Observe… Learn… Do… Teach

On this journey we call life we learn from our personal experiences as well as the experiences of others. A common desire of virtually everyone is to live a healthy, happy and prosperous life.

Unfortunately most people live unhealthy, unhappy and unprosperous lives. The sad irony is that the principles for living a healthy, happy and prosperous life have been with us for thousands of years. 

At the age of 11, I began my quest to learn the secret to health, happiness and prosperity. Of course I wasn’t that clear on what I wanted, but I can clearly remember that I wanted to be healthy, I wanted to be happy and I wanted to be wealthy when I grew up. I figured that, barring a tragic accident, I was looking at 70 or more years of life ahead of me. This seemed liked a long time to live each day unhealthy, unhappy and financially struggling. I remember thinking that I just would rather not live out my life like that and that I needed to learn what I needed to do so it wouldn’t be like that for me.

Back then I learned mostly through observation. Even at that young age it was easy to see which behaviors resulted in good health, happiness and prosperity; and which behaviors didn’t. It was so obvious in fact that it was a mystery to me why so many adults with many more years of experience and observation continued to behave in ways that resulted in poor health, made them unhappy and kept them struggling financially.

I began looking at people as crystal balls; that the sum total of each person’s experiences and behaviours were a way to see what my future would be like if modelled that person. So I began looking for healthy, happy and prosperous people to model.

I learned how to be a consequential thinker and to tie certain behaviours to certain consequences. If health, happiness and prosperity where the consequences of  certain behaviours, I wanted to learn and do those behaviours. When I observed the opposite consequences, I wanted to avoid the behaviours associated with those negative consequences.

Although a simple plan, it seemed to make a lot of sense me. I remember thinking that maybe it was too simple and I was missing something. After all I was only 11 years old and very inexperienced in life.  I decided to give it a try. I thought of my plan as a great, life-long, experiment; and that at some point in my life I could write about my results. Either it worked, or it didn’t.

So here I am 40 years later. And although I still have many years yet ahead of me (hopefully), I feel at this point in my life that I can say with confidence that the simple plan conceived in my 11 year old mind has worked well for me.

My desire is to share the behaviours that I have observed and the principles that I have learned and applied in my life that have attributed to the healthy, happy and prosperious life that I now enjoy.

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