How to Protect Yourself From Failure
Bad habits! are difficult to get rid of they haunt you and control your future. I agree with M. Ballantyne your environment is probably part of the problem. The following article talks about how changing your environment will get rid of bad habits and “protect you from failure”. A well written article by “Craig Ballantyne” It’s my pleasure it’s share this article with you enjoy
Claude for Sanky’s Corner
How to Protect Yourself From Failure
An alcoholic walks into a bar. An hour later, he’s drunk. Two hours later, he stumbles home.
Um, alright, that wasn’t a very good “guy walks into a bar joke”, I’m sorry.
But it is an excellent, albeit extreme example of a point I want to make today.
If we have a bad habit, putting ourselves into an environment that promotes the bad habit is the first step in making the bad habit worse. Therefore, we need to identify not only the bad habits in our lives that we want to change, but also the environments we must avoid in order to foster this change.
The other night while driving from the big city to my home in the country, I was listening to an interview with Dan Kennedy. On the call he described how he structures his weekly errand’s route so that he doesn’t drive by a donut shop. For Dan, a diabetic, he’s struggled with a lifelong “addiction” to donuts. So he makes the effort to remove himself from the environment that would support the addiction.
Likewise, almost every bad habit we have in our lives can be limited by removing ourselves from particular environments. For example, let’s say that you have a problem with gossip. Every day at 10am you find yourself at the proverbial water cooler in your office with the same people having the same useless, negative conversations about other people.
What’s part of the solution?
Avoiding the water cooler at 10am.
You see, most bad habits can be significantly reduced by avoiding the environment, yet often we think we can have the willpower to put ourselves in that environment and somehow resist the urge to give in to the bad behaviour.
Do you really think you can go to the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet at lunch while on your diet and just order a salad? That takes a strong-willed person, and really, that willpower is best left to fight against something else more important in your life. Instead of wasting the willpower on this environment, just keep yourself out of the offending environment altogether.
This also applies to the people and items you bring into your environment. For example, one of my friends, nutrition expert Brad Pilon, simply recommends a “no eating in the car” rule for his readers, and this simple little suggestion helps eliminate unwanted and unnecessary calories. After all, the majority of foods you can eat in your car are on the “do not eat” list from your diet.
When you control the environment, you remove the opportunity to fall back into a bad habit. Lead yourself not into temptation and you shall do no evil.
Of course, there will be times when you’re thrown into an environment that is no good for you, and you’ll need to develop coping strategies for those times as well. But that’s another lesson for another day. Today, I simply want you to focus on two things.
First, identify the bad habits and where they most often occur. What people, places, and things contribute to your participation in activities that you want to remove from your life?
Second, identify solutions to these obstacles. For example, in the case of the water cooler gossip, avoid engaging these people in non-work related conversations. Avoid the water cooler at 10am.
I speak from experience. When I was young and foolish I would often meet my best friend in a bar on Saturday evenings. Needless to say this was not conducive to a Sunday full of relaxation and preparation for the week ahead.
In order to maintain our regular meetings and 30-year friendship, we both identified the offending environment and removed ourselves from it. Today we meet on Sunday afternoons (a day on which neither of us drink alcohol) in locations that don’t lead us into temptation and our friendship is stronger than ever.
You don’t have to lose relationships in order to better your life. You often just need to lose the offending environments that put you in harm’s way.
Put yourself in a positive environment with positive people who provide you social support and you’ll build better habits without draining your limited willpower.
The Difference Between Success and Achievement
What is achievement? What is success?
I would say that we see when something is achieved or not, we know, we can say it objectively , Success on the other hand, is the next step it’s like the result of achievement and it may never happen or show up just a little bit but in this case, we can improve our “creation” because it means it’s is not perfect.
Success, everyone can say is something that is welcomed with honor, that everybody appreciates and will remain in peoples minds a long time.
Achievement is something everyone can qualify as good, because it’s something that works properly, but it’s not why everyone will love it, we can also say that it is something immediate and personal that may become after some time a success !
That’s the difference between achievement and success!
