August 20, 2009

“I Don’t Know What to Do”

“I don’t know what to do.”

This is the biggest thing keeping people from improving their lives. They don’t know what to do because they don’t know what they really want to do. Often people just muddle along until things get so bad that they know they have to change something — and more importantly, then they have a pretty good idea of what kind of change they want to make.

But you don’t have to sit around waiting for something to happen to give you that kind of clarity. The next time you feel bored with life, instead of checking to see what’s on television, check to see what’s on . . .

August 10, 2009

How Long Does It Take to Create Lasting Change?

“Hey, let’s build a garage this weekend.”

I don’t know if that’s quite the way it started, but people driving to work this morning might notice a new garage in town, one that wasn’t there on Friday. On Friday after work, I saw two people working with a pile of lumber. On Saturday, you could hear a lot of cutting and pounding, and by the end of the day, the new garage had taken shape. Now that it has been built, it is likely to still be there 120 years from now.

For any lasting change, you can trace it back to the one day it got started. We tend to think of big changes as taking a long time to happen, but that’s not always the case. It only took a weekend to put together a garage, and I can think of similar examples from my own life.