Happiness & Prosperity – It’s No Secret

Today I'm starting a new series. I was going to write a book and had about 20 pages or so. I'll post them here a little at a time while I turn to YouTube to complete what I wanted to say. You can see the first video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjW4ZFUf7VY&

Happiness & Prosperity – It’s No Secret

Jim Luciano

Introduction

Happiness and Prosperity go great together. There are “Happiness and Prosperity” authors selling thousands of books, tapes, cd’s and dvd’s as well as many speakers who offer expensive seminars. They’re happy and prosperous!  But what about you? 

You’re inspired. You read their books, listen to their tapes, and attend their seminars. You’re filled with hope and can’t wait to be happy and prosperous. But as time passes the lesson seems to fade, so you try another book, a new guru, or the latest pop-psychology. The goals are real and achievable; the universe is truly wondrous and mysterious, so why does happiness remain elusive?  The books and teachers tell us; follow the steps and you will have it all.  However problems can begin when you try to do what they tell you. They often tell you to do things you don’t know how to do. Sometimes what they’re saying doesn’t even make sense. Where is the gap? Are they speaking nonsense? Are you unable to understand? Do other people have the same problem? Can you find real step-by-step instructions that you can understand so you can find the inspiration, wonder, happiness and confidence you were born with?

For the lessons to work you must experience them. A few people are fortunate to experience the results just by reading about them. This works best for people who have had similar experiences. For most of us reading about an experience is not enough. I can talk all day, show you pictures and movies of my flight on a Hang-glider, running off a mountain top in Rio De Janeiro, but you will never really understand the experience until you fly off a mountain. If you are a sky diver, you will connect with my story on a different level. The true benefits these authors and speakers offer you are actually beyond the ability of words to describe. This idea of experience is an area where you will find a difference between this book and others like "The Secret". If I sat down with you and relived my flight over Rio, if I became very emotional and described everything in a wonderful glowing story, you might be inspired, you could become excited and enjoy my telling of a great experience. But where would that leave you next month when you're at work, dealing with the problems of the day. Books like "The Secret" are similar. They tell us real stories, which can build up excitement, but for most of us the excitement fades. Why? You didn’t get to have the same experience the storytellers had. There were no instructions that led to having the experience, they only told you about it.

Even though these authors have familiarity with all the wonders they offer, they really don’t understand it well enough to tell you how to have the same experience.  For example, if you’re unhappy, Wayne Dyer’s new book suggests you bring happiness to all that you do.  How the heck do you do that? This may be easy for him. He has years of research and thinking. He is the author of numerous best sellers such as “Your Erroneous Zones”, “Pulling Your Own Strings”, and “Real Magic”. Living in his beach house in Maui he worked for more than a year walking on the beach and contemplating ideas such as bringing happiness to all that you do.  It might not be as easy to do in your life. For instance, imagine you’re on the freeway and the boss is screaming on the other end of your cell phone “where is my report, you’re late?”. Meanwhile the guy behind you is beeping his horn and waving his finger in an obscene way; and then the guy in front of you cuts you off and you miss your exit. Wayne says just “Bring it”. Yeah sure, bring happiness to that puppy!

Is it possible you don’t know how to bring happiness to whatever you’re doing, especially when you’re unhappy?  I respect Dyer, Chopra, and the many contributors to the best selling book, The Secret, for their passion and efforts to contribute to our lives. Each has unique ideas of the way to a better life. When you hear them speak or read one of their books, you’re filled with hope. Yet days or weeks later the lessons have faded into the background. You work, take care of family, struggle to get things done and make ends meet. It seems that everything demands your attention and you struggle just to keep up. Before long, life resumes its tedious pace. The promise of manifesting a few million dollars, having great relationships, and happiness is gone. What happened? You might begin to wonder “Did I work at it long enough?”  “Did I try hard enough?” or “Maybe I need to read it again?” “Is it just me? I hear so many stories about success with this book” Think about it. How many of the readers of the 7 million copies of The Secret manifested millions and a happy life? Where are all these new millionaires? And did they follow the instructions for happiness?

