(Long Island, NY) As we pass Boardwalk and the Go square of another year, as we pay the luxury tax and income tax, we promise ourselves to make this year better than the last. Sure. Don’t fool yourself, my friends, because unless you get extremely lucky, nothing will change very much without a game plan. That’s why babies make people so happy. They are clean slates, vicarious do-over’s. They offer hope, hope that there starts a life filled with more happiness and accomplishments than yours. And we proudly exhibit that child, mostly through pictures, to the world, as if he or she were an extension of ourselves. This is hogwash and does very little to improve your own life. That is the plain truth.
If you know one or two people who actually care about you or your kid’s pictures, that’s a lot. Other than these few souls, though, no one cares about you, your pictures, your problems or your accomplishments. That is why you cannot find happiness by telling other people only what you want them to know about your life. Get off Facebook and listen to this.
If you wish to make this year a little better than the last, you will start with the core of your own life:
1. Wake up early
There’s no better feeling than the feeling that you’ve made some accomplishments before most others even get a foot out the door on their way to their hum-drum jobs. And there’s no worse feeling than the feeling that the world has started cranking before you even hit the shower.
2. Change your diet
There will be plenty more on this subject, but if I had to give one piece of advice, it would be to drastically lower your intake of a single item – sugar. I know plenty of people who line up the capsules on their kitchen counter – some supplements, some preventative medicine like cholesterol reducer. We are a nation of pill-takers. Put some time and energy into researching and eating fresh food, and don’t counteract the goodness by washing it down with a sweet drink or diet soda.
3. Ignore the fear
We all have good ideas, some better than others. Some of us even write them down. However, few of us implement them because we fear the consequences of failure. Do what you have to, to marginalize your fears so they no longer constitute a substantial factor in your decision making process. Remember, for every real success a person encounters, that person fails approximately ten times.
4. Maintain a positive attitude
Many of you will read this point and want to throw up. You’ve heard it a thousand times before, and in keeping it clean, you may at once acknowledge the truth in this advice and call it “malarkey”. I understand. Some of us are positive people but many of us are negative, critical, misanthropes (people haters). Therefore, since this challenge is far more difficult than the previous three, my advice is to be positive about yourself and stop comparing your life with his or hers. Again, get off Facebook. In fact, stop thinking about that other person’s life or lives altogether. What they do is usually none of your business anyway.
5. Change your habits
What is meant by this last point? Changing your habits is an essential ingredient. It is the salt (sea salt, always) which gives that special flavor to all the other components of the soup. You can wake up early for 10 days, then fall back into what? Old habits! You can eat right for a week, then revert to what? Old habits. Once you make any of the above four points into a habit, the energy needed to stay with it is reduced and you can move on to more improvements. A habit is an act or omission which the body and mind yearn, and which no longer requires great efforts or sacrifice to make happen. So, believe it or not, once you reduce a positive change to habit, you will free up energy to move on to other things.
Keep reading my articles and feed back your thoughts. My writings are interactive as long as you keep it clean and on point. Hopefully, you will be inspired, entertained and informed. However, and I warn you, you are likely at one point or another to become disgusted, angered and even motivated to shoot back a poison pen email. I do not aim to please everyone with every article. I merely aim to discover the truth with you as we travel along.
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Carl Fiser, Life Guide
