birth and death with a lifetime of incredible experiences and considerations.

So powerful is your purpose that nothing and no one can dissuade you from it, distract or disrupt you away from it. You gently persuade people toward the light and love that you have found that now guides you. You no longer feel the need to manipulate anyone to do anything against their best interests. You are passionate about doing the right thing. No one can tell you that you do not deserve everything that you are now becoming and living every day. You will not be moving in the same circles and doing the same things as before. Those things no longer serve you well. In fact those old habits are the reason that you were stagnated in a purposeless life before. You now know that the words “I can’t” and “I know I should” are the same thing. Either way nothing happenings. You have jettisoned excuses and now understand that excuses are just the skin of a truth packed with lies.

Everybody gets twenty four hours in their day. How you use those twenty four hours determines who and what you are as a human being,

a success or a failure. Whether you are actively moving the human race forward or standing in the way, your twenty four hours are guaranteed, your success is up to you.

One of the most powerful words that you can use to assert into your vocabulary to move you toward the changes that you deserve is the simple word, “Yet.” Your brain will try to use logic to show you a thousand reasons why something your vision should go by the wayside.

Once you have a thought, an idea, a simple plan, you need to execute it immediately. Do something to take action toward it. This reinforces the initial thought and takes it out of your mind and puts into some form of reality. When I have an idea that would further my project, I immediately write it down. I may not remember it in an hour. I carry paper and a pen with me just for that purpose. Now it is in motion. I am human too so every so often my ghosts of failures past come to haunt again. “You can’t do that.” I could push back and go into all the reasons why I can, which only feeds the ghosts. So I add to the defeatist thought the word …yet. I can’t do that …yet. I am not good enough…yet. I don’t have enough funds to accomplish that program….yet. I don’t have the right people in place…yet.” I works well to shatter the negativity that would take the wind out of my sails and reinforce that what I do not have in hand, yet, is something that my R.A.S. will be subconsciously looking for everywhere I go thereafter. Learn how to turn your thoughts around to serve you. Your brain is trying to dissuade you from your goals because change is perceived to be painful and your brain’s job is to protect you from all pain in every way it knows how.

I went skydiving once. At the door of a tiny plane with the wind blasting past me at 70 miles per hour, my brain screamed “Noooooooo!” I went out at three thousand feet, a static line deployed my parachute automatically fifteen feet out. No one got around to telling me that it takes another two hundred feet for the chute to fully open. I was expecting something out of Mary Poppins, jump and pop. My brain was screaming for those two hundred feet, “I toooold youuuu sooooo!”

I had already told my friend who went out of the plane right after me that if my parachute did not open, buy the plot of ground where I landed because I intended to strike oil. In another thirty seconds I was floating gently through the clouds and over corn fields and pasturelands just like I was in a dream. It was one of the most amazing and empowering moments of my life. I carry that experience with me whenever I face a new challenge and face a new seemingly fearful consequence. Life should be full of these experiences because your confidence is all that you have in many cases to overwhelm the brain from saying that what you are attempting is impossible. Pushing past your perceived limitations in life is a little easier when you add the word ‘yet’ to your goals.

Remember that no one was born successful, or at the top. Even though it may appear that way for some. The “Lucky Parents Club” still does not assure instant success Comfort perhaps, but automatic success? Hardly.

Consider the children of famous movie stars. Of course they will star in their Daddy’s movie. Naturally, producers will cast them just because of their famous last names. For them opportunities are like fish that jump into their boats. There is no guarantee however, that their efforts will automatically morph into success. Is their success, void of the painstaking patience and tenacity to pay their dues, really success? Had they learned what it takes to become and maintain that success?

Considering how many end up in tragic conditions and places none of us want to be, the hollowness of their “victories” seems all too apparent.

Consider children born into royalty. Aside from gracing the covers of magazines when they have a baby, can anyone name a particular talent or humanitarian accomplishment that they personally launched that wasn’t for the benefit of cameras and window dressing? Success is a game of inches, or millimeters depending on what standard you use.

