I’ve often spoken about three goals I believe pretty much all people have: to be happy, to be peaceful inside, and to be successful in the world. If I were to pick one term to encapsulate what I mean by all three of these, it would be that all humans wish to thrive. This series of articles, in large part, is about how to thrive. But instead of looking at the fine details, as we have when looking at your Internal Map of Reality, we’re going to look more at general principles. If you follow these principles, you’ll have the ingredients that will allow you to thrive in this life.

Your Internal Map of Reality is really just a way of taking what comes in through your senses and turning it into what you feel, how you behave, and the people and situations you attract or become attracted to. There are several steps in this process. In the simplest sense, you begin by deciding what to pay attention to. Then, you decide how to pay attention to it, in other words, how to represent to yourself internally whatever you are paying attention to (i.e., how to think about it).

Every year women ranging from professionals to housewives get together as volunteers in Thimphu, Bhutan, to raise funds for a nunnery in a valley far from the city. They collect donations, organize monsoon balls, sell lottery tickets, and write about the life and hardships faced by the nuns who reside there. Thanks to their diligent efforts, conditions in the nunnery have improved in recent years: A new housing facility has been built, and the nuns are provided with warm clothes and proper food.

Viewed through different lenses, the women’s work appears either as a Buddhist act known as jimba or a secular act of public service. Reflecting on these alternate names for a common work inspires hope for a new approach to mobilizing human resources to meet the needs of a suffering humanity, not only in Bhutan but throughout the world.

In today’s hectic world we often do not take the time to allow ourselves the luxury of quality time with ourselves, free from the cares and craziness of the daily circus that is our lives. It seems that, on the whole, we’ve all become phenomenal multitaskers, capable of amazing feats of juggling and endless readjustments to our schedules.

Five year olds take note! Your hyper-charged antics have absolutely nothing over a 21st century adult male or female anywhere in the world plugged into cyberspace via iPod or blackberry, amped up on various unholy mixtures of sucrose, caffeine and lactose, rocketing down a high-efficiency autobahn or freeway in an amazingly over-powered personal transportation vehicle, liberated from the office to go to yoga class, take in a movie, grab a bite to eat, shop for new cellular service and make it home in time to do a load or two of laundry and zone out in front of the TV.