MLOs (Missed Learning Opportunities)

How Many Teachers Have You Ignored?

Is it just me, or do most of us have a past filled with lost learning opportunities? Times when we knew someone or were close to someone who could have taught us something interesting, useful, or valuable, and we just missed the boat. I guess I’m ready to admit my abject failure at taking advantage of some of these MLOs in my own life, or I wouldn’t have started this post.

I suppose one of the first such missed opportunities was learning to play a musical instrument. I don’t play any, and my father played at least six. Before he married my mother, he was a member of the famous Ferko String Band appearing in the annual Philadelphia New Year’s Mummer’s Parade, where his instrument was the banjo. He also played the banjo mandolin, accordion, guitar, harmonica, and ukulele.  He tried to teach me the guitar, but it hurt my very young fingertips and I gave up quickly. I imagine a psychologist would have a field day exploring what that said about my relationship with my father and how it affected my future life.

My grandmother spoke Russian and I could have easily learned the language in childhood, but I didn’t and to this day only speak English. I’ve talked about my 12 years in prison, but not about the fact that it would have been a great opportunity to learn Spanish from Mexican or Cuban fellow inmates. But other than a few curses, I didn’t.

Back in the mid-1990s, I lived in a commune not far from Silicon Valley and one of my housemates was a young man who wrote articles for WIRED magazine, reviewing new software. He was an expert at surfing the Internet before most people even knew it existed, and offered to guide me through its intricacies and secrets–and I wasn’t interested.

One of the great loves of my life was a yoga teacher, and I never learned a single posture. I had a French girlfriend for a year, but never learned any French (mainly because she was fluent in English and didn’t like speaking her native language outside France). I could go on and on. Considering this, it is amazing how many different things I actually have learned over the years. Looking back, I am sorry I didn’t take the time to benefit from all this additional available knowledge. I suppose this just confirms all the research that says that at the end of a life, we don’t regret what we did, but what we didn’t do.

There’s Still Time

So here’s my point: unless you are fading and faltering and on your last legs, you still have lots of time to learn lots of things. You could start by going back and making a list of perhaps 10 Things I Could Have Learned, or 10 Of My Missed Learning Opportunities. And then pick out one you are willing and able to learn at this point in your life. Another one for me is from my life just after high school, when I attended The American Foundation of Dramatic Arts. I took a one year program in radio and television broadcasting. They also had some classes on improvisation, a relatively new art form at the time. I was fascinated when I saw the students having so much fun in class, but still having a lot of my childhood shyness remaining, I did not take the risk to explore improvisation. 2012 looks like a good year to remedy that, and I am checking out some improv classes in San Francisco.

This goes to something I have long maintained, that there is no such thing as a missed opportunity, merely a delayed one.

Jerry

The Thought Exchange

An Important and Impactful New Book

Back in March, I did a post on award-winning composer/conductor/coach, David Friedman. I also had an amazing discussion with him on a Moneylove Club audio. I was so impressed with his very unique and particular perspective on how to get what you want that I just sent out a bonus audio of a talk he gave a few weeks ago at Unity San Francisco. He is very much in synch with the New Thought Movement that started with Emerson, and evolved into such nondenominational churches as Unity and Unitarian.

During his recent talk, David said four things that are very much related, but very powerful as individual thoughts:

1. “Whatever you are looking for you already have.”

2. “Prosperity is not caused by money or success or achievement.”

3. “The experience of prosperity is the ability to think any thought we like.”

4. “The point of life is to know that we have everything.”

I also like the opening of the Author’s Forward in the new book by David, The Thought Exchange:

“Our thoughts create our reality. What we think appears before us in the world. Change your thoughts and you change your life. We all know this. Why don’t we do it?”

And David has a great subtitle for The Thought Exchange:

Overcoming Our Resistance to Living a Sensational Life

The word “sensational” has a double meaning here. One is the common definition of something unexpectedly exciting or wonderful. The other is related to the senses or sensations we feel. David has taken the concept of The Law of Attraction a step further than the bestselling, The Secret, maybe several steps further. He says he much prefers the term, The Law of Noticing, to The Law of Attraction, since attempting to attract something to us reinforces the idea that it is missing from our lives right now. And as you can see by the quotes above, David believes it is all there right now, but we just have to pay better attention. And it has to do with sensations related to feelings. I watched him work miracles in a singing workshop, in which in just a few minutes he took several singers, amateur and professional, to new levels of performance, even to higher notes than they believed they could hit, by having them focusing on the sensations they felt when attempting to do so, and the thoughts behind those sensations.

