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?

What I Learned from Billy Joel

In my last years of high school (when I was around 16-17 years old), I discovered Billy Joel’s music more deeply. Most people know about Uptown Girl and Piano Man, but he has performed such a great range of music that these are just scratching the surface. Today, I would like to review what I learned from listening to Billy Joel’s music.

My Life

This was probably the song I listened to most during high school. The message of My Life is quite simple. The people around you will try to guide you in this or that direction, but you must forge your own path at the end of the day. You are the one who must live with your decisions, not someone else.

Many things in life can be learned quite easily, but they are not truly grasped until you experience the message in many different ways. In listening to this over and over, I felt energized through the music. It felt refreshing to see that I was going to figure out my own life, however easy or hard this may be, and at the end of the day, I would be responsible for my own choices.

I think I just longed to be fully free and on my own, even though I had no idea what that would truly mean. With that freedom, whatever mistakes I may make, I would make them and get through them, and this was just a natural consequence of living out my own life. I would rather make my own mistakes than make someone else’s, trying to live out their dream.

Big Shot

Another song I listened to many times was Big Shot. Basically, this is about the dangers of always needing to appear to be better than everyone else. This song made me think about how we often worry too much about what other people think. Then in caring too much about this, we want to impress them so that they think we are greater than we actually are. We tend to become obsessed with having the appearance of greatness rather than actually attaining greatness.

Since this song showcases the dangers of trying to be too much of a big shot, I realized it was much better to be humble and to strive to be whatever it is I wanted to be, rather than to go for it for the sake of appearing to be something. To do that would only lead to emptiness.

This is not a lesson that is gathered all at once, but one that can be arrived at by listening to this song over and over, by contemplating the message, and by reflecting on one’s own life motivations. Are you doing what you do for the credit? For the positive reactions, you expect to get? Or because it actually matters to you?

All About Soul

This song indicates some deeper feeling that we sometimes can get if we find the right partner (or perhaps a bond that could happen with anyone). We may arrive at a point where we can sense things in each other without the need for words to express them. You may sense trouble, or emotions, or even a deep need that someone has.

Again, as I was 16-17 years old when I listened to this song, this was quite a deep message to me. I had always thought we needed things to be explicit and openly stated for them to be real. Yet here, Billy Joel was hinting at the idea that there was a deeper, more profound, intuitive way of knowing.

Listening to this song made me realize that it could be worthwhile to explore this deeper soul or deeper feeling that perhaps we all have. In general, this may be something that we haven’t properly explored or even developed.

We Didn’t Start the Fire.

I heard a legend somewhere that an American History teacher told his students to forget about the class textbook. Rather, they could learn everything stated in the song We Didn’t Start the Fire, and with this, they should get a good grade on the final exam. I wish I had had that teacher – I may have actually learned something.

Much of the era he is describing in We Didn’t Start the Fire happened before I was born, and so I never did get all of the references, but still, I found the song fascinating. You can’t help but get the message that there have always been tremendous problems throughout history and likely always will be.

If you don’t know your history, it’s easy to feel like you are in a unique position that has never happened in all of human history. And of course, part of this is true, as there is always something new happening. Yet much of what is already happening is just recycled and pops up in a modified form. It’s new, but it’s still old.

Perhaps it’s true we didn’t start the fire, but it seems we will all keep it burning.

Pressure

I did not give this song much of my focus until I got to college. Pressure is not the most aesthetically pleasing song out there, but what is interesting to me is that the song itself does brilliantly capture the feeling of being pressured near your breaking point and being fully overwhelmed.

When the pressure is so great, and you don’t know what to do, how can you handle it?

The main message here is that we can run or do whatever we want to get away from the pressure, but it will find us nonetheless. The best we can do is learn to manage our own feelings about it. There comes a time when there is no other way but to get through it on your own. Personally, I have found that there is great value in learning to get through the pressure. It’s always there or ready to pop up somehow, so this is something we have to learn to deal with.

Other Songs

There are other songs that I listened to many, many times and that left some impression on me, but I don’t have too much to say about them. I’m not sure how to put in words the lessons or impressions that I gathered from them. Nothing beats just listening.

Those songs are Keeping the Faith, Only the Good Die Young, Tell Her About It, Piano Man, She’s Always a Woman, Just the Way You Are, and Allentown. Sometimes I just liked the song. Sometimes I may have gathered a different message than he intended. Sometimes I may have just absorbed the feeling, and it didn’t matter the words used.

By the way, I purposely didn’t mention any lyrics for legal reasons. Also, if you are interested in understanding what I have said here more deeply, I fully recommend listening to the songs on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen to your music.