Just wanted to let you know that I made my first million last month. Just wanted to dedicate that success to you. I learnt a lot from you. Some of the key lessons are:
1. Waking up early regularly
2. Understanding the concept of success in the dimensions of finances,career, family, social, spirituality and community. I am giving back to the community my time, effort and financial help and it has really provided the warm feeling of mental peace.
3. Just like you have people like Wonga Tonga, who do not value your contribution, I have also seen some people who dont seem to understand the concept that success and growth is largely how you define it. But, my friend, don’t let the Wongas of the world deter you from your path of making a difference. You have made a big difference in the lives of many people through your positive messages. Dont steal their inspiration by replying to the questions of people like Wonga.
Remember that no matter how good you are, how much of a difference you make, there will always be some people who’d not agree with you. Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead and Socrates was poisoned. Every one is entitled to their opinions. By trying to win people, who obviously dont agree with you, you waste your enormous time and energy, which could have been effectively utilized creating hope for the enormous volumes of readers of your blogs.

Yours truly,

A work in progress

It is a major benefit of the free-market system that anybody can set himself up to do just about anything within the law. The market then votes with its business who succeeds and who fails. Some will have more success than others, but there is room for many more than just the very best in each field. And even though the very best may be great now, they were once beginners who had the courage to start.

Bottom line, it’s where your heart is. People are more important than things or money. As long as you have that figured out, using good sales techniques can only help you. It’s like using the right recipe for your cake - you may make a cake, but if you make a really good cake, you’re much better off than you are if you just make a cake to get by. Excellence.

I believe that helping people find purpose in life and to live more consciously is a worthy end in itself. The physical manifestation is that readers of this site have quit unfulfilling jobs, transformed relationships, and started deciding and choosing their dreams more consciously (such as by starting their own businesses). It’s fair to say that there are dozens of new businesses that exist today at least indirectly because of the work done here. This is assuming people were truthful in reporting these changes to me via email. I’ve also received emails about people changing their lives for the better in other ways — starting new relationships, reaching new educational goals, etc. Many of these emails are very long, sharing with me the details of how the person’s transformation took place. I always enjoy reading them because it helps me see how certain ideas impact people.

These may not be worthy results in your opinion, and that’s fine if you don’t value them much. To me they are worthwhile. A change like a new business being formed is the material manifestation of a person’s own growth in consciousness. I help foster the growth in consciousness — they start the business.

Helping people grow in consciousness is to me the most worthwhile end I could pursue. Even while I was running Dexterity, I could see the rippling effect of how raising people’s awareness in some areas would lead them to manifest concrete changes in their lives. I realized that if I could help thousands more people identify their purpose in live and live more consciously, that would have a greater long-term effect on the world than anything I did purely for myself.

I sometimes think of my work as planting seeds. Those seeds are thoughts and ideas. When they go out into the world, they have a rippling effect. I saw this happen with my Dexterity articles, and I see it happening today. Almost every day I receive emails from people telling me about those ripples. “I quit my job to start my own business.” “I asked my girlfriend to marry me.” “I decided that what I really want to do with my life is to be a writer, and I’m going back to school.” “I started a new exercise program and have kept it up for 30 days and have a lot more energy now.” “I left an abusive relationship.” “I nearly doubled my productivity at work and soon received a promotion.”

Did not Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Teresa all serve to raise people’s awareness, to make us more conscious, to plant seeds within us? I would say that this was the greatest effect of their work, which endures even after death. I’ve read their stories too, and their thoughts and ideas are now seeds in my own consciousness.

I’m excited to think of all the long-term ripples that will manifest in the coming years. It fills me with joy to imagine how the world might be transformed with thousands more purpose-driven highly conscious beings living in it.

So yes, whether you call this growth or change, this is what I’ve been working on. This is a fairly recent perspective for me though (perhaps last few months), so I’m sure it will continue to evolve.

See… on one level of awareness, you might say that some perspectives are better or worse than others. For example, you might say it’s better to be a millionaire than a pauper. And within that paradigm, those statements make perfect sense. If you were a millionaire and lost all your money, you wouldn’t consider that as growth. As you said, a better word for it would be change.

