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“To know is to do. To know and not do, is to not yet know”. — jeff’s friend
Said another way: “Common sense needs to be common practice”. – jeff noel
Otherwise, it’s like we don’t even know what common sense is.
Yes, this is painful to admit. Yes, it’s not easy to apply common sense. Yes, our lives will become better (not perfect) if we apply more common sense to our lives. Yes, it’s completely up to us. Always has been. Always will be. Carpe diem!
Last night I was transferring photos to several external hard drives, when I found this, from April 2007. Well over two years ago, I had started to write the first page. Had completely forgotten about this attempt. Here it is for posterity:
EVERYTHING’S IMPORTANT: April 02, 2007
How many books and articles have been written, over time, about what’s really important in life? In business? In leadership? In raising children? In becoming successful? In learning to prioritize your life? In achieving financial freedom? In becoming the best you can be? The answer, we all know. It’s thousands and thousands. This begs a profound question. What are they all trying to say? Really?
Two of the most magnificent days in your life are the day you were born, and, the day you figure out why!
Have you figured it out yet? If you’re like me, and the rest of your human brothers and sisters, the obvious answer is no! Most of us, simply because we’re human, will go to our graves not knowing. How tragic is that? It’s criminal, eh?
How then, is it possible to travel for decades on this glorious planet, and never figure this out? This too is a no-brainer. It’s because, “EVERYTHING’S IMPORTANT”!
What do you mean, Jeff? Think about it. We have all had bosses, or maybe we were the boss, and, it’s one fire-drill after another. Everything’s important, right. It gets so confusing that we finally just cave in and say, “OK, everything’s important”. It’s that seemingly insignificant moment that you doom yourself to a life of mediocrity. Really!
It’s like the story of the frog in a pan of room temperature water, sitting on the stove. A group of teenagers slowly turn up the heat to see what the frog will do. We all know how this plays out. The frog never notices the slowly changing water temperature and dies as the water finally reaches the boiling point.
How is this possible? It’s possible because you and I are weak. We are conditioned to accept mediocrity. We are shown images of greatness in the media. Constantly. No one ever talks about the serious, but do-able, effort required to be excellent. And so it goes. We give up, It’s perfectly acceptable to give up. Everyone does it. Why should you be any different? Because!
Because if you don’t try harder, you will never know the difference between joy , liberation and inner peace, compared to the alternative – a life sentence in your unfulfilled journey. Is this your legacy? The legacy you want your children to see and model? Go to jail, go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200 dollars.
Right now you should be feeling some pain. Emotional, psychological pain. This is a very good sign this book is for you.
It has taking years, no, decades, to discern the truth. You’ve probably heard it said: “Wisdom comes from experience, and experience comes from making mistakes”. The truth is here at your fingertips. In these pages. You can do what you want at this point. The choice is yours (there’s a BFO)!
I know of no other person who’s invested more time and emotional labor to simply life’s truths. They say, “to teach is to learn twice”. Your journey is like mine. We are born. We grow and learn. Somewhere on your path, is your answer to your question, “why am I here”?
Are you ready?
Pause!
Yes, pause and think.
This will make you feel uncomfortable, no doubt. You should get used to this feeling, so that, in time, you will welcome your pain that comes when you slow down and looking inside yourself. You will discover, there is no other way.
If you think about why you are reading this book, then your answer to continue or not will be automatic. Yes!
Please turn the page when you are ready.
I’ve had this article for ten years, given by a friend. The author is unknown. Here it is in it’s entirety:
The question remains, despite all the work and inquiry of the researchers discussed in this column and countless others: How can we build committed, competent people and workforces?
I received the following as a handout at a class I attended; the author is unknown. Because these reflections give me solace, I am sharing them.
1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time information school called life. Each day in this school you will have opportunities to learn lessons. You may like the lessons, or you may think they are irrelevant or stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, of experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately work.
4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. There is not better than here. When your there has become here, you will simply obtain another there that will again look better than here.
7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.
jeff here again. How was that for the first installment of “Too Long Tuesday”?
There’s been a very calculated effort to make all five blogs comply with a “short post” challenge.
It was a simple test to see what would happen. What happened?
Website traffic spiked. Thank you everyone, for your interest. While the real reason I blog so much is selfish, it’s actually an amazing joy to think others may benefit as much as me and my Family.
This leads to today’s title, Too Long Tuesday. It seems an occasional long post may work, without overwhelming me or you.
Personally, and generally speaking, long blog posts bore me. No offense to those who write them. Have written a fair number myself, but mostly in the early days.
Time marches on, and so has this post. See ya tomorrow at Too Long Tuesday?
It is ridiculous. To think that a bunch of guys with ordinary lives, doing ordinary jobs, would someday be riding around in a big tour bus, makin’ that easy money:
After 9/11, it was time for this.