One morning, the son awoke to find his horse had run away. Running to his father, he informed him of this tragedy, saying this was the worst thing that could have happened. His father, in all his wisdom, replied, “Is that so? How do you know what it means?”

The next day, as the boy was working in the barn, he heard the sound of horses galloping in the distance. When he looked up he saw his horse leading a herd of wild ponies to him. Seeing this, he ran to the house shouting, “The horse has come back leading a herd. This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened!” In all his wisdom, the old man replied once again: “Is that so? How do you know what it means?”

That afternoon, the boy decided to tame one of the ponies. As he proudly sat atop the new-found gift, the horse bucked, throwing the boy to the ground causing a broken collarbone and a fractured arm. As he was placed in his bed by his father, he said, “All those horses coming – that’s the worst thing that could have happened.” Once again, the old man spoke: “Is that so? How do you know what it means?”

The next day, father and son were abruptly awakened by the sound of militia knocking on their door. They were here to take the boy to fight in the civil war. The old man said, “There he is, take him.” The captain took one look and said, “He’s useless to us,” and left. The boy said, “This is the best luck I’ve ever had.” And the old man, in his wisdom replied, “Is that so? How do you know what it means?”

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

~Rudyard Kipling

For nearly ten years, I’ve been working to educate people on the importance and impact of their environment on not only their success but on their health.  Even before the Human Genome Project, Americans were all too happy to pin the tail on some other donkey.

“My parents were obese – it’s in my family genes.  It’s not my fault.”

“Well, it’s not like my family was ever good in school.  We’re built for sports.”

“Well, it’s not like my family was ever good at sports.  We’re built for science.”

“Farming is in my blood.”

And on and on and on.

Dolly Parton who, regardless of whether or not you like country music, is an amazing singer and musician, was on Larry King a few months ago.  When Larry asked “Do you think musical talent is hereditary?”, Dolly who was and is usually light and airy, became very serious when she answered “Oh yes, I think it is.  My family was always singing and playing music.”

Well that doesn’t make it hereditary or genetic.  That’s still the environment teaching and those who are rewarded with praise (false or earned) will develop a passion for what they and others around them are doing – monkey see, monkey do.  If you’ve seen Simon Cowell and American Idol, then you know that some genetically ‘un-gifted’ people believe they can sing despite the contrary, obnoxious evidence.

Now, this is all harmless fun.  It doesn’t matter what you believe about musical talent and how it is obtained.  But when it comes to health, Americans tend to believe the same way.  And who could blame them – it is after all shoved down our throats by the AMA.  They used to tell us – “We need to know about your family history – this is the greatest predictor of disease as diseases tend to be genetic.”

Then, here comes the Human Genome Project to save us.  When it was announced 10 years ago, it was seen as the savior to all our ills.  It would, after all, be expected to map out all of our genetic makeup (markers) and combined with data on diseases, illuminate us all as to which markers ‘created’ which diseases.

But as the New York Times pointed out yesterday – A Decade Later, Genetic Map Yields Few New Cures – it has failed to show anything conclusive after spending $3 Billion.  Three Ba Ba Ba Billion.

For biologists, the genome has yielded one insightful surprise after another. But the primary goal of the $3 billion Human Genome Project — to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and then generate treatments — remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.

One sign of the genome’s limited use for medicine so far was a recent test of genetic predictions for heart disease. A medical team led by Nina P. Paynter of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston collected 101 genetic variants that had been statistically linked to heart disease in various genome-scanning studies. But the variants turned out to have no value in forecasting disease among 19,000 women who had been followed for 12 years.

The old-fashioned method of taking a family history was a better guide, Dr. Paynter reported this February in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

So, I just want to say it once again maybe this time a little LOUDER.

YOUR ENVIRONMENT IS KILLING YOU

The AMA wants you to believe that they hold the key, the golden chalice to all things medical.  Yet, after $3 Billion, they have not been able to prove their conclusions.

Here’s a thought and, hey, I’ll offer it up for free to save the taxpayers $3 Ba Ba Ba Billion.  You SHOULD check your family history, but not because of the chance future disease is genetic, but BECAUSE you share the same environment.  You eat the same food, you sleep in the same house with all of the same carcinogens entrapped by caulking and sealing yourself in (to save energy), you brush your teeth with the same chemicals, you walk on the same chemically-induced lawn and you breathe the same polluted air.

