Last year when Stacy McCain was under attack by the Left, Stogie helped to rout the attackers thanks to his personal knowledge that they were using bogus charges. Now Stogie is in trouble — he has been out of work for over a year. His savings have run out. He has missed his July mortgage payment and might miss August, too. Bill collectors are calling. Even a small donation will help because every donation gives him another reason to hope and loosens the grip of fear so he can think properly and make a new plan.

If you are wondering — yes, the book I advertise here, Stuart Lichtman’s How to Get Lots of Money for Anything — Fast,* DOES help in situations like this because it teaches you how to get your conscious and unconscious minds to work in harmony to achieve your goals and shows you how to turn self-defeating patterns into supportive ones. If you are skeptical about it because I’m recommending it and I’m not rich — now — that’s because I haven’t really described the challenges I’ve had to overcome.

I’ve decided it’s time to do that because it will put posts I’m planning on the nature of conservatism versus the nature of liberalism in context. I’ve held back because I was worried about affecting my ability to get a job in the future — you know, like nothing else I’ve written here would ever come back and bite me in the ass. However, my best hope is to make it as a writer and entrepreneur, so it’s time to commit and that means being forthcoming about my challenges. My intention is that my dear gentle readers will see the congruence between my life and my writing and that people with similar challenges will see their path to overcoming them.

Right now — please help Stogie by going to his place and clicking his “Donate” button.

*This is an affiliate link, which means I receive a commission if you buy the book and do not tamper with the link. The book is worth more than Stuart charges for it and he provides a LOT of value for the money, including how to apply his techniques to finding the perfect job, losing weight (it works!) and finding your perfect spouse or business partner. If you are intrigued, but on the fence, then try his free mini-course.

I relate to the mother in this personal story because I was my late life partner Margaret’s warrior for over 20 years. But I’m also almost seven years in to the battle to save my own life from hypoxic brain damage due to obstructive sleep apnea — I was in death’s foyer before I was diagnosed and treated — and I can confirm that tenacity of purpose and a clear mental image of what you want to create can produce amazing victories:

Growing up, I always had to fight to get people to listen to me.

The worst part about being disabled isn’t the pain or the struggle but how the world tries to shove you into a corner and pretend that you don’t exist. After all, what could you possibly have to contribute? You’re going to die soon, poor thing. Here’s a nice, quiet room and some morphine to ease the pain.

They don’t proactively hold you back, no, but they don’t expect you to succeed either. I’ve spent my entire life fighting against the weight of those expectations.

Like when university professors were flabbergasted when, on the first day, I asked my attendant to raise his hand, so I could answer the question that no one else could.

Or the vaguely constipated look on the face of a venture capitalist when I asked for $500,000 of startup capital for my first software company.

Read the whole thing at Copyblogger here.

Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire  in the U.K. who researched how to be lucky and wrote a book about it called The Luck Factor. He published a piece giving highlights of his research findings on Jan. 9, 2003, at the Web site of the British newspaper, the Telegraph:

… unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, I created a “luck school” — a simple experiment that examined whether people’s luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn, whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from “luck school”, she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.

In the wake of these studies, I think there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune [note: boldfacing by CY]:

• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell — a reason to consider a decision carefully.
• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.
• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

FYI — the book I advertise on this site, How to Get Lots of Money for Anything — Fast by Stuart Lichtman, includes information on how to become much luckier. It covers far more than generating and attracting money and while I may not be wealthy, Stuart’s book has, literally, been a life-saver for me. For more information, including how to buy it, see the advertisement below this post.

Thanks to Stuart’s book I am able to recognize that Dr. Wiseman makes sound observations about the differences between the lucky and the unlucky and his principles to apply to become luckier — and since you, my dear gentle reader, are lucky enough to be reading this, I thought I would share the infomation to give you some tools you can use to make yourself even luckier.

Dad’s OK, I’m OK, Cuban Diva BFF’s OK, all the cats are OK.

But I spent the day working on a post that required me to re-live aspects of caring for Margaret while she was dying. Dear Jennie, The Bloggess, linked this song, “Laughing With,” by Regina Spektor in a tweet awhile back and it is so true and so piercingly beautiful. Today just seems like the right day to share it.

I haven’t forgotten that I promised to write about former ACORN leader Marcel Reid and how just a few minutes of conversation with her changed my view of the Left forever — I’ll get to it soon. I also want to tell the story of Margaret and Martina Navratilova at the 1993 March on Washington. And if my photos from the National Equality March are good, I’ll share some of those.

