How do you think 2022 is going to go?
I’ll give you a clue.
It will go however YOU decide it will go!
There is so much we cannot control…
Yet, the most important item you DO have direct influence over is your attitude.
For me, 2021 was packed full of heartache and worry.
Yet, my life was also transformed in extraordinarily positive ways as well.
So, was this a good year or a bad year for me?
The answer is, “It was neither.”
Good and bad are subjective terms that are determined by your attitude.
What is an attitude?
According to the dictionary, attitude is “a settled way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, typically one that is reflected in a person’s behavior.”
It’s the way you choose to view and interpret the situations you experience.
This will be my 34rd year of studying human behavior.
Wow, does time flies!
I’ve noticed that even though you DO have a choice in what kind of attitude you have…
…in reality, your attitude is more heavily influenced by your past experiences, and the unconscious beliefs that formed as a result of those situations.
I’m creating a free course that will provide a clear understanding of how your mind works, and it will answer questions like…
– What are beliefs?
– What are self-sabotaging beliefs?
– Where did they come from?
– How do you know if you have them?
– What is an unconscious mind?
– What do I mean by “upgrading” your unconscious mind?
– What is Hypnosis?
– What’s a trance?
– Can it help me change the way I’ve been thinking, feeling, or behaving?
This course should be completed by the end of next week, and I’ll send you the link when it’s done.
Two weeks ago, I was helping my son with a homework assignment.
He was writing a paper based on a speech given to a group of Barratt Junior High students in Philadelphia on Oct 26, 1967 by the legendary Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The topic was, “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?”
I read through the transcript and was touched by how profound the message was, and how relevant it still is today.
Instead of paraphrasing the speech, I’ve pasted the transcript below. The audio recording is also attached, if you wish to have the full impact!
Enjoy this bit of wisdom as we close out 2020 and prepare to enter 2021 with an updated Blueprint For Life.
Happy New Year!!
🙂 Tim
“I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is in your life’s blueprint?
This is a most important and crucial period of your lives for what you do now and what you decide now at this age may well determine which way your life shall go.
Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, as the model for those who are to build the building, and a building is not well erected without a good, sound and solid blueprint.
Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid and a sound blueprint. I want to suggest some of the things that should be in your life’s blueprint.
Number one in your life’s blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth and your own somebodiness.
Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody.
Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance…
Secondly, in your life’s blueprint you must have as a basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor.
You’re going to be deciding as the days and the years unfold what you will do in life, what your life’s work will be. And once you discover what it will be, set out to do it, and to do it well.
And I say to you, my young friends, that doors are opening to each of you, doors of opportunity to each of you that were not open to your mothers and your fathers and the great challenge facing you is to be ready to enter these doors as they open.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said, in a lecture back in 1871, that “If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”
That hadn’t always been true, but it will become increasingly true, and so I would urge you to study hard, to burn the midnight oil; I would say to you, don’t drop out of school.
I understand all the sociological reasons why we often drop out of school, but I urge you, in spite of your economic plight, in spite of the situation that you are forced to live so often with intolerable conditions, stay in school.
And when you discover what you are going to be in life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it…
If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera.
Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept well.
If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a scrub in the valley. But be the best little scrub on the side of the hill. Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.
If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail.
If you can’t be the sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or you fail.
Be the best of whatever you are…
And finally, in your life’s blueprint must be a commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love and justice.
Don’t allow anybody to pull you so low as to make you hate them.
Don’t allow anybody to cause you to lose your self-respect to the point that you do not struggle for justice…
Let us keep going toward the goal of self-hood, to the realization of the dream of brotherhood and toward the realization of the dream of understanding good will.
We must keep moving, we must keep going.
If you can’t fly, run.
If you can’t run, walk.
If you can’t walk, crawl.
But by all means, keep moving.”
Here’s the link to the audio MP3 and Video of King’s Speech.
What Is Your Life’s Blueprint? by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Full Transcript)