Take the Time to Do What You Need to Do and Do It Now!

In a class I teach for adults, I recently did the "unpardonable." I gave the class homework! The assignment was to "go to someone you love within the next week and tell them you love them. It has to be someone you have never said those words to before or at least haven't shared those words with for a long time."

Now that doesn't sound like a very tough assignment, until you stop to realized that most of the men in that group were over 35 and were raised in the generation of men that were taught that expressing emotions is not "macho."

Showing feelings or crying (heaven forbid!) was just not done. So this was a very threatening assignment for some.

At the beginning of our next class, I asked if someone wanted to share what happened when they told someone they loved them. I fully expected one of the women to volunteer, as was usually the case, but on this evening one of the men raised his hand. He appeared quite moved and a bit shaken.
 
 As he unfolded out of his chair (all 6'2" of him), he began by saying, "Dennis, I was quite angry with you last week when you gave us this assignment. I didn't feel that I had anyone to say those words to, and besides, who were you to tell me to do something that personal? But as I began driving home my conscience started talking to me. It was telling me that I knew exactly who I needed to say 'I love you' to. You see, five years ago, my father and I had a vicious disagreement and really never resolved it since that time. We avoided seeing each other unless we absolutely had to at family gatherings. But even then, we hardly spoke to each other. So, last Tuesday by the time I got home I had convinced myself I was going to tell my father I loved him.

"It's weird, but just making that decision seemed to lift a heavy load off my chest.

"When I got home, I rushed into the house to tell my wife what I was going to do. She was already in bed, but I woke her up anyway. When I told her, she didn't just get out of bed, she catapulted out and hugged me, and for the first time in our married life she saw me cry. We stayed up half the night drinking coffee and talking. It was great!

"The next morning I was up bright and early. I was so excited I could hardly sleep. I got to the office early and accomplished more in two hours than I had the whole day before.

“At 9:00 I called my dad to see if I could come over after work. When he answered the phone, I just said, ‘Dad, can I come over after work tonight? I have something to tell you.’ My dad responded with a grumpy, ‘Now what?’ I assured him it wouldn’t take long, so he finally agreed.

“At 5:30, I was at my parents’ house ringing the doorbell, praying that Dad would answer the door. I was afraid if Mom answered that I would chicken out and tell her instead. But as luck would have it, Dad did answer the door.

“I didn’t waste any time—I took one step in the door and said, ‘Dad, I just came over to tell you that I love you.’

“It was as if a transformation came over my dad. Before my eyes his face softened, the wrinkles seemed to disappear and he began to cry. He reached out and hugged me and said, ‘I love you too, son, but I’ve never been able to say it.’

“It was such a precious moment I didn’t want to move. Mom walked by with tears in her eyes. I just waved and blew her a kiss. Dad and I hugged for a moment longer and then I left. I hadn’t felt that great in a long time.

“But that’s not even my point. Two days after that visit, my dad, who had heart problems but didn’t tell me, had an attack and ended up in the hospital, unconscious. I don’t know if he’ll make it.

“So my message to all of you in this class is this: Don’t wait to do the things you know need to be done. What if I had waited to tell my dad—maybe I will never get the chance again! Take the time to do what you need to do and do it now!”
Dennis E. Mannering

The Spirit of Love

A man married a beautiful girl. He loved her very much.

One day she developed a skin disease. Slowly she started to lose her beauty. It so happened that one day her husband left for a tour. While returning he met with an accident and lost his eyesight. However, their married life continued as usual.


But as days passed she lost her beauty gradually. Blind husband did not know this and there was not any difference in their married life.
He continued to love her and she also loved him very much.
One day she died. Her death brought him great sorrow. He finished all her last rites and wanted to leave that town.
A man from behind called and said, now how will you be able to walk all alone? All these days your wife used to help you.
He replied I am not blind. I was acting because if she knew l could see her ugliness it would have pained her more than her disease.


So I pretended to be blind. She was a very good wife. I only wanted to keep her happy.


Moral- Sometimes it is good for us to act blind and ignore one anther's shortcomings, in order to be happy.