David Friedman says it isn’t about changing the sensations, which might be sweaty palms, tightness in the chest, difficulty breathing, butterflies in the stomach, etc. It’s about, he asserts, changing the thought behind those feeling sensations.

It can sound rather metaphysical and esoteric, but in practice it is very simple and down-to-earth.  I suggest you buy the book and check it out further. Or you can visit David’s website:

http://www.thethoughtexchange.com

Jerry

A Giant Thumbprint

The above tribute to Steve Jobs was designed by 19 year old Jonathan Mak Long, who says, “It’s just this quiet realization that Apple is now missing a piece.”

Well, we’re all missing a piece with Steve Jobs no longer here. I often have talked about one of the main motivations for true innovators and visionaries not being money, but rather to leave a thumbprint on the world. Jobs did more than that, he created the instruction manual many of us now are living by. Few people will be born in the coming decades who won’t be influenced by something he saw first, designed to perfection, and brought forth with marketing genius.

I think a lot of people are missing the point when they say he died too young. In his 56 years, he left many thumbprints on the world, and lived perhaps five lifetimes worth of adventures and realized dreams few of us can even imagine.

I believe Steve Jobs lived a very long and full life, it just happened to be mega-compressed. At his famous commencement address at Stanford in 2005, he directly addressed the subject of death:

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

As a MacBook Pro user, I am filled with gratitude to Steve Jobs, but as someone who tries to look at success and prosperity in new ways I can share with others, I am even more grateful for the legacy of wisdom he has left us with. For quite some time, I have collected his quotes.  For the next edition of my Moneylove Club audio, I am going to take some of my favorite ones and elaborate on them, allow them to stimulate my own creativity. His view of the world was like that, it gave people an inspiring vision which they could then build on from their own perspective.
In several places since his passing this week, I have seen a comment that evidently was quite popular and often quoted around Apple headquarters:

Steve Jobs is surrounded by a reality distortion field; get too close and you might believe what he is saying

The truth is no one can be said to be gone when tens of millions of people all over the world can still hold a piece of him in their hand.

Jerry

How’s Your Empire Doing?

“The Empires of The Future are The Empires of The Mind.”                                                                                       Winston Churchill

It seems to me that today a lot of thinking in politics, economics, international relations, and many other areas of life is rooted in old paradigms and remnants of the past. We are imprisoned by the stone walls of our limited imaginations and aspirations. The world is facing perhaps its greatest challenges in history, and countless so-called leaders are bogged down in discussions about how big or small government should be, whether climate change or evolution are fact or opinion, and whether taxing billionaires is class warfare when the gaps between rich and poor are greater than ever before in human history. I’m not taking sides here, just suggesting that we are discussing the wrong things, asking the wrong questions, not recognizing that a new reality has dawned and this is the 21st Century.

In preparing my most recent Moneylove Club audio, I went back to one of those books that changed the way people viewed the world, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. He wrote it in 1970 and it was filled with some truths about the changes facing us–and the amazing thing is that some people are still stuck in the world that existed then, making a lot of what Toffler said as relevant today as it was back then.

Alvin Toffler said that future shock was:

The shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.

Do you see where some of this is happening right now, forty-one years after publication of the book?  Or how about this Toffler quote:

Idea assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.

This certainly sounds like an up-to-the-moment description of many members of Congress. But perhaps the Toffler quote that has the most relevance today, particularly with all the current talk about the lapses in our education systems and how to remedy them:

The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.

