If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Now that you have your definition of success, you can identify 25 elements that comprise your perfect life. These elements allow you make your success a reality.
These elements include:
- people and how they treat you
- possessions which are perfect
- personal/character traits that you have
- unique/special skills and talents that you have and love
- special events or adventures
- elements of your home or other environments
- special routines and care rituals
- easier ways to live and enjoy life
- lifestyle improvements and components
- feelings and experiences.
These perfect life elements are not a laundry list of to do’s or long standing goals. Rather, your list would include items big or small, which are particularly meaningful and naturally motivating for you.
What would really be perfect? Not just okay, good enough, not pretty good. Most people don’t allow themselves to have the opportunities, relationships, car, house, health that would really be perfect.
Do not include the following types of elements:
- things your should do or have to do
- pipedreams (enjoy the possible instead)
- recycled goals (let them go)
- conditional situations (which depend on others to come true)
- elements that will require more than 2 years to reach
The trick is to have each item be perfect and have each contribute collectively to a perfect life.
For example: A perfect motor home, if you want to live an RVing life, is a Prevost motor home. It’s beautiful, totally functional, awesome and $850,000. The problem? It’s 45 feet long which means that you can’t take it to most national or state parks, where you might like to spend your time while travelling the road. Instead, you would be stuck at RV parks. So, the motor home itself is prefect, but it might not be part of your perfect life, because it conflicts with how you would like to spend your time–camping in national and state parks. So, unless it is part of your perfect life, it’s not perfect in itself.
First
Start by listing who and what is already perfect in your life.
For example:
- the way your wife listens to you
- your king size bed
- how much you love your kids, unconditionally
- your annual adventure vacation
- your talent for colors
- your purple couch
- your unwavering personal integrity
If you are stuck on this, stop and work to develop the skill of gratitude. Fully acknowledge the 5 – 10 key elements of life that matter greatly. Give credit for what you have, not just what you want. Appreciate yourself, even if it is awkward or painful. One of the ways to do this is to strengthen what is already perfect.
Reinforce each of the elements you already have in one of the following ways:
- if it’s a person, tell the person why they are on your list and why. Do something special for this person to “show them” how much they matter as part of your perfect life.
- if it’s a possession, spend some time perfecting it; cleaning it; protecting it; insuring it; honoring it.
- if it’s a feeling/state, look deeper and identify what might upset that state and then build a reserve of that state to insure its continuation
Second
Ask yourself, “What else would be a key element of my perfect life.
For example
- an absence of worry about money
- a totally flexible daily routine
- ample energy throughout the day
- an outlet for my creativity
- fitting easily into my black Donna Karan dress
- sunlight on regular basis, even in winter
- a loving puppy
- owning my own business
- a coach who would challenge me
- waking up happy every single day
Third
Have fun with the elements
- share your perfect life list with people who will play with you
- work with a coach trained in this
- set time goals for each element
- let go of elements that are just not going to happen
- continually experiment until you find the perfect 25 elements
There are four things that each of your perfectly happy life elements need to have
- 6 words or less
- only one adjective allowed, per object
- it needs to have life, like poetry or art
- it is doable in two years or less
You can start with a paragraph describing what is perfect for you. Then, distill it down to a phrase that speaks to you. You will have, in the end, a 25 phrase tone poem that makes you feel alive when you read it everyday.
Your perfectly happy life elements can be seen in your mind and are different from your manifested reality. All of your elements are not in your reality now. If they are, it’s no fun. Some of them need to be there now. If they are not, it’s frustrating. The dynamic between having and creating makes your life delicious.
Write your 25 perfectly happy life elements.
Who would be in your perfect life? What possessions would you have? What personal qualities? What experiences? Include both the elements that you already have which are perfect as well as the elements you don’t yet have but which are possible to have during the next year. No pipedreams, coulds, shoulds, or will-do’s, please.
Review your elements and ask yourself:
1. Does your element have life?
For example, regular global travel with loved ones could be more alive as new passport stamps every year for us.
2. Can you detect a “should”, or a long term goal that needs to be let go?
Financially responsible could become a jar full of fun money too; or finish my Ph.D. could be a career that make my soul sing
3. When you read it, does it make you smile?
Want some inspiration?
