Marcel Legros - Play the Game of Life

Welcome to the Third Edition of the “Meaning of Life” Carnival.

This is the third edition of this weekly carnival. We had quite a lot of submissions this week but I was exceptionally picky as well, so I narrowed it down to the best six out of all entries. Even if I get 500 entries in one week, I will only choose the best entries and never have more than 10 entries for any given carnival. This ensures the highest possible quality and relevance. The deadline for each edition is Saturday night and is published on Sunday. It’s a little late this week because I’m traveling and had to find a high-speed access point for my laptop to put this all together. Thanks for your patience.

Thank you to every author who submitted an entry whether it was accepted, or not. If you didn’t make it this week, try again next week! Please start a discussion by leaving a comment, and don’t forget to Stumble this post or submit it to Digg, so that your work will reach the largest possible audience. I appreciate all the great writing you’ve submitted - I really enjoy reading it.

Christmas is Near - Bring on the Cheer!

1. Steve Pavlina has been one of my favorite personal development writers for years and today I’m happy to include his article Career Transitions in my carnival roster. If you haven’t already found Steve’s site - Personal Development for Smart People, I highly recommend it. Good work Steve!
2. Albert Foong at Urban Monk submitted another phenomenal essay this week entitled, Psychology’s unique contribution to your Compassion and Self-Esteem. I really enjoy Albert’s writing style and depth and in a very short time we’ve developed a mutual friendship. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of good things from him in the future. What’s Christmas like “down under”, Albert?
3. Warren Wong submits, Conversation Skills / Tips: How To Have A Good Conversation. Hey, who doesn’t want to have a great conversation? Sometimes the simple things are left undone, and I’m glad guys like Warren are covering all the bases. Now, if I only had someone to talk to…
4. Tupelo Kenyon writes, Consciously Programming Your Subconscious Mind Before Sleep. I like the ideas behind the article and it’s well written. When I travel, I play audio books on my laptop at low volume while I sleep and set it on ‘repeat’. The next day, I listen to the same passages and whether it’s my imagination or not - they sink in a lot faster. This is a great way to learn new material. Tupelo has captured the negative side to this - don’t go to sleep with ugly content streaming into your brain. Garbage in - garbage out, folks!
5. Shaun Connell is also a repeater with the following essay titled, The Pursuit of Happiness. I agree with you Shaun - happiness is found in a lot of different ways, but without emotion and reason, it’s not going to stick. Well put, my friend.
6. Matthew Spears rounds out this week’s carnival with Interconnectedness of Being. This article is fantastic and captures the truth that every wisdom in life can be found within the boundaries of your own mind and body. I love your writing and respect your wisdom Matthew. Thanks for sharing again this week.

Welcome to the second edition of the “Meaning of Life” Carnival.

I think we’ve all asked at one point, “Why am I here? What will become of me when I go? What am I meant to do now that I’m here? What’s the meaning of it all?” So we strive to find the answers. We hope that one day we’ll ‘get it right,’ but often we never do. Let’s all raise a glass to getting it right and praise all those who’ve gotten it wrong. We couldn’t have done it without you.

This is the second edition of a weekly carnival with even more great articles than last week. The deadline for each edition is Saturday night and is published on Sunday.

Thank you to every author who submitted an entry whether it was accepted, or not. If you didn’t make it this week, try again next week! Please start a discussion by leaving a comment, and don’t forget to Stumble this post or submit it to Digg, so that your work will reach the largest possible audience. Thanks for the great work, and we’ll see you all next week.