What is happiness? Perhaps another problem with “bringing happiness to all that you do” is not recognizing happiness when it’s right in front of you. For example, my wife was afraid of heights so the thought of stepping off a treetop and careening down a mountain on a zip line was not her idea of happy.  Now it’s one of her happiest memories.  What if the geek, scientist, tree hugger, or neighbor you can’t stand has the potential to be the most important person in your life (no, no, not her/him!) At a dinner party, I helped congratulate a stranger on her divorce and toasted her vow never to marry again. Three months later we were engaged and we’ve been living a life of unbelievable happiness. We each saw the opportunity for happiness and grabbed onto it.  When your next opportunity for happiness shows up, will YOU recognize it?

Sometimes the solution to a problem is so close it’s difficult to see. You can work and struggle to accomplish a goal, and fail because of a simple step overlooked at the beginning. How does some seemingly obvious step trip you up? How do some people seemingly find opportunities at every moment they need them? Did you realize you could be blinded by what you already know? Things you know are skipped when you learn something new.  You take some things for granted and never look back. This is where our search for happiness has failed us.  Something that we all learned, keeps us from seeing the opportunities that are showing up everyday. We miss opportunities and life seems to pass us by. Don’t let it happen to you! Happiness and prosperity shouldn’t be a secret. There are real-life practical steps you can follow to take control of your life and opportunities.  I will show you how to get back to the beginning and see what is missing. I will give you the roadmap to happiness and prosperity. 

Amazing Bytes in our iPods, Mp3's, computers and more.

How many gigs (GB) in your iPhone? Hard Drive? MP3 player, Video card? We don't talk much about bits and bytes anymore. All our gadgets and great stuff appear to work with a kind of magic or mystical NERD stuff. It seems way too complex to worry about unless you're an engineer or worse yet an actual NERD!!

While our high tech IS complicated, a few simple ideas can take away some of the mystery (and for some, a hidden fear of all the gadgets).

First, computers are not smart. In fact they're really dumb. About the only thing they can do is see whether the electric is on or off. It's like the light switch on the wall, you turn it on or off and that's it. That's the extent of "computer intelligence" What makes our gadgets look smart, are the clever ways engineers and scientists figured out how to use this "is it off?, or is it on?" binary way of thinking. You could say that OFF is nothing or zero (0), and ON is one (1). This on/off switch is called a "bit" of information. Taking this a little further, people put together 8 of these bits or switches and started the thing called "bytes".

The thinking went like this; "Well if we took 7 switches (later 8) that can be OFF or ON, we could assign a different meaning to each of the combination's of off and on" (see ASCII). So for example, if we turned on only the first and the last of 8 switches, and put the middle six off, we could agree to say that means the letter "A". With 8 switches you could have 256 different combination's, enough for all the letters, numbers, and other useful characters. That was a big help in getting us started making computers useful for more than just crunching numbers.

OK that's kind of interesting, but what happens if you turn the computer off? If we're talking about light switches, when you turn off the electric all the switches will loose their off/on information. So where's my "A", last tweet, email or sms? Well in some ways, they do go away. These electric switches (Logic gates) really do exist in most devices and they're the part we call RAM chips. All the memory in RAM gets lost when there's no juice.

Not wanting to loose all that precious information like our "A", we need something else. Several types of neat gadgets were developed to hold onto your tweets even when the lights go out. We need a way to remember which switches were off or on, when you turn the computer on again. One of the earliest ideas was to make little groups of 8 magnetic spots on a metal disk. These groups use the same "ASCII, byte" idea as RAM. If spot one is magnetized, the next 6 are not magnetized, and the last is, then... Wow, there's an "A". We saved your "A" on the thing we call a hard disk! Whenever you save something on your computer it magnetizes lots of little spots on a spinning metal disk called a hard drive. Whenever you want to retrieve that really important "shout out" to your BFF, the computer will read which spots are magnetized or not, turn on the matching switches and presto - your "A" is back. Floppy disks work with magnetism in the same way.