This sounds very much like what Melinda Gates was describing  just today during a TV discussion on Morning Joe about education.  The fact that students need more great, dedicated teachers to prepare them for life in this new era. The Gates Foundation has put its money where its mouth is on this issue, pouring millions into various school systems to affect positive change. And where are most politicians on this issue? Arguing about the merits of teachers’ unions versus non-union teachers. Melinda Gates says their extensive research shows no difference in learning results between states with strong teachers’  unions and right-to-work states. It’s about the quality of the teaching. Did you have at least one great teacher you still remember fondly, who inspired you to reach higher than you otherwise might have? Most of us have had that powerful experience, but many students today can’t even relate to that situation.

We need to expand the empires of our minds in many ways and many new directions, or else end up future shocked into oblivion.

Jerry

Jerry

Wealth and Poverty–Some Words From the Wise

Poverty Levels Indicate Greater Gap Between The Haves and The Have-Nots

A lot has been made in the past few days about the newest poverty figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau. They show poverty has increased among just about every segment of society, but more rapidly among minorities. In fact, the only group not affected seems to be seniors. And the simple reason for this is Social Security. So all the recent attacks on that beloved institution are probably going to backfire. The truth is that it’s doing what it was designed to do, keep millions of elderly Americans out of poverty.

The Thoughts On Poverty In America from Brzezinski.

Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor, appeared today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show,  which features his daughter Mika as co-host with former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough. After discussing some foreign affairs areas, Mika asked her father his take on the recently released poverty figures. He said they were distressing and added:

But I worry about the other side of that, which is the one percent of the richest, who have the benefits of tax loopholes, and of preferential arrangements, and whoop it up without any responsibility, social responsbility, for our lives here in America. This is a prescription for social conflict as well as economic paralysis.

I still nurture the conviction that the residual assets of America are still there, that this society has the capacity for self-renewal and self-reflection, but we’re going right now through a kind of lunatic phase in our politics.  Look at the comments and speeches and perspectives shared with us by putative Republican presidential candidates. It’s literally frightening. These people are living in some sort of never-never land of illusions, slogans, passions, convictions, very unrelated to reality.

We’ve been very lucky because we’ve been a democratic society in which everyone felt they had a chance of rising. Today, social advancement from the lower to upper classes is faster in Europe and China than in America. We have right now a stagnant social, highly differentiated society in which the rich are getting richer, absolutely socially indifferent, they evade taxes right and left, and we’re indifferent to it. As I’ve said, this is a prescription for social unrest and economic paralysis.

Though I haven’t always agreed with Dr. Brzezinski’s sometimes hawkish foreign policy positions, he is certainly one our deepest and most erudite thinkers on many subjects. I think he illuminates in a very succinct way some of the issues facing us in today’s economic situation. Granted, he’s pretty partisan, but he also has never been slow to attack fellow Democrats when he feels they are in the wrong. In fact, though he was an early supporter of Barack Obama, he has recently criticized the President for a lack of leadership in the Middle East (Brzezinski was largely responsible for the historic Camp David accords during the Carter administration), and for depending too much on speeches instead of action.

Brzezinski also likes Warren Buffet’s economic approach and says it should be a model for Congress. I think it’s important with all the inane opinions and historically inaccurate distortions being thrown around, for us to listen to some of the more sensible, saner thoughts from our wise elders.

Jerry

They Call The Coach Maria

The Coach’s Coach On Our Voice of Wisdom

Almost exactly a year ago, I featured a prosperity dialogue on the Moneylove Club audio with Dr. Maria Nemeth, author of The Energy of Money and Mastering Life’s Energies. I had attended a workshop with Maria and was very impressed with her perspectives on prosperity consciousness. For many years, she was a clinical psychologist, and then dealing with her own money issues transformed her into a Master Certified Coach, and one who has trained many other successful life coaches.  She founded the Academy for Coaching Excellence in Sacramento, CA, and you can find out a lot more by Googling her name, including some delightful videos.

Just today, Dr. Nemeth spoke at Unity SF, where she will be presenting a weekend workshop at the end of this month on Mastering Life’s Energies. Talking about the Voice of Wisdom she says we all have, she not only demonstrated her dynamic personal charisma and forceful commitment to essential truths, but presented some ideas with the power to transform lives in just twenty minutes. We spent some time chatting, and what I notice about her, that I don’t often notice in prosperity teachers out there claiming to show people how to be millionaires, is that even in a free talk for a very short amount of time, she is totally present and totally and passionately committed to making a difference in people’s lives, rather than just inflating her own ego and bank account.