If you listen to this song, I’d like to recommend a couple of things to keep in mind. First, what you put your attention on grows stronger — so look to the good (and if you can’t see it, keep affirming it will appear until it does). And second, try this suggestion from an inspirational e-mail that I received from a dear friend today: “Stop telling God how big your storm is. Tell the storm how big your God is!”

A few days ago I posted a photo from LOL Cats that had captured my heart because of its unity of joy, silence and motion. I captioned it, “You gots to dance like no one is watchin.” I was thinking of a quote I’d heard at a Realtor seminar and attributed then to Louis Armstrong as, “You’ve got to dance like no one is watching, sing like no one is listening, love like you’ve never been hurt and work like you don’t need the money.”

I’ve captioned a couple more LOL Cat photos to go with the quote. But I thought I’d take a few moments to track down the real quote and its source. Here’s what I found at Quoteland.com from Nostromo, Quoteland Potentate:

I contacted Mr. Purkey asking him (here is the beginning of my message to him):
Are you the author of a quote that goes something like:
“Dance like no one is watching,
Work like you don’t need the money…”

and this is his reply:

Dear John,

Thanks for your note regarding the quote. It is
obvious that the theme has worked its way through many minds.
I certainly want to give credit to those who have tinkered with this beautiful concept.
My version follows. I am sure that most of the words are mine.
“You’ve gotta’ dance like there’s nobody watching,
Love like you’ll never be hurt.
Sing like there’s nobody listening,
And live like it’s heaven on earth.”
(And speak from the heart to be heard.)
Hope this helps.
Best wishes,

William W. Purkey
Wed 6/13/01 8:31 AM

I’ll be on the look-out for photos that speak to me about “Sing like there’s nobody listening” and “Live like it’s heaven on earth” and maybe even “Speak from the heart to be heard.” In the meantime, here is a reprise of “You’ve got to dance like no one is watching” and my LOL Cats for “You’ve got to love like you’ve never been hurt” and “Work like you don’t need the money”:

moar funny pictures

moar funny pictures

moar funny pictures

All my adult life I have had to work at being optimistic in the face of an assortment of crushing and deadly adversities and I have learned a lot about how to do it. So today I am going to start a category of posts on affirmations because I have been using them for over 30 years now and there is both an art and a science to being successful with them. My objective is to put in my gentle readers’ hands tools that have helped me and which will help them, too.

My biggest religious influence has been the work of Catherine Ponder, who is a minister of the Unity Church. I recommend every single one of her books, starting with her first, The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity. On page 11, she writes:

Success Adores the Prosperous Attitude

Another of the shocking truths about prosperity is that thoughts of our mind have made you what you are, and thoughts of your mind will make you whatever you become from this day forward. The more you realize this, themore you will come to know that people, places, conditions and events cannot keep your God-given prosperity and success from you, once you decide to deliberately employ prosperous thinking as your ally for success. Indeed, you will discover that the things, people and events that have previously worked against you will either begin to work for and with you, or they will fade out of your life, and new people and events will appear to help you succeed. That is the power of prosperous thinking.

Some authorities believe that one prosperous thought is more powerful than a thousand failure thoughts; and that two prosperous attitudes steadily held and expressed are more powerful than ten thousand failure attitudes! Success adores the prosperous attitude — of that you can be sure. A loving Father seems to adore the prosperous attitude, too. Surely others adore it and are attracted to it and work for it. More about these things in the next chapter.

Meanwhile, remind yourself often that God is the Source of all your supply and then make spiritual contact with Him, His rich substance and rich ideas that await your appreciation: I am the rich child of a loving Father. I now accept and claim his rich good for me in every phase of my life. My own God-given success in the form of rich ideas and rich results now appears!

The affirmation to use is the text in boldface. Elsewhere Dr. Ponder recommends decreeing an affirmation aloud or writing it by hand at least 15 times, or as long as it takes to get a sense of peace about the problem that concerns you. If this is something that resonates with you, or you are so desperate you are thinking, “What have I got to lose?,” then I suggest you start with this one because it is focused and she has tested its success power.

The mistake most people make when they compose their own affirmations is that their affirmation is a conglomeration of desired outcomes and a conglomeration does not have success power. I’ll write more on that in the future.