Manage your schedule; be productive. Personalize yourself; productize yourself. Run with your ideas without neglecting your responsibilities. Everyone has responsibilities—success comes with responsibilities. Rules afford you freedom, not take it away. Have routines; they help you to remember what you already know.
Take personal responsibility for your own happiness, as well as your own success. Design your career within the context of your job. Your results and your quality of work are your responsibility. Don’t be afraid of being compensated based on your results; work to make your results worth compensating.
Love your work! Make time to play. Play at work. Don’t work all the time. Exercise your body. Take naps. Let your mind wonder. Meditate. Follow creative inspirations. Work hard. Be balanced. Know that balanced doesn’t mean “equal parts”; it means “includes the parts”. Pray. Have personal spiritual practices; don’t relegate them to doctrine and guilt. Pay homage to that which carries our mind and spirit and gives us our talent, abilities and creative inspiration.
Relationships, of all kinds, are the fruit of life. Focus on the similarities between you and others; appreciate and respect the differences. Give someone the gift of your time. Be present in the moment. Look for opportunities to be of service. Only when you are “fit”, do you have something to offer someone else, so take good care of YOU. Don’t give away what you don’t have, but know that the only way to ‘keep’ what you do have is to be willing to give it away; ‘keep’ is a form of control.
Avoid “obligatory” integrity—doing something because you have put yourself in a position to “have to”, instead of being “able to”. Align your thoughts, intentions, desires and actions. Be in integrity with yourself; don’t judge your insides by other people’s outsides. Stand in your own space; don’t take up residence in others’ space. Do the right thing even when no one’s watching; someone’s always watching.
Be true to yourself, but don’t be selfish. Don’t say “yes”, when you really mean “no”. Seek your “true north”, pray for knowledge thereof and be willing to follow it. Tell the truth to others, when asked, but don’t be brutal. Keep the “committee meetings” in your head in check; they often tell lies.
Over a period of time, I’ve been keeping a collection of things that I wanted to remember; things that struck me as important. I recently sat down and compiled and categorized these things into what became the “Declarations of Success” by which I want to live. Some are things I’ve heard others say and some are my own original thoughts. As it turned out in the final work, I compiled these thoughts into eleven categories. Over the balance of this year, it occurs to me to share my compiled thoughts in each of these categories. The categories are:
Truth
Integrity
Family & Relationships
Physical Health & Spiritual Fitness
Freedom of Entrepreneur Spirit
Personal Responsibility
Gratitude
Courage
Competition & Collaboration
Originality
Personal Growth & Development
Being detached from the intended placement of our creativity allows us the freedom to engage the process—to create crap if we need to—as a means of burning thru to the good stuff. Embrace the process for the sake of expressing our insides, instead of being lured by the dreams of our mind about what it could become.
If you have peace of mind, when you meet with problems and difficulties, they won’t disturb your inner peace. You’ll be able to employ your human intelligence more effectively. But, if your mental state is disturbed-full of emotion-it is very difficult to cope with problems because the mind that is full of emotion is biased-unable to see reality-so whatever you do will be unrealistic and naturally fail. -Dalai Lama
Of course, most of us recognize this as a commonly referenced passage of the Bible, specifically a quote from Jesus. The Bible connoisseurs among us know the passage is John 14:6 and will be quick to point out that the rest of the quote is “No one comes to the Father except through me”, so let me go ahead and make that acknowledgement before sharing what’s on my heart.
I’ve recently had some very interesting wonderments about this statement. I spent a great many years with a certain disdain for organized religion. While I certainly have times marked with good memories while participating in church and related activities, deep down I was plagued with bothersome feelings for which I could not quite formulate words. For years, I disguised these feelings as an intellectual curiosity, under the guise of “seeking to understand”. I thought I had to understand it with my head before I could believe it in my heart. Understanding was the cause and belief was the effect.
As I meandered along my own personal journey of discovering what a connection to God actually felt like, I also started to discover the source of my previous disdain. And this quote from Jesus lay at the core of it. As I’ve grown in my relationship with God, I eventually came to put words to those previously indescribable, bothersome feelings–this inner observation that the purveyors of religion believed they were in sole possession of the Truth.
So herein lies my wonderment: Is is possible that what Jesus meant by this statement was that he, in his essence, was his own way; his own truth; and his own life–that his source for the peace, prosperity and goodness of life was the God-source that laid within him? And is it possible that what he was offering with this quote was that the same was true for all of us? That we all are born in the eyes of God and thus all have an innate source of God within our being; one that we can harness as our own personal Source of God to help us find our way, our truth and ultimately learn how to live our life in service to that authority within us?