2009: Danger or Opportunity

2009: Danger or Opportunity?


I must confess that for me, 2008 went very fast. Almost like a blink of an eye. I bet that is true for you too. Well, the older you are, the faster it goes. I certainly don’t consider myself old but I must admit that every year the previous year goes faster.
A friend of mine showed me something he created on a piece of paper. It was actually a napkin and it had a bunch of squares. He said each square represented one year in a person’s life. There were 76 squares drawn on that piece of paper because 76 years is the lifetime of a person living in the United States as well as in Puerto Rico, I think.
The squares with an “x” in them represented the years he had already lived. The squares without an “x” represented the years he had remaining if he lived the average lifetime.
What that piece of paper did for him, he said, was give him a graphic and somewhat depressing view of the exact spot he is in life.
Don’t despair my dear reader. Lots of people make it to their eighties, nineties and even hundreds. I heard an statistic that there are over 200,000 people over a hundred years old in the world. Maybe even more. There are also 89 people over 110 en the world, 79 women and 10 men. You can see who has the advantage. A dear friend and fellow Rotarian, Chuck Hitt is still playing tennis and he is in his late eighties. He is to me, an inspiration and I am honored with his friendship and the opportunity to play with him sometimes. Yes, if we really think about it, being old has a lot to do with your own mind-your attitude-your paradigm-your interpretation of reality.
In 1980 I attended the New York Marathon and there was a runner with a number pasted on his back. So, I correctly assumed he was going to run the marathon. He certainly did run it and finished it too. There were 14,000 runners and he came in around 4,900. So he in effect beat over 9,000 runners many in their twenties, thirties, forties and so on. He was 83. The fellow who came in 11th was 47 years old.
Yet on the other side of the coin, we should always remember that the future is promised to no one.
We live in strange times. Life gets more perilous every day. The crime rate in PR is the highest it has been in the last 30 years.
What to do? Well, I know of one thing that we shouldn’t do. We can’t give the whole responsibility to the police department or the government. We have to take action as citizens and assume responsibility because we are members of society.
Yes, I have thought about this and I do have many ideas to impact crime in society. I know many of you do also. But that is not the theme of this article.
The point of this article is that nobody really knows how many years they have left. The truth is none of us have very long from the day we are born. Life is short at best and it can end for any of us in a New York second. So, I have a very important question for you:
How many more X’s are you going to accumulate in your life until you decide to start pursuing your dreams? Your dreams are definitely different than mine and they are different than your friends or loved ones. But even though our dreams may be different, there is one element universally common to everybody’s dreams and that one element is:
The search for happiness.
So, what makes you happy. What makes you really, really, happy?
Now go to your planner or agenda and open it up. (If you don’t have one, minus 10 points) Look at activities you have planned for today, for tomorrow, for next week, even for next month. Are those activities going to lead you to achieve that which makes you happy?
You might say, “Well, no, in reality the activities I have planned are not leading me to that which I want in life, but SOMEDAY I will reach my goals.”
Do you know what “SOMEDAY” really means? It means NEVER. That is right. It means it will never happen.
It took me years to write my first book, How to Survive Among Piranhas. I kept putting it off because some day I was going to do it. It wasn’t until I really decided to get it done that I planned it on my daily planner. I made it a weekly obligation, day by day.
One day, after a speech I did, when I went to my car I found my car vandalized and my planner gone. It was quite a shock. That was December 12, 1998. I offered a $500.00 reward to anyone that would return my planner. It had really no value for anyone with the exception of some pictures I had with Los Angeles Lakers players and other athletes and personalities. It had lots of value to me because two years of writing my book were in that planner and I had no duplicates.
I stopped writing and said to myself that SOMEDAY I would write the book again. Well, two years later I hadn’t even started to write the book again. Remember, SOMEDAY means NEVER.
I started writing again when I met a Japanese teenager who had no feet and no hands and he had already written a book and graduated from college. I felt like a mouse. That jolted me out of my lethargy and I wrote the book. It was published in 2003, finally I then wrote Don’t Eat the Marshmallow Yet which became an international best seller with sales of over 2 million copies and just recently Don’t Gobble the Marshmallow Ever. Let’s see how that one does in 2009.
So, the real lesson.
For you to get anything you want in life, you must make a commitment. You must decide to do it. You must plan for it, decide on how you are going to get it and if you are willing to pay the price in sweat, in blood or in tears. Then you have to put your plan into action. In other words, DO IT. Last but not least, you have to persist until you get it. As Winston Churchill once said: Never, never, never, never give up.
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