In short, achievement is more a personal and objective thing while success is a rather a subjective and popular thing!
Indeed, when something is achieved, it is finalized and functional, we are sure of that, we can say it in all objectivity, it would be disingenuous not to admit that something is achieved when it works as we wanted it to work, when we can use it. Achievement will always be an achievement and probably a good success, of course, it may be “challenged” by something similar that will experience greater success in the future.
So, success only lasts a while, it’s rather a temporary achievement, although it is recognized by many, it can last a long time, but it will always end up collapsing, replaced by a better “achievement” , something that will in turn become popular for some time, and so on.
Success is related to the opinion of people, their opinions on the thing and everyone may not agree on this, that’s the big difference between success and achievement.
“The Best Exercise for Weight Loss”
Being retired well not really because I’m retired. But… I’ve always had problems with my weight and this article by Will Edwards, really helped me with this problem. I taught it would be a good idea to share this with you and maybe it will help you also. Here it is……. Enjoy
The Best Exercise for Weight Loss ….by Will Edwards
Recently, I have embarked on my own weight loss program and it, of course, 
involves exercise – the E word, as I like to call it. But exercise alone is not sufficient to lose weight, so if you would like to know what I recommend for getting off that excess fat, take a look here.
However, the purpose of this post is to examine the various forms of exercise that are available to most people and determine which of them is best for the purpose of losing weight. Before we start, you know the usual advice don’t you, about consulting your doctor? Of course, you should use your common sense and make your own decisions. That said, here are the raw facts about exercise and calories:
Walking – around 360 calories/hour
Firstly, let’s take a look at walking. We are talking about walking fast enough to raise the heart rate just a little. It is excellent exercise for most people as it is very low impact and it burns about 360 calories per hour. That’s quite a decent return of your investment of time as it’s more than the 255 calories in a 49g bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Mill chocolate.
Jogging – around 600 calories/hour
Now if you can do a bit of jogging, you can nearly double the calorie burn rate (over walking). So that means you can actually eat a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate and still burn 375 calories if you go for a 1 hour jog. Now jogging for an hour, even at a fairly slow pace probably means that you will be doing about a 10Km distance, so that’s no mean feat if you are not used to it.
Riding a Bike: around 1000 calories/hour
Beginning to step things up a bit here. Naturally, it does depend on how fast you go, but you can be burning up to about 1000 calories per hour via this method. That means, you could have a bar of chocolate and still produce a net loss of 745 calories after an hour of cycling. Are you beginning to think I’m obsessed with chocolate?
Swimming: around 800 calories/hour
Swimming is generally considered to be excellent exercise as it is again low impact. However, as you can see, at 800 calories per hour, it is also an extremely effective exercise for weight loss. You could have a bar of chocolate and a 12 oz Latte (204 calories) afterwards and still end up burning 341 calories – is this beginning to sound interesting?
Dancing: around 500 calories/hour
Finally, dancing is also extremely good exercise at around 500 calories per hour. You probably won’t want a bar of chocolate if you are going dancing, so you could have a 5 ounce glass of Pinot Grigio instead (123 calories) and still end up with a net loss of 377 calories.
Which Exercise is Best?
So after all that, what exactly is the best exercise for weight loss? Of course, it depends on many things including your willingness to not eat the chocolate. But, I would say that swimming comes out as a front runner (if you’ll pardon the pun) for a number of reasons: it is low impact and yet burns calories at a fairly decent rate.
My advice is: don’t join a gym unless you actually like engaging in that kind of physical workout. The truth is that if you don’t enjoy it, you won’t manage to keep it up, and that is a real key to using exercise to lose weight; you need to be doing it, whatever it is for you, regularly.
So the best exercise is the one that suits you best. You have to be able to fit it into your lifestyle. Don’t discount the value of simply doing a bit of extra walking or going dancing a bit more often. They are both very pleasant activities and they are good low impact exercises too.
What is Your Personal Inspiration?
I find personal inspiration by focusing on the present. My vision of where I want to be drives me hard on days when things aren’t always going so well.
