Daily Gratitude: We talked some about persistence yesterday a bit it’s such an important subject. Napoleon Hill devotes entire chapters to it in all his works. For most of my life it was something I just “did” (being persistent) but without even realizing it or understanding what I was doing. However, this past spring I really found out what it meant. As I was training for Vol State, I was having a lot of trouble. There was no improvement. My pace stayed the same and it was horrible. No matter what I did, I didn’t seem to get past a certain point where my legs would just feel empty too. And hills-oh my, there was no change there either. What was I going to do? What i wanted to do was quit and just go back to easy walks of only a couple hours. But my desire to finish the entire 314 miles of Vol State drove me to keep going out. I added 4 days in a row of 8-9 hours per day for 3 weeks in a row. I will tell you that it was the hardest thing I had to do after the second one. That third series was full of self talk. And it wasn’t good self talk. My head was a cacophony of negative words and phrases. It was like plowing my way past an iron curtain of those thoughts. Swatting flies was easier. But fear of not finishing kept me going out even without evidence of results. Well, turns out there was improvement but it took being in the race and covering the miles to find that out. That resistance (all the bad talk and thoughts) was just being resistance- that’s just what it does. I had to be persistent without even seeing that it was doing any good. Same thing when I kept applying to medical school. Resistance kept pushing me back and I kept coming on submitting another application. You have to just keep pushing against it. And you’ll win eventually!

Daily Gratitude: Don’t be guided by what the “masses” do or think it say. That is so easy to do with social media but you have to do your own thing. Have your own goals, make a plan and then follow the plan. Make your own time table and then abide by it. You can do your writing whether others have gone to the beach or put off their writing til tomorrow. You can go for a walk today even if it’s raining and everyone else is staying home. If you do, then tomorrow when they finally decide to go out, you’ll already be ahead. If you continue to do things as you planned, you will get ahead. But getting ahead isn’t your goal anyway. Your goal is to achieve what you’ve set down in your plan. Forget competition as a goal. You will come out ahead of whatever game you’re in because you are persistent and doing things when others don’t “feel like it”.

Daily Gratitude: Emmet Fox talked about your mixing bowl, saying that you can expect whatever ingredients you put in that bowl will somehow be tasted in your finished dish. If for some reason you put kerosene in the mixing bowl, you can expect the finished item to taste like kerosene – not so pleasant no matter what else you put in there. The same applies to your thoughts. If you’re “almost” always positive about things, what does that mean? Is there sometimes kerosene in your thoughts? If so, things may not work out so well. Sure things can appear to be bad. But if you use my mantra “everything always works out for me”, you can just accept what happens knowing that the universe has some plan for you and even if that plan doesn’t seem to be the same as the one you laid out, it is most likely the better plan. My life has proved that. So, instead of trying to be Pollyanna, I simply proclaim that “everything always works out for me!” As such I don’t put any kerosene in my mixing bowl. Keep track of your thoughts and see which ones you want to filter out. Then go about that elimination process diligently.