1. Take responsibility for your internal experience
With the ego seemingly always enveloping our deeper essence it can be so challenging to actually “be the change you wish to see in the world”. We all know that we need to “be the change” but how with all the programming and challenges we face do we actually do this?

The answer: have a personal goal to take responsibility for your internal experience and love yourself for who you are. This one step, if taken by all, will build more trust, love and compassion than any other. This one step is powerful enough to shift everything toward paradise quickly yet with grace.

Ideas, including good ones, come naturally to human beings. As Robert Tucker said: “Anyone who has ever taken a shower has had a good idea.” But good ideas are only the starting point for innovation.

No less an authority than Joseph Schumpeter put it this way: “to carry any improvement into effect is a task entirely different from the inventing of it, and a task, moreover, requiring entirely different kinds of aptitudes.” In other words, it takes work to turn good ideas into something helpful and profitable.

Mary squirmed in her chair as she continued, “I just don’t know what is wrong with me. Why can’t I just do it? I feel stressed all the time when I’m not writing. ‘I should be writing’, I say to myself, but I don’t. I think, if I just get the laundry done, then I’ll be free to sit down and write the next chapter. But then I don’t. Maybe I need to exercise first, and I go for a run. I get back home, fully intending to sit down at the computer. But I don’t. And all the while I’m feeling bad and stressed about not writing. What is wrong with me? Maybe I’m just lazy. Or maybe unconsciously I don’t really want to write. Or maybe it just means that I’m not really cut out to be a writer. ‘Writers write’, I tell myself.

The limitations of rational thought become clear if we consider the simple premise: “God does not have to think.” Thinking is not possible without information, and perfect information makes thinking unnecessary. When you have information, you simply know, there is nothing to think about. There are no decisions to make, situations define themselves and what needs to be done is obvious. Thinking is a compensation for inadequate knowledge. It is a substitute, and a poor one at that.

The most brilliant minds on the planet are gathering in Montery, CA. for a 4 day conference, by invitation only.

Imagine a gathering where the worlds top entrepreneurs, designers, scientist and artists present astonishing new ideas. Remarkable ideas from every area of knowledge. Great ideas brought about by passion, ideas that have the power to change the world. What could be called a Cirque Du Soleil of the mind and heart.

People from 26 different countries come together to explore. Something magical happens; there’s nothing more exciting than a bold new idea.

A teacher friend of mine once asked his tenth graders to blurt out the first words that came to mind on hearing the word “power.” They came out with “money,” “parents,” “guns,” “bullies,” “Adolf Hitler.” And in my workshops with adults, I’ve also heard “fist,” “law,” “corrupt” and “politicians.”

As long as we conceive of power as the capacity to exert one’s will over another, it is scary: Power can manipulate, coerce and destroy. And as long as we are convinced we have none, power will always look bad. Even my hero journalist Bill Moyers recently reinforced a view of power as categorically negative. “The further you get from power,” he said, “the closer you get to the truth.”

In my courses on time management, I point out that the very worst use of time in life is to stay at a job for months and years for which you are completely unsuited. There are a great number of people who spend their whole lives doing something during the week so that they can somehow find something enjoyable to do on the weekends.

Out of the chaos of the present time will emerge a new understanding of the meaning underlying our existence, and every effort will be made to express our awareness of that meaning in our daily lives. This will bring about a complete transformation of society: a new livingness will characterize our relationships and institutions; a new freedom and sense of joy will replace the present fear. Above all else, mankind will come to realize that living is an art, based on certain laws, requiring the function of the intuition for correct expression.

OK. You’ve finally let the bitter truth seep into the part of your brain that admits bitter truths. Your job sucks. The mere fact that window envelopes with pretty checks in them arrive every two weeks is not doing it for you anymore. You are becoming very good at the thousand-yard stare, the long, unfocused look past your cubicle into a green-and-gold world out there somewhere, a world that’s passing you by. Or perhaps you’re so damned wiped out at the end of a day on the assembly line, behind the cash register, or at the nurse’s station that the thousand-yard stare shrinks to six inches.

My doctoral thesis was about biological transformation and how the hidden intelligence inside each cell communicates with the whole entity as change is happening. I netted a tank full of tadpoles from a local pond and then studied them at intervals as they metamorphosed slowly into frogs. The same question that guided my research then is still exciting now: What is the natural intelligence that guides transformation?

Tadpoles are fascinating to watch. They’re orderly change artists, masters of subtle and sneaky transformation. Perfectly engineered water wonders, tadpoles have big heads and graceful, tapering tails that offer little resistance to forward movement. With no fanfare at all, the pollywog simply starts to change one day: His tail gets shorter as his body absorbs it, and he sprouts four tiny limb buds.

Along with all the nuts and bolts I’ll teach - the “how to” - there are also a number of fundamental principles all successful people follow. Without these fundamental principles, the nuts and bolts are pretty much useless. If, however, you really embrace these fundamental principles, the nuts and bolts become easy to implement. The nuts and bolts almost become an afterthought, a process of filling in the blanks.I want to share one of these principles with you today. This principle is truly magic, and if you can integrate it into your life, it will improve everything.

Valentines Day began back in November for over 10,000 Los Angeles County children, as they entered the first annual Love Equals children’s Valentine’s Day writing contest, a joint venture of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation and Zimand Entertainment.

Love Equals reached out and touched students and teachers at 2500 Los Angeles County schools, crossing income and cultural lines, in neighborhoods such as Ranch Palos Verdes, Skid Row, Woodland Hills, Inglewood, Pasadena El Monte, Pacific Palisades and San Pedro. The teachers spurred their students, ages six through 11, to write and send in their essays and poems expressing what “love” means to them.