Every hard earned step of progress moves you closer to goals and dreams and visions that will be your personal victory. No one handed it to you, it did not arrive in the mail. You have accomplished this yourself.

It required changes, adjustments of your life, the scraping of your comfort zones and the abandonment of ways that did not work for you in the past but were oh so familiar and comfortable. This takes courage.

Which you have. This builds confidence, which you have. No one can say that you did not earn it. That is absolutely obvious. Who can deny you of what you deserve? Only you. The best awaits you with open arms.

Walk into that embrace.

Trading is not Sacrificing We are starting to pull many if the thoughts in these chapters together into a dynamic and powerful way to obtain the changes that you deserve. How you speak to yourself, your perception of what change means determines whether it is a positive or negative happening.

Two words that I want you to consider are the words, ‘trade’ and ‘sacrifice’. If you consider that your life must change for you to become the person that you always dreamed of being, and so much more, then you need to smooth the path and make it easy on yourself. When I was making massive and drastic changes in my own life, thinking and saw the developments that would inevitably follow unfolding, I had to toss aside the word ‘sacrifice.’ Were there sacrifices that I had to make to arrive at this place in my life? That may be one way to see it but I never did. By definition, sacrifice means to lose one thing to obtain another. I sacrificed nothing. I did not lose anything, I traded what no longer

served me well, or as not well as I needed it to, and reached higher.

Could I go back to my old life and continue where I left off? Sure, I suppose I could but I never thought about it. I do not look back with remorse and grief over what I no longer do anymore nor the people I was friends and familiar with. The familiarity was, what I now understand, toxic when considering what I could have been years ago had I made my visions a ‘must’ sooner. I had an enviable social life. It was enough to numb me to what I could become, what I was actually capable of. With some changes and personal development, it was absolutely within my reach. At the time I just believed it too far away, too hard, too much of a sacrifice. If I am being honest, I would have to say, I really didn’t want to. I was enjoying my singe life, a job that got the bills paid and the comfort that I accepted as my due. I already mentioned in another earlier chapter how things altered and getting ‘Out of Dodge’ became a matter of life and death. Still, I could have drifted down the stream of mediocrity had I not made my ‘must’ something that was to be the greatest change of my life. I traded up to the life I have now. I am trading everyday now, up, up and higher up.

Limitless. My humanitarian project will remain my obtained goal of course, but I am designing ways to expand to be able to reach, help and benefit many more than ever before. That is the new trade. The trade of ‘here’, to the next ‘there’. The next mountaintop, so to speak, in this mountain range of incredible experiences.

What are you willing to trade away that may currently be inhibiting to you reaching the vision that is your new passion? If you look at it objectively, you will realize that what you think is valuable to you, may be the very thing that is shackling you to your current life. Would you be willing to start making small changes if you were fairly certain, reasonably secure in the thought that a better life, one of your own design and creation, was a possibility? Almost everyone would say yes.

There are some that could not conceive of the thought that any other life is available. As simplistic as this sounds, people, when challenged to

…do ..it…now… will falter and hang onto the familiar even if it is an anemic version of what they actually want in life. Usually, what I hear is, “What if it doesn’t work out?” The fact is it may not. You may have to make adjustments and alterations a few more times but life is a long journey. Who gets everything they want on the first try anyway? Look at where you are right now and as yourself if this is where you wanted to be twenty years ago. No? That is like wearing shoes that are too tight because the new shoes may not be the right fit either. Trading what is no longer working for you to your complete satisfaction to reach for the best that life can be for you is trading, not sacrificing. Understanding that it is in your own best interest, probably in the best interest for your family, that it is pleasure not pain, as your brain might tell you, is imperative.

People will stay in dead end, underpaying, and unsatisfying jobs because they fear changes. Women stay in abusive relationships, university students stay in unfulfilling majors, people live in their old houses in neighborhoods that have turned downward and people stay in organizations, religious or political, long after they realized the promises and assurances were proven to be false. Is change that terrifying for them? Is the prospect of a better life really that big of a sacrifice? It is, if they see it as sacrifice and traumatizing uncertainty instead of trading one life that no longer serves them for another one and perhaps they have to start over, but the personal growth and rewards are incredibly happier and beautiful. If there is a definition of insanity, this is about as accurate as I can imagine.

