What Are You Thankful For?

I’m thankful to have had so much love and support from family and friends.

I was born into the right family for me, and I truly could not ask for anything more from them. My parents did everything they could to raise me well, and the rest has been up to me from there. I am always thankful for all the opportunities I was granted through them. Growing up, my mother made sure that my brother and I were always well cared for, and my father always encouraged us to push ourselves further.

I think a big part of what I am now grateful for is the belief that my parents always had in us (my brother and I). Of course, more than just belief, my parents actually followed through to help us make that belief into a reality. This is what truly made the difference.

Something memorable to me is that from around 8 years old, it was understood in my home that I would go to college. What that meant to me is that my parents believed in my abilities. Before I had a strong enough inner drive to know what I believed in, my parents believed in me. I wish everyone could have this. Before we can have our own Thoughts as children, we probably adopt our parents’ thoughts. So, it certainly helps if they have good thoughts worth having.

Through my career and sometimes through happenstance, I have connected with so many great people through the years. Some of the people with who I have built friendships with in the past years would be Arthur von Boennighausen (research engineer / real estate developer), Michal Stawicki (author of many self-improvement books), Dave Edelstein (co-author of Question Yourself), and Bob Rich (clinical psychologist). I have met many, many more who I am also happy to hear from, but these are the ones that I tend to stay in communications with regularly. I am thankful for these connections.

Of course, I am thankful for my wife and the extended family I have now, thanks to her. My wife and I see and support each other every day, and I’m grateful for this.

I’m thankful to have all my needs met every day

I know many people in the world are struggling, and I feel fortunate every day that I have not had to worry about having any of my needs met. My whole life has been a privilege, and I aim to give something back to society to help compensate for all that I have been given. A key way that I am doing that is through this blog.

To meet my needs, I must focus on some of the key fundamentals – such as eating well, meditating, exercising, and being spiritually centered. At this point, I’m grateful to have the time and energy to focus on this.

I’ll be honest and say it is quite easy to forget about all the needs you have every day when you actually have them every day. It’s easy to take for granted: clean water, healthy food, a dishwasher, a laundry machine, a clean space of your own to live, helpful friends and family, warm clothes, etc. It’s very easy to forget that these needs are not a given. It can take determination, hard work, and often even luck to get them. I make an effort to be conscious of this and be thankful every day.

I’m thankful for my career.

When I began my career, I was very doubtful about my abilities. I wasn’t sure which direction I was going in. I wasn’t sure if I could make a living doing this. Now, I am doing it. I am earning a living with my writing career, which is all I ever hoped to achieve. I get contacted monthly with new business opportunities, and it makes me smile. I am already at the point I had hoped to reach. I have found my rhythm.

Now, of course, I have new ambitions. I want to grow this blog. I want to produce more audiobooks. I want to have my books translated into more languages (my usual ones are English, Spanish, and Portuguese).

Speaking of translations, I would like to give a special thanks to my mother, who translates my books into Spanish. She works hard and does an excellent job. My books in Spanish are widely read, and I have to give her credit for this. I have published many books, and more often than not, she is working on translating one of them. I’m honored and grateful that she has been happy to help with this.

Even though I have reached the point I wanted to reach, there are always new goals for me to strive for. Luckily I have been enjoying the journey, the work, and seeing where it takes me. I’m thankful for all this.

In the end, I have to remember that my career is mostly about helping my readers. I’m thankful to be able to help so many people, truly.

To you, yes you, the person reading this now, thank you for reading!

This career is just beginning – I look forward to evolving and growing along with you. I hope you stay along for the ride.

I am thankful for my teachers

I’m thankful for all the teachers I ever had. Of course, a few stand out above the rest, as I think they went above and beyond what was truly necessary.

Mr. Strombeck, in the 5th grade, taught me many life lessons that made an impact on my life. He was a very strict teacher, and I dreaded the class when I was there, but many years later, I realized that he was doing his best to prepare us for real life. It wasn’t just another class.

Mr. Gerhold, in the 9th grade, helped me learn algebra by volunteering to tutor me in the early mornings, even though I was struggling and thought I was going to fail the class. He spent a couple of months working with me so that I could understand. With his help, I ended up doing very well in the class. I still remember what he taught me, even though my field does not involve algebra. While I don’t use algebra in my daily life, this class was critical to do well in geometry, trigonometry, and then calculus. If you don’t understand algebra, you can quickly get left behind.

