Life is a slippery, muddy hill. If you don’t keep trudging up, you’ll keep sliding down. As we age, we’re faced with crow’s feet, thinning lips, and forehead lines. Exercise and diet can be a decent bulwark against this erosion, but the tide of time knows no surrender.
Posted in Master Your Mind | Tagged dream, health, journey | Leave a Comment »
Don’t always be hard on yourself. It takes time to break in a new habit, like a well-fitting pair of jeans. It took me 6 months to start waking up each day at the same time and another 2 months to reduce my “snoozes” from 2 to 1. In 2 more months, I hope to excise “snooze” from my life altogether. Ostensibly, that may seem like a pitiful achievement, but remember that even small course corrections can mean the difference between a successful voyage and ineluctable shipwreck. Your destination, good or bad, is rarely the result of a single decision, but rather the final sum of all the little decisions you make each and every day, including this one–today.
Posted in Asides | Tagged let it go, random tip | Leave a Comment »
Keep moving. Don’t let yourself settle in before it’s time. When I get home from a crushing day at the office, I immediately change and hit the gym, at least 5 days a week. I know that if I sit down for 1 minute or make 1 innocent phone call, I’m toast; there’s no way I’ll make it to the gym after that. So it is with any endeavor that begs discipline.
I once read that over 80% of the fuel consumed by a space shuttle is used up at the time of lift off–do you understand?
Posted in Asides | Tagged momentum, random tip | Leave a Comment »
The hardest part of writing, as fellow writers on here can attest, is actually parking your butt down and moving your hands across that keyboard. Whenever I think too much about the grand plan, I get stultified. So I make a deal with myself to write for a short while, say 30 minutes or until my cup of coffee is finished, and I don’t worry about how much gets done or even how good it is.
I remember one road trip my family and I took when I was a young teenager. I don’t remember if we were going to Hoover Dam or the Great Salt Lake, or some other unordinary landmark, but the drive was long. Every so often, like whac-a-mole automatons, someone would pipe up and ask my Uncle Tim how much longer we had to go. “We’ll get there when we get there,” he said, smiting one of us back into his hole of patience. At some point, at some lonely gas station in the desert, we stopped talking about how much longer we had to go. We began sharing jokes, stories, riddles–and we had a blast.
When we got to where we were going, we spent 30 or 40 minutes, no more, taking pictures before hopping back into the SUV. As I said, to this day, I still don’t remember where we went exactly, but I do remember that rare car ride–when we had all surrendered to the journey. And I came to realize later in life, that like writing a book, it’s the car ride itself that you need, not the disembarkation.
Posted in Asides | Tagged car ride, journey, random tip | Leave a Comment »
EVERNOTE. Get it. It’s amazing. I don’t even use Microsoft Word anymore (especially since you have to pay for it). Everything you write on Evernote gets stored on a cloud and can be accessed from anywhere. I typically scribble short notes by phone and login later on by laptop to do my more “serious” writing. Also, I use the export-to-HTML function after each session so that I have a local copy in case my account gets hacked or their server goes down.
Posted in Asides | Tagged evernote, random tip | Leave a Comment »
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Choose to Take the Journey 