Mikes Blog

What’s easy
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It’s easy to demonize those who disagree with you. It’s better to work at finding common ground so you can cooperate and create real value.

It’s easy to blame your troubles on someone else or something outside your control. It’s better to envision a way forward and to put your vision into action.

It’s easy to construct fantasies about the world that assuage your feelings. It’s better to deal with the facts as they are, no matter how challenging that may be.

It’s easy to come up with lots of excuses for delaying or avoiding what must be done, and to hope against hope that things will improve anyway. It’s better to give time, attention, and focused, effective effort to your hopes and to bring about improvements in your world.

Life is difficult, and the way to make it even more so is by seeking to deny or avoid the difficulties. Life is difficult, yet by meeting its demands with positive purpose and diligence, you can fill life with meaning, joy, and goodness.

What’s easy is not what makes life good. You deserve, and your world deserves, for you to do what makes life good.

— Ralph Marston

What are your choices?
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Your choice can make any situation miserable. Your choice can make any day enjoyable.

You may have more potential than any other person who has ever lived. Yet it is only your choice that enables that potential to be realized.

Your life is subject to countless forces, to the designs of strangers, to random twists of fate. Your choice determines what you make of it all.

Others are likely to define you by your heritage, your job title, your appearance, even by the sound of your name. Much more than these things, though, you are defined by your choices.

Your great fortune is that you are in control of those choices. You can keep them, you can change them, you can abandon them in whatever way you see as best.

Through all your choices you live a life that is uniquely you. Ask yourself often, what are your choices and where are they taking you?

— Ralph Marston

Multiply the goodness
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Are your skills being regularly tightened and lubricated by challenge and purpose? Or are they falling prey to rust and decay through neglect and complacence?

Are your resources being renewed and increased in relevance because they’re being put to good use? Or are they sitting in some forgotten warehouse gathering dust and obsolescence?

What about your relationships, your knowledge, the places you love, the experiences you treasure? Have you grown complacent about them or are you constantly finding new ways to breathe more life into them?

The good things in your life lose their value when you hoard them, neglect them, or hide them away. To maintain and increase their value, share them and make beneficial use of them.

Open up the full value of all you have by infusing it with the power of purpose, effort and attention. Multiply the goodness in your life by doing good things with it every day.

Give full respect and appreciation to all you are, all you have, and all you can be. Make use of it all, and make it all even better.

— Ralph Marston

The good that can be
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This is a day when you can think about what you choose to think about. This is a day when you can feel the way you wish to feel.

This is a day when you can be your authentic self. This is a day when you can live the highest values you hold.

You are alive, aware, and able to achieve whatever you take it upon yourself to achieve. You have time, resources, wisdom, experience, and the ability to make use of them.

You can take positive and purposeful action, well informed by your own life and the lives of countless others who have gone before you. You can care deeply and put forth effort in the service of all you care about.

You’re capable of courage, discipline, commitment, persistence, focus, and more. You’re able to acknowledge, honor, and support those things that matter most with the way you choose to live.

This day and this world are filled with possibilities and you are an integral part of it all. Live it well, for all the good that it is, and all the good that can be.

— Ralph Marston