Do not ever let this be you again. Do not let the past promises, assurances, tiny victories and familiarities and mediocrities somehow shine back at you as though things are different now. I was leaving a job several years ago that I considered strangulating to my creativity, opportunity, potential skills and my personal happiness and well-being. I listened for three years to promises of raises that never came, promotions that I was Thisclose to getting and readjustment of working

conditions that would be to my liking. When I turned in my resignation with eight pages of reasons why I was quitting, which also included a few major violations of labor laws, I was told things would really change now and I was asked to stay. Then pleaded. Then finally I was told, I would never be allowed to work at this place again if I left. My parting comment was, “Trust me, I am never coming back, else I wouldn’t be leaving.”

I left to work at another, riskier company because I was trading a guaranteed salary for a straight commission job. I was unsure of the conditions and the people I would have to get to know from scratch. I believed in my own abilities and talent and within six months I had doubled my salary. Soon after I left, I read in the newspaper that a class action lawsuit was filed against the company for violation of labor laws.

They were later acquired by another company and dissolved after over one hundred years being in business.

My friends, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If you like ducks, that is great. If you had eagles in mind, the quacking is a strong indicator that you need to make the changes that you deserve, immediately. Do it!

“Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and re-imagined if it is to survive.” ~~~ Zadie Smith

The Three Questions I was teaching a class of young students, in their teens and twenties, three questions; 1. What would you attempt to do if you knew you couldn't fail?

2. What would you attempt to do if success or failure was 50/50?

3. What would you attempt to do if failure was probable?

The responses were enlightening. Some had to know what the challenge was before they could answer. It had to be something worthy of their initial effort.

It couldn’t be too hard or taxing physically, and it had to be something they liked or wanted. Even if success was 100% ‘in the bag’, they had to qualify the hell out of it before they could consider it. They needed guarantees before any change could be attempted, even if success was guaranteed. They were suspicious that it could be a trick. Once we were all on the same page, I clarified all of their contingencies, everyone said, if success was 100%, they would do it. Just as long as it was not on the same night as their favorite television program.

The second question. The same set of circumstances and challenges existed, but this time, there was only a 50/50 chance that success was possible. Most said they would not attempt it if success was that slim. Even if it was something that they deeply desired, like a university degree, a new career or their own business, a 50/50 chance of success did not seem like an appropriate risk/reward. When I bumped up the reward, within reason, still, 50/50 was not worth their effort.

I gave them the third question. Based on the previous response I already knew the answer. No one would attempt the challenge regardless of the reward if failure was the probable outcome. Probably was 95% with just a

slim 5% chance of success. No, with those odds they were not even thinking about it.

I was curious. I ran these same three questions past several other people to see if these students were a good cross section. Most gave the same answers.

Without the qualifying of the first question, most would give it a shot with a 100% chance that success was guaranteed. A few still needed a large reward at the end and a minimal amount of effort to get there. I shook my head.

Some people couldn’t work in a pie factory as a taste tester. The idea that most said that they would “give it a shot” was disturbing to me. If success, whatever they deeply desired, was obtainable without obstacles, their sense of passion still was not there. Their sense of ‘Must’ still was lacking. It was almost as if 100% was a gift without any appreciable value and they would get to it on their way to doing everything else.

