To Be A Light

Recently, I read a book called The Traveler’s Gift by Andy Andrews. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you get yourself a copy and read it ASAP. It’s an amazing book that teaches the seven decisions you need to make in your life to achieve personal success.

I’m now reading Mastering The Seven Decisions That Determine Personal Success, which is the follow-up to that book and covers those seven decisions in more detail.

The first decision or principle is “The Buck Stops Here” and it refers to personal responsibility, which really hit home for me since I had just written about personal responsibility in my last post. It talks about how many people, when faced with adversity and difficulty in their lives, become mired in self-pity and spend a lot of wasted time and effort asking

Failure to take personal responsibility is one of the most pervasive problems in America today. If your lives are not what you want them to be, you blame something or someone outside of yourself and stay stuck right where you are. Your lives are a mess because of:

• Your parents. They loved you too much or didn’t love you enough.
• Your boss. He doesn’t appreciate your hard work and give you the promotions you deserve.
• The economy. How can anyone get ahead when jobs are scarce, wages are low and the cost of living just keeps rising?
• Time. There’s not enough of it and, what little there is,  goes by too fast.

Don’t feel bad. I’m as guilty of this as you are. For most of us, it’s a habit so ingrained in our thinking process, we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We do it because it’s easier to get angry at someone else

Those are just a few of the things this book promises you can do.

I have to admit, when a friend first handed me this book, I thanked her and pretended to be interested, but my mind was really thinking “oh geez, do people really believe in this stuff?” I know I didn’t.

I took the book home and tossed it on my shelf and forgot about it. Or I tried to anyway. My friend is a very determined person and she kept asking me about it and, for a while, I kept making excuses for why I hadn’t read it yet. Eventually, I gave in and read it just so I could tell my friend I had and get her to leave me alone. It wasn’t enough. Once I read it, she pestered me to

In chapter 4 of The Unemployed Millionaire, Matt Morris talks about the importance of having a dream list.

What is a dream list? It’s a list of anything and everything you dream of doing or having while you’re alive, not just things you think you can get or think you can do. It’s a list of anything and everything you WANT, no matter how outrageous or impossible it seems. Every item on your list should be as detailed as possible. Don’t write “Fancy sports car.” Write exactly what make and model you want, the color, and all the other little details that make it come alive and write it in present tense, as if you already own it or are already doing it, NOW.

Why? Because studies have shown that writing your dreams out in this way actually triggers your subconscious mind to work on fulfilling those

The To Be A Light blog has been around for a long time, but after my brother died unexpectedly on September 22, 2007 at the age of 32, I lost the heart for it and stopped writing on this blog. I didn’t stop blogging entirely. I just stopped blogging on To Be A Light. It was too painful to be here, especially after writing about the loss of my brother. I could never seem to come up with a post that seemed right following that one.

Recently, after much soul searching, I decided to wipe out the original To Be A Light and start over. I’ve given the site a whole new, much brighter and more cheerful, design and I’m ready to start writing on it again. I hope you’ll join me in creating the motivating and uplifting experience I originally intended for this blog.

Stay tuned for the exciting, new version