Starting 2020 well with Seneca top teaching from”On the Shortness of Life”

I decided to publish a few of my favourite Seneca’s quote from his book “On the Shortness of Life” to start this new year.

It is always important to remind ourselves of those things that are truly important in life. It also helps us to prioritise our daily life, our decisions every day and aim for what will add real value to us and others. So, here they are…

“Can anything be more idiotic than certain people who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves officiously preoccupied in order to improve their lives; they spend their lives in organizing their lives. They direct their purposes with an eye to a distant future. But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future.”

“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”

“But excess in any sphere is reprehensible.”

“As far as I am concerned, I know that I have lost not wealth but distractions. The body’s needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs.”

“Life is long, if you know how to use it.”

“All life is a servitude.”

In summary, there are Five Things to Consider as we start the new year:

1 – What should my focus be every day this year?

2- What should I eliminate from my life?

3 – Stop procrastinating, show up and get on with it!

4 – Work hard and smart in the present, seize the moment, and the future will look after itself.

5 – Define what is ENOUGH and live by it, one can find meaning and happiness there.

Have you all a very peaceful, blessed and successful 2020!

Motivation gets you going, self-discipline takes you all the way

“All life forms drive to the maximum of its potential except human beings”
Jim Rohn

Your motivation is a good starting point but after while you will not be able to rely on it. It might fail you. You get distracted, you get sidetracked and betrayed by your own feeling.

What drives you must turn into an automatic self-discipline system. Only motivation cannot take you all the way to the finish line. There will be days that you do not feel like doing it. In those days, only habits and self-discipline can get you to pass your feeling.

Today is Sunday, I’m on holiday, or at least I’m supposed to be, but I made a commitment to myself. I have gotten up 5:30am, I did not feel like, my mind was saying ‘f#$k that s@#t I’m going back to bed’, my commitment and self-discipline drove me here not my motivation.

We are constantly bombarded by hundreds if not thousands of different stimulus. Most of us live with the pressures of our social lives, people around us, family and friends and loved ones. Powerful branded messages from products, entertainment, useless shopping gadgets, etc. All that sensory messages play a powerful role in our feelings and emotions, ultimately in our decision making. We can get easily demotivated and sidetracked. We get pushed away from our vision and goals. Our motivation betrays us.

“Let all communication devices serve you but let no one interfere with you”
Jim Rohn

We think we can postpone, do it later, after all, just a bit of distraction will not make any difference. A bit of this, a bit of that, and suddenly the week has gone, the months and the years. I can attest to that in many areas of my life.

In reality tomorrow doesn’t exist. it is invisibly shrouded and seeded in the actions we take today. Take a close look at this, do you remember how many tomorrows have since passed and have become nothing more than of a shadowed yesterday’s memory. Today when you ponder upon, you wished you had taken a different set of action and achieved a different outcome.

Self-discipline will make you work harder on your self than on your own job. Good habits will spring you into success and fortune. That’s why most people do not achieve anything, it is easy to get sidetracked and stopped.

As Jim puts it, you must develop “The ant philosophy”. They never quit, the think winter all summer and they seem to be in a hurry. All stoics philosophers told us to plan all the negative scenarios when all is positive. The ant thinks summer is winter. They are not motivated, they are discipline to achieve their goals.

Les Brown says “do what is easy and your life will be hard, do what is hard and your life will be easy”. Self-discipline is the key to take you all the way to the finish line.

Why me? Do you know the odds of you being alive?

Why not you? Yes, you!

The odds for you to be alive right now is practically zero according to do Dr Ali Binazir. Let’s start with the odds of your dad meeting your mum (1 in 20,000). Then multiply that by the chances of them staying together long enough to have you (1 in 2,000). If you keep going along those lines you will eventually get to the following probability of you existing 1 in 102,685,000.

Based on this perspective, the reality of our lives and the narrative we can create become unlimited and powerful. We are a freaking miracle of nature!