The fact that a 50/50 chance of success was considered unfavorable odds and not worth their time and effort was equally disturbing. To ask that girl to dance at the party, to pursue a job interview with eagerness, to take that test for admission into a school, to invest in a business opportunity which would create a new career, did not matter. If there was that large of a chance that failure could be the end result, it was considered too great of a risk. When I emphasized that there was an equal chance of great success if they attempted the opportunity fell on deaf ears. They could only see the chance of failure. The fear of loss of face and time. The loss of reputation and the fact that their peers might laugh at their failure far outweighed the fact that success was equally as possible as failure. They could not visualize, they could not put themselves in the mindset of someone who was successful, wealthy and comfortably living life on their own terms. Equally disturbing was the fact that none of them even knew more than one or two successful people and then only by casual association. This proves the fact that you become your environment. If you are surrounded by those who do not believe in success as a possibility for their lives, that they will always be destined for the life they now live, how can you rise above that if you stay among that mentality? I am not saying that you necessarily have to dump your friends and family but you do have to find a new circle to associate yourself with. You may be able to

influence change among your old peers. They may see a glimmer of hope for themselves by seeing your development and results.

I have a friend who came out of a remote village in Peru’s Andean mountains who wanted a better life for herself. Domi was going to be a teacher, have a life that included such things as sufficient money, electricity in her house, hot and cold running water and a normalcy that she did not have growing up in her pueblo. You would think that her family, friends and neighbors would applaud her effort to advance herself and career. Instead they ridiculed her, tried to demoralize her and dissuade her from her dreams. Domi became one of the best, most fluent English teachers that I have ever encountered. Her life now is a success story of her own design and accomplishment. I love repeating her story as one that should not be a lightning strike but something available to everyone who wants to grab success by the throat and take what they are due in life. If you are willing to trade the old thoughts, habits, mentalities for a new way of thinking, with no guarantees except hard work, you can have anything that you can envision for yourself.

I experienced the same ridicule, even before leaving the United States. When I decided that my life of sitting around with my old friends that I had known since high school, drinking every weekend and telling old stories that admittedly were hilarious but an endless loop of same old-same old, I started to move in a wider orbit from them. I became interested in sailing, met new friends, I studied law, investments, real estate, stocks, precious metals and I began associating with others who were also interested in seeing what was possible with risk/rewards available. When my risk developed into massive rewards, my friends came around to hop onto my coat tails. They wanted to be included in my new success, spelling that, “Give it to us.� They wanted the results immediately, without the risk, time, investment or research necessary to obtain such success. It seems anyone will help you carry gold out of the mine after you dug it up for them already. I was a good friend but not that good. What appreciation would there be for, in effect, a handout? I reminded them that before I was rich, I was poor. I was struggling as a single father, worked at a menial job and no one came around to lighten the load for me. I owed them nothing but the same friendship and well wishes that they offered me during my struggling times. That response was met with

resentment and envy. I even offered one friend an opportunity to go half with me on a real estate deal that was a 100% guarantee profit maker within thirty days. “The dirt the house sits on is worth twice the asking price the bank wants to get this off of their books.” It was a sweetheart deal that comes around once in a lifetime. My friend asked me to front him his half which he would repay with the profit of the sale. Said another way, my friend wanted me to add his name to a piece of property with zero investment from him and 100% investment from me. When I declined, he shared the story in such a way that painted me as a man who promised to include him in a real estate deal and reneged, keeping all the profit for myself. This is why you need to be very careful as you step into your new life with regard to who you bring along from your life that you are improving. We all get what we deserve, not what we feel is owed to us because of some association or connection. I parted company with those who could not understand this. You will find this difficult but your life is yours. If you realize change is what you deserve, your ‘must,’ then those who understand will applaud your efforts. What kind of friend would expect something for nothing?

Happiness, to most people, is having everything going your way. The traffic flows in your direction, the food served is exactly how you like it, the weather is great and everybody agrees with you. The problem with that life is that with the first ripple of discontent and your whole world is thrown in a tizzy.

You never faced obstacles and never learned how to cope. True happiness is being strong enough to face the worst of times, content enough to enjoy the best of times and having the character to love whether conditions, are pleasant or challenging.

The point of the three question is that human nature is basically lazy. Since the days of the caveman, people were expected to go out and hunt and gather for food and water, to find a safe place to dwell and protect each other in the tribe. One hundred years ago, people still understood that if you did not work, you would starve. There were no social programs or entitlements in place yet. Most people owned family businesses. Only 10% worked for someone else. People had dreams, they had vision out of pure necessity.