Good Reading to Warm the Winter Blues

1. Edith Yeung submitted, “What Would Make You Smile?” This article made me smile, Edith. Nice work.
2. Matthew Spears essay, “Emotions as Beauty Itself,” deals with a different way of looking at intense emotions, especially those related to past sexual abuse. Thanks for submitting this one Matthew. I wish you well in your healing process.
3. Warren Wong explores hidden reality in, “Why Your Thoughts Create Reality - Thought, Energy, and Matter.”
4. Tupelo Kenyon writes, “Integrity Through Self-Reliance.” This is a great article with a lot of insight.
5. Steve H Joseph submitted, “Learning to Ask Better Questions About Life.” Steve brings some personal insight into our ego-dominated pursuit of always having to be right. Here’s something I learned a long time ago Steve; please let me share it and add to your ideas - “You can be right, or you can be married.”
6. SJ Yee offers a moving video from a speech made by Jim Valvano back in 1993. The title of the post, “How to live each day and get from where you are to where you want to go,” is meandering, but the SJ Yee’s recap, and the video itself is very moving.
7. Patricia’s article, “How to Start Over: Rebuild or Just Remodel,” is my favorite this week. It’s well written, insightful, and emotional. Very gutsy article, Patricia!
8. Alex Blackwell posted, “The Most Dangerous Word.” I like this article a lot. I won’t ruin the suspense for you all, but I’ll give you a hint: the most dangerous word starts with a “T.”
9. Karen Lynch submits, “How Do You Do?” This essay is based on the idea of acting without action, a core principle in the Tao Te Ching. It’s funny that Karen submitted her article this week; I just finished reading the Tao Teh Ching this week. I read Dr. Wayne Dyer’s book “Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life,” based on the Tao Teh Ching, last week.

Give yourself permission to succeed. A number of people don’t succeed in life because they do not give themselves permission to succeed. They hold themselves back on some level, if they know it consciously or not. Take a moment and tell yourself that you are a good person and that you deserve to succeed, see how you feel, does it feel right? If not, keep telling yourself you are good and deserve success. Gradually, your self-image will improve and you will begin to move towards achieving your goals.

Edward W. Smith brings the One Minute Motivators to you. Mr. Smith is the author of Sixty Seconds To Success, the Producer/Host of the Bright Moment cable TV show, is President of The Bright Moment Seminars, and a motivational speaker.

Failure generally occurs when you have decided to quit, not when someone else tells you it is over. You have a lot of control over when failure occurs. If you keep going, it isn’t a failure. To reduce the amount of failure you have in your life, you need to increase the amount of effort you put into your various projects. What can you do to hang in there a little longer? What can you stop telling yourself that makes you stop?

Most people find that success is located, just beyond the point where they stopped. Don’t you be one of them.

Edward W. Smith brings the One Minute Motivators to you. Mr. Smith is the author of Sixty Seconds To Success, the Producer/Host of the Bright Moment cable TV show, is President of The Bright Moment Seminars, and a motivational speaker.

Interested in being happier and more successful? We can all learn a lesson from an episode of TV’s “Star Trek” that gets in under our radar and teaches us the importance of focusing on the positive.

In one episode, the crew lands on a vacation destination planet where they could create any reality they wanted, just by thinking about it. At first they have a great time creating wonderful things, but gradually become bored and tired and begin to focus on negative things, which creates negative situations for their reality there. Many of us run our lives the same way, by starting out focusing on the things we want, but then shift our focus to what we don’t want and our lives turns out as badly as the “Star Trek” crew’s in that episode.

So how do you focus on the positive? You need to make a decision to focus on the positive, it doesn’t just happen. As a motivational expert, I stress the importance of having goals to guide your life and “focusing on the positive” should be one of them.

People attending my seminars are surprised when I tell them to announce to the people they are in contact with that you intend to focus on the positive. My personal experience with this is that the reactions you receive will run the gamut from total acceptance to almost outright hostility. I advise you not to let the reaction of others to affect your own thoughts and behavior. By announcing to the world that you intend to focus on the positive, you reinforce your decision by putting yourself on notice and encouraging other people to give feedback on how you are doing regarding being positive.

Scientific research can help you take full advantage of a positive focus to make decisions. Research shows that we tend to become happier as we move through the day. Our mood is generally lowest when we wake then peaks at noon, then declines till four in the afternoon, and then begins to build to its highest point of the day around 10 PM. So use those peak times to make plans, set goals, tackle hard jobs, etc. Make decisions when you are the most upbeat during the day in order to reduce the negatives in your life from pulling you back.

It also helps to realize that you can only control yourself, you can’t control things like the weather, things that other people do or don’t do, mechanical failures and so on. Focusing only on what you can control takes a lot of pressure off you and leads to greater happiness.

Business and Life Coach Theresa A Smith spends time having her clients become very clear about what they want of life and then helping them focus heavily on pursuing the steps needed to attain that life. She finds knowing what you want out of life and then working towards it is the number one step her clients can take to give them long lasting happiness.

