Tag Archives: Thoughts

Back to the origins

For a few days now I have in mind going back to the origins or Inspiration for Success, back to the beginning. And in my mind are things like that I wanted to share my journey to success using the Principles of Success as described by Napoleon Hill. And something like improving the world. And related to the principles of success something like that I was not good in Master Mind and that that was the thing to ‘work on’ as I made some kind of score table related to the Principles of Success. And then I wanted to add value, ‘give’ something, yes in order to be rich, become rich through this site, through this project. Ah, and yes, somehow the promise to myself to write every day, except Sunday, as I found that seven days a week is just too much, I found that a human being needs some rest, some point to let go of ‘work’, of obligations.

And I am afraid this is going to be quite a long post, as I did and wrote an awful lot of things since starting this site, since registering the domain inspiration-for-success.com on April 3, 2013. And am I successful? Well, not really, as I still don’t earn enough even to support my current life and I did not reach my main goal, my definite purpose yet as I wrote it down in my desire document around one and a half years ago. Ah, and yes, there is no team anymore, I am still doing everything myself, even though on some projects related to what I want it seems some kind of team is starting to form. And yes, my promise to the team to get one million dollar each still stands, as I found that indeed sticking with decisions is very important. Sticking with dates is more difficult though, as I passed quite some dates without achieving the goal I had set for those dates. Ah, yes, planning, that was also a weakness of mine and somehow still is. Although I do have a plan now, a way of planning things, and the method is improving and growing.

Ah, and yes, I am still jealous of all those people who seem to have ‘made it’ much more easy than me, especially if they did so at a very young age. Samples are Richard Branson and Donald Trump and Leonardo DiCaprio and more of those. But the more I look around I also see many people who indeed are (only?) successful at a later age, older than forty, sometimes older than fifty. Like I was amazed that the actors playing James Bond were often in their late forties and fifties. And yes, Richard Branson and Donald Trump are older, quite a bit, than me, so maybe not such good people to compare with as they also grew up in a different time. And also Bill Gates is a bit older than me, a bit younger though than Richard Branson and Donald Trump.

So where do I stand? Well, I’m not fully sure. The most amazing thing is that some of the things in my desire document changed from completely insane and impossible to at least possible or plausible. I also noticed that after a while, I think like six to nine months after I wrote the initial version, I started to ‘live’ my desire document, like everything that happened and happens to me somehow gets a place in the things I wrote in the desire document. And this happened quite naturally. And maybe the most important change that I noticed is that my self confidence grew from practically zero to ‘pretty self confident’ right now. And yes, any idea I get now I take quite seriously. I don’t consider any idea ‘crazy’ anymore.

So yes, no matter where I stand right now, the Principles of Success of Napoleon Hill, somehow make sense, somehow have put me on a road to, well, I guess success.

Worried

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Caterpillar Tomorrow I am planning to go to a funeral and that got my worried about how to deal with my posts and stuff. And that feels a bit strange, how I am obsessed with not missing one day with posting and such, like if I miss one day that would be the end of the world. And that makes me think how obsessed I am with these kind of things, that I am not so flexible, something people often said about me. And right now I am a bit torn, as everything I have learned about ‘success’ also points to persistence and do what other people don’t. And I have the feeling I am doing all those things, learning all those things, especially ‘plan the work and work the plan’. And discipline of course.

But somehow I have the feeling I am overdoing, that I am doing it in a very strict, inhumane way. And that that way of doing, thinking, may exactly be my problem (in life). That I would need a little more flexibility.

Anyhow, that’s not really what I wanted to write about. What I wanted to write about is about the caterpillar and how that image came in this post, as the caterpillar image is what I started this post with. And it is a good sample of how things come into being, how thoughts work, how events work, how things are connected. As I started today with ‘funeral’, which made me look for a ‘life and death inspirational quote’. And then I found the quote “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” from Richard Bach. And that made me search for ‘caterpillar’ as I wanted to put an image of a caterpillar.