A blue house with white trim and sea breezes
A clean well lit space
Two loving arms to hold me
A clear unblemished face
Style that’s always in fashion
Grace in expressing my truth
Time to garden with abandon
And a handy lap top to boot
A year’s worth of living expenses
A portfolio of mid-risk stock
A diamond I paid for by myself
All new underwear and socks
A manicure and pedicure weekly
A regular steam and massage
Weekends spent with the wind in my sails
Dancing with a wrist corsage
More downtime with my daughter
More chances to laugh with friends
Complete overhaul of my Volvo
Enjoying the means to the end
Or
My Home
Scenic views, cozy rooms, all mine
When I’m loving you, I always feel fine
My heart is happy, don’t need a reason
My body is strong in every season
Creating ‘Brand You’ is my claim to fame
Let’s get together and go to the game
The game of soccer is my warrior’s quest
I keep what I love, give away the rest
Bring it to life that’s how I treat learning
For some grand thing I’ll always be yearning
…
To have a perfect life, you need to have a very high desire to live it. If you have a belief that you don’t deserve it or that it is unattainable, the idea of a perfect life may just cause discontent or discordance.
It is possible that there may be an increase in stress during your transition to a perfect life. You are making fundamental changes. You may need to invest in new habits, learn new skills, or evolve new revenue streams…
Getting to perfect may not be easy, but the process will be one that pays off, forever.
Are you ready?
Tags: finding perfect, perfect life
Most people define success by their financial status, where they live or what other people are saying about them.
To enjoy a Perfect Life, you need to define what success means, on your own terms.
For example:
I know I am being successful…
…by how many whims I am chasing.
…by how much open space there is in my calendar without worry.
…by how much I am brightening the lives of the people around me and bringing joy to myself.
My definitions of success do not depend on something happening–an “if, when” scenario–or someone else happening–an “if only” plot. I can stop at anytime during the day and decide, am I successful?
The trick is in the phrasing. Most people tend to phrase these in terms of a goal: when I have a net worth of [fill in astronomical number]; when I have found my soul mate; when I have lost [fill in publicly accepted number ] pounds.
Each phrase needs to start with
“I know I am being successful by/when…”
Unless you use this phrase, you have a goal, not a definition of success. They can incorporate a doing–an activity that would make your day–and feeling–how you would feel doing it. It is not a temporary state.
Write your 3 definitions.
Review your definitions and ask yourself:
Is my definition dependent on something happening?
For example: “I know I am being successful when I have $1 million in the bank.”
That’s a goal.
Better to say, “I know I am being successful when money does not dictate my lifestyle choices.”
Does someone else have to do something?
“I know I am being successful when my children are happy and well-adjusted.”
Better to say, “I know I am being successful when I watch my children growing up laughing, and confident.”
Rewrite then until you are happy and they make your heart sing.
Here are some examples to help you get creative with your definitions:
I know I am successful…
…when I am doing work that makes my soul sing “It’s a Beautiful Life”
…when money flows to me in ways that I never imagined so that I never have to say, “I can’t afford that.”
…when I am at peace.
…by how rich my life is without being a consumer.
…when I have thrown away my alarm clock because it is unnecessary.
…when I eat the best foods for me effortlessly and easily because I enjoy them.
…when I keep my body fit as I age.
…when I have a feeling of peace in my heart that I have lived on God’s land, done my best to help and nurture it.
Tags: defining success, success
Sorting through papers, I found this poem by James Allen. Re-reading it, I realize why I kept it. The rhythm of the words sings to my heart and my thoughts float higher.
Would you scale the highest heaven,
Would you pierce the lowest hell,
Live in dreams of constant beauty,
Or in basest thinking dwell.
For your thoughts are heaven above you,
And your thoughts are hell below,
Bliss is not, except in thinking,
Torment nought but thought can know.
Worlds would vanish but for thinking;
Glory is not but in dreams;
And the Drama of the ages
From the Thought Eternal streams.
Dignity and shame and sorrow,
Pain and anguish, love and hate
Are but maskings of the mighty
Pulsing Thought that governs Fate.
As the colours of the rainbow
Makes the one uncoloured beam,
So the universal changes
Make the One Eternal Dream.
And the Dream is all within you,
And the Dreamer waiteth long
For the Morning to awake him
To the living thought and strong.
That shall make the ideal real,
Make to vanish dreams of hell
In the highest, holiest heaven
Where the pure and perfect dwell.
Evil is the thought that thinks it;
Good, the thought that makes it so
Light and darkness, sin and pureness
Likewise out of thinking grow.
Dwell in thought upon the Grandest,
And the Grandest you shall see;
Fix your mind upon the Highest,
And the Highest you shall be.
Let us lay hold of faith.
