April 20th, 2023

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This calm and tranquil sea holds the power and ferocity of overwhelming and devastating storm weather. 
While drifting quietly in this calm, we need to be mindful and prepared for when the changes begin to come
Friend, good morning.

'Easy choices, hard life.
Hard choices, easy life.”
– Jerzy Gregorek

Somebody was talking about Tony Robbins the other day. 

I've heard some of his tapes, read two of his books.
To my mind the content of his work is inspiring.

i just have an issue with his delivery. 
He's toned it down a bit over the years, but I do remember years ago, when a nephew living in California very kindly sent me a box of his tapes. The enthusiasm with which he spoke was off the Richter scale, so that by the time I'd finished listening to the first tape, I was in a state something close to exhaustion. His emotional investment was total. And it infected listeners. It was hard to listen and not get caught up in the breakneck pace and hysterical rhetoric.
But.
The material was solid. For me, this was particularly so as I had completed a course in Sports Psychology a couple of years previously and was able to identify precisely with what he was saying. He was translating the material I'd studied, and loved, and believed in totally, into a practical, everyday useful language. He transformed the principles of Human Performance on a playing pitch, a race course, a boxing ring, a tennis court, into the principles of Human Performance in Life.

And one of the things he always emphasised was that you had to take action on anything. You had to stop the thinking, curtail the planning, lessen the talking, and just shut up and get on with it.

He also told us that Life wasn't fair. That that's the way it was. We had to make our opportunities and make the most of who we were, where we were, and with what we'd got.
No argument with that. 

He also spoke of the biggest problem that most of us had.
And that was that we believed that there was a life without problems.
And that, to me, made sense.

Dealing with problems is what life is about, isn't it?
It's about seeking solutions to difficulties or situations that arise which may be causing us concern.
And every circumstance in the world is fraught with immediate or potential problems. And we have to deal with them. 

That's easy, though.
It's easy if you accept it and work hard at it. Then you either obviate the problem or you're prepared for it when it hits.

Life was never easy. Not if you've a smidgeon of ambition or desire  and want to achieve something, whether it's making a business or some other thing you want to accomplish. There will arise things to foil your efforts, undermine your confidence, steal your energy, divert your attention. 
Always.

I read an enlightening paragraph recently in which someone said the he didn't pray for a miracle, but prayed for the strength, the courage, the intelligence, the resilience, to deal with whatever arose, so that the outcome might well appear to be miraculous.

And so long as we accept that that's what we've got to deal with, and we're willing, as my dear mentor and long-gone friend told me, to 'Take a decision. Do it with a will. And see it through.', we'll find life relatively easy.

And sleep at night.