And the results of that search amazed me, as the first results were all related to the Caterpillar brand, the manufacturer of heavy machinery. And then of course the thought came to me how commercialized the internet is, as ‘commerce’ is one of my personal struggles. And then the thought came to me how the two are connected, the animal and the brand, as I’m quite sure the company Caterpillar was named after the animal, especially as their logo is similar to the colors of the animal. So that’s how a human being can start with funeral and end with animals, machinery, the connections between them and logo’s and images.

Amazing, isn’t it?

Patience?

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Actually I wanted to write about this yesterday, but somehow the other idea took charge, so what happened to me last Saturday or so needed to wait.

And it wasn’t that special what happened last Saturday, but somehow it also was. And it’s worth thinking about I guess, it’s worth contemplating.

And you may or not know, but for quite a while I have been trying to start with the tools section in this website. Tools like helping you create a desire document or helping you get more clarity on your goals and how to reach them. And me being me I want to build that part of the site in my own way, according to the standards of Active Discovery Designs. As I believe building it in WordPress, according to the WordPress standards, will be too complicated and too time consuming. And next to that I don’t want to depend on the way WordPress is going as I don’t have good experience with Open Source systems when you have to support them, want to maintain them, want to expand them. And don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Open Source systems as e.g. most of the web servers on the internet are even running on Open Source systems like LInux, PHP and mySQL. And until now this whole site has been built with WordPress according to the WordPress standards.

Anyhow, I didn’t want to talk about Open Source systems and such, but about my experience with something that had been bothering me for weeks already, maybe even months. As I was looking for a way to create a simple signup procedure where you only have to enter your e-mail address and a password to either sign in to this site or to register. And yes, at the same time go to my own, much simpler, way of programming a website, a web application. But I got stuck.

And getting stuck when writing software is quite a common thing, at least for me. Sometimes you ‘just don’t see it’ and you get stuck in some very weird process where you just can’t find the bug, can’t find the error, can’t find why something doesn’t work. And it can keep you busy for days, where in the end the solution is often just one or two lines of code or some very stupid simple programming error. So I got stuck in the problem of automatically logging the user in after signing up, after entering a new e-mail address. And no, this website is not a full time job or something, especially the programming part, but I did spend quite some hours spent over a few weeks to solve this problem. And I couldn’t find it, I just couldn’t find why it didn’t work. And last Saturday I did one small search in Google and suddenly I found the solution as also other people had experienced the same thing. And indeed, also this time the solution took like fifteen minutes or less to implement. And it will take me probably hours to take out all the ‘debugging code’ that I have added to find the problem. But again, I don’t want to talk about software development.

No, I wanted to talk about that sometimes, or even mostly, solutions just ‘come to you’. And that is maybe also what the teachings of Abraham Hicks are trying to tell us. That all the pushing and shoving and hammering that we often do when things don’t work, when we want to put something into place, are not needed or even can have a negative impact. As when I would have just searched in a relaxed way in Google instead of trying and trying and trying to solve this problem I would have saved a lot of time, effort, energy and annoyance. So yes, often stopping and thinking works better than just ‘work, work, work’.

And I remember another sample of a similar situation. As I was on the way to the wake of a friend of mine who had died. And I didn’t know exactly where it was, but the name of the funeral home made me think it was somewhere near a subdivision with the same name. And that subdivision is something like six kilometers away from the city center, the city center where I started my search. And it took me I think even hours to find out I was in the wrong place. While if I would have just asked someone in the city center, where I was, close to the funeral home, I would have saved a lot of time and effort and even money. But no, I just had a wrong perception and was too, well, maybe preoccupied, with what I thought was right, to consider asking.

So better think and ask first, before doing a lot of effort.