When there is a salmonella outbreak, let me ask you this, do medical ‘professionals’ run around checking family history or do they run around trying to find everyone who ate the same thing?  They try to find everyone who ate the same thing – go figure.

Four years ago when we sold our house and moved away from the midwest and venture south, we learned something disturbing.  For the entire 8 years of living in our cush house in a cush golf-course community we just happened to be trapping too much Radon in our home.  So much so that we had to install a special basement to roof vent/blower system to make the house safe for the new owners.  THE NEW OWNER’S???  Not to sound insensitive, I care about the new owners, but what about US?

Here are some tasty facts about Radon:

• It is a radioactive, colorless, odorless, tasteless noble gas, occurring naturally as the decay product of radium. It is one of the densest substances that remains a gas under normal conditions and is considered to be a health hazard due to its radioactivity.  NICE
• According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, radon is the second most frequent cause of lung cancer, after cigarette smoking.  NICE

Wow.  Now if I were to develop lung cancer one day, some idiot from the AMA might well conclude that it was because of all of the smoking I was exposed to as a kid as my parents were pretty heavy smokers and that I was genetically prone to lung cancer.  And then if my kids get it, well, simple – it’s genetic, runs in the family.

Then again Waldos, it might just be that no matter my genetic markers, Radon is bad.  And it might just be that my environment as a kid and as an adult living for 8 years in a Radon trap had a little something to say about my future health.

So we moved to change our environment to a more satisfying, more productive place for us.  We didn’t feel healthy emotionally or physically where we were.  So we moved.  We had control over our environment and we took the reigns to make things better.

I encourage you to do the same.  Take the reigns back in your life and stop looking for the genetic scapegoat that ‘proves’ things are beyond your control.

OR – you can listen to the AMA and your physicians if you feel compelled to with the logic that their training, their profession’s commitment to continued studies/trials/education and societal pressures all dictate that we don’t question authorities/professionals.

Go ahead, it’s your life.

For me and my family, hell, I’m going to use my eyes and react to tangible data.  A clinical trial of 982 sample patients means Donkey Kong to me.  If clinical trials were reliable and pharmaceutical companies were not selling us a load of manure to make profits and please shareholders, we’d still be buying Vioxx.

Here’s the problem with the cocky, American economy as I explained some time ago in Economic Cannibalism – we are so proud of our role as the world’s leading economy of consumption that we don’t even realize that we are eating ourselves to death.

And we are suckers for urgency and chaos.  So what do snake oil pitchmen do?  Never mind importance, they only need focus the gullible masses on urgency.  How about a few examples:

• “Sunday, SUNday, SUNDAY!” – great for selling monster rally tix
• “Yours now for only 3 LOW monthly payments!” – most as seen on tv ads
• “But that’s not all folks, order within the next 10 minutes and we’ll DOUBLE your offer!” – most as seen on tv ads
• “Billy Mays here…” – enough said
• “Don’t wait, ask your doctor about Cialis” – gotta love pharmaceuticals skipping the middleman here – MDs study for 7+ years, consumers on average, 7 minutes, nice

And do we really “need” another set of knives?  Yeah, the can-cutting thing is cool and I’m sure the tomato drop/perfect split took some skill/practice, but really – have you seen most people’s over-crowded knife drawers?

The point is – if you have overstuffed drawers, can’t get your car(s) in your garage, have a loaded attic (or storage unit) and generally find yourself struggling with clutter – well, you have been duped, sucked right in.  You see, we should be following our passions which should be only a few things, I mean, who has time for more??

But, when we are sucked in, we consume/buy until we have trouble storing everything that somebody else told us we ‘needed’.  And these people convince us to place a high urgency on something that is of little importance to our life or survival.  So, don’t be a sucker.  Put a stop to the madness.

a) don’t follow priorities that are urgent but not important and
b) don’t ignore priorities that are important to the point that they become urgent.

If you do, you’re just chasing your tail and your focus will always be survival.  If you break free and pursue ‘real’ priorities – well, welcome to significance and your Ideal Life and you will be surprised at how much time you will have for leisure – who hates that?

I am challenging you to think otherwise.