Another paradigm, however, is that one perspective is no better or worse than any other. Each has value in its own way because each new perspective you experience will foster the growth of your awareness. So within this paradigm, if you had an experience like Bernie Ebbers or Martha Stewart just did, you would still think of it as a growth experience, not merely as change. Even as your material situation seemed to be contracting, your consciousness would ultimately expand as a consequence of experiencing a new perspective.

I’m still goal-oriented. However, the nature of my goals has shifted. It used to be that about 80% of my goals were about physical world accomplishments, and 20% were related to becoming more aware or conscious. Now it’s 80-20 the opposite direction. I find the consciousness-related goals much more challenging and fulfilling.

I would still appreciate it if you feel comfortable answering my question about spectacular achievements.

But sometime during the past year, I gradually let go of that defintion. Today I define success more in terms of being and becoming.

Someday my human life is going to end. No matter what I accomplish here in terms of measurable actions and deeds, both for myself and others, those results will ultimately turn to dust, given enough time. As I see it, the only part of me that has the potential to endure is my consciousness. My physical body and all my stuff will have to stay behind. And that holds true for everyone else here too. I don’t have total certainty as to whether or not our consciousness can/will endure after death, but I do have certainty that nothing else will.

So I choose to spend my time working on my consciousness and the consciousness of other people. Then when I die, I’ll just keep doing the same thing I’m doing now, assuming I’m still conscious and aware on some level (if I’m wrong, it won’t matter anyway). I’ll find other conscious beings who resonate with this purpose, and we’ll continue to explore and develop our consciousness together.

So the greatest success I seek is the process of exploring and understanding consciousness itself. This is a journey, not a destination, and while it can produce some manifestations in the physical world that can be measured and observed with eyes and ears, it goes much deeper than that.

For example, a huge success to me was identifying and consciously choosing a purpose for my life, a purpose that would be flexible enough to withstand my own exploration of consciousness while still providing enough direction to be meaningful. From a material world perspective, it is nothing but a few words. But from my own exploration of consciousness and the effort I put into this goal, it is one of my all-time greatest personal accomplishments. I would not trade it for a billion dollars — seriously. It is certain that I can’t keep a billion dollars when I die, but there is a chance that I can retain my sense of purpose even after death.

Some of my other personal successes include:
- a feeling of pervasive joy and happiness
- motivation and passion for living
- a daily sense of gratitude
- courage
- no fear of death
- no fear of failure
- unconditional love
- forgiveness (mainly of myself)
- no anger or resentment towards anyone
- compassion for all living things
- inner peace

Material world success is guaranteed to be temporary. But successes in the exploration and development of one’s consciousness — those may have the power to endure. To me, that is real success — the chance to build something that may last forever.

I understand that to many people, these do not represent worthy achievements. I also note that there are problems with maintaining a blog that serves as a history of who I was in the past rather than who I am today. I knew this would be a challenge when I started this blog, but I decided to keep the old material online even when it doesn’t represent my current thinking. I don’t agree with much of the stuff I wrote last year, but I see that as a good thing — it means I’m growing. Rather than delete every day’s entry after a month or two, I figured it’s best to keep it online. I still get positive feedback on articles I wrote six years ago, so apparently people still find it beneficial.

Another issue is that I often write blog posts from a perspective that doesn’t represent my current level of consciousness. This is why some articles seem more conceptual and high-level like how to discover your life purpose, while others are more about third-dimensional success like what foods to eat. I opted to do this because I thought it was important for helping people who are at different levels in their own personal growth. To some people, the idea of getting out of bed before sunrise is a challenging and difficult one.

But perhaps this was a mistake on my part. Maybe when I do this, I am not being true to myself. For example, if I were to write an article called “How to Organize Your Home Office,” it would likely become very popular. I could share a lot of tips that would be useful to people who are currently struggling with that type of thing. I’ve certainly written articles like this in the past. But it would not be a good representation of my current level of thinking. It is certainly nowhere near the edge of what I’m personally working on right now.

You’ve (perhaps indirectly) given me something important to think about here. Perhaps I should spend more time writing about the front edge of what I’m working on instead of the trailing edge of things I figured out 5-10 years ago. That might result in a greater congruency between who I am right now, what I write, and helping others to grow as well. I’m going to take some time to let this sink in.