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To become successful in life requires a long list of important steps, lots and lots of persistence but above all else; determination. There are several great manifestos, filled with the keys to achieving success and several thousand (or more) places where you can obtain this information, all of which is meaningless until it's assimilated to become knowledge, then put into practice to become wisdom. This process is known as "The Pursuit of Happiness".

If we were to amass all that's ever been written or spoken about happiness and then distilled it down to the purest idea, that which we could consume like a magical elixir, it would be this: the secret to success is in your mind. Now I know that may sound rather simplistic, and yes it's been said by a thousand different people but herein lays the road-map to enlightenment - master your mind, moment by moment, and make yourself manifest your destiny.

There's so much more than can be said on this topic and so many ways to come to the same conclusion but anyway you slice and dice it, you'll always come back to the same understanding. My favorite comparison of the mind, is the computer. Since the operating instructions for the applications to create happiness are default programs installed on the hard-drive (brain), and came delivered that way from the factory. It happens that sometimes we get more excited by new programs and become distracted by the gee-whiz shiny new applications, and forget the need to keep things simple.

Related articles

• Philip Reynolds: The Biblical Definitions Of The Pursuit Of Happiness (huffingtonpost.com)
• Are You Happy? (socyberty.com)
• A Tsy Manifesto | in the Pursuit of Natural Born World Shakers (theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com)
• In Hard Times, The Tenacious 'Pursuit Of Happiness' (npr.org)

As we entered this new decade at the turn of the new year, despite having every intention, for the first time since I can remember, I neglected to write a new personal mission statement. I did however read over some of what I had written to myself in the past several years. To commemorate this new year I even had in my mind the steps I was planning, to write my mission statement for 2010, complete with spreadsheets for tracking my progress. However, not a word of my mission was written until today because in my heart I could feel that something was wrong with my thinking this year, or maybe for many years.

Over the last several weeks I became aware that I wasn't thinking completely for myself, one of my concerns was that I had allowed myself to become comfortably numb about the world around me. Sure I've been distracted by things in my personal life, such as loss of family members including someone I loved who left before his time, plus my business interests had been exceptionally tumultuous and occasionally stressful, on top of all this my own creature comfort habits had reached a level bordering on obsessive compulsive but none of these things alone was what was bothering me deep inside.

So I made a few major lifestyle modfications without even writing the new goals down, I just achieved them, almost like leaving one era of my life and entering another. Then in an attempt to understand the recurring notion that something in my life was misaligned I started consuming information at a tremendous rate, while at the same time stepped up my physical activity and exercise, reduced my food intake and eliminated all toxins. The data that I loaded in to my mind to process was very diverse and came from a broad spectrum of sources, mostly printed material, video segments and full length documentaries. Much of what I analyzed was not happy or uplifting but eventually I discovered one common nagging question I needed to answer.

I decided to take up writing on this weblog again and for no other reason than to express myself in a way that is not about making money or promoting another web project. Just purely for the sake of having a place to publish my thoughts and ideas. Also, to make use of this Domain, which I've always been rather fond of and to use this publishing system for practice, as well as somewhat of a "sandbox" for testing various technologies developed for Movable Type by the "open source" developer community of which I am a member.

This weblog is actually quite old, originally started with Radio software in 2001, which is why it was named "weblog" rather than "blog" since I started using this type of communication tool before it became fashionable and before the web community adopted the name "Blogging"  - for those that keep a "Blog". In the beginning it was more about keeping track of site development.

Ever since I read the book "The Power of Now" I've become acutely aware of what my mind was thinking, I realize that for the most part it's out of control. By that I mean thoughts and ideas are arriving from seemingly no-where then bouncing around, sometimes causing other ideas to emerge, sometimes I become conscious of these thoughts but for the most part my mind runs amok like a high-powered computer just processing random information from Wikipedia with no particular purpose or reason.  

In the book by Carlos Castanda about the further teachings of don Juan, a Mexican Nagual or Sorcerer who is teaching the ancient art of sorcery as passed down for thousands of years from teacher to student. The author shares the teachings of don Juan most of which are nothing more than complex and often confusing lessons of life.

John Perry Barlow coined the tern "cyber space" from which I embellished "cyber estate" to describe online property. He was such a pioneer JPB, so much so, as to be way out front of almost anyone else alive at the time. When he published "Economy of Ideas" it must have caused allot of confusion even amongst academia, the only place it would have been read (at first). Now all these years and quantum leaps forward his manifesto is just as valid as it was, and may always be. The most valuable assets in the new global economy are ideas.

Today I was running a few laps at my club and thinking about what ideas I'd like to write about. Then my eyes started looking at the trees, plants, and flowers that surround the track, I realized that I was the only one there in the middle of a Monday afternoon the track was all mine.

Art is a result of human creativity which has some perceived quality beyond its usefulness, usually on the basis of aesthetic value or emotional impact.
~ Wikipedia

Such a broad topic; Art, that it could have dozens of categories and subcategories. Anyone can be an Art Critic and probably everyone is, to some degree or another.

I like this new term "carbon footprint" and the idea it promotes that each of us on the planet has a responsibility to reduce the amount of natural resources we consume because our consumption is proportional to the rate of global warming, hence our own carbon foot print. This notion means that every person can do something about the problem, aside from pointing the finger at governments and corporations.

Next we need to raise people's conscience about the social condition of our planet.