The Profit Prophet

Some time ago I came upon a list of 18 Things Mentally Strong People Do with a wonderful graphic. While it was a great list, it did not give any advice on how to achieve these 18 Things. What I would like to do here is expound upon this list with some insight. While having a list is always good, reasons behind the list are usually better in getting a person to act and grow. As Amelia Earhart’s quote goes, “The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.” So, let’s all decide to act towards being a stronger, better person! 1. They move on I would put it more like they do not dwell on things that they cannot control. They fully understand their limits and realize when the return on effort nets zero (or something less than zero). As Helen Keller put it, “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” Those people who are mentally tough see those ne...

All of us want to be happy, but few of us actually feel that way most of the time. Of course, we all experience bouts of happiness, but in general, only about 20% of the people are happy most of the time. So, what keeps us from being happy, or more precisely, but experiencing a continuous state of happiness? There seems to be five mistakes that are common on the road to happiness. Believe it or not, the first one is to try to figure out if we are happy or not! When we try to pursue happiness as a goal, we often want to experience more joy and contentment…than we had before. So, to find out if we are making any progress we start to compare our past state of happiness to our present condition. This creates its own ennui of dissatisfaction. As soon as we start to compare, we move from the experiencing mode into the evaluation mode. To be truly happy (and there are decades of research on this), you have to be totally absorbed in what you are doing. Think of being engrossed in a good...

What if we are alone?  With the recent breathtaking Venus in Transit pictures happening yesterday, I was amazed at the size and scope of this cosmic happening. What struck me was how everyone was talking about how rare an event this was, and it got me thinking about space, and probabilities, and are we alone? I remember as a kid hearing Carl Sagan talk about the billion upon billion of stars in the universe and the probability that somewhere out there, there has to be life around one of those other stars. According to the European Space Agency’s scientists, there are 1 times 10 to the 12 (a 1 with 12 zeros trailing) stars in our galaxy, and perhaps 1 times 10 to the 11 or 12 galaxies in the universe.  That means there are 1 times 10 to the 23 or 24 (1 with 24 zeros trailing) stars in our universe. That is a vast amount of places that could have a planet like ours.  But now we have to think small, like in chance and probabilities, and this got me postulating. Ea...