So, today will be day 3 for Personal Power from Tony, and yesterday’s sessions were pretty good, as they got me thinking a bit about my own life, and why I choose to do the things I do. The principal, was basically, that we as humans do what we do for two basic reasons. Pain and pleasure. Or perhaps more succinctly, the avoidance of pain, and the pursuit of pleasure. It explains why we procrastinate so often about things (avoiding painful tasks), and why we do things like overeat so much (the sweet pleasurable taste of chocolate). The exercise was pretty good to. Coming up with 4 things that I should be doing, but am not, and how they are related to pleasure or pain. Basically, how much pain I’m avoid by not doing them, but also how much pleasure I could be receiving if I actually completed them. The problem with most of us, including me, is that we associate the actions or tasks more with the pain then with the pleasure associated with them. It seems like many things in life have both pain and pleasure associated with them. Tony claims that in subsequent tapes, he will train us to associate the actions with pleasure, and not with the pain. For many of us, whatever we feel in our minds is the most real (pleasure or pain) with the task is the one we make our decisions on. Eating chocolate in the moment seems more pleasurably real, then the thought of “oh, I’m going to gain weight” in the future, so we decide to eat the chocolate now. I think, in the past, I’ve tried to change that association in my mind. I’ve done things, like stick pictures of bigger boats, or nicer cars to my monitor, but they never seem to work long term. Maybe, I just haven’t done enough of it, or just not consistently enough. I know, that where he wants to get my head to is a workable approach, I’m just hoping that his methods are more successful then mind. Maybe, it’s not so much just adding the pleasurable feels to my long term goals, but it is the removing of the painful feelings from those same goals. The feeling that this writing of novels venture won’t end in the same way that my other business ventures have. Sure, it’s always a possibility that business will go wrong, but this is the first time, that I’m creating something that seems really valuable. The books I want to write will be written my be, and will hopefully stand up to test of real human reviewed reading. Real people will actually look at the stories, and hopefully enjoy them, or hate them, who knows. But, that’s something that I’ve never done with any of my sites. They were always just meant to be temporary things that could be replaced by another site, when Google caught wind of them, and their algorigims tossed them out. But, these books are real stories, that a reasonable intelligent person (me) came up with, and hopefully in time, I will improve my skills as a writer and create better and better stories. That’s the long term goal, and that makes good sense. The urgency, I feel though, is that I need to get going at this like now, as it’s such a great opportunity in this time with e-books for independent writers to get a leg up. So many success stories, I’ve read from others, who are no smarter, or gifted then I am have changed their lives. Just think, about how they must feel every morning when they roll out of bed, that they have new readers, and fans, and monies in their bank account. That every day it’s your job to simply be creative and come up with cool new stories about people and places and things that appeal to you and others in interesting ways. Just think how you would feel, knowing that you are a competent writer, and that you can sit down, and write interesting dialogue, that you can come up with interesting plot twists. That you surround yourself with people, and things that feed that creativity, that your world becomes better then the world you now live in. That basically at this age, you reinvent yourself in someone more interesting then you were a year or ten or twenty years ago. That people will think that’s cool, and that the new people and friends you make will take an interest in your stories. That you can now afford to travel around the world to different places, and have different experiences that will only fuel the new stories you want to tell. It could be a really wonderful life . . . one well worth living for many many many more years.

LOCATION: home office WORDS WRITTEN: 0 PUSHUPS: 25 TODO: tony robbins session, christmas shopping, return electronics, put some sites back up, scan some more pictures TV: The Road, glee BOOK: none GAME: none EXERCISE: none WEIGHT: 178 BREAKFAST: eggs & bacon LUNCH: big ass salad DINNER: none SNACKS: grapes, orange, trail mix ALCOHOL: none BEDTIME: 11:30 pm AWAKE: 1:30 am and 5 am and 9 am