Mrs. Short, in the 11th grade, was a ruthlessly difficult chemistry teacher. If you wrote out an answer and had it 90% correct, you still got it wrong in her class. Oh, and I shouldn’t forget to mention that she was (in)famous for assigning 2-3 hours of homework per night. Yet when I made it to college chemistry (for majors, meaning they made the class extra difficult), I was glad that my high school class had been so difficult. In college, my classmates were dropping like flies. Week after week, the chairs emptied as students dropped, transferred to an easier class, failed, etc. I made it to the end with an A, thanks to the fact that Mrs. Short never took it easy on us.

I am thankful for all the medical staff

In these difficult times, we can’t forget to be thankful for the medical staff (e.g., nurses, doctors, paramedics, psychologists, etc.) working hard every day to help save lives. I can’t pretend to know what they’ve been going through. I am sure the job can be quite grueling, but they are doing it. Whatever they are paid, it isn’t enough. These are true heroes, and we should all be thankful for the job that they do.

Remember that even if you have not needed any medical care this year, someone that you love may have. The important thing is that if you ever do need it, they will be there for you.

I will leave you with a question: What are you thankful for?

Community Acts of Kindness

In this society, a lot of strain is placed on teachers and schools: they are expected to take care of all of a child’s needs in some cases since some parents cannot do this on their own.

A lot of strain is placed on police: they are expected to deal with a wide range of societal problems that no one else wants to deal with.

A lot of strain is placed on parents: they are expected to raise children well while dedicating themselves fully to their jobs. If these parents have older parents of their own, they may be faced with parenting children and caring for their parents all at once.

Much strain is placed on college students: they are expected to know what they want to do with the rest of their lives and pursue that major, yet there is no guarantee that there will be jobs when they graduate. The field that they study may not even exist in a few years.

There is a lot of strain placed on those with poor health or those with disabilities: how can they be expected to thrive when they must deal with lost time, energy, and the financial costs of their illness.

There is much strain placed on most people who live through some of the above or have family members who are living through other strains that I did not mention.

At some point, we must realize that no single profession can take on all of these strains. A teacher cannot fix it when a child is facing neglect in their home. The police cannot fix it when that child grows up to commit crimes. The solution of putting this person in jail is not a real solution. The real solution would have been to prevent this from happening in the first place. The parents of this criminal cannot fix it when they had decided long ago to work two jobs each to keep the lights on at home. They never made time for their own child.

The college student cannot fix it when he has taken 100k dollars in loans to get a degree in something that employers view as irrelevant. His guidance counselor never mentioned the risk of that when he was studying hard to earn good grades.

Those in poor health cannot fix it when they have to choose between spending money on taking care of their health or getting educated in a field that will help them have a good career.

Many people are strained enough that they can’t see beyond their immediate situation.

Expecting some of these professions to fulfill their roles perfectly can have disastrous effects. In reality, no one will fulfill their roles perfectly, so as individuals, we need to take on more – if we are in the position to do so.

If we can help someone, we should do it. If I can help some people in my community, this helps build a better community for all of us.

Many people surely will think that they are not in the position to help anyone. But it’s not as complicated as we may think. We all have a set of skills. If someone needs your help and cannot pay, consider helping out pro bono (without charging them). If you need certain materials to do the work, then tell them to pay for the materials and that you will do the rest.

For example, perhaps you make your living working at a company, earning a decent salary. But you also have many handy skills. If a coworker needs some help around the house, you may volunteer to help out one day, and you may not ask for any compensation if you know that he is struggling. Or perhaps this coworker is new and just moved in. He has plenty of other costs and things to worry about, and so it would be a great help to him if he did not have to pay you.

If you own a business and a client is paying for a wide variety of services, and at the last moment the client notices that he actually needs more services from you, you may perform a small additional service at no added cost as a “thanks” to this client. Or you may look for creative ways to help him that don’t require much extra work on your part without increasing his costs.

The better you are doing in your own life, the more you should look for opportunities to add value to the people around you, even if it does not necessarily increase your own profits.

We live in very profit-driven societies. We are obsessed with currency because it is a hard metric that we can track. We can look at our bank statements and see that the figures are going up or down or staying steady. With so many other important areas in our lives, they are not always so easily trackable.