That's the spirit of LOVE

The Power of 20

Lt. Col. Frank Dailey unexpectedly found himself on the receiving end of an act of kindness from an 8- year-old boy named Myles Eckert after leaving a Cracker Barrel one afternoon.

Little Myles spotted a 20-dollar bill on the ground and decided to pay it forward to the soldier. Attached was the following note:

"Dear Soldier — my dad was a soldier. He's in heaven now. I found 20 dollars in the parking lot when we got here. We like to pay it forward in my family. It's your lucky day! Thank you for your service. Myles Eckert, a gold star kid."

Myles’ father, Army Sgt. Andy Eckert, was killed in Iraq just weeks after Myles was born.

Lt. Col. Dailey was so inspired by Myles’ kind act, he shared the story via email which in turn was shared more than half a million times on social media.

This momentum led Myles to found The Power of 20, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping other charities and families facing obstacles, nationwide. Most recently The Power of 20 spearheaded an effort to provide a dying soldier his final wish of attending a Green Bay Packer playoff game.

Do you feel inspired by this story to pay it forward?  Share some of your money with the less privileged.

Most Retweeted Tweet

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, the first passenger on Elon Musk’s planned rocket flight around the moon, has posted the most retweeted message in Twitter’s 13-year-history. 

Maezawa wrote in Japanese on 5 January that his online fashion retailer, Zozotown, had recorded incredible sales, and to celebrate he said that he would “present one million yen ($9,200) in cash to 100 people to make a total of 100 million yen". Maezawa added that he would contact the winners via direct message after the 7 January deadline. 

The tweet has since been retweeted more than four million times, beating the previous records set by a Nevada teenager’s 2017 campaign to secure a year’s supply of chicken nuggets and Ellen DeGeneres’s celebrity selfie at the 2014 Oscars. 

It was a good move to up his follower count, as well. The number of people following Maezawa’s account went from about 500,000 at the end of last week to more than 4.5 million by Monday lunchtime, according to the Japan Times.

Elephant and Dog Story

An elephant and a dog got pregnant at the same time. Three months later the dog gave birth to 6 puppies. Six months later the dog was pregnant again, and nine months later she gave birth to another dozen puppies. And so that pattern continued. 

In the eighteenth months the dog approaches the elephant to question her, "Are you sure you are pregnant? We were pregnant at the same time, I have given birth 3 times to a dozen puppies and they are already adult dogs and you are still pregnant, what's the matter? " 

The elephant replied, "There is something I want you to understand. I am an elephant, not a puppy. I only give birth to one in two years, when my baby touches the earth, the earth will feel him. 

When my baby crosses a street, humans will stop to see with admiration. So what I have is powerful and great. "

Do not lose faith when you see others receiving their gratifications soon. Do not feel envious if you have not received your own blessings. 

Do not despair, say to yourself "My time is coming and when it comes, people will be admired".

How Can You Make a Million Dollar in a Year

 How Can You Make a Million Dollar in a Year

https://jacobbinoy.blogspot.com/2018/12/how-can-you-make-million-dollar-in-year_26.html

How One Woman Went from Homeless to Millionaire In Less Than Two Years

How One Woman Went from Homeless to Millionaire In Less Than Two Years

It was Christmas Eve, 1990. 

“I was stoned out of my mind for two months – sleeping with eight different guys. I got to eat only by dating all these people. I realized that I had become worse than the family I grew up in and that was devastating. My mom and dad were drug addicts and I had never seen my parents sober. My childhood was filled with threats and getting beaten daily; week in, week out. My whole life was filled with horror and terror and lies and I vowed that I would never be like my family. And there I was doing cocaine...”

She hated cocaine ‘with a passion’ and recalls that when coke was introduced into the home by her parents when she was a teenager, the violence had intensified and the emotional instability was ‘horrifying’. “They would say one thing and then another thing after 15 minutes.”

That Christmas Eve, she joined other waitresses at the beach on a drink and drug binge.

“I was sweating as I was constantly dancing. I see the coke and I leaned down and I did a line. I remember waking up at 10 the next morning on my beach mat and I am asking everyone for coke. I was walking around saying, ‘Where do I get more of that stuff?’