People took calculated risks to invest in their futures and personal benefit.

Neighbors helped neighbors because one day, it might be you needing the help.

If I posed these three questions to people of one hundred years ago, a 100% success guarantee would have people running to claim it. A 50/50 chance of success was considered a good risk and worth their best efforts. A probability of failure but a slim chance of success is what motivated the California Gold Rush of 1849. If a door of opportunity creaked open just a bit, they were going through it with passion.

What happened to people? The third world out backs of Peru or the affluent, developed countries like the United States England or Russia, people want assurances before they will consider any risk taking whatsoever. Even with 100% guarantees people have conditions. A 50/50 risk scares people off no matter what they reward, and if there is only a slight chance of success, people have better things to do.

The cold hard fact is, life falls into the 50/50 category or the slight chance of success category almost 100% of the time. Why aren’t massive numbers of people reaching out for the changes that they deserve? There are risks, hard work, changes in habits and lifestyle, they cannot envision a better life, they live in perpetual fears, insecurity and doubt in their own abilities. They are tied too tightly to the puppet masters who have convinced them that they already have everything they need or could want. They accept the average, the ordinary, mediocrity as the normal, ‘way it is’. They will die one day with a list of wishes, could have beens, and if onlys. They will leave this world never having made a single footprint, a single contribution to the betterment of humanity. The saddest part is that it was always there, with outstretched arms waiting for them to embrace the changes that they deserved. But they perceived the journey too hard, change to scary and readjustment too time consuming.

We wonder why 1% of the United States owns 90% of the wealth. The focus needs to be on ourselves. Everybody gets 24 hours in their day. How you use those 24 hours determines who and what you are as a human being, a success or a failure. Whether you are actively moving the human race

forward or standing in the way, your 24 hours are guaranteed, your success is up to you.

What we need to ask ourselves is what are we willing to trade, what are we will to do differently, what are we ready to risk, right now, today, this minute, to better our lives and opportunities? It starts with the smallest of steps.

Everybody has access to the internet at some point. Streaming videos of movies that you have seem a dozen times is not going to get you there.

YouTube is free. There are hundreds of free content on subjects of motivation, inspiration, life enhancement, self-improvement and how to get what you want in life. I listen to these daily. In my morning routine, I have a library saved of many of these videos and fill my head with them before I venture out every morning. Before I go to bed at night, somebody’s encouraging voice is reinforcing what I agreed to become. If you believe what you see and hear is what you become, this is where you need to be. My own self-talk is positive. I know something will meet me today that will move my progress forward. I may not yet know what it is but my R.A.S. is widely alert looking for it.

If it is so easy, why aren’t more people doing this? Go back to the Three Questions. We live in a world where drive through, swipe your debit card, life owes you a living, is the current mentality. Good enough replaces spectacular.

Fame replaces true contribution to the world. Look at the celebrities that have become famous just for being famous. Those in rehab, mental wards and prison cells are revered as those who life beat up too badly. The responsibility of our own actions fades and the “bad boys” and the naughty girls” become the poster children of “Cool”? The distractions and distractors of every media outlet and publication dominates the focus of the millennials.

In between the pages of such stories are advertisements that tell us what to wear, eat, drink, drive, bathe with, what will get us there, what we need and how we should be enjoying it. How did the puppet masters get us to believe such superfluous nonsense? Houses are filled wall to wall with stuff that people will never use, actually need or after one use give a rat’s fuzzy ass about again. But we feel naked without it? The delusion becomes the reality while our goals, dreams and visions for an incredible life, so easily obtainable and would give us such profound purpose in life, fades. Somebody is getting

ripped off here, Big Time! Do not let that be you, not again, not anymore. Do yourself that favor.

Here is something that you need to know about winners. They did not win because of mere good fortune. They did not win because victory happened to be in their path. They did not win because they happened to be in the right place at the right time. Winners are people, no different than you or I, who saw a situation as it was and decided that a better situation had to be created. Winners made victories out of the trash that everyone else walked around. Be a winner."