There are some other ways to save your "A". Since all our digital devices use the same "Byte" idea, it's always a case of figuring out how to hold on to a bunch of 0's  and 1's. CD's and DVD's for example, have shiny surfaces that reflect light. If you would burn a tiny spot with a strong laser beam it wouldn't be as shiny and couldn't reflect light very well. So the zero and one are back! Shine a light (laser) on a spot and if it reflects... Yeah! a ONE! no reflection? You're a ZERO!
Putting it together, The electric switch, magnetic spot or burn on a CD are "Bits" and represent zero and one. Hmm, So that's why we say "Burn a CD"? 8 bits together in any form and you've got a "Byte". What does that mean? Think about your 16GB iPod... Do you know how many little switches it has? The G = "Giga" , means billion, the B = "Byte", means 8 switches or spots. So your little gadget actually has 16Gigs x 8 bits, or 128 Billion little switches inside!
The next time you start typing "YO!" You've just turned 24 switches off and on like this:
    Y                O                !

101 1001 -  100 1111  - 010 0001
Now next time, believe it or not, it's those same dumb zeros and ones, used in really smart ways, that give us digital pictures and our uTube videos, but that's a story for another time.

Al Gore - CNN reports

Someday the USA will wake-up and realize how badly the country has been brain washed by poor reporting and entertainment taking over the news. CNN today reported the Nobel Peace Prize and compared Al Gore with the "Nutty Professor". Reporting on the event, they gave more time to a critic of global warming than they did to Gore's comments.

If the world were divided I might understand this type of reporting. The US (the biggest polluter) is the ONLY developed country that has not signed on to the world treaty to help end global warming. As of November 2007, 174 countries, including China, have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

CNN reported that most "Europeans" treat global warming as a fact whereas in the US less than half of the population thinks global warming is a threat. Did you ever think that these reports are the REASON people are unaware of the danger? Europeans are serious about their beliefs and are well on the way to producing their energy from non-polluting, renewable resources. Within just three years the entire EU will be producing 20% of their electric from renewables! Even if the whole rest of the world were wrong, most of the rest of the world IS reducing their oil imports and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs building and selling the renewable energy technologies.

Just to make sure the "Nutty Professor" wasn't taken seriously CNN added reports about Gore making a lot of money from his movie and that the Nobel Peace Prize really didn't count anyway since it's all "political" and "people" in Washington are aware the Nobel people just don't like Bush and wanted to make him look bad by giving this award to Gore. Give me a break!

US energy policy?

While the rest of the civilized world is working on their future energy requirements, including clean, renewable, and locally produced energy that creates new jobs, where is the USA's energy policy. Do we even have one?

Actually we do. Early in his first term, our Vice President Cheney sat down with executives from the oil and power industries to discuss our energy policy. He won't reveal what was discussed, leaving us to guess. Judging by $90 - $100 a barrel oil, my guess is that windmills, solar, and other renewable's were not a big part of the discussion.

Listening to the democratic debate(?) I wasn't impressed with anything I heard about energy policy. Mandating better gas mileage is really not the answer. Coincidently I just heard another report on TV showing a Spanish system that uses mirrors to focus the heat on one area, creating steam to power generators. It will soon power a city of 700,000 people. In the report they mentioned that if a huge system of this type were to cover ONE percent of the Sahara desert, it could produce enough electricity for the entire world!

Given the wave, solar and wind technologies already existing, and the spirit and ingenuity of the american people we should easily be able to eliminate nuclear, coal and oil for electricity, heating and cooling. We just need leadership to clear the way and let us get started.