What Maria Nemeth had to say about the Voice of Wisdom is that it is an inner voice we all have and we need to learn to pay attention to what it is telling us. She puts a lot of emphasis on focusing our energy, and I love her comment:

You and I are known in life by that upon which we focus.

I’m still very impressed with Maria’s definition of success:  Doing what you say you’re going to do in life, consistent with clarity, ease, focus, and grace.

She asks the same question of audiences all around the world, from India to Israel, “Would it be okay with you if life got easier?”  It’s a great question for all of us to ponder.  She also puts a lot of emphasis, as she did in our audio discussion, on the word “willing.” She says:

“Willing” is the ability to say “Yes” no matter what your doubts and fears.

Maria Nemeth’s message is often simple, but always more substance than fluff. How more plain-speaking can anyone be than in her definition of “focus.”

Learning to put attention and energy where it will do the most good.

Simple, yes, but profoundly so. And I’m sure I wasn’t the only one in her audience this morning who asked myself, “Am I putting my attention and energy where it will do the most good?” A master teacher and coach, to my mind, is someone who inspires you to ask penetrating questions of yourself, who gets you to interact in active debate with your voice of wisdom, who breaks it down into what is essential, valuable, doable, and winnable.

I’m pleased to consider Maria a friend, colleague, and mentor. I’ve often talked and written about the importance of making good (make that great!) choices in the company you keep. And the importance of having people around you from whom you can learn important lessons and gain powerful wisdom. How can I go wrong with someone who says something like:

If we continue down this path, we’re liable to end up where we’re headed.

Thanks, Coach, now I feel even more ready to play a winning game.

Jerry

A Novel Approach To Prosperity Consciousness

Reading Fiction Vital For A Well-Rounded Life of Abundance

Often in my Moneylove Seminars over the past thirty years, I have stressed the knowledge and wisdom we can learn from those master observers of the human experience: Novelists. Just recently in a comment on a Barbara Winter blog post, I said,

Novelists are among our most important philosophers and psychologists in understanding the human mind and spirit, and are a window into the souls of our fellow human beings. I have consistently noticed something missing in the consciousness of people who don’t read fiction along with their business and self-help, biography, and academic books.

Do check out Barbara’s excellent blog. She is the guru of the joyfully jobless movement.

http://joyfullyjobless.com/blog/2011/06/books-are-the-bomb/

Wisdom From An Updated Sherlock Holmes

I’ve written a lot about the inspiration I received, including my whole Law of Subtraction concept, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Of all the many people trying to update and carry on the Holmes tradition, the best by far is Laurie R. King and her Mary Russell mysteries. Mary’s character is the wife and investigative partner of a middle-aged Holmes, and I am now reading The Language of Bees. You may remember that Holmes in retirement became a beekeeper. In this mystery novel, Mary is reading a book about bees from Sherlock’s bookshelves, and this includes an explanation of how all the female bees destroy the male drones when they have served their purpose and the hive is full of honey. The paragraph that leapt out at me as a great description of the underlying foundation of our capitalistic economy is the following:

What might we say of the intelligence of bees? On the one hand, it beggars the imagination that an entire species would permit itself to be enslaved, penned up, pushed about, and systematically pillaged for the hard-fought product of a year’s labours.

Yet is this so remarkably different from the majority of human workers? Are they not enslaved to the coal face or the office desk, told where to go and what to do by forces outside their control? Do not the government and those who control prices in the market-place systematically rob human workers of all but a thin measure of the year’s earnings?”

What a great description of market forces and government regulations and taxation policies.

Do you ever feel like one of those doomed drones? Fortunately, we human beings have powers bees do not to exercise our own will and manifest our own destinies. A lot of food for thought–have a dollop of honey with it.

Jerry

Sing Your Way To Success

Fresh Eyes On The Subject

I love finding new prosperity masters from other fields of endeavor, like my friend and big fan, Kevin Delaney, a very successful voice-over actor now branching out with his own unique perspectives on success. And David Friedman, a famed composer, conductor, singer, singing and acting coach. David has an approach he calls The Thought Exchange, and his book of that title will be out in April, with a great subtitle, Overcoming Our Resistance to Living a Sensational Life.