There are no 100% guarantees in life. 50/50 opportunities are rare. This is why dreamers, visionaries the few who obtain victories, continue to believe the best, the success, the changes that need to make it happen are possible in the next attempt. Never giving up, holding fast to their idea that what they wanted in life is due them regardless of how many attempts are necessary to see it become a reality. Lewis and Clark and the famous expedition they led westward in the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, was not made taking a road trip on I-40. Marco Polo did not discover the Oriental passage to China by hopping on a cruise ship heading that way. The Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, did not invent Apple computer products by hopping in a car and shooting over the Radio Shack. These are just a few of the people who took risks, parked their doubts and fears and summoned up the courage, in the face of obstacles and disappointment, to develop, create, design and made what was not even thought about yet in the heads of ordinary people.

Nowhere in their biographies will you read the word “lucky�. In fact, great people who accomplished amazing things will write about how the odds were against them in most cases. What courage they needed, they either found or acted in the absence of and continued on what they considered their passion and purpose. One important thing to note is that every single person that you can name who is in the category of greatness of achievement, followed their passion with helping humanity in mind. The only exception being those who pursued great visions for vainglorious or selfish personal reasons. Who cares what the odds against you are, if it is your dream, do it!

Your Default Mode

For some reason, people seem to chase their dreams as some sort of escape from whatever they do not want. They envision forming a company to be their own bosses because they hated their last boss. The re-marry a spouse because that new mate is nothing like the old one. Their idea of personal growth and happiness is whatever the opposite of whatever they do not want happens to be.

Excuse me, but that is like taking a vacation in France because you hate Las Vegas. Do you like France? Do you even know French or anything about France aside from the Eiffel Tower? Would you eat cuya because you hate the taste of beef liver? (cuya, by the way, is guinea pig that the Peruvians love as a delicacy but I have never been able to get past my teeth.)

Is happiness, whatever you perceive it to be for you, simply a default position away from what does not make you happy? The fact that this kind of hazy notion of happiness, whether it is in relationships, job choices, opportunities

or investments of your time or life, lack the specifics to create the lasting and deep joy that you deserve.

The past is back there somewhere, let it stay right where it is, you have moved forward, and moved into a new field of focus. What do you want?

What do you need? What do you want to accomplish and what are you willing to do to make that vision a reality? Otherwise you are floating around in some bucolic haze that is so undefined you wouldn’t recognize success if it landed in your lap wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and a smile.

As Tony Robbins, Brendon Buchard, Les Brown and Robin Sharma share in many of their videos and presentations, you need to raise your standards.

From good enough to, “I will no longer accept anything less than this, not from others nor myself.” This was a powerful change for me personally. I had accepted what anybody threw out at me as “What I had coming” or “It wasn’t worth the argument and confrontation to demand more.” When I protested that what the management on my job was demanding was against company policy as well as state labor laws, I was told, “Just be glad that you have a job.

If you are unhappy, there are fifty other people waiting for your position.”

How much should you accept that is personally unacceptable to you? How much compromising are you willing to take before unacceptable is the ‘way it is?’

I admired people like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Che Guevara, Cesar Chavez, Karen Silkwood and the thousands who peacefully stood against militarized police at Standing Rock, North Dakota to stop an oil pipeline from being run underground beneath the drinking water supply for millions of people as well as Native American ancient burial grounds. I was encouraged by their resistance to ’the way it is’ to take my own small steps in my daily life.

When people were deliberately rude or disrespectful to me, I let them know that I considered their behavior unacceptable. I resisted gently, without violence, but I began drawing lines against people’s attitudes and belligerence and acted in my own best interests. Recently, I bought a kilo of sugar at a small neighborhood market. The lady put the sugar on a scale and quickly wrapped the plastic bag and handed it to me. Politely, I put it back on the scale. It was ¼ kilo short. I saw her standing off to the left side of the scale as she weighed it. From that angle it looked like a full kilo. In time past I

dismissed it as a minor annoyance. Fair is fair however. I showed her as I stood in front of the scale that she was short. She insisted it was accurate and until I eased her in front of the scale to show her that she was short. Honesty is important to me and I now insist on others to be honest with me as well.