Of course, you can’t control how things are going to work out, but having a vision for the way you want your life to be will inspire you to take action.
Today, Jason Leister’s article “Connecting the Dots Looking Forward” shows you how to to look forward in your life by searching for the answers in a place that most people don’t look.
Connecting the Dots Looking Forward
By Jason Leister
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
I first heard that quote by Steve Jobs back in 2005 or 2006 when I saw the YouTube® video of his commencement address at Stanford. I still remember watching it that day up in my office in Batesville, Indiana. I knew in an instant that he was speaking truth.
At that moment in my life, I was spending a lot of time and energy trying to connect the dots of my life looking forward. I was trying to “figure things out.” Trying to figure out what I should be doing and why I was put on this planet.
I was trying really hard. I was doing everything I could think of… except paying attention to what was right in front of my face. Oh… and except for simply enjoying each day as the gift it truly is. Oh… and except for actually looking inside myself for my own answers.
Over the past few years, I’ve grown up just a bit. I realize now that I’m never going to “figure it out.” And I don’t have to. Because my real task is to simply show up and be fully me. To follow my own path and be OK with that.
The “I’m never going to figure it out” thing might sound a bit fatalistic to the over achiever who wants to “make something of himself.”
To me, it’s about the most liberating thought I know.
The fact is…
There’s No One Out There Who Has the Answers for YOU
I’ve spent far too much of my life looking for answers to what I should be doing and who I should be becoming. I’ve spent countless dollars ingesting the ideas of other people who have no idea who I am, what I’m about or what I want to do with my life.
I naively thought that my answers might be found in some of those books. Instead, I found other people’s answers. I found stories of other people accomplishing things I thought I wanted to accomplish.
Only fairly recently did I realize that my answers would only come as fast as they were supposed to come. And more importantly, that those answers would bubble up from the inside of me rather than being reeled in from some place on the outside.
You might think this sounds just a bit too “airy fairy” to be a business article. But I think the days are fast approaching when people will wake up and realize that there was never really meant to be a line between business and life.
We put the line there because it made us feel safe. It allowed us to go off into the world and “be somebody” without having to really figure out much about the person we already were.
But we’re humans, not robots. And we don’t live in compartments that we can switch on and off like machines. We can do that, but it just ends up making us miserable. Our goal is to live as full and complete human beings. And that comes from integrating all of the parts of our life into one whole person.
You have the answer about how to do that.
You might not realize you have the answer yet, but it is in there. Life experiences will bring the answer out, but only if you are listening and watching closely. In the end, you will lead yourself to where you are meant to be.
What? You don’t need an expert to lead you?
Experts are valuable for helping you make progress, but you are the leader. It’s your life. Don’t abdicate your responsibility for its outcome.
If you are sitting there searching for your answers to questions about your life and business, let Steve Job’s advice and life serve as a gentle reminder to you that no one knows what they are doing.
We are all in this thing called life to learn.
But don’t think you are in business to prove anything to anyone. You don’t need to “figure it out” so you can be somebody.
You just need to put one foot in front of the other and follow the path that’s been set out for you.
You will mess up. And you will fall.
There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s called life. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Because that’s how you learn.
And we are here to learn.
Moments like the passing of a great icon are an opportunity. Because they break through, even if just for a split second, the craziness that is life. And in those briefest of moments, we catch a glimpse of what lies beneath the mind numbing amount of activity we endure each day.
The passing of Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, is an opportunity for all of us. It is an opportunity to see clearly.
In a very short time, that opportunity will be gone. Life will resume and we’ll forget the feeling we have now. The feeling that comes from being reminded of what it means to live life with authenticity. And the reason that that is so important.
The next time you get all caught up in the craziness of life, go listen to Steve.
Or even better, just print this quote of his out and hang it somewhere so you’ll see it everyday:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Thank you Steve Jobs.
[ Note: Jason Leister is an internet entrepreneur, direct response copywriter and editor of “The Client Letter,“ the daily e-letter from ClientsSuck.net, where he helps independent professionals create success. You can contact him via his website at JasonLeister.com.]