That day, I would have given my body – I would have become a prostitute for coke and that’s how low I became. I hated everything about myself. I knew my future would never be good. I was suicidal from the age of six. My life was not worth living. There was no chance to turn it into anything better. I was disgusting. I hated how my parents raised us. My life was filled with broken promises and lies and people stealing and people beating me and people hating me and me hating myself even more...”

Fueled by the after-effects of the drug, in an almost catatonic state that morning, Dani decided she was going to end it all. “I started walking towards the ocean and dived underneath the wave.”

A few more moments under, and her life would have ended there – not an unsurprising demise given her circumstances, the coroner and police chief would have quietly concluded.

But as it happened, in that instant, her life changed forever.

'Almost a Miracle'

“I heard a voice say, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’’

It felt almost like a miracle to her.

“The feeling of coke left instantly - I wasn’t wanting it anymore. I rolled up my beach mat, turned around and hiked a mile that I needed to in order to get back to my car. I drove 45 minutes to the beach where I was living. And the whole time I was driving, it was as if the left side of my mind was saying, ‘This is not what is intended for your life, you shouldn’t be drinking. There is more to life,’ and the right side was saying, ‘You’re a failure, you’re a loser, you’re filthy; worse than your parents. Drive this car into the ocean.’ This was like a war inside my mind with these voices and I was literally in a trance.

And I have no idea why I chose to listen to that first voice.”

So Dani began to ask herself: What can I do? What do I need to do to get myself out this situation?

“As a cocktail waitress, I was not making enough, so I had to figure out my options.”

She needed $4,500 to be able to afford an apartment but with a small income derived mostly from tips coupled with the island’s high rents, it would take her four months to save enough money.

“I didn’t want to be homeless for another four months. Rent in Hawaii was outrageously expensive and I couldn’t afford plane tickets back to California. I knew no one. I was terrified I would be raped or beaten or kidnapped because there wasn’t any shelter. I was a kid who, between the ages of three to 16, was abused and molested. The emotions were still there. You try to push this back but when you’re homeless, it is at the forefront of your mind all the time and it was terrifying to me.”

That night she fell asleep in her car without any answers but the following day, the proverbial light bulb went off.

“I get this idea. Everything I ever owned was in the backseat of my car. And there was this weight loss program I had purchased long before I was homeless, lying in the back seat. I had used it for a week. I never paid attention to it before. And it just caught the corner of my eye in the sun. It was warped from the humidity. But it was as if this device was talking to me. I picked it up and it was as if this thing was saying, ‘I’m your answer.’ And my first thought was, ‘No, I’m not going to peddle a weight loss program! No way I’m going to do this!’

As if it was beneath me. As if it was sinking to a new depth. And you know, sometimes you have that feeling that you need to do something you don’t want to do?

I turned the box around, saw the manufacturer’s details and called them from the payphone.

I started asking them the question: What is it going to take to carry the product in Hawaii? As it turned out, it would require me to have licensing - and money, that I didn’t have.”

And this is when Dani - given her very scant means – decided to get resourceful.

“I handwrote a flyer [for the weight loss program] but I needed a phone number to advertise so people could contact me – and I didn’t have one. So I picked up the Yellow Pages in the phone booth. You know cocktail waitresses always have coins! So I looked through the Yellow Pages and called a small telecommunications company. And I chatted with this guy for some time, trying to build a relationship. I asked him what the cost of their voice mail service was.

He said to me, ‘Don’t drive all the way to pay for this. Send me a check for $15. 

Here’s your new number...!’

Dani, of course, was elated – down to her last quarter for that week, she got the break she needed.

“I put up the flyer at the Post Office where everyone in this town went to, and three hours later, not thinking I would get any messages - it was filled with 25 messages. I didn’t know what to do with them!

Long story short, I ended up with 40 checks, totaling $4,000 dollars from people I didn’t even know – that first month!

I called up the manufacturer with an order but they wanted a physical address to send the product and I didn’t have one. So I talked the local liquor store into letting me use their address.”

Dani made a quarter of a million dollars that first year just by selling the weight loss program, was a millionaire by the second year and went on to open up 18 weight loss centers around the country. She sold the business in 1996 - a multi-millionaire.