What is your mission in life?

You would never enroll in college unless you at least knew you wanted a degree.

You would never drive from Washington to New York unless you took the time to at least find out how to go north.

Yet in life, can you answer this question:  “why are you here on earth?”

When reading an obituary, we often see the convoluted paths that have taken people to the end of their life’s journey.

Why are we here?

My career has been in and around broadcasting and media but I see my reason for being on this earth is to teach and use my God-given skills to communicate.

What about you?

Once we know what is important to us we can pursue it more effectively.

Try this experiment.

Ask a few people (friends, family, associates) why they are on this earth.

Don’t be surprise to get an “I don’t know” or a weak answer.  Remarkably, most of us never think about it.

We can’t get to where we want to go if we don’t first know where we want to go.

Young folks are often caught in the trap of acting as if they don’t care – even about important things.

Some actually do care, but act as if they don’t.

Some don’t care at all so it’s easier to be cool.

But playing it cool isn’t unique to the current generation of young people and, believe it or not, older folks often adopt the same unfortunate attitude.

When did working hard to attain something you want become negative behavior?

Not for an Olympic athlete.

Not to an entrepreneur.

Not for a teacher.

Not for a doctor.

In fact, not for anyone who wants to live a fulfilling life.

I worry less about kids trying to play it cool than adults who have given up on working hard to chase their dreams.

I read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist during my shore vacation last week – a gift from a friend.

The book has been around a while but it was a new discovery for me and the professor in me found lots of things to underline.

The most important was this:

“Life is the moment we are living now”.

Like you, perhaps, I struggle with focusing on the present.  Everything that has helped me attain my goals from career to personal were set in future anticipation.

But Coelho is correct “If you can, concentrate only on the present, you’ll be a happy man (person)”.

Ironically, this is easier done than said but somehow we make it difficult.

We can start today.

This morning.

Right now.

For one day focus on what is happening in life as you presently live it. Postpone future plans or worries to a special time when you can handle such things.  Don’t let planning interfere with living.

For one day focus on what is happening in the present not the past.  Go to the past to retrieve a happy moment, a fond memory or a lesson learned and then quickly return to the present.

If we make it simple, we can do this.

The Cumberland Americans just got eliminated from this year’s Little League World Series.

They stood stunned and teary-eyed losing by the smallest of margins – one run.

But coach David Belisle had all the right words in a rambling and emotional post game pep talk.

• He built them up, didn’t tear them down.
• He told them what they had accomplished together.
• He said it was okay to cry – and most of these young boys did (and you will too if you watch the video).
• He said how proud he was of them.

There is more benefit to losing than winning.

Winning feels better.

But losing is transformative.

Whether it is a young person in your life or anyone of any age, positivity, accomplishment, feelings and pride are four things that help people recover from defeat to succeed another day instead of discourage them.

Here’s the video.  It’s 3:38 seconds like you’ve probably never seen before.

Sad, but successful people seem to grow tired of their mates often after they have both endured many trials and tribulations.

But what if we put as much work into our relationships as we put into our careers.

Now look, I am not speaking as a stellar example.

I am speaking as a graduate of that old School of Hard Knocks we always hear about.

The same things that drive our career success could really help make more marriages and relationships successful.

1. Spend as much passion in the marriage as you do at work.
2. Details always matter in a successful business and the same attention to detail is a homerun in relationships.
3. Show even half the enthusiasm upon greeting your loved one at the beginning and end of each day as you do meeting clients or associates you like.
4. Have goals.  If we’re successful at work, we have a game plan.  What’s our game plan at home?  Same old, same old leads to a mighty unhappy marriage.
5. Give up some power.  Take real and genuine pride in outsourcing an equal number of major and minor decisions to your spouse.  At work, no one likes a control freak.  At home, no one likes a control freak.

The skills we have at work are a great rehearsal for a better relationship at home.

Which means – we already know how to make our relationships better.

