No More Mondays

Perhaps I should have waited to talk about this on Monday, but there's no time like the present. A few weeks ago, life coach, author, and radio show host, Dan Miller came to speak at one of our devotionals. He left us all with a copy of his latest book No More Mondays as a gift.

As I read through his first book, 48 Days to the Work You Love, I had a hard time getting into it. It suspect it was largely due to the fact that I really liked my job and I was not into reading as much. Well, this time around was completely different. I loved the book. I took a lot of great quotes and examples from every chapter. Just being in the book made me feel confident about chasing one of the dreams I've had for the past few years.

Here are a few excerpts that I was glad to find. Enjoy the book and keep reading.

People often ask me how I find time to read as much as I do. (I read at least one new book a week.) The answer is that I'm afraid not to...

...The marketing guru Dan Kennedy says he's observed that people with tiny bank accounts tend to have no libraries, but they usually have big TVs.

A Stanford University study has indicated that if you read thirty to sixty minutes each day in your field of interest, in four to five years you will be a national authority.

All leaders are readers.

- No More Mondays , p198.

Security on Public WiFI

The next time you are using public WiFi with your own computer, you could make something like the image below your desktop background. It looks like you have several programs open and the little note may cause someone who is hacking your computer to think twice about hanging around. I don't know if it would work, but I thought it was a funny idea.

Danger and Opportunity

John F. Kennedy was once quoted with saying "When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters - one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity." I don't know much about the Chinese language, in fact I hardly know anything at all. So, I took a little time to look into it a little more and found something interesting. I discovered that even though you might try to make this inspiring and convince yourself that a crisis is a good thing because there is opportunity to be had, you need to keep looking just a little further.

"Crisis" is in fact made up of the two words that are literally, danger (wei) + opportunity (ji). However, here is what I found that was interesting. The word above is still "crisis" in Chinese. There is nothing good about a crisis. Even though symbolically, there may be opportunity in the face of danger, it is still a crisis. If you want to make Kennedy's quote a little more applicable, you need to understand that the Chinese have another word. If in fact you want to turn a crisis into an opportunity you must go from "wei ji" to "zhuan ji". Zhuan (turn into) and ji (opportunity) literally means "turn into opportunity". That is how an opportunity can arise out of a crisis. It requires a little change.

Take a look at the Chinese symbols here. You can also read more about how these Chinese characters have been taken away from their meaning here.

Write yourself a check

This weekend I started reading No More Mondays by Dan Miller and came across this story about Jim Carrey. Here's the brief version.

[Jim Carrey] wrote himself a check for $20 million and kept it in his wallet until he earned that amount for The Cable Guy (1996). - IMDB.

I like this story. It's motivating. It's inspiring. It helps you visualize your goals. I'm writing myself a check tonight and it's going to be BIG! I'm not going to tell you the amount, but I would encourage you like Miller does his readers, to write yourself a check. Aim high and put together a plan.

"Aim for an eagle, bag a pheasant, and you won't eat crow."