For example, we do not have a device that measures love, peace, happiness, or wisdom. These are immeasurable, so we tend to disregard them in our societies that place great value on data. We treat them as unimportant when they are actually critical features of a properly functioning society.

Our thinking needs to shift more to being like a gardener. If I plant a peach tree and watch it grow, I am not concerned if it bears no fruit the first season I plant it. Maybe it is still young and needs time to grow. Maybe in the second year, it will give me a few peaches, but maybe in the third year, it will provide loads more peaches than I need.

The fruits come when they come – all I can do is nurture them to grow and wait patiently.

Practice your patience, and stop needing everything to happen right now.

Likewise, with our communities, the fruits will come when they come. If I meet a neighbor and find out her child struggles in algebra, I may think back to my own childhood. I found algebra to be highly frustrating, and I thought I would never understand it. But eventually, through hard work and through the kindness of my teacher, who tutored me pro bono, I was able to understand it quite well. And so, I may volunteer to help a neighbor’s child whenever he has a problem he is stuck on. (These days, there are so many online resources to help with these kinds of issues, but they did not exist when I was a child.)

These are small steps, but that is fine. We are all busy with our own lives, but there is so much more that matters beyond our own personal concerns.

Surely you have your own struggles, but ask yourself if you have all that you truly need. Do you have much more than you need? If you do, start thinking of others around you, of your community.

This neighbor’s child struggling through algebra may end up becoming a mathematician. Without my help, he may never have realized that he actually enjoyed the topic very much.

We never know what kinds of fruits will come from our actions or how much time they may take to truly blossom, but that is the wonderful thing about these community acts of kindness.

Even if the fruits of your labors are not always your own to profit from, there is a tremendous pleasure that comes from knowing that you have helped someone to become a better version of themselves. To help someone overcome an obstacle that is holding them back can also be life-changing.

When your community is able to thrive, there will be cascading effects. If one community is thriving, that community will help neighboring communities, and this positive, helpful energy will gradually spread through and through. From one community to the next, one city to the next, then one state to the next, then one country to the next.

It is not so easy, and I don’t mean to make it sound that way. But it all begins with a simple step from one individual. That one individual could be you today.

When someone asks you for help today, don’t cast them aside so easily. Take a few minutes and see what you can do to help. If you can, avoid setting up a “Wall of Busyness” where you are so busy with your own life that you cannot do anything for anyone else.

We tend to value our independence and figuring out our troubles on our own – but no one truly does everything on their own. The self-made man or woman is an illusion. No one is born, and taught, and guided toward greatness all on their own. We can achieve quite a lot through our own willpower, but we still need others to get there.

So it would be a step in the right direction if we continued to value our independence, but it is also important that we place more value on helpfulness. People need help to become fully independent. And people need help to thrive and arrive at a position where they can also help others.

Don’t judge someone just because they are at a lower level in the game of life. See what you can do to push them forward. You may be surprised to find where they end up.

So many people are on social media now. You may consider looking for groups or communities in your social media channels that correspond to your physical location. Perhaps someone near you could use a helping hand.

Or you may look for ways to help people who need advice in an area that you have expertise in. There are online communities for every conceivable skill, problem, and interest.

“How Does That Make You Feel?”

I once interned with a clinical therapist (when I was a college student) – her specialty was working with adolescents and families who were facing a variety of problems. Some of those problems could be behavioral issues, communication issues, improper parenting techniques, drug abuse, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.

Her goal was generally to help resolve some of the problems they presented but also to help bring families closer together so they could communicate better and solve their own problems.

In seeing this therapist in action, I realized that she had a catchphrase that worked quite well for her. After someone presented a problem or issue in their lives, she would ask:

“How does that make you feel?”

People naturally wanted to discuss the problem, which usually involved other people being wrong, and them being right. But the therapist always brought the conversation back to feelings. It was important to figure out the feelings that had made people so upset and led them to take certain actions in their lives. It was important to look more closely at which feelings may have led to growing conflicts and problems rather than resolutions. The feelings by not having been properly processed, acknowledge, and directed, had led people into toxicity, maladaptive states, and chronic troubles in their lives.

By not processing or understanding our own feelings, we can get stuck at one station in life.