I publish a free daily One Minute Motivator via email and YouTube and in a recent one I said,

“Every day we have a choice. We can choose to focus on negative thoughts that leave us feeling insecure, frightened and cynical or we can choose to focus on positive thoughts that empower us and fill us with a sense of optimism about our world and our role in it. What type of thoughts we choose to focus on, grow stronger, and the other type will grow weaker. Make the choice to focus on the positive, and you will find it gets easier the longer you do it.”

In my book, “Sixty Seconds To Success,” I make a similar point.

“Your focus is your future. You get what you focus on. You can focus on the things that will move you and your projects ahead, or you can focus on things that will not. Focus brings all your power together and enables you to do things in one area that you couldn’t do without it. Picture yourself achieving your goals, and your chances of achieving them go up dramatically. Believe it and you’ll see it.

What you think about on a daily basis is what your future will be like. Tibetan monks believe that if you want to know your future, look at what you’re doing right now. Everything we do now affects what will happen next. Our life’s a chain of now’s and all the things we did in those now’s. Now is what counts and now is what will make your future.”

The two worlds are there for each of us to choose which to live in. Choose the world of your dreams and focus on the positive in your life - it’s as close as your next thought- and before long your dream will be your reality.

Edward W. Smith brings the One Minute Motivators to you. Mr. Smith is the author of Sixty Seconds To Success, the Producer/Host of the Bright Moment cable TV show, is President of The Bright Moment Seminars, and a motivational speaker.

There’s an old saying, “You Can Never Go Home.”

I understand the sentiment behind the proverb, but I feel the need to add to it, with:

“You can never go home. You’re already there, and you’ve never left.”

When you go back to places and people from your past, they’re never quite the same as you remembered them. Sometimes you’re let down and disappointed by what you find but often they’re exactly as you left them. It’s a strange feeling returning to a childhood haunt or place of past importance to you. It feels like you’re walking onto the set of your own movie or surreal painting created a long time ago, and now it’s right in front of you. It’s even stranger to contact someone you haven’t spoken to in years and say hello.

Go to a place you haven’t visited in a long time - somewhere important to you. Time has a way of changing your perceptions of old places.

Call or email someone you haven’t talked to since you were a kid - maybe an old friend, neighbor, relative, or teacher. They’ll be surprised, and so will you.

It’s exciting and satisfying, but I’m not entirely sure why.

Make room for the new you.

You may not have totally determined who the new you is going to be, but you probably have decided that there are some things about the current you, that you want to change.

Well while you are working on what the new you will be, start “cleaning out a room” for the new you to live in. Get rid of the junk in your life both physical and mental that doesn’t fit you anymore. Take things out of your schedule that are taking time from finding out what you want to do. By making room for the new you, you will create a vacuum that the new you will rush in to fill and you will be on your way to the top.

Edward W. Smith brings the One Minute Motivators to you. Mr. Smith is the author of Sixty Seconds To Success, the Producer/Host of the Bright Moment cable TV show, is President of The Bright Moment Seminars, and a motivational speaker.

Flip a coin ten times:

The odds are it will come up heads five times and tails five times. You may flip heads several times in a row, but the more you flip, the closer to 50/50 the odds become. This is Yin and Yang in action - this is the balance of the universe.

In our world of form, nature ensures that every extreme has an equal and opposite extreme to counterbalance it. Extremes are perceived as good and bad, sunny or stormy, smart or dumb, beautiful or ugly - but they aren’t really what they appear to be. As human and physical beings, we carry with us every extreme, all at once. We’re all ugly and beautiful. We’re all successful and failures. It’s okay, and it normal to feel that way. You can’t change it, but you can learn from it. With this knowledge, you will bring happiness and compassion into everything you do, and you’ll enrich the lives of everyone you meet.

