Choose Your Results

If your life is orbiting around a single reference point, make it a healthy one.

Dana Bate
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Hello Marty
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Years ago, among my many other jobs, I conducted some seminars in public speaking. The seminar was in New York City. At the beginning of the first session I asked each of the participants to stand and speak for a minute about themselves and any special interests they had. One fellow spoke about his love of gambling. I lectured briefly and then we went to lunch. When we returned from lunch the man wasn't there. He didn't reappear later or on any of the other days he had paid for. I knew exactly where he was. He had talked himself into a mini vacation in Atlantic City. Obviously gambling was more important to him than learning to be a better public speaker. Gambling was evidently what his real life was about.

I know drinkers whose life is centered around sucking intoxicating liquids out of a bottle any way they can.

I know drug users whose lives defined by smoking, sniffing, swallowing some sort of dope or injecting it into themselves through a needle..

To those people losing money, getting disgusting or paranoid, sloppy and sulfuring withdrawal pains are not results but annoying intrusions on the otherwise happy times they would be having.

The danger is in just that. There is so much enthusiasm connected to whatever the particular habit is that one forgets how self destructive it is. In fact the enjoyment is so great that anything negative about it will usually be ignored.

I used to know some drug users in New York who talked of nothing else but the drugs, what they were, where they got them and when they took them and never about their families, the work or their careers.

Enthusiasm is a very good thing if it's focused in the right direction. Enthusiasm is among the first steps toward any activity. A further step is imagining and determining what the result will be of that activity. Is it a waste of money with negative and possibly dangerous outcomes? Or is it rather something that will provide a happier and better life for you and for those around you. People for whom the center of their lives is involved in working a successful business, raising a family or even tending a flower garden may have a positive, healthy point around which their lives are orbiting.

It isn't difficult to find such a focal point if one looks for the right results and strives for them. A clean, clear, positive, happy life is not found in the dope, the booze or the roulette wheel. Those are where death is found.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never give up.
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