Happy SMART Day Everyone!
Many years ago when Thom and I first entered the real estate field we discovered a motivational speaker named Zig Ziglar. Old even then, Zig was a guy that bounced around onstage and told stories about one thing or another all designed to get us off our butts and out there living our dreams. Sure, some of it was pretty corny, but that was part of his charm. And yes, some of the stories were good—really good. So much so that even now, many years later, I remember Zig very well AND, I cherish a particular idea that he shared that is sure to be part of my life forever.
Zig started out by asking, “If someone walked into your living room and dumped a bucket of garbage on your living room floor, what would you do?” He would then look around the crowd with big hairy eyebrows raised waiting for an answer. Then he would blurt out, “Why you would tell him to pick up that mess and GET OUT right now! That’s what you would do!” And we’d all sit there nodding our faces in agreement—before he’d belt out, even louder “ Then why do you let people come into your mind and dump garbage?”
Zig was correct then and he is still correct. We would never let someone throw garbage around in our house (at least I wouldn’t!)—but we consistently let people dump garbage in our minds and do nothing about it. Don’t agree with me? Do you watch the news? Most TV news is nothing more than piles of negative information. Do you have acquaintances that continually complain or berate you? Yep, that’s garbage too. While trash is fairly easy to recognize when it comes out of a trash container, it is much harder to see when a friend or an electronic devise is dumping it into your ear or your consciousness!
The reason I bring this up is that most of the time we don’t notice much of the trash we are absorbing. That’s why it is good to consciously decide to do the opposite—dump positive and uplifting information in instead. Besides reading SMART Living 365 on a regular basis, every Monday I want to recommend another great resource that consistently puts out good information for us to absorb.
This week’s recommendation is easy—it’s a magazine and website called Good. Good is the antithesis of regular news because its focus is on sharing the best of all the news out there in dozens of categories. You can sign up on their website: http://good.is for their daily good; you can go to their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/goodinc and “like” it for continual good feeds, you can subscribe to their print magazine and have Good delivered to your mailbox, and any time you want, you can search out Good for a variety of articles and information to remind you that you are surrounded by more good that you ever know.
In case you are wondering, I’m not an employee of Good or any of the other websites I recommend here on SMARTliving365.com. But I do believe that there is a boomerang effect to sharing good—meaning that what you give out always comes back to you. Plus, as I said in the beginning, ever since I first heard Zig I have grown very careful about who I let in my house and what I allow others to dump in my living room or my mind. Think about it, if we all read Good and others information like it, then we’d all be in the position to share “Good” every single day.
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” –The Buddha
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