If you only looked at the probability of the right sperm meeting the right eggs in isolation to any other variables that would be one inf 400 quadrillion.

Start living today with that perspective, make decision and choices based on the fact that you are a freaking odd miracle, you are here to change things, to leave a mark, as Jobs said, a dent in the universe. You life is not a mistake it is a celebration, a joy no matter the circumstances that brought you here.

“A miracle is an event so unlikely as to be almost impossible. By that definition, I’ve just shown that you are a miracle… Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are.”

Dr Binazir

You should never never ask the question again. Why you? Because you are unique, an effing miracle, there is only one YOU. For Dr Binazir the odds of you being alive are zero. Still, you are here. Stop b$#@ing about and get on with your life, do epic s#&t.

Dr Binazir explained the odds with the following example:

“Imagine there was one life preserver thrown somewhere in some ocean and there is exactly one turtle in all of these oceans, swimming underwater somewhere. The probability that you came about and exist today is the same as that turtle sticking its head out of the water — in the middle of that life preserver. On one try.”

Changing your worldview

Don’t get stuck in your old ways. Change happens in an instant; it’s a conversion, a turning of direction. The philosophy, worldview and the lenses by which you see everything must be in congruence with your goals and visions for your future; otherwise nothing will work.
Change your philosophy is the starting line and the best way to achieve anything is by optimising your life for the starting line, not the finishing line. .

Some claim they want to change the world, some others want to win the world, a large number of people just want to get by. No matter what you have chosen your life by your own philosophy. It ultimately informs your beliefs and values, shapes your choices, habits and decisions.

Whatever you want for you, it will be achieved or not by your own views of the world and the reality around you. That is what Jim Rohn is telling us here. The biggest giant lies within, without defeating him/her first you will never feel free to be what you have got to be. Your own self-limiting beliefs and philosophy is preventing you from growing and from success.

This blog aims to address the needs of those two initial types of people in the paragraph above. The ones who want to change and affect the world as well as the ones who want to win. And many times they are but the same people. You can’t conquer the world unless you truly affect lives.

You must affect your world first, to be able to influence others’. You must adopt a new mindset first then you will realise what steps you need to take to fulfil your dreams. You have to adopt the right attitude, the correct set of behaviours and values.

What is the minimum change you can promote today, right now to start the process? What should you think differently about? What kind of thinking is not supporting your vision for your future?

We all can change…

“…Seeing what you can become and what you can help others become is the major challenge in life.” Jim Rohn My Philosophy for Successful Living

The Road to Success…

Someone once said: ‘the way you do anything it is the way you do everything’. So, how we will achieve anything in life is directly linked to way we face and takle our daily menial tasks. Even the most simple ones or the ones we feel we should not be doing.

Success does not happen to you by chance, but rather it is born out of a lot of sweat and tears. It is often the result of years of practice and determination, repetition and failures, ultimately of compound actions based on your beliefs and the dreams you might entertain for how you want your future to be.

When you decide to pursue that vision and build your life goals the you set off on that road, your journey to success.

Whatever we want to manifest, it will not happen to us as a matter luck. It is what we do repeatedly until it becomes a habit, then those habits will take us to our destiny.

It might start with something as simple as an idea, as Tony Robbins likes to put it our ‘sweet obsession’. Something that will compel us to keep going, pushing forward.

The road to success is a rocky crooked one, never a straight line and always under construction.

But what is success? How do we know we got there?

We all have our ideas of what success is. For some, it could be financial freedom, for others the limelight, stardom; or both. Some may define success by the recognition they receive based on the intellectual contribution to science and human development. They seek their place in history.

True success is manifested in how deeply our lives are touching others and how much we have become an agent for transformation, peace and love, for equanimity. Success is about building and raising up futures generations and the legacy that survives us after we departure from this life.

What is success for you? Are you pursuing it with all your strength? Are you devoting time and energy to make it happen? What do you want to leave after you? Or what do you want to be remembered for?

“There’s no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient” prof. Jordan Peterson