Author Esther Hicks on where to look: “If all you did was look for things to appreciate, you would live a joyously spectacular life.”
Archive for the ‘Attitude’ Category
What We Observe
April 24, 2026Three Rules for Life
April 23, 2026Coach Lou Holtz offers 3 rules: “I follow three rules: Do the right thing, do the best you can, and always show people you care.”
Repetition Builds Consistency
April 22, 2026A truly ingrained habit forms not through motivation, but through consistency, through repeating actions until they become automatic. Through repetition. Don’t wait for motivation (he says as he’s waiting to get motivated to practice the guitar).
Because what you repeat becomes who you are.
Crucial Question to Ask of Yourself
April 21, 2026If you want to activate more happiness in your life, ask yourself: Who am I helping grow?
Listening Without Agreeing
April 8, 2026You talk with a person who advances ideas that seem off to you. Like with a person I know who has bought almost every conspiracy theory alive on the internet.
The test. Can I listen without agreeing and without arguing?
Greek philosopher Aristotle on listening but not agreeing: “It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
This remark is about 2,500 years old. I’d go him a bit modern to make it, “It is the mark of someone with equanimity and kindness who can entertain a thought without accepting it.”
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Practice Kindness
April 7, 2026A philosophical razor consists of a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate (shave off) unlikely explanations for a phenomenon or avoid unnecessary actions.
Hanlon’s Razor describes one of my favorites.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
We interact with other people frequently. They do or say something. We take offense. Maybe it’s on the highway and we give the American one-finger salute.
Maybe these people aren’t out to get you. Maybe they have their own problems and aren’t even aware of you. Or, maybe, yes, they are just “stupid.”
Our best response is…kindness. (He says as he helps a mother with two small children navigate leaving Starbucks.)
I’ve never found kindness out of proportion even when dealing with those people who have (metaphorically) stabbed me in the back or revoked promises. I don’t think it’s weakness. I think it’s an attitude that allows me to forget the past and journey into the future.
Practice kindness.
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How We Interpret The Bible
April 6, 2026Rich Dixon asked this penetrating question at Rich’s Ride Blog.
Do we use Scripture to interpret what love means – or do we use love to interpret what Scripture means?
When I sit down to read, am I asking God for the message? Or, am I looking for sentences that validate what I already think?
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Cross Pollenating Life
April 3, 2026From my earliest memories of high school, I recall loving to learn from a variety of sources trying to synthesize knowledge and experience.
Fitness has been a goal since the mid-70s when I moved from a job in manufacturing where I walked miles a day to a desk job in engineering where I walked feet per day. It happened in late summer. The first of April I went out to play softball and couldn’t run from home to first base. I joined the jogging craze the next day.
Now in my mid-70s I walk miles and resistance train. Like Yoga was developed thousands of years ago to train the body for sitting in meditation, the physical fitness helps my mental and spiritual fitness.
I use The Pump app to guide my program. It’s designed by Arnold Schwarzenegger and two guy who work closely with him. One just interviewed his boss.
Arnold Schwarzenegger Trained for 60 Years Without Counting a Calorie. Research Explains Why It Worked. The science of decision fatigue, goal complexity, and why simpler approaches to health are also the ones with the strongest evidence.
So I asked him: after sixty years of training, what has actually lasted? He gave me the answer, and I realized I already knew it. The basics. It’s always the basics that work best.
When we’re given too many choices, too much complication, too much nuance, we’re less likely to act on any of them and less satisfied when we do. When a health plan contains too many decisions — which supplement? which protocol? which meal timing window? — every micro-choice draws from the same limited cognitive well. You deplete that resource before you ever get to execution.
A lifetime of studying and teaching the Bible has taught me the same thing about spiritual life. I love studying the earliest Jesus followers. For 300 years, they sought to live out what Jesus taught. We can tell from some early letters that have been preserved that avoiding the too human pitfalls sometimes complicated life.
The answer invariably returned to Jesus’ two commands. You shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself.
Period. Full stop.
Everyone who tries to complicate those commands with more options and decisions and complexity have strayed from the simple path. Physicists call it first principles.
(Oh, how am I doing? And how are you doing?)
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Paradox of Renunciation
April 1, 2026We are in the season of Lent. Some people practice “fasting” as giving up something for Lent. I had an older friend, a devout Catholic, who gave up fried food, deserts, and beer for Lent. He lost several pounds over the six weeks or so. Easter Sunday was feast day. I think he gained it all back in a day!
The annual story around my village concerned a guy who gave up watermelon for Lent. Of course, there was no watermelon to be found.
How about you? Have you given up (renounced) anything? Maybe like being on a diet. You need to drop 15-20 pounds or more. Instead of changing your lifestyle, you focus on the foods you now cannot eat.
Then, has this happened?
Every time you renounce something, you are tied forever to it.
Some spirituality teaches to give up things. That ties you to them. Simply wake up, understand, and then the desire goes away.
The better way:
- I am the sort of person who eats this way.
- I am the sort of person who practices prayer/meditation daily.
- I am the sort of person who smiles and greets others when we randomly meet.
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Empty Ourselves
March 25, 2026Robert Van Gulik was a scholar of China, a excellent writer, excellent artist, and Dutch ambassador to China before World War II. Retiring, he wrote a series of murder mysteries based on a historical character called Judge Dee. The mysteries are fiction, but Van Gulik brings 7th Century China to life.
When I’m between projects and my brain needs refreshment, I’ll pull one of these from my bookcase.
The other evening it was Necklace and Calabash where he drew a character typical of ancient China—a “Taoist” recluse. A sort of spiritual guide.
Master Gourd left Judge Dee with a piece of wisdom relevant for us all:
“It is only after we have been emptied of all our vain hopes, all our petty desires and petty illusions, that we can be useful to others.”
Are we so full of ourselves that we haven’t time to love and serve others as Jesus commanded?
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Gary Mintchell
Faith Venture 