10 Things I’ve Learned About Natural Balance and How To Apply It To Your Own Life:

1. Today you might feel bad. Maybe something awful happened to you. Tomorrow is another day, and “This too shall pass.”
2. Today you feel great. You might have just had the best moment in your life. Tomorrow is another day, and “This too shall pass.”
3. For every exceptional success, you’ll find a dismal failure.
4. For every honor roll student, there’s a flunkie. Within every person, there is a genius and an idiot. Don’t be afraid to be both of them - it’s human.
5. In every business or organization, no matter how big or successful, you’ll find incompetence - you’ll also find geniuses.
6. Never complain about an inept or disorganized coworker. If every employee and business were remarkable, you might be out of a job.
7. Don’t envy someone smarter than you - take them out for lunch! You learn from the masters. Aspire to be one yourself.
8. In every class of doctors, dentists, psychologists, and lawyers, there are many who just barely graduate, but they still get the same diploma. The assumption is, “He has a diploma, so he must be good!” When was the last time we asked our doctor how he placed in his class? Is he really good or did he just scrape by? A piece of paper on the wall means nothing.
9. Creativity ebbs and flows. You can encourage creativity but it can’t be forced. The most successful people act on every creative impulse when it happens instead of waiting for the next “big wave” or “big idea.” Little ideas that people value are much more important than big ideas that never catch on.
10. How often have you failed? Fail often - every failure will bring from nature the potential for great success.

Are you exceptional, dismal, or average?

You have the power to decide to be successful and brilliant but it is not within your power to avoid failure. Take chances and let nature find balance in your life. Know that for every dismal failure you’ve had, another stunning achievement is just around the corner. Everything arises and then returns to it’s source in the formless.

Don’t worry about it. Just do something. If you feel like doing nothing today, then today, do nothing. Just think about it. Tomorrow is another day - this too shall pass.

Welcome to the first edition of the “Meaning of Life Carnival”

Play the Game of Life is a blog about personal development, spirituality, and self-actualization. People go about living their lives in so many different ways but we’re all looking for the same things - happiness, peace of mind, and fulfillment. I think we’ve all asked at one point, “Why am I here? What will become of me when I go? What am I meant to do now that I’m here? What’s the meaning of it all?” So we strive to find the answers. We hope that one day we’ll ‘get it right,’ but often we never do.

Finding the answers isn’t so much where you look, but what questions you’re asking. The only way to figure out what the right questions are, is to admit you don’t know and ask people wiser than yourself. I certainly don’t have it figured out yet, but with the help of wise teachers that came before me and the wisdom of people around me, I might. I hope you find your answers too.

This is the first edition of a weekly carnival with contributions from any author who wishes to join in the conversation. The deadline for each edition will be Saturday night and published every Sunday.

I am indebted to each author who submitted an entry. If you didn’t make it this week, try again next week! There’s some really good material here and I really enjoyed reading them all. Please start a discussion by leaving a comment, and don’t forget to Stumble this post or submit it to Digg, so that your work will reach the largest possible audience. Thanks, and see you next week!

Good Articles - Great Thinkers

1. Albert Foong writes, “Love and Aloneness - Unravelling the Ego and Pride.” This is my favorite entry this week. He provides some invaluable thoughts on the difference between being alone and being lonely. I really appreciate your work and hope you enter another article next week Albert!
2. Alex Blackwell entices us to ask, “What Would You Say Today?” His thoughts on relationships and human connection is very insightful. I love this article.
3. Alvaro Fernandez submits, “Enhance Happiness and Health by Cultivating Gratitude: Interview with Robert Emmons.” Can we enhance our happiness and health by cultivating gratitude? You bet we can! Thanks Alvaro, for sharing this with us.
4. Tejvan Pettinger gives us a few suggestions on how to get a fresh look at the direction of your life with, “Where is Your Life Heading?”
5. Jeremy Neal explains in, “You Are a History Maker”, that every one of us, in our own way, is making history every day of our lives.
6. Shaun Connell submitted a late entry early this morning but I wanted to include it this week because it was so direct and unapologetic. His entry, “Cold Reason” is exactly how I feel some days. Thanks for posting Shaun, even if it was a little late - I won’t hold it against you.

Why are you keeping your dreams on the back burner?

You have wonderful dreams, dreams that deserve to come true, and you are not keeping them alive. The only way you will achieve your dreams is to bring them to the forefront of your life, and begin to pursue them.

Dreams are what make life worthwhile and lead you to the life you were destined for. Take your dream, flesh it out with some plans, put a date on it and presto, you have a goal. Someone like you, who has special dreams, deserves to have them come true. Start moving your dream to the front of the line today.

Edward W. Smith brings the One Minute Motivators to you. Mr. Smith is the author of Sixty Seconds To Success, the Producer/Host of the Bright Moment cable TV show, is President of The Bright Moment Seminars, and a motivational speaker.