Week 1 - "Create a Life of Meaning"

This week was a good week for "reflection" and finding the "inner-self", truthfully I have always believed that people have "more" lurking and hiding inside that they let on and that it simply takes "something" to get it to come out. But I realized that personally I have not tried to get that "more" out of me for a little while, I have been kind of in cruise control figuratively, not that I haven;t been pushing myself to work hard, do as much as I can, or be the best I can be, but simply finding the "inner" part of me that has those dreams or wants inside that tend to get suppressed with life's disappointments or discouragements. This weeks focus really helped me take a moment to look inside and find more of me that I haven;t seen for awhile, the activity that really made my brain open up was the "50 Things I Want to Do" exercise, basically it is an exercise where you make a list of the fifty things you want to make sure you do before you die or pass away. Sounds maybe a little "The Bucket List", "Second Hand Lions", "Brian's Song", or even "A Christmas Carol", but a good exercise that you might be surprised as to what comes out if you allow it to do what it can do. If you haven't done it try it, just try it and you will see what I mean. Here is a good website to check out if you are in need of ideas or thoughts that can again summarize and amplify the significance of the exercise, http://www.my50.com/ .

The other topic starts with a fun trivia question:

• How many times did James Dyson fail before he finally had a vacuum cleaner that he could sell?

Regardless of the exact answer at this moment it was definitely more than one, two, three, and yes even one hundred. The next point to emphasize this week is to "fail forward", what that means is 

failing with learning attached. A person can fail many times, I like the good examples of this with  Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, or the Wright Brothers, all of there scenarios represent that with failed attempts eventually success was an eventual result. Failing is not failing, when learning is attached and a person can advance in knowledge. So in the big scheme of things just because your first try is unsuccessful don't give up, because with enough tries it eventually will, especially if your determined and have a passion for it. 

I enjoyed this weeks information and found it motivational to keep on the track of "not giving up" and that "there are really and plenty of worthwhile goals we can accomplish" and the only thing holding us back is ourselves, whether it be allowing ourselves more financial freedom to do it, not trying hard enough, or simply needing a new goal to reintroduce drive again. If you need a pep talk yourself right now or something new to read to help you boost morale here is a great talk that we read for our assignments this week by Jeffery A. Thompson, I believe it is worth the read http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=1900 

By the way the answer to the question regarding how many times James Dyson failed before he had a vacuum to sell is 5,128. Don't ever give up on something you are passionate about.