My default level, raising my standards and what I expect of myself and those who I deal with, has made a difference in my self-esteem, my personal power and my insistence on integrity in both directions instead of shrugging it off as ‘not worth the argument.’

There is a difference between being polite and tactful and breaking into a “This is Sparta!” rage. Many things are not worth the argument, especially if you know going in that you will not come out a winner. I would not advise, for example, taking issue at the airport security lines with the authorities who are commissioned to run you through a scanner, search your bags and pat you down. It is a ridiculous, degrading abuse of authority in the alleged search for radical jihadist terrorists of which they had captured none to date.

Unless you want to swim to your destination, you need to take a plane and that means security checks which no one is going to get around. I was in a line in Lima in front of a woman who was sure this barbaric and humiliating treatment was beneath her. She was detained while every single pill in her medicine bottle was examined, she was searched as were her bags with the thoroughness of the Mossad looking for ninety year old Nazis travelling through Tel Aviv. Some of what I was carrying could, in the broadest sense, be considered dangerous but because I was as accommodating as possible to make their jobs as smooth as reasonably expected, I was not given a second look. You have to pick your battles. Remember that you usually get the respect that you offer others. I do.

Years ago I worked for a bank. I have no idea what caused people, who were generally friendly and amiable, to step into our bank line for service and morph into the worst possible version of themselves. It was like a chemical reaction in their brains took place and the helpless bank teller was the victim of a customer's rage about everything from a one dollar bank fee to the melting of the polar icecaps. I responded by writing up a little card and glued a dime onto it. I mounted it on the counter in front of the customers. The card simply said, "It won't cost you a dime to be nice to me." People's attitude

changed. A small reminder that I was human too and deserved a smidgen of respect while I did my job. The power of words create reactions.

Raise your standards as to how you want to be treated and are willing to treat others. Raise your standards as to how much you decide your time is worth when you trade it for compensation on your job. Raise your standards as to how you will raise your children and how you want them to see the world and determine what they deserve in life. Raise your standards regarding your choice in a life partner and how you will treat them during good times and the challenging ones as well. Raise the default level in the type of day you will have every day. I asked a student what kind of day she was having and she said, “Not bad.” Does that mean good? Does that mean she isn’t quite ready to put a pistol in her mouth or that she is relatively happy? Why is total misery what we are trying to avoid instead of our lives being somewhere between good to great? People who know me ask me about my day. How is my day? “I’m just living a dream.” Is my standard answer. I speak my happiness into existence because I accept nothing less. It is my default level.

My challenging days are just that, challenging, not ugly, not “I can’t wait until this day is over.” And definitively not “It is beating me like an ugly redheaded stepchild.” Your words are powerful, your words are your power. Make sure they serve you instead of being at the mercy of what you hear yourself saying to yourself and others.

The glitch in many people's lives is that they feel an illusion of control when they accept or reject things that come to them. Just taking it as it comes.

Your life was meant to be lived so that you are the one making things happen in your life. You are not a thermometer but a thermostat. You decide the temperature that you are comfortable in.

Wake up with the expectation of something good about to happen. Say thank you out loud upon rising in the morning. You want to experience the changes that you know you deserve so act like they are on their way to your front door. There are no more bad days. Your default days are good and higher.

Think like a winner and a champion and your will wake up one day in a champion’s skin.

Now it’s Up to You

Do you know what the biggest challenge is for people who will listen to a hundred motivation type videos, go to a dozen conferences of selfimprovement and read “The Changes That You Deserve”?

They never start.

