Mikes Blog

Commit with action
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Wishes, plans, and promises have a common deficiency. They all lack meaningful commitment.

Commitment begins when you take action. The most impressive words, the most detailed strategies have little meaning until they’re acted upon.

Are you not quite ready to begin? Begin anyway, initiate genuine commitment, and you’ll quickly be making progress and will forget about whether you were ready or not.

You can always learn and adjust as you go, but it doesn’t work the other way around. You never make progress if all you’re doing is learning, preparing, and revising your plans.

Give your intentions the action they deserve. Implement your plans, go where they lead, and you’ll invoke the power of commitment.

If you wish you could, if you think you can, begin it. Commit with action and make it happen.

— Ralph Marston

Now is ready
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No one you know currently has any time other than now. Every person, everything that exists, is now.

So what are you going to do with it all, right now? How will you make the most of the abundance and the possibilities that whirl around you, right now?

You’ve been in similar situations before, all your life as a matter of fact. You’ve gained new richness from every moment you’ve been through and you’re in the process of doing so again, right now.

You can’t be sure what changes will happen later, yet you’re able to see how the world currently is. Now you can make good use of that clarity.

Skills are now, opportunities are now, and here you are, able to transform intention into reality. The possibilities are too consequential to ignore.

Now is ready for what can be done with it. The next move is up to you.

— Ralph Marston

Everyday goodness
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Going through your normal day to day activities, you’ll encounter plenty of opportunities for giving a little boost to the experience of life for yourself and others. Make the most of those opportunities.

Such ordinary instances of goodness might seem trivial. Yet they have a much larger positive impact than you might imagine.

The big, impressive acts of benevolence and attainment receive plenty of attention, but that’s because they are so few and far between. Everyday goodness, on the other hand, reaches people often, when and where they live, in ways that are wholly relatable.

A smile and a kind comment might only affect one single person, yet for that person, it can improve their whole outlook. That positivity could very well spread to others.

Make the offering of small goodness into such a habit that you don’t even notice it. You can be sure, however, that many people will notice.

Such everyday goodness costs you nothing while creating real value in people’s lives, including yours. Make a little goodness every time you can, and somebody’s sure to benefit.

— Ralph Marston

Miracle of it all
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Listen as waves roll again and again onto the shore. Watch as the sun gently sinks below the horizon.

Invest the whole of your awareness in the moment you’re in, the place where you are. Notice how completely the spectacular permeates the ordinary.

Gaze long enough in the same direction, and everything you see is beauty upon beauty. Give sufficient discernment to the situation, and its great value and potential become self evident.

Relax your concerns. Face the possibilities.

Let yourself be so consumed with gratitude that gratitude is not even close to enough. Then act upon your most sincere and loving instinct to expand upon the miracle of it all.

Shiny, dusty, old and new, simple, complex, soft and hard, everything joins in the magnificent spectacle. And here you are to know it, share it, carry it forward.

— Ralph Marston