Yeah, I know I’m ugly…I said to a bartender, make me a Zombie, he said, God already beat me to it. – Rodney Dangerfield, comedian.

Better hold on tight because I’m very inspired this week…The other day I had the wonderful privilege of getting stuck in commuter traffic headed to Boston. To put it as nicely as I’m able, I can’t think of anything worse…but this time was different. I seem to be looking for the deeper meaning in events rather than take them simply at face value and wow did this one hit me! There exists the strange phenomenon that some drivers simply get in the passing lane and meander forward oblivious of the fact that there is traffic behind them chomping at the bit to get by. Trust me that this is not the simple observation of a potential road rager, rather the observation of someone asking…why? Looking down the road it was quite clear that there was plenty of room to simply slide over to the slow lane and continue at the tortoise’s pace, but instead the hares continued to zip by on the inside tossing nasty glances the way of the slow poke. But, when I went by and threw my compulsory glance, I noticed something even more frightening….a Zombie! I wonder if they even remember an instant of the trip…how about years of their lives gone by! I’m not talking the thing of Halloween folklore, rather a real live human zombie living amongst us, and as the day wore on I noticed that they were everywhere! Sitting in a hospital waiting room, I heard one staff member say to the other: “are you havin a good day” to which the other replied “so far, so good” to which the first concluded “me too…it could be worse”…pure Zombie speak! These people were so zoned out that they had fallen into a pattern of communicating that made no sense…how could “so good” get worse if it’s not bad in the first place!

Few friendships would remain, if each knew what his friend said of him when he wasn’t there. – Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher, whose work strongly influenced the development of modern economics and social science.

I’m not sure why this comes to me with the surprise of an epiphany, but I’m amazed at how often we can’t stop ourselves from bad mouthing each other. There seems to be almost an addiction level response that when given the opportunity to throw somebody under the proverbial bus, we don’t even hesitate a nanosecond! As an emotional reactor most of my life, I suppose I never gave much thought to it because if I knew when someone had done it to me I simply went into attack mode, sought them out and unleashed a pointed verbal counter attack. I’ve never had a problem mincing my words so I’m sure I left many people fractured in my wake. Call it whatever you will but perhaps it’s maturity that has finally provided my personal smelling salts! I have noticed that from my kids, to friends, to business associates most people feel the need to verbally denigrate somebody else in order to feel better about themselves! Think about how many times you too have been sucked into this vortex of negativity…especially when someone else does something well that awakens the green eyed monster of jealousy!

It’s a question of spreading the available energy, aerobic and anaerobic, evenly over four minutes. If you run one part too fast you pay a price. If you run another part more slowly your overall time is slower. – Roger Bannister, English athlete and the first to run the mile in under four minutes.

There are certainly times that we must go all out with very clear goals in mind in order to feel productive and raise the level of bodily endorphins to incite the visceral feeling of happiness, but the quote from Roger Bannister tells the whole story…that if you go too hard during that journey you pay a price, often times very significant. We have all had that time in our lives when we pushed so hard that something seemed to snap. It might have resulted in a divorce, missing valuable time with our kids, talking ourselves out of a great job or even worse, doing some physical and psychological damage to ourselves. As a highly driven person, I know this challenge all too well. There have been several times in my life that I thought I was supposed to conquer the world in a half an hour only to leave myself in a highly frustrated and exhausted place. It’s funny how life just delivers the same message until we finally get it and fall into a more reasonable pace!

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. – Steven Wright, comedian.

Over the years I have become an avid reader of books and only wish that I had started at even a younger age. I can remember like it was yesterday the first time I truly got lost in a book. It was J.R.R.Tolkien’s, the Hobbit. I had finally become so bored one day chasing my tail with nothing much to do that I finally submitted and forced myself to sit still in a chair and try to read. What happened next to me was actually remarkable as I sat in that chair for hours…I have no idea for how long, but I do know it was the better part of the day. I can still feel the synapses firing away as I imagined myself in that strange and exciting place…another world. My love of reading, however, did not really catch fire until I had graduated from college, probably because during those school years there is so much of it required that I just needed a break.

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination. – Napoleon Hill, American author who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal success literature.

Ex Nihilo is a Latin term that translates to “out of nothing.” Albeit the term is used in many different references, it struck a chord with me recently conjuring up relations to the work of both Napoleon Hill and Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Hill was truly the modern day creator of the self improvement industry through his incredible 20 year study of the greatest minds of his era culminating in his seminal work, The Law of Success. He is also very well known for his book Think and Grow Rich with its mantra “what the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Dr. Maltz, certainly influenced by the work of Hill, takes us from the theoretical to a real “how to” approach when it comes to actually programming our mind to create something from nothing.