I must note that she had a compassionate, delicate way to ask this question. It wasn’t just the question itself but how she asked it that helped people open up to her. She was truly empathic and cared deeply, and surely this helped her to open up communication channels with her clients.

Understand that when we communicate, many of us are mostly paying attention to our own feelings. We tend to get absorbed in this and forget that the people we communicate with also have their own feelings. We have to be open to communicating with our true feelings to open up someone else’s feelings and then come to a meaningful understanding. When someone’s feelings are not heard or acknowledged, they tend to become aggressive, or they may want to avoid you, or they may ignore you. None of these provides a proper path toward fruitful communication.

Of course, opening up our true feelings is not always easy, but we must learn to do it if we wish to communicate openly, rather than set up walls that shut down communication.

This simple question, “How does that make you feel?” has made me realize over and over that many of us have a lot of room to grow when it comes to our communication skills. We have gotten used to only surrounding ourselves with people who we agree with. Being around people we agree with makes us feel good, but unfortunately, it can stunt our personal growth. In this age, we also surround ourselves with social media or news feeds that only provide us with the viewpoint we already agree with. Again, this makes us feel good but does not necessarily help us to grow as a person.

What happens when people agree with us? This may make us feel smart, liked, or special in some way. And when they disagree with us, we may feel dumb, disliked, and useless. So when people disagree with us, rather than allowing ourselves to have those negative feelings, we may jump into rationalizations and justifications and bitterly defend our positions. Even if, at times, our position is not actually reasonable.

Feelings are important to how we communicate, but at the same time, it should be obvious that just because I feel good about an idea does not make it true.

Why are feelings important to communication, then? Feelings are about finding a pathway toward understanding and resonating with people. Feelings get at the core of who we are. We own our feelings as a part of ourselves more than we own our facts or rationalizations. Facts and rationalizations are available to all. But we see our feelings as uniquely something that we are experiencing. Even if I am sad and you are sad, we are still sad in different ways, so we always know our own experience to be a unique marker of who we are at a point in time. To deny my feelings is to deny me and to say that I do not matter. When someone debates rationally while completely ignoring how I feel, I feel as if I do not matter.

“Well, our budget is smaller this year than last year, and we needed to cut something somewhere. There’s no other way. Sorry, we’re letting you go. I need you to pack your stuff up and be out by the end of the day.”

Anyone faced with hearing the above would probably feel completely denied as a human being. There is no interest in hearing how you feel. The decision is made about your life without actually factoring in your life, feelings, purpose, and will.

Of course, this denial of who we are makes us angry, depressed, anxious and provides us with a full spectrum of negative emotions. The denial of our feelings makes the situation seem worse than it had to be, somehow.

Here is another scenario to consider. For whatever reason, you may find yourself seated next to someone who holds opposing viewpoints on big life issues. Well, what if instead of bitter debates, personal attacks, and building up our anger and hatred for each other, we instead focused on our feelings?

What if the conversation went something like this:

Robert: “I hate how liberals are always trying to control us.”

Martin: “Well, how do you feel when that happens? (Notice that rather than fueling the fire or resisting this potentially antagonizing idea, we ask a neutral question.)

Robert: “It feels aggravating and like we always have to fight just to keep our basic rights.”

Martin: “I’m a liberal, and I feel aggravated too like we always have to fight to make any basic progress toward something better. It sounds like we feel the same, doesn’t it?”

From there, perhaps the conversation could grow in a direction where both people realized that they both feel aggravated, they both feel misunderstood unheard, disregarded, treated unfairly, etc. Both sides are probably experiencing the same feelings, but they are processing them differently, and they have formed different belief systems or worldviews.

We could choose to focus on the common human factor here, which is our feelings, rather than what splits us apart. When we argue, even with facts, all either side truly hears is:

“He disagrees with a plainly obvious truth that anyone with basic intelligence and human decency should be able to see – so he is obviously ignorant at best or a wretched person at worst. I should give him a piece of my mind so he knows how ignorant and wretched he truly is.”

And, of course, such thoughts cannot possibly go anywhere productive.

The way we tend to behave isn’t as a person who is calmly evaluating facts and weighing them against each other. Rather, we are more concerned with our feelings. We tend to react to the way things make us feel.

