Mikes Blog

Difficult things happen
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Every problem is a chance for you to become a better version of yourself. Every challenge charts a path for growth and improvement.

Every setback carries the potential for powerful motivation. Every disappointment can lift you to a higher level of resolve.

Every inconvenience has the power to inspire new resourcefulness. Every frustration gives you a way to strengthen your patience.

From each positive experience, you learn a few things. From each negative experience, you learn much more.

Of course you would not intentionally seek to be hurt or disappointed. But neither would you want a life where hurt and disappointment never happen.

Difficult things can happen, do happen, and amazingly, life finds a way to make them beneficial. Difficult things can happen, and that’s what makes the good things so very good.

— Ralph Marston

Give goodness
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Give goodness, not in the abstract, but in real places, with real people. Give goodness, not as a vague idea, but to a specific moment.

There’s quite a lot you can do to lift up life, here and now, as you are. And nothing is as satisfying as doing so.

Rather than accumulating more reasons to boast about yourself, give goodness. If you want people to care about what you achieve, pursue achievements that improve their world.

Give goodness because you can. Give goodness because it makes a difference that reverberates through lives, through time.

In ways large, small, and in between, give goodness. In ways that inspire you to give even more, give goodness.

Put your love for life into loving action. Give goodness.

— Ralph Marston

Relaxed attention
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If you wish to copy a drawing by hand, you’ll improve the accuracy of your copy by first turning the original upside down. Try it, and discover how it focuses your attention on the actual lines and curves, and prevents you from being overly judgmental about how well you’re doing.

Plenty of other things in your life can benefit from more relaxed attention and less opinionated judgment. You can free up much time and mental energy by letting go of the need to have so many opinions.

Sure, to function in life you need to have a well-developed perspective. But that doesn’t require you to carry around a truckload of opinions on every little issue.

Is it really necessary to conduct an extensive internal dialogue about every person you encounter? Perhaps you’d be better served, and much better liked, by attentively listening to what that person is saying.

Give your opinionating a rest, and give life the opportunity to unfold in front of you. Stop over-analyzing everything you come across, and give yourself the chance to simply enjoy it.

Improve the accuracy of what you observe. Actually look at, listen to, and experience what you experience rather than placing so many judgments on it all.

— Ralph Marston

Prepared to be patient
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As soon as your day begins, be prepared to be patient. Be prepared to be tolerant, understanding, and forgiving.

Know from the start that someone in your life will do something foolish, selfish, hurtful. For no one you encounter even comes close to being perfect.

But that’s okay, because you can prepare yourself to handle it. You can remind yourself that someone else’s foolishness is not, after all, about you.

You can be so ready in advance for the offenses of others that they don’t offend you at all. You can enable and empower yourself to quickly let them go, and to move positively forward.

There’s no need for the negative behavior of others to waste your energy or drain your spirit. Simply know that it will happen, and when it does, continue with your own highest intentions.

Be ready to encounter the negativity of others. You’ll immunize yourself, and won’t have to make that negativity your own.

— Ralph Marston