What profit is it to us to gain a firm hold on life, if we hold it blindly, without any light on the meaning of our present condition, or the character of our future destiny? Faith holds the key to the blessedness of the eternal life. Faith opens the gate of pearl, and lets us in.
Strong, serene, unquenchable faith in the loving-kindness, the wisdom, the guidance, and the redeeming love of God, will enable us to look fearlessly toward the end of the temporal existence and the beginning of the eternal, and will make it possible for us to live our lives effectively, grandly!
Let go the unworthy things that meet us—pretence, worry, discontent and self-seeking; and take loyal hold of time, work, present happiness, love, duty, friendship, sorrow, and faith, so we can live in all true humanness as to be an inspiration, strength, and blessing to those whose lives are touched by ours!
Tags: life lessons, worthwhile
Let us lay hold of sorrow.
Do not be afraid of it, for when grasped firmly, like the nettle, it never stings. The life that has not known and accepted sorrow is strangely crude and untaught. It can neither help nor teach, for it has never learned. The life that has spurned the lesson of sorrow, or failed to read it right, is cold and hard. But the life that has been disciplined by sorrow is courageous, and full of holy and gentle love. Without sorrow life glares. It has neither half-tones nor merciful shadows. Disappointment, in life, is inevitable. Sharp sorrow, at one time or another, will come to each of us, if indeed it has not already come. But this same sorrow is a gentle teacher, and reveals many things that would otherwise be hard to understand.
Sorrow passes. “See,” says a keen observer, “how little trace a single sorrow, even a great one, leaves in any life.” He did not mean that the influence of sorrow is slight. He only meant that life is greater than sorrow, and need not be overborne by it. Says Emerson, “All loss, all gain, is particular: … it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered. The infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.”
There is no new sorrow. We shall be called upon to bear nothing that has not been borne before. Does not this thought quiet the wild clamor of life? Shall we murmur at our lot when unnumbered mourning hearts, as sensitive, as true, as loving, as our own, have been breaking under the weight of the same sorrow that oppresses us today; have met this grief of ours, whatever it may be, and have conquered it? Shouldn’t we now in turn try to bear the cross more bravely than any that have gone before, that we may give strength and courage to the weary ones who must bear it after us?
Every day of meeting sorrow superbly makes the life grander. Every tear that falls from one’s own eyes gives a deeper tenderness of look, of touch, of word, that shall soothe another’s woe. Sorrow is not given to us alone that we may mourn. It is given to us that, having felt, suffered, wept, we may be able to understand, love, bless.
Tags: life lessons, worthwhile
Let us lay hold of friendship.
In the eternal life shall we not have friends forevermore? I used to think that friendship meant happiness. I have learned that it means discipline. 
No matter how hard we look, we shall never find a friend without faults, imperfections, traits, and ways that vex, grieve, annoy us. Hard as we try, we, ourselves, can never fully fulfill the ideal of us that is in our friend’s mind. We inevitably come short of it. But don’t give up friendship, though we have found this true.
To have a friend is to have one of the sweetest gifts that life can bring. To be a friend is to have a solemn and tender education of soul from day to day. A friend gives us confidence for life. A friend makes us outdo ourselves. A friend remembers us when we have forgotten ourselves, or neglected ourselves. She takes loving heed of our health, our work, our aims, our plans. A friend may praise us, and we are not embarrassed. She may rebuke us, and we are not angered. If she is silent, we understand. It takes a great soul to be a true friend— a large, steadfast, and loving spirit.
One must forgive much, forget much, and bear much. It costs to be a friend, or to have a friend. There is nothing else in life, except motherhood, that costs so much. It costs not only time, but affection, strength, patience, love. Sometimes we may even lay down our life for our friends. There is no true friendship without self-abnegation, self-sacrifice.
Be slow to make friends, but, having once made them, pray that neither life, death, misunderstanding, distance, nor doubt, will ever come between the relationship. Be patient, let us be kindly, and let us be self-possessed in friendship. Be true to our friends, and then believe that they are and ever will be true to us. True love never nags. It trusts.
One of the dearest thoughts to me is this: that a real friend will never get away from me, or try to, or want to. Love does not have to be tethered, either in time or eternity.
It is a great and solemn thing to say to another human soul: Your joys shall be my joys. Your sorrows shall be my sorrows. In absence you shall yet be near. You shall never be so far from me but that I can hear your voice in the twilight and in the night. Though land and sea divide us, you shall yet walk by my side, still I shall feel the touch of your hand, and rejoice in your sympathy. Your letters shall make me strong and glad. I am not afraid of you. With you I don’t need to be too greatly reserved. To you, I may speak the deep thoughts of my heart. With you alone, I laugh. With you, I shed tears and am not ashamed. To you only can I say, “Behold, here am I, an undisguised human soul. All others know me in some one mood,—you know me in all moods.”