I was fortunate enough to spend a good bit of last weekend in David’s company at Unity San Francisco. On Saturday, he did an amazing workshop, Finding Your Inner Voice. It was billed as a breakthrough singing and acting workshop for singers and non-singers–which was good, as I am most definitely a non-singer. He worked with about half a dozen participants who got up and sang, some professional, some very much amateurs. And every single one of them had breakthroughs and sounded measurably better after fifteen or twenty minutes. I’m looking forward to interviewing David for an upcoming Moneylove Club audio, and will also include some of his comments in a future post after that interview.

What David says is that when people get up and sing and encounter a problem, rather than attacking the problem (like one singer who had trouble hitting a very high note) we can assume it’s really a reflection of our thought. He suggests that such problems disappear with a simple change of thought. Simple but profound. On the Law of Attraction, he basically says it should really be the Law of Noticing. In other words, what thoughts do you have about attracting wealth, and what are you noticing and thinking about what you’ve already attracted into your life?

What An Amazing Musical Adventure

David Friedman is a platinum selling songwriter, conducted and arranged several Disney films, conducted for several Broadway musicals, has written songs sung by Diana Ross, Barry Manilow, and Kathie Lee Gifford. You may have seen him with Kathie Lee on the Today Show, where he appears regularly to compose a song about an audience member. He wrote many of the songs sung and recorded by the late, acclaimed cabaret singer, Nancy Lamott. This included one she used as the closing song for her act, and is just one of many David has written that are like motivational/inspirational seminars all by themselves. Some of the lyrics from that song, Help Is On The Way:

Help is on the way from places you don’t know about today, from friends you may not have met yet.

You don’t have to know where the path you’re on is leading, you just have to walk along,

Dreaming as you go. Asking for the things  you’re needing.

You never can go wrong, if you have faith that things are happening as they should,

And you believe each step you take is leading you to something good.

On Sunday, David did a concert of his music with several other gifted singers, including three from the famed San Francisco musical company, 42nd Street Moon, known for putting on great vintage Broadway musicals. At that event, David Friedman told us he had been asked to write a Christmas song, and came up with My Simple Christmas Wish, which certainly surprised anyone who heard the title before hearing the song itself.  Talk about prosperity consciousness!

I wanna be rich, famous and powerful. Step on all my enemies and never do a thing.

I wanna be rich, famous and powerful, so all I have to do in life and sit around and sing.

I want what I want and I want it all today.

As you can imagine, many very funny cabaret performers have loved singing that song and you can find a few on YouTube. Perhaps one of the things I liked most about David Friedman is his great range of emotional cognizance from the serious and poignant to the downright silly,  and all the while sharing his own brand of unique wisdom. When his book, The Thought Exchange, comes out, you’ll be hearing a lot more about this remarkable teacher.

Jerry

Billionaires on Demand

Google Your Way To Great Wealth

In the current issue of The New Yorker, also available at www.NewYorker.com, Adam Gopnik has a long and great article called, How The Internet Gets Inside Us. It opens with a pretty astonishing realization:

“When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far.”

Two ideas I’ve discussed thus converge. One, the concept that we can learn from the dramatically increased visibility of today’s very wealthy individuals. In bygone years, people took desperate steps to try to get a few words of advice from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and other super rich folks. I often suggested in my seminars that people take advantage of the fact that more and more millionaires were now visible–on TV talk shows, and in such magazines as Forbes and The Robb Report. Now there’s Google, and there is no excuse for you not tuning into the words and wisdom of men and women who’ve created huge amounts of wealth for themselves.

Greater power than the most magical wizard, richest potentate, most revered entertainer now lies in the hands of the average man and woman. To check this out, I simply googled Billionaire Quotes.  And almost immediately found a few statements that can profoundly change anyone’s economic situation.

From billionaire Bill Bartman:

The only opinion of you that matters is your own.