Remembering that most every priority that is both urgent AND important was once only important.  It only became urgent to do because it was ignored or missed altogether.  That’s right, procrastination, disorganization or just plain blindness results in ultra-urgent and ultra-important tasking.  So, are we to believe that this is the way we should be striving to organize our lives – by ignoring ‘priorities’ then rushing around when they become urgent?

Uh, no thanks.  Because when we chase urgent tasks, we are missing the tasks that ARE really important.  How do I know?  Because if a task was once so important but not urgent, why didn’t you spend time on it??  Let’s be real – it wasn’t all that important as we once thought it was.

Don’t get me wrong – we all have events that happen in our life in which are important but we have little control (say, a recession maybe), but we’re talking about those areas of life where we have control in our jobs, in our relationships, in our finances and around the house.

So it is in our best interests to remove the blinders (which could be general clutter, high-maintenance people and other typical distractions) and increase our ability to manage and execute tasks while they are only important and NOT urgent.

How?  By taking a few minutes each day, week or month (depending on the systems you have in place to manage priorities) and prioritizing tasks before you launch into them.  You may argue that you typically like to jump in rather than waste time staring at lists, but again, I challenge that a 10-minute planning/review session will save you hours per week staying out of crises, stewing over urgent tasks and just plain ole wasted efforts.  Try it.  Prove this exercise to be right or wrong and drop your comments below.

And it doesn’t matter your personality type.  Even if you are naturally a flexible personality as opposed to a more rigid/scheduled personality, planning to some degree is not only necessary but a means to protect your desire for flexibility.  Let’s face it – when you are moving in a tornado of constant crisis (like working on urgent tasks), how much flexibility do you really have?  So, planning, while it doesn’t have to have color, laminated charts is important for everyone who wants to Build Their Ideal Lives.  Otherwise, you might find you’re too busy only helping somebody else Build Their Ideal Life in a win-lose exchange.  Boo win-lose.

In an upcoming post, I will touch on the only thing worse than important and urgent tasks – non important, urgent tasks.  Come on, you’ve had ‘em – life suckers – they vacuum years of our lives under the guise of good intentions – think PT Barnum.

“From the space program, we learn that tremendous power is needed to clear the pull of Earth’s gravity. So it is with breaking old habits. Breaking deeply embedded habits such as procrastinating, criticizing, overeating, or laziness involves more than a little wishing and willpower. Often our own resolve is not enough. We need reinforcing relationships-people and programs that hold us accountable and responsible.” ~ Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

This is why I enjoy Life Coaching so much – because sometimes all it takes is a little boost to help people achieve something that they’ve wanted for so long, but while close, were unable to reach.  For most people, habits hold them back like gravity but with just a few tweaks, habits can become rocket boosters.  So if you are stuck and in a rut, check out LifeMAPP and explore coaching with me.  You’d be surprised how cost effective and easy it is!

Here’s a quick story.  A middle-aged man, fresh from drowning his troubles gets behind the wheel of his SUV.  There were warning signs that those around him missed.  His wife who considered his drinking a bothersome, but untouchable vice.  The bartender who served this man drinks night after night knowing that he left the bar impaired but after so many nights, apparently not bad enough to cause any trouble.  The liquor store clerk who week after week watched as this already inebriated man comes in for his home stash just before entering the lion’s den.

But one night, something changed.  That bus of kids coming home from camp late at night was not usually there.  In fact, there was NEVER anybody at this annoying red-flashing light.  So he does what he normally does – blows through it.  But on this fatal night, he doesn’t make it.

The drunk driver’s t-bone was enough to kill 3 kids on impact, but the worst of the accident was when his SUV drove the bus into oncoming traffic in which a semi-truck cut straight down the middle of the school bus leaving all but 1 dead.  The lone survivor was the drunk driver whose SUV was peeled off the bus by the semi-truck and sent into a wild spin in which the SUV landed safely in a ditch.  That driver, in fact, would climb out of his SUV unscathed and disoriented by the spin, having no idea what even happened as he could not make sense of the wreckage and smoke 300 yards away.  There are no screams left to hear.  All he sees is the badly damaged front-end of his SUV buried in a ditch.  So he starts walking the last 1/2 mile home alone in his continued troubles.