In our real conversations, of course, it will be a challenge to have a calm, reasonable conversation with someone from an opposing group or belief system. This is a great challenge because we must connect to our emotions while not letting them rule us. Connecting to our feelings will help us see that we share something that unites us with even people from opposing groups.

While we can reason logically through the facts, the reality is that most people do not think in this way. Most people have a feeling or emotion about something, and then they pick the facts or arguments that support their position. There is a confirmation bias – meaning that we only pay attention to evidence that confirms what we already believe. After you believe something, it becomes quite a challenge to change someone’s mind.

So instead of trying to change minds, why don’t we aim to respect our differences and build connections with people? Ask how people feel and encourage them to tell a story about what got them to that point. If you open your mind and listen to people’s pains, you will see that we can’t argue with feelings. We can argue by using logic, but implementing logic successfully is an overwhelming challenge when we live in a world with more and more misinformation, misinterpretations, and biased information. Also, new research is constantly identifying that what we thought was true becomes false overnight, as new “truths” replace the old ones. And of course, when you argue with logic, people tend to get quite emotional about their “facts,” which defies the point of using logic in the first place.

Understand that when we argue from the point of needing to be right, we can’t convince anyone.

The more you feel the need to be right, the more that the other person will feel the need to be right. And the situation we end up creating is of locking horns (such as with bison, antelope, or moose). And sometimes, in nature, both animals lock horns so tightly in a gruesome battle that both sides end up losing their lives. If that is not the future we want to create for ourselves, then we should reconsider our need to be right and instead look for ways to open ourselves up to others and get them to open up to us.

Debating the people we disagree with in an angry, hate-filled way is not the path forward.

Ignoring that the people we disagree with exist is not the path forward.

Treating the people we disagree with as less than human is not the path forward.

Instead of closing down, we must open up and invite people into our hearts, minds, and souls.

If we open up and explore people’s feelings, we create an open window of communication—a channel between souls where true understanding may develop.

The Lesser Paths and Better Paths

I see regret in many people. It is painful to wake up to our lives and realize that we are on the wrong path. It may appear we have chosen the wrong job, we have sought the wrong relationship, raised our kids improperly, moved to the wrong town, and so on.

When our path is wrong, we feel it with our whole body, with the resistance of every fiber of our being wanting something else. Anything else. We want to eliminate the dead weight we carry around every day as part of our life’s burden.

However, we often forget that we needed this wrong path to see how wrong it truly was. Or we needed this wrong path to learn great lessons that would help us on the road to better paths. Or, in many cases, when we are young, no one could have talked us out of taking this path. It’s as if it were our destiny. I’m aware of many people who had a hunger for adventure and travel, and so they went to different states or even countries, only to realize that the place they truly belonged was back at home where they grew up.

I use the term “wrong path” because we all know what it means. But we must understand that a path that seems right for us in one moment can change and become the wrong path. And vice versa.

Truthfully, the wrong path does not exist. There are only better paths and lesser paths. Naturally, we will aim to take better paths and avoid the lesser ones. And when we cannot avoid them, we will wish to get through the lesser paths as quickly as we can to move on to something better.

Here is what comes to mind for me when I think of the lesser and better paths.

When I finished my undergraduate studies at Purdue University, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. I thought it made sense to continue my studies in psychology, as I did enjoy the field. So I decided to go to graduate school, but many things on that journey ended up being wrong for me, and I chose to leave after three years with a master’s degree even though I had been expected to finish the Ph.D. degree there.

During my time there, I struggled to enjoy anything that I was doing. Everything seemed like work to fill my life with. I lost perspective, and in many ways, I stopped recognizing who I was. I had become whatever I needed to be to fulfill the role of graduate student that I had been playing. I was playing the role, not fully embodying it as my own self. For me, it was the right choice to leave.

A few years after leaving, I realized that this “wrong path” in life had given me so much. I completed advanced courses in psychology and statistics. I had published academic articles and book chapters, which helped me learn to write professionally. I learned to organize my time and work, which was something I had never done before this. I practiced presentational skills, which was an area that I always struggled to perform well in. And I learned to work collaboratively rather than just on my own. Almost everything I had done helped me to later succeed in creating my own life and business on my own terms. In the end, I had done so much in three years that I felt as if I had acquired six years’ worth of experience in that period. One of the things I disliked the most in the program was the intense workload, but I could finally see that it had all been worth it after finishing.