In the eternal life we may make new friends. But can those radiant, perfect, and glorified ones ever be quite as near and dear to us as those more human souls that we have known when they, like ourselves, were but struggling, aspiring, and suffering mortals. Those who have shared joy and pain with us, who have watched us wistfully over mountain, wilderness, and sea, who have quarrelled with us and kissed us again, who have loved us with tenderness, and who have been faithful to us, even unto death? Comings and goings, hugs and farewells, loving nearness and grieving tears: these are experiences of friendship on earth. But in eternity there shall be neither weeping nor any sound of sighing, and there shall be no parting there.
Tags: life lessons, worthwhile
Let us lay hold of common tasks and affections.
Let us lay hold of the tenderness that belongs to them. Shall we miss all the divine sweetness of life in order to have an ambitious career? Shall we shed home, family, and relatives, in order to learn Sanskrit, ethnology, or philosophy?
This is the great danger, and a grave one it is, that is apt, at some time or other, to confront us all— the danger of substituting some intellectual ambition for the ordinary human affections.
Ambition is, in many ways, the most deadly foe we have—the most deadly foe to our character, I mean.
Little by little that intellectual ambition will draw us away, if we are not careful, from our true place in life, and will make cold, unloved, and unhelpful women, instead of the joyous, affectionate, and unselfish women we might have been.
We need not try to annihilate ambition, but let us keep it in bounds. Hold it in a just proportion in our lives. We don’t need to let our talents lie idle or neglect to make the most of them.
We must love each other more than our careers. If the instinct of daughter, sister, wife, or mother dies out, even in the course of a most brilliant career, the world will forget to love her. It will scorn her. If she does not make her surroundings loving wherever she is, whether she be teacher, artist, musician, doctor, writer, daughter at home, or a mother, and if she herself is not cheery and loving, gentle in manner, and beautiful in soul as every true woman ought to be, the world will feel that the one thing needful is lacking— vivid, tender womanliness, for which no knowledge of diseases or politics can ever compensate.
Tags: life lessons, woorthwhile
Let us lay hold of the happiness of today.
Don’t we go through life blindly, thinking that some fair tomorrow will bring us the gift we missed today? Poor mortal, when do you think then, to be happy? Tomorrow? When is tomorrow? Is it different from today? Isn’t it just another today? Know if you are not happy today, you may never be happy.
Today is given to you to be patient, to be unselfish, to be purposeful, to be strong, eager, and to work mightily. If you do these things, and if, you do them with a grateful heart, you will be happy.
Tags: life lessons, worthwhile
Let us lay hold of work.
There can be no happy life without strenuous unremitting work in it–work which occupies mind, body, heart, and soul. But what work shall we set ourselves to do?
This is one of the questions that we encounter when we leave school, and that reappears from time to time as we experience more of the possibilities of life. We fear to make mistakes! We do not want to throw our efforts away building walls of sand when we might have built monuments more lasting than bronze.
There are three questions that we may ask about a work before we decide to do.
Is it for me to do?
Is it mine alone?
Is it vital?
How many kinds of work would be cut out with honest answers to these questions?
Does it conflict with any present situation? If so, that work is not for our hands to do. If we attempt it, we are leaving our work undone, and we can become a busybody in other people’s matters.
By individual, I mean, is it a work that belongs to me alone? It is a wonderful truth that not one of us is put into life without a special and particular work to do. Emerson says, “Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.” How true this is! In all God’s universe, there are no two souls alike. There are no two with the same work to do. There are no two whose talents are rivals, or whose gifts conflict or interfere. This thought ought to put an end at once to all the envy of life–grieving at another’s good. What I can do my neighbor cannot. Why should either of us be jealous of the other, or imagine that we conflict? Each human soul can say: I am unique.
In all the worlds, in all the ages, there has never been any one like me, and in all time there shall never be again. I have no double.
Is the work vital? Is it of lasting value, either in strengthening my own character, or inspiring others, or helping the world? If so, the work is worth doing.
We are all capitalists. Let us examine our capacities and gifts, and then put them to the best use we may. I do not find that we can do better than to put them absolutely in God’s hand, and look to him for the direction of our life-energy. God can do great things with our lives, if we but give them to him sincerely. He can make them useful, uplifting, and heroic. God never wastes anything. God never forgets anything. God never loses anything. Though He holds the worlds in the palm of his hand, He will yet remember each of us, and the part we are fitted to play in the eternal drama.