Windmills, waves and solar

On our recent trip, I enjoyed the windmills in Spain, but I didn't see the "wave power" when we were in Portugal. A Scottish company is deploying sausage-shaped tubes off Portugal to create the world's first commercial wave power plant providing electricity to 1,500 homes. They expect to expand this to a 20 Megawatt system before long. As you watch the video think about the jobs that have been created in Scotland. Do you have any idea how much these workers earn??

The European Union is going full steam ahead on their commitment to convert to renewable energy. The European Union requires 22 percent of electricity consumption to come from renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and wave by 2010. You've probably seen lots of stories on your local news or "Fox & friends" keeping you informed on these and other stories that WILL have an effect on your life and your grand children's. Yeah right!! We all hear about Brittney's latest adventures, Prince Harry's girlfriend, and the latest reason why we should be frightened of terrorists, but with few exceptions (a few like Lou Dobbs), no one is letting you know the important news that really affects your life.

Even if global warming doesn't exist as Fox tells us, how will the countries working on these energy solutions fare in the future? Will we manufacture any of the many new energy technologies or will we be serving them hamburgers?

And by the way, is the rest of the world paying $100 a barrel for oil? Not really. See my next post.

Ferrari theme park-Entertainment for the whole family!

Can't wait for this park to open!

"The development will provide entertainment for the whole family ... to allow visitors to learn the story and history of Ferrari, to participate in Ferrari motoring activities, and to experience the Ferrari brand also through virtual simulations. Another important feature ... an advanced and sophisticated circuit where tests and driving courses will be organized, as well as races. The concept will also include hotels, retail, residential and hospitality elements embracing the design ethics of the Ferrari brand."

Should be open in 2008. Just pack up your family and travel to Abu Dhabi! No idea what it might cost but since we have such a strong economy I'm sure the average American with one or two Ferrari's in the garage will want to see the latest Ferrari has to offer. Buying a huge chunk of Ferrari probably helped Dubai put this deal together.

Our economy really is doing great don't you think? Now that we have sent most of our manufacturing overseas we can really reap the rewards of cheap products. The stock market has done really well. Yep, our companies now produce and sell their stuff all over the world. Before long we probably won't even have to worry about stocks going down because Americans aren't buying enough! As more and more Americans can't afford to buy all their stuff, our companies can sell it to the people who now have the American jobs!! Yea!! Our economy is safe!! Thank goodness for FREE TRADE, thank goodness we invested 100's of billions in the BRIC countries.

Energy? Easily solved !

If there were some way to get the politicians out of the way and have a leader that simply pointed the way, we could easily take care of all our energy needs, and probably cause Oil to drop to a fraction of it's current (almost) $100.

As mentioned in my previous blog, windmills are so much more efficient than nuclear power and other countries are installing them by the hundreds. Today I saw a report on ocean wave and tidal power systems that are already operating. These technologies are already proven. We also have solar power. Yes, it's more expensive right now, but what are the chances the prices would come down if we were to start a massive increase in production?

There are surely many other designs and ideas that Americans are working on. What's lacking? What would happen if we had a leader who did a "Kennedy like" declaration (going to the moon), that we are going to produce 30% of our energy needs from these and other sources within the next ten years? 75% in 20 years?

You don't need to know all the details. You set the direction, give support, and fix the problems as you go. I have no doubt in the ability of Americans to do it. The real problem lies in the big money interests that prefer the status quo. While investments in these technologies will pay off big time, the need for the constant 10% - 15% or more increase in quarterly profits keeps them from taking the longer investment view.

If startups begin to make real progress, then the money will jump in and buy them up. BUT that's the long road. And, like the windmills, if we wait too long, the progress will continue to happen OUTSIDE the US. We'll wind up buying the technology and equipment from the BRIC countries. (BRIC = Brazil, Russia, India, China)

I already speak Brazilian Portuguese, should I start learning Chinese OR can we elect a congress and president that can help keep the US a great nation?