message 346

Is it really better to give than to receive?

Dr. Gilbert talks about this but is it true that it’s better to give than to receive?

Why don’t you try it this Christmas season….but don’t make it about Christmas only.

So many people are hurting all year round. Can you make a deal with yourself to give to someone or some cause at least once a month for the coming year. That’s only 12 times you have to go out of your way to help someone. you can do it anonymously if you want.

What does it feel like? I will tell you that it feels like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. A friend of mine posted a GoFundMe link for her nephew who had lost everything in a fire. Everything. Take a moment right now. Close your eyes. and think of what your life would look like if that were you. What is “everything” for you. Sure, things like clothes and appliances can be replaced fairly easily (if people help you out) but what are those things you have that cannot be replaced? What would you do? How would you feel? I bet it would feel awfully isolated.

Then imagine how you’d feel if someone came up to you and said “come with me. you can stay at my house until you get some stuff straightened out.”

What a relief. What pressure would be lifted. Just from a simple gesture. Or maybe someone said “i can help you with your meals during this transition time. My religious group will be happy to help take some of the responsibility off your shoulders.”

Just thinking about all you have to do to start again is overwhelming. sure, maybe you’re a resilient one who knows you can overcome anything. But that doesn’t eliminate the immense weight of it all happening at once. There’s no time even to figure out step by step. Unless you have people who will help.

I was able to help this young man and his family with a donation. They don’t live near so that’s all i was able to do from afar. But, the emotions i had doing that were the best I’ve ever had.

Can you go even beyond the once a month idea and so something, some little thing every single day in 2026 – and yes it’s ok if you miss days, this isn’t a streak thing. it’s to get your mind outside of your own self and your own world, trying to glimpse inside of another’s. Smile at someone, hold a door open, let someone turn in front of you, buy someone’s coffee behind you, send an email or a note to an old friend or acquaintance asking how they are. I have another friend who wrote me the other day telling me he’s developed a sarcoma in his thigh. This is a runner and a man who has the best sense of humor you could imagine. You’d never know he had this horrible cancer. Just as I’ve talked so much about people with the invisible disability – chronic pain, you may never know how much they are hurting – physically and emotionally. They feel alone and abandoned. a little note or text or even a call may make all the difference in the world.

how often can you be Santa in the new year?

Message 345

“Our perceptions determine, to an incredibly large degree, what we are and are not capable of. In many ways, they determine reality itself. When we believe in the obstacle more than in the goal, which will inevitably triumph?”

He said jobs learned early in life that reality was falsely hemmed in by rules and compromises that people had been taught as children

We don’t control reality but our perceptions do influence it.

How do we usually deal with an impossible deadline handed down from someone above us?

We complain. We get angry and sulk thinking “how could they? What’s the point ? Who do they think i am?

We look for a way out and feel sorry for ourselves

None of these things affect the objective reality of that deadline. Not in the way that pushing forward can.

Jobs refused to tolerate people who didn’t believe in their own abilities to succeed.

He pushed people through what others thought were hard limitations.

We can,like Steve Jobs, learn to reject the first judgments and the objections that spring out of them because those objections are almost always rooted in fear.

We’ve been taught to be realistic and to listen to feedback and to compromise.

What if the other party is wrong? What if they are too conservative?

What holds us back? The all too common impulse to complain, defer and give up. That’s what.

We all have the ability to break through these externally imposed limitations. If you’re given what seems to be an unfair task, see it as a test to see what you are made of.

What’s it going to hurt if you give it your best? What if you make it work? How special that will be.

And what if you dont succeed? So what? Keep trying. Find a different way.

After all Seneca said “a good person dyes events with his own color….and turns whatever happens to his own benefit”.