Have you read any good books lately? It is amazing, after all the great books written about almost every subject in life, we would have learned some lessons or even a lot of lessons. Change is always upon us in every turn in life, yet, we are still caught unaware. We can safely assume that for everything in life that has been hyped up to the maximum, sooner or later the bubble will burst, whether it is the over exuberance at the stock market or the housing market. If we charge too much on our credit card, sooner or later the piper needs to be paid or we will pay dearly. If anything is too good to be true, it probably is, yet we still get caught in ponzi schemes like the Madoff case. Will we ever learn? If not, why not?
A friend once told me that her sister, in good times, would pile the supermarket full with food with no regard to how it costs and now she's more careful. She wanted to know if I was the same way. I said, no. In good times and in bad times, I live very frugally. I like the supermarket near me because it is small and their turnover is lower and I find that they have to mark down a lot of their meat because of the lower turnover. These are perfectly good meat and I would buy up a whole bunch to keep in my freezer. I've been doing it forever, in good times and in bad. There's no shame in it. I'll find some ready to cook meatloaf for half price or some fillet Mignon for half price.
I, constantly mine the bible for prosperity tips. Proverbs is full of them and I read it to constantly remind myself. They say, the book of Deuteronomy is a blueprint for prosperity and that book has been my all time favorite forever. 'the plans of the diligent leads to abundance...' Proverbs 21:5.
In the book, 'Creating Excellence', published 1984, I read,
''No one can acquire versatility without regularly pursuing a variety of activities at both the personal and professional level. It is as much an attitude as a skill. If you don't weave varied activities into all levels of your life, you will never be able to anticipate and adapt to change." It goes on ," three rules for making varied activities part of your everyday life....
-Never allow more than thirty days to slip by without pursuing a major new personal or professional activity. These can range from hobbies not directly related to your work, and can be work related like a new marketing strategy.
- Drop at least one old, worn-out activity every thirty days.
- Avoid adding new activities that are similar or related to old ones.
I like to think that you are what you read. How does one prosper if we only read the sports page or People magazine? We read to get ideas, we read to empower ourselves with a new vocabulary that would set us alight with new empowerment.
It was a great Christmas. While the whole country is under snow, we are still enjoying the sun, but it is still cold in the mornings. This was taken in the back yard a week ago, the succulents are doing well. Yesterday my sister and I went into the English store in Santa Monica looking for mince pies, they're sold out. We came home and I happened to have some old jars of mincemeat, I whipped up some pastry and made some mince pies. Everybody loved it, growing up in a former British colony, our tradition is very much English, it's fruit cake and mince pies at Christmas. I haven't made mince pies in some 10 years, the last time I ate some was 8 years ago in London, one of my aunts made some.
