Choose Life, Happiness and Joy
July 20, 2018
To Inspire:
Looking for greater motivation to pursue your deepest dreams and aspirations, the one God has placed deep in your heart? Then read these challenging words of iconic motivational speaker and author Jim Rohn and pass them on to a friend or loved one too.
Our results are only limited by our imagination; history has proven that time and again. For example, beginning in 1960, our nation moved within ten short years from being technologically unable to put man on the moon to doing it. President Kennedy’s challenge awakened the spirit of our nation – planting a seed of future achievement into the soil of our collective imagination. With that bold challenge, the impossible became reality.
The same principle applies to each individual. Can overweight people get in shape? Can poor people become wealthy? Can you achieve the dreams God has given you? Of course. The unique combination of desire, planning, effort, and perseverance will always work…the question is not whether the formula will work but whether a person will work the formula. Start by understanding failure. Failure is not a single event but critical errors in judgment repeated every day. Failure’s most dangerous attribute is its subtlety; we do not seem to be failing and since nothing terrible happens to us, since there are no instant (negative) consequences to capture our attention, we simply drift from one day to the next repeating the errors, thinking wrong thoughts, listening to the wrong voices and making the wrong choices.
That is why it is imperative to adopt important but simple disciplines and practice them every day. And the first discipline is to take a few minutes every day to look a little further down the road – to see the impending consequences of your current conduct. Armed with that information, you will be able to take the necessary action to change your self-defeating efforts into new success-oriented disciplines.
By disciplining yourself to see the future in advance, you will be able to change your thinking, amend your errors and develop new habits to replace the old.
I know one surefire way to create that positive change: start. If you start today, this will be the first day of a new life leading to a better future. If you start today to try harder and in every way to make a conscious and consistent effort to change subtle and deadly behaviors into constructive and rewarding disciplines, you will never again settle for a life of mere existence rather than one of true substance.
More often than not, change isn’t as simple as flipping a switch, however. So understand that it is usually driven by one of three emotions:
Disgust – Properly channeled, disgust can change a person’s life. The person who feels disgusted is ready to throw down the gauntlet at life and say, “I’ve had it!” Productive feelings of disgust come when a person says, enough is enough. That person is primed to become something new.
Desire – Many things can trigger desire – a song, a memorable talk or sermon, a movie, a book, a conversation with a friend or a bitter experience. Welcome constructive experiences into your life – let life touch you. The next touch could be the one that sets your desire on fire.
Resolve – Resolve says, I will. These two words are among the most potent in the English language. Benjamin Disraeli, the great British statesman, once said, “Nothing can resist a human will that will stake even its existence on its purpose.” In other words, when you’re resolved to “do or die,” nothing can stop you. If you want to create change in your life, resolve to make that change.
Any day you wish, you can discipline yourself to change. It might be opening a book to expose your mind to new knowledge, or to start a new activity that starts the process of life change. You can do it immediately. You also can choose to do nothing, the more comfortable setting. But if you begin thinking about the future you will know why you should choose labor over rest, education over entertainment, truth over delusion and confidence over doubt. The emotions are ours to feel and the choices are ours to make. We create our circumstances by our choices. We have both the ability and the responsibility to make better choices beginning today.
We cannot allow our errors in judgment, repeated every day, to lead us down the wrong path. We must keep coming back to those basic disciplines that make the biggest difference in how our life works out. And then we must make the very choices that will bring life, happiness, and joy into our lives. We have the power to choose.