Wealth is your birthright. It’s everyone’s birthright! The silver spoon was in your mouth on the day you were born. You may not realize it because you think that to have riches you need lots of cash or financial holdings - or a genuine silver spoon - but this is a very limited and distorted way of thinking about wealth. Being rich doesn’t necessarily mean you have a pile of $100 bills, a stack of gold bars, or a mink coat in your closet.

How do you know whether you can be a successful entrepreneur, or if you are better off as a salaried employee? Everyone has bad days at work, when they start to fantasize about how great it would be to be their own boss. But before you make any drastic moves, it is wise to do a bit of self reflection to determine if this is really something you’ll be naturally suited for.

If you are like most people, you learned quite a few things in school that you will probably never use in your life. Things like how to dissect a frog, the amount of rainfall during summer in the Amazon jungle, and plenty of weird equations required to solve algebraic problems.

Unfortunately I do not foresee what we are taught in schools changing anytime soon.

However, I do know that there is a tremendous amount of very useful information available in all of the millions of books that have been written over the course of a very long time.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle

Humans are certainly creatures of habit. We go about living our lives one day at a time, often performing same tasks over and over again daily, weekly, monthly, and so on.

A habit can be simply defined as any task we consciously or unconsciously perform on a regular basis. A habit can be as basic as always putting on a seat belt prior to starting our vehicles or more sophisticated such as taking an hour just for ourselves every Sunday evening to reflect back on the prior week and plan the one coming ahead.

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened - as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding - she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness - of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Watch the video here
(Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44.)

To give a flavor for how the power of intention is being studied in the laboratory, let’s briefly consider two experiments recently conducted at IONS. The first explored the quantum observer effect - modern physics’ “skeleton in the closet” suggesting that consciousness is inextricably wound into the fabric of reality.

Experienced meditators and nonmeditators were asked to imagine that they could intuitively perceive a low-intensity laser beam in a distant, shielded Michelson interferometer. If such nonlocal observation were possible, it would theoretically “collapse” the photons’ quantum wave-functions and change the pattern of light produced by the interferometer.