Understand that when we are on the wrong path, often, this is just a part of our journey toward something better. I am glad that I completed three years in the graduate program because that allowed me to gain most of the benefits from being there. If I had left earlier, I may have lived with regret, knowing that I could have learned and accomplished so much more. Yet if I had left later, I would have also lived with regret, knowing that I was living a lie, pursuing something that was not me. I had been working toward something that my heart was no longer in.

When you believe you are on the wrong path, you have to ask yourself if there is a better path available to you. If not, it could make sense to continue on the road you are on, as long as you gain something from it. However, sometimes, to find a better pathway, you must open yourself up to the unknown, to uncertainty, and explore what you can create in your life out of nothing. Sometimes it is worth taking that leap.

A realization I have come to in living my own wrong paths and seeing others live theirs is that we need these paths in our lives. In many ways, our lives may end up just being a series of lesser paths that we take, and then better paths, and then lesser, and then better, in endless cycles.

The lesser paths that we take help us learn and grow to identify those better paths. With that experience, we can then take those better paths more courageously, confidently, with greater skill, poise, and gratitude.

Ultimately, the lessons that we learn along the journey of lesser and better paths will help us become our better selves.

“I am Better Than You”

The thought that “I am Better than You” may be one of the most harmful thoughts ever produced in all of society, yet it is often seen as quite benign or even as a good and healthy thought to have. For many people, they may view it as their right to think this thought every day.

I will admit that I have been guilty of thinking this thought at times. I am well educated, and I think education is highly important. So it is tempting if I meet someone who did not go to college to think that I am better.

Yet, in reality, I just happened to be born into a family where a college education was highly valued. Since I was 8 years old, I knew that I would go to college – it was never a question. Another 8-year-old in my neighborhood perhaps had never even heard the word “college,” as his parents may not have found higher education to be especially important. Another 8-year-old in a less fortunate country was perhaps working full time to help his family survive, and the idea of college would be completely foreign to him.

There is not a good reason to convince ourselves that we are better than others. Often, we just had different circumstances and different opportunities.

A humbling thought I sometimes have is that if I had been born exactly in someone else’s position, meaning to another mother and father, in the same context as someone else, then I would be that other person. We like to focus on our self-control and our ability to do what we want, but if you were born in an environment without proper nutrition, education, healthy mindsets, good role models, and so on, then why would you be the 1 in a million statistic that performs well in life?

Contrariwise, if everything in your life were moving you toward love, wisdom, and success, with good parents and good school systems, and positive nurturing family and friends, what type of person could fail to live a fruitful life in this case? If everything were aligning you toward being a good and successful person, then to fail horribly in life would perhaps make you quite the unusual statistic.

With this type of thinking, I see myself in every individual I cross paths with. I see that if things had been different, I would be them, or they would be me. In a sense, we’re all the same individual because if I had been born and raised in precisely your circumstances, I would be you, and if you had been born and raised precisely in my circumstances, you would be me. This is a powerful idea that has impacted my life.

There is nothing to feel too proud about. I should not feel that I am better than you. Or if you are in better circumstances than me, you should not feel that you are better than me, either.

This thinking helps me sympathize more and relate to people who are not in as fortunate circumstances. I think many of us fear interacting with someone who has less than us because I think deep down, we all know that we could just as easily have been in their shoes. But rather than empathize, we often choose to distance ourselves more and more from them. It’s easier to pretend they do not exist or to blame them for their shortcomings.

From a group or nation level, “I am better than you” is probably a persistent thought from people in many nations throughout the world. Nations tend to want their people to feel proud of their country – e.g., patriotism. Yet, there is a point where feeling that we are better than others can result in prejudices, racism, harassment, violence, etc.

When we think we are better, the mind easily shifts into a dark place, where we start to think it is okay to take control over someone else’s life, to use them for our purposes, to objectify or dehumanize them, or in the worst of cases, as a justification to exterminate people.

We should aim to support our thoughts with evidence. We shouldn’t have a thought and feel it is true just because it makes us feel good. And, we should aspire not to feel good just because a thought strokes our ego. We should aspire to get our self-esteem from good thoughts and good actions, not from belittling and looking down on others.

All I ask is that we take more caution with this widespread thought that we probably all have had at some point or another: “I am better than you.”