In his wake, 24 kids, a retired bus driver and a semi-truck driving father of 3 all lost their lives because there was never enough alcohol to drown one man’s troubles.  And when the police trace the vehicle later that night and show up to arrest him, his wife has disbelief, but not surprise in her pained eyes.  When this drunk is awakened, the first thing the officer in charge does is READ HIM HIS RIGHTS.

You see John McCain, whether born here or naturalized, a citizen of the United States has unalienable rights.  And while it’s tempting to play to national fears about terrorism, you continue, as George W. Bush did, to walk along the slippery slope.

Government must NOT overstep our unalienable rights – good, bad or indifferent.  And I quote from Thomas Jefferson – ‘A government big enough to supply you with everything you need, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.’

You see, fear and terrorism tactics have worked in this country since perfected during the cold-war with Russia in which traveling salesmen did their best to put unnecessary bomb shelters in the back yards of Main Street USA.  And they justified their parasitic income and lives as a national duty.  In fact, more people will die EACH YEAR because of tobacco sales, car sales, alcohol sales, firearms sales and, let us not forget, medical malpractice and pharmaceuticals than would ever die in a crowded New York City car bomb attack.  But you and your lobbyist bedfellows will work tirelessly to promote your agenda and work to market and teach and manipulate Americans to believe that these all too common domestic/corporate deaths are part of life, while the rare terrorist deaths are outrageous and require reshaping our Constitution.  You are wrong.

And the worst part?  Is that every election cycle, you come begging to our doors, our televisions and our emails for more money to keep selling us this fear.  The fear we should have is of people like you who pander to the lowest common denominator in us all in hopes to maintain your lifestyle and the fear of people – like you – who prey on our collectively short memories.

Well, I don’t forget my history, not the history of this great nation, and certainly not the history of man in which there always has been and always will be strife, poverty and pain.  Nor will I forget those that will ignore the real threats and propagate the false.  For those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.

So go on, you non-Maverick you, tuck your tail between your legs and after you lose your upcoming election, go bunk up with W. and start touring the country with hate and fear-riddled speeches.  The rest of us are moving on – moving on to fight terrorism where needed, moving on to get our economy back on track and moving on to trying to protect ourselves from the enemies from within who surround us in the form of politicians, Wall Street executives, the hospital/insurance/pharmaceutical triad and lets not forget those OTHER lowly, cowards who ALSO take from unsuspecting families, parents and spouses what is not theirs to take – drunken drivers.

This low-life group, along with domestic, nationalized terrorists should be read their Miranda Rights.  Then, after a public trial by their peers, if found guilty, they should all be brought to a very public execution in which we place the fear where it should be.  The fear that any greedy, ignorant bastard who puts himself above the law or above society will pay the consequences of justice as created and guaranteed under our Constitution.

Block Out The Noise: And Take Back Your Life will be done soon.  This book focuses on showing you how to recognize and eliminate the subliminal noise that bombards us daily and controls our lives.  It is especially appropriate in this recession.

I am also working on (though a little slower) on turning our seminar series from a few years ago into a follow-up book in the series, Block Out The Noise: Building Your Ideal Life.  We’ve had such great feedback throughout the years that we’re really anxious to see it in written form.

Time for some kid-time with a trip to the park or maybe the fair, but then back to writing for me.

Let’s see if we can change that.  Hard to remember that, at one point, this lil blog had 30,000 reads a month at one time and my content was being picked up and re-blogged by users all over the world.

Our “Building Your Ideal Life” slideshow once had 20,000 viewers and was one of the top viewed slides at Slideshare.

But then came facebook and LinkedIn and of course, kids, family, businesses and a trip around the sun.  Lots of growth, lots of learning, lots of posting, but very little blogging.

So I don’t know if we’ll see 30,000 again but I’m going to take the first step and kick the dust off.  I am working on my first book in a series for Block Out The Noise so I will be talking about that a lot and my thoughts may be incoherent as I get back into Freud, Maslow, Skinner, et al.

Let’s see how it goes.

Which reminds me, only 10 weeks left to save on Disney annual resident passes which are being extended to 15 month passes.  Our car tax savings will pay for half the cost of Disney for our family for over a year.

A win-win as we inject that money directly back into the economy (the intention of the stimulus) and our family gets much needed time together at discounted prices at a place we really enjoy.