Birthday

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I didn’t know what to write today. And I didn’t really feel like writing also, as I’m tired and a bit out of inspiration. And I just finished watching the movie Inception, a movie I really like, just to watch, but also because of it’s kind of deep background, as most good movies have. And it’s about virtual and reality, things we don’t really know how it fits together. As somehow of course reality, the reality we all experience, doesn’t exist. So again, I wanted to write about the famous and not so famous, but still somehow known actors, about ‘success‘.

So before writing my post for today I was thinking about what quote to send today. And while doing that I ended up in Facebook, and of course saw the things that a good friend of mine wrote about her son, writing that it is her son’s birthday today, or actually that it was her son’s birthday today. And she posted a part of a poem he wrote. And I didn’t know he was a poet, but I thought it was a beautiful poem. So I decided to use a part of that poem as my daily quote, just because I thought it was a nice thing to share, but also to honor him. And I was a bit scared as I didn’t ask for permission to do that. But I also didn’t want to ask, as that didn’t feel good. So I decided to send the quote and also publish it in our Facebook page as I often do. And to share that post with my friend, so she would know. And fortunately she liked it, so I guess with taking the risk I did the right thing.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about the strangeness of life, where it seems that in our deepest downs or in death or in suffering we achieve the greatest things. As e.g. this whole site, the project Inspiration for Success started with one of the deepest downs in my life. And I’m not sure if it adds a lot of value already to people, but I do know some people like, or maybe appreciate, the quotes I send daily. And right now, the sharing of these parts of the poem of Andrei Brian Ramos, started with most probably a lot of pain that my friend must be feeling today, not having her son around anymore. And the fact that he is not with us anymore put more attention than usual to his poem.

So strange, how life works. As in the end we all live on in some kind of way, even after we die. In the end we all contribute something to ‘life’, in the end indeed life is something continuous, something we are all part of, something forever, something infinite.

So yes, let’s celebrate life, as we are here, as we experience it, as we contribute, while we contribute. And let’s celebrate all life before us, that made life as it is now. And let’s celebrate our contribution to life, no matter what it is or how big or how small it appears. As it’s all ‘life’.

What a miracle, what a wonder.

It’s starting

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So where do I stand right now? I still certainly don’t feel successful, especially as my financial situation is still not good and as my partner went away again two weeks ago, very angry. And while I kept going very well since he left, better than ever, yesterday I kind of collapsed emotionally.

But still, somehow my self confidence has grown enormously since my deep down one and a half year ago, the period where the ideas of Napoleon Hill came to me in the form of a book given to me, the book Think and Grow Rich. And somehow these ideas, or at least working from these ideas, from this book, seem to start making sense. And no, it’s not the only book that gave me ideas to work from, but somehow it was the starting point.

So yes, I was very down yesterday. But imagine, yesterday, not the whole two weeks I was alone, where before I was much more affected with these type of things. And also, the idea of definite purpose and not changing decisions (too easily) makes life much easier, including stating dates and stuff and what I am willing to give. As e.g. I now don’t have to think so much anymore when people are asking me things like what I want and why I want it. As it’s just all written down in my desire document and everything that happens to me just gets its place in the ideas that written down there. And I really mean everything that happens to me, positive or negative. As the negatives I just turn into positives, into opportunities. That is my mindset now.

And somehow it is starting to pay off, as today I had some discussions about business, really large business, business in the sense of the things Napoleon Hill writes about in Think and Grow Rich. And somehow these things came to me, I did not really search for it or did effort for it. So indeed there seems to be something like Infinite Intelligence or Law of Attraction that goes beyond what we can see. But the main thing I felt today was more self confidence, like just stating what I want, without excuses or anything, even if it is unreasonable. And apparently just the way I talk about things, just the way how I want things, just stating what I want to happen seems to make an enormous impression on other people. And again, I’m not forcing it, it just comes natural, it’s just the result of the process I’ve been in for the last few years.

So no, I definitely don’t feel successful yet. But something did change, and it is changing big. And yes, of course I am also still scared, but different.

Thank you Lord!