Month: March 2010

If you wake up and expect today to be a wonderful exciting experience where you learn new things and people call you up and totally love you and you have all these good things happen. Then your chances of that happening go up about a thousand percent. You will look and you will find these things.

You dont have to wait for them to happen. You only need eyes that can find them. When you see them a little, you will see them a lot.

So you get one sad, bad or frightening call. Start looking for the good things as they are there too. Look and they will appear. When we get freaked out we stop seeing anything good and only focus on the bad thing. Even though 15 good things happen and one bad thing, you will see the bad only if you are normal.  Don’t be normal. Be abnormal and everyday will be great.

Every second of the day we determine what we will do next. Nobody else determines anything for us. WE do.

Every time we say to ourselves I am going to do this(with determination) we do it till we say to ourselves”ok ,this is too hard”

or “I will continue this later” or “I will just take a break. ”  We are determined until we stop being determined.

One way to be really determined it to have a friend right next to you helping you say yes we can when you don’t want to anymore.

A real person standing next to you, a personal trainer so to speak.

I think that as soon as we say we will do something with any kind seriousness , all the forces in the world that are bad hear it and they determine to make you fall.

You have to think of it as a war. Everything good wants success and everything bad wants failure.

It is you and you. good you bad you. The war rages on.

I think it is helpful to think of it as a war because then you will be more inclined to fight. That’s why the phrase fight the good fight is so real.

One example of this is a week when my friend and I went to soap lake to do a juice fast. We bought all the healthy things to juice and we were determined to do it three days.

the first three days are the hardest. We went christmas shopping on the second day to keep busy and every place we went had free everything we could  not have. Cookies, candy etc were offered all day. Well we were pretty hungry and it was free after all but we said no and were so proud each time we resisted the temptation. I have never gone christmas shopping before where there was anything free offered so it was kind of unusual.

We had to keep saying to each other we can do this one more hour and then one more day. We kept going. I do not think I could have done this alone. I am sure she could not have done this alone.

Other things in life that we are putting off or stopping the determination after an hour are likewise needing a friend.

Another help is to put something good in a blank space of time. So not have nothing to do or for sure you will have all the evil forces in the universe will be coming to fill the void with a myriad of things that will break you down.

The wonderful life of being an artist and calling yourself that and living that and only being that is what anybody can do.

I am not unique. I decided to do all of the above when I was very young. There is something in that decision that cut off all the other paths and made it simple. Once you have made your mind up the rest just falls in place. Some people are art teachers and artists second. That is a choice some people make because it seems safer. But you will always be that two things. Doing one thing is focused and powerful.

Burning every other bridge except what you really want is risky only in the sense that you might experience pain along the way.

the reality of it is you will experience pain no matter what. Being poor has it’s own reward. You do learn not to depend on money because that is not even in the equation . Once you have money you get dependent on it . Money is like a drug. You don’t have to live in a big house, You can live in a room if you have to. Lord knows I have lived in several rooms along the way.

I have a friend that used to make a ton of money as she was a CEO of a big company. She told me she couldn’t stop working because of the “golden handcuffs”. She was used to being able to buy anything anytime anywhere.

Security, even imagined security is a tremendous pull.

Burn all the ships I say, Burn the bridges and just do it and see what happens. Yes this is a radical concept but it is the right one if you want to do something. If you always think I would rather do ,,, fulltime, then do it.

Original photo of cuffs courtesy of banspy

Have you ever been 86ed from someplace? I have. I was with my family, and we were too noisy because we were pretty happy and excited to be together and we were 86ed from this bar in Seattle.

Well I call that an accomplishment. First of all, life is loud sometimes; and you should just stand back and let it be loud.
It won’t always be loud and clear. So you should enjoy it when it is.

There are few plans so weird or so ‘out-there’ that they’re completely unworkable, especially with a little tweaking. The way to tell if you can use a wild idea is to try it on for size. I mean, just go there and you can tweak it on the way. The process of examining it from different angles might make another solution or plan reveal itself.

Don’t limit yourself to only things that will probably work. On the way to “no way that will work” is “well maybe this aspect of it could work,” and if you weren’t going for “way out there” you could have never found the aspect that is on the way.

Here is an example. Lets say you want to plan to make a movie. You have no experience and no equipment, no nothing but a dream. Call someone who is already in posession of a movie camera and ask to borrow it. They may say yes. They may let you go with them and use it. Who knows. One thing could lead to another. The reality of it is, people w ho have no experience or money or anything have made movies before. That is how film noir started. You might blaze a new trail because you know nothing that has been done before. Sometimes that is a blessing.