I am telling you that absolute truth about this. The longest distance in the world is from someone’s head to their heart. People know without a doubt, what they need to do, they will have the materials in front of them to do it

and they are determined to start their personal development, ’any day now, soon, real soon, you’ll see. I care personally because I know the personal power of putting these principles into action. I also am fully aware that until you do, these are simply words on a page. I care personally because I sense the profound loss of potential, the loss of opportunities for someone to launch into a path that could influence the world. I care personally because the passion of purpose that people could experience would be lost if this book just goes into your laptop files and stays there.

Be one of those who are ready to use the information here, a piece at a time, because it is a lot to do all at once, I understand. Be one of those who will let this be a starting point in the creation of the new you. Add to this information, all of the many resources available to you. It becomes a habit once you allow yourself to enjoy the incredible benefit of the changes that will bring you a little closer to the person that you have always wanted to become. No one will have everything you need, so it is important to read many other similar books and listen to programs that will support the direction that you are going in.

Stand on the shoulders of the giants that have been sharing life altering messages for years. Some you will resonate with immediately. Others perhaps you might find a tad harder to embrace. That is perfectly fine. What you want to do is delve into the information, let it sink in and see how you can apply it to your own set of circumstances and situations. Everybody has a different direction that they are coming from. What you will find is that most of the videos and online information is free because, like myself, they want you to have the best life you can possibly create for yourself. The profit of writing books and making videos is secondary. Many offer workshops, seminars and online developmental courses which they charge a fee. If you want to join some, enjoy them, without reservation that someone is “making money off of this.” That does not diminish the message and value as long as you are benefiting from it. There is nothing wrong in investing in your own selfimprovement, is there?

This path is yours to develop, create and manage anyway you see fit. No one is judging you, telling you what you “have to do” or guiding you off the edge of a waterfall.

The most important step for you to make is the first one. You are going from good to great and beyond. You will need to be consistent because after the first step you need to remember that this is now your ‘must’. Re-read sections of this book when you feel the need arise. Let everything help you. It is why it was written. For you. The best you that you want to be. A life of your own creation and design. How many people do you know personally who are in that position right now?

One of the most powerful ways to reinforce what you read, hear and become is to share it with others who can benefit from the information as well. Based on the tremendous power that this journey has given me, what I have learned and experienced from my Baltimore roots to the Peruvian Andes, I felt compelled to write and share with you. I teach it in the language center where I am currently working. I share it with the children of Changes for New Hope in each group I meet with. I share it with those who ask my advice, help and need my encouragement. I share it in the digital magazine my project has developed called, “The Changes for New Hope Humanitarian Awards Magazine” which is published monthly on Issuu.com free of charge. I share this with other NGOs and their leaders in an effort to make their service for the disadvantaged of the world more effective. I share this with the eighty five thousand readers of ‘Living in Peru’ magazine in Lima where I write a weekly Sunday morning column. I want people to understand that fear is an illusion in their minds. I want to bring people into a unity of one human family, erasing the lines of racism, ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, I want people to embrace the concept of doing the right thing, for themselves and toward others. I want people to understand how close what they dream of, deeply desire and envision is to becoming a reality for them. I want to melt apathy and indifference in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking on doors on Sunday morning with pamphlets in hand. I believe in the Zen philosophy, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” I wish that I had believed in my own possibilities forty years ago. I hope that my foresight can become your hindsight. I believe in you, your energies and passion that will carry you into your own path of greatness. Wherever that leads you, I have complete

confidence that it will be a beautiful place. These my friends, are the changes that you deserve. Live large, my friends, live deliberately. ~~~~ Jim

About the Author Jim Killon is an American born humanitarian, author/writer, mixed media artist, photographer and life enhancement developer. He is the president and founder of Changes for New Hope, a non-profit project that he created in Ancash Peru to help children living in destitution and despair.

He currently lives year round in Peru where he publishes his digital monthly magazine “The Changes for New Hope Humanitarian Awards Magazine” that highlights the projects and leaders of other NGOs around the world to raise awareness and support. He also sponsors “The Changes for New Hope International Photo Contest” each year and exhibits the winning photographers in the national museum located in Huaraz Peru. (www.cnhphotocontest.webs.com) Jim can be contacted www.changesfornewhope.org

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