Let us not try to escape our work, nor shirk from it. Above all, let us not fail to see it. As long as we live we have a work to do. We shall never be too old for it, nor too feeble. Illness, weakness, fatigue, sorrow–none of these can excuse us from this work of ours. That we awoke this morning is proof positive that God has something for us to do today. Ask yourself as we arise each morning, “what is my work today?” We do not know where the influence of today will end. Our lives may outgrow all our present thoughts and out dazzle all our dreams.
Every day is a test-day. Every hour is an examination-hour. God puts each fresh morning, each new chance of life, into our hands as a gift, to see what we will do with it. A servant takes a block of wood and throws it into the fire. Another seizes it from the flame, and carves from it an immortal statue. It has been said, “Today is, for all that we know, the opportunity and occasion of our lives. The success and completeness of our entire life may depend on what we do or say today. It is for us, therefore, to use every moment of today as if our very eternity were dependent on its words and deeds.”
If we do not do the work we were meant to do, it will forever remain undone.
In the annals of eternity, there will be some good that is lacking which we could have provided; some reward that is un-bestowed; there will be something incomplete in all the everlasting years. Imagine the sorrow for opportunities neglected, slighted, or despised! The remorse for the good we might have done, and did not! Doesn’t that bring regret and pain to the sensitive soul?
Again, this work of ours, whatever it maybe, will never pass away. We are a part of the great world-energy: no atom of its force is ever lost. Every breath of our lives, every noble heart-beat, will pulsate through all eternity. Our lives are indelible, imperishable.
Tags: life lessons, worthwhile
Pretence, worry, discontent, and self-seeking–these are the things that we may let go.
Now, what are the things in life that are worthwhile–that we should lay hold of, guard and use?
It is worthwhile to be wise in the use of time.
It is with time that we purchase everything life has that is good. It is in the wise use of time that we make ourselves competent for eternity. In the eternal life, there is no misspent time.
The most reckless spendthrift in the world is the one who squanders time.
Money lost, can be re-gained; friendships broken, can be renewed; houses and lands sold, or burnt, or buried; can be bought or gained or built again. But what power can restore the moment that has passed. The day whose sun has set? The year that has been numbered with the decades gone by?
It awes me when I think of it: that there was a time when you and I were not–when the cycles of eternity swept onward and the stars turned in their courses without the sight or sound of man. And then came a time when Cain worked his fields, Job watched Orion–and yet you and I were not. But now there can never come a time when you and I shall not be. The vast gift of eternity has been laid in your hands and mine: eternity is not wholly in the future, but one which is here now.
Shall we not use its hours rightly?
The question of life is not, “How much time we have?” In each day, each of us has exactly the same amount.
We have “all there is.”
The question is “What shall we do with it?” Shall we let this priceless gift slip away from us in haphazard deeds, or shall we adopt some plan of saving and of systematic doing in our lives? What shall this plan be? How shall we determine what things are worth giving time to? Let us think about this question. In our thoughts, let us not forget one point: time spent in being interrupted is not time lost. A strong thinker once said, “No one knocks at my door that is not sent by God.”
We are spending time well when we are paying it out to God, to buy the things he means our lives to own, whether he is putting before us a duty to be done, a friend to be won, a small service to be rendered, a book to be written, a child to be consoled, or a house to be set in order. There is time enough given to us to do all that God means us to do each day and to do it gloriously!
How do we know that the interruption that we snarl at is not the most blessed thing that has come to us in long days?
But in all our lives, though time is given to us to eat, drink, sleep, work, and play, there is no moment given to us to throw away.
We have to meet this question of the wise use of time not only as individuals: we should consider it today as it affects us as an association, and our united power for good in the world. We are working out a problem in history, and the world is looking on to see what we will do with our lives, now that we have them.
We cannot afford to lose a moment of usefulness, or the sum of our influence will be less than it might have been. Suppose each of us should resolve today that not a minute should ever be wasted. What energy there would be in our lives! What strength! What noble purpose! What grand results! What could we not accomplish as an association, if no one of us ever lost time in grieving, in dreaming, in regret, in harmful pleasures, in idle talk! Eternity is long: there will be time enough for dreams. But life is for work and for patience. Ask today: how much am I going to deduct from the grand possible total of time in our lives, by my idleness?
Tags: life lessons, worthwhile