This reminded me of the comment by my old friend Terry Cole-Whittaker, who also used it as a title for a book:

What you think of me is none of my business.

Other people have been credited with that line, but I happen to know for a fact that Terry said it long before anyone else. And I think both her statement and Bill Bartman’s point out the importance of not letting someone else’s view of you dictate your actions or your feelings of worthiness or deservingness. Sure, we want others to like and respect and even acknowledge us, but we only create discord and anxiety when we attach too much value to their perceptions of us.

Then, a line I really like from billionaire Richard Branson:

Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.

This is important information as we get constantly bombarded by emails offering such opportunities for “a limited time only.” Next, a comment from billionaire Mark Cuban

It doesn’t matter how many times you strike out in business. To be a success, you only have to be right once.”

This is a statement you could live a whole successful life by. Finally, another quote from Bill Bartman:

Learn how to forgive both the people who took advantage of you, and the people who did not do anything when they should have.

I just recently have been thinking (and stewing a bit)  about several very successful motivational gurus who were once students of mine and have promised me a lot of support and exposure for my Moneylove Club. They have not made any effort in this regard, and I’ll admit is takes effort on my part to not let it upset and frustrate me. One way I deal with it is to allow it to become my teacher. Every time this happens, I see it as a new opportunity to affirm my own commitment to always do what I say I’ll do in all my dealings with others.  Especially in today’s information-overwhelmed world, it is vital that people stick to their word and do what they say they’re going to do. And it’s important for all of us not to make promises we are not willing to keep–and to keep no matter what.

Jerry

Let Martin Luther King Uplift and Inspire You

“I Have A Dream Today”

Each year on Martin Luther King Day, I try to read his 1963 speech and it never fails to move me. It is surely one of the most powerful examples of inspiring oratory in American history, and has a way of becoming very personal for everyone who hears it or reads the text. What separates the ordinary from the extraordinary among us is the quality of our dream, or whether we even still have one. And it doesn’t have to be as profound a dream as that of Dr. King, as long as it is passionately felt within your own heart and mind.

When King was assassinated at the age of thirty-nine on that April day in Memphis in 1968, I was working in the newsroom at KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia. None of us got much sleep for the next several days as violent reactions broke out in major urban areas. I think it says something positive about our national consciousness that his speech from the Lincoln Memorial is what we remember most rather than the violence surrounding his death. King was a follower of the nonviolent philosophy of Mathatma Gandhi.

Connection Between Gandhi and King

In fact, there was a direct link between Mathatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, whose mentor Howard Thurman had actually met with Gandhi. During that meeting, Gandhi told Thurman he regretted that his practice of nonviolent protest had not become more of a worldwide movement, and suggested that America’s black population might carry on where he left off.

Two phrases from King’s 1963 speech stand out for me in my latest reading of the text.

We cannot turn back.

We cannot walk alone.

I see many people who have not achieved their original dream turn back from that aspiration, whether because of doubts and fears, or frustration at having not come close to realization of the dream. This is often reflected in our politics, as politicians who had started out with great hopes and dreams and ideals, allow them to be beaten down by the “realities” of our political structures. When I hear the minority leader of the U.S. Senate declare that his highest dream is to prevent the President from winning another term, I wonder if he ever had higher aspirations for himself and his nation, and what happened to them. The dream Dr. King had was not so narrow or petty, it had a grandness of spirit that can instruct us all.

And as to “We cannot walk alone,” this reminded me of something a famous psychologist once said, that a true mark of someone’s sanity was their realization that we all need other people. Think about the recent shooter in Arizona, and all the other deranged perpetrators of violent acts who mostly do walk alone. One of my own favorite Martin Luther King quotes is from one of his sermons:

All I’m saying is simply this, that all life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

I think some of our political figures could take instruction from these words as there is so much conversation today about toning down incendiary rhetoric.

“You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”  This reminds me of a favorite quote my Russian grandmother used to repeat often, “Before you try to clean up the world, sweep your own doorstep.”

So your homework assignment for today, if you choose to accept it, is to watch and listen to the I Have A Dream speech and ask yourself afterwards what message it has for you in relationship to your own dream about what you ought to be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEMXaTktUfA

Jerry