The current best thinking is to always provide references when applying for a new job.

The phrase “references available upon request” should be retired.

There is a better way.

At the end of your resume, include only the best references you have.  List their name, title, contact information AND …

A line quoted exactly as they summed your skills up.  In other words, ask them for it in a letter and include the quote after their name.  Most employers will not want to make more work and call all your references if they think the quotes are authentic.

And never fear a bad reference.

That’s right.  You may want to reread that line again.

Some people get pleasure or feel justified in hurting others from moving on from a bad situation for both of them.

I once applied for an on-air job at a big number one radio station in Philadelphia.  I had great references except for one difficult to work for employer but I had to list my employment at his station.

My prospective employer in fact called that mean person and sure enough got a not so nice reference.

Later when my prospective employer called me back for a second interview and an audition, he asked me point blank – I called this so and so and he didn’t have very nice things to say about you.

I was stunned.

But I said, “I am sorry about that, but I worked hard for him and I am grateful for the other mentors I’ve had”.

After what seemed like a verrrry long pause, he leaned over and said, “He’s an idiot anyway.  Never has a nice thing to say about anyone.  You’re hired”.

My willingness to be humble, authentic and honest overcame a glitch that could have ruined a breakthough career opportunity.

You’re never out if you’re never down.

I have a wristband called Lark that I can wear to bed that reports the quality of my sleep via Bluetooth and an iPad.

How many times did I wake up during the night even briefly.  How long did it take to fall asleep.  And I get a total grade from 1-10 on how well I slept – with suggestions on how to improve.

This kind of thing is likely to proliferate as Apple is rumored to be working on a wristband (iWatch maybe) that can report other vital heath and happiness signs to the wearer.

Some say it can even monitor blood sugar or tell you when your blood pressure goes up.

In other words, we’re about to enter the age of tracking exercise and social interaction, two of the main contributors to happiness.

But how do we get started?

1. Exercise – without that your health is compromised.
2. Make new friends, spend time with old friends because socializing is a main contributor to happiness.
3. Work for at least one accomplishment a day.  It can be anything but shoot for 365 accomplishments a year and they will soon dwarf the disappointments that rob us of happiness.
4. Be grateful not just for what you have but that which you don’t have.  Do we have to get cured of cancer to be thankful or can we train ourselves to say, thank goodness I am healthy and I appreciate it.
5. Questions to answer:  Have I gotten the most important things I want in life?  If I could start my life all over again, would I change anything?  In what do you find beauty?  In what kind of relationships do you find warmth?

If we start now, those wristbands are going to someday reflect the progress we are making toward a happier and more meaningful life.

Perhaps you have emojis activated on your phone’s text messaging.

For those who do not know what an emoji is think of a little smiley face that you’ve seen at the end of an email or text.  Except much more.

Emojis are replacing text.

What a long distance we have come – from Gutenberg’s first printing press, to books, newspapers, letters, emails, Twitter and text messaging and now a few icons and a few words.

The world evolves and we evolve with it.

Communication is the goal.

Whatever fosters better communication is what we should embrace.

No reason to fear the future because things are changing. Just don’t lose sight of our main purpose as a society – to communicate effectively to others.

Bring on the tools.

A Time Magazine and Real Simple poll of women released a few weeks ago indicates that women need to take more risks.

The poll illustrates that the fear of failure is keeping more women from top corporate jobs.

Everyone fails but according to the poll, women fear failure even more then men.

I like to take the gender away from this issue although the research speaks for itself.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained became an oft-used pearl of wisdom because it is true.

So what can we do about the fear of taking risks?

1. No one wins 100% of the time.  Substitute trying hard 100% of the time instead of concentrating on succeeding and the victories will come more readily.
2. Lack of confidence feeds the fear of taking risks.  You build confidence when you give yourself credit when you do succeed.  Most people skip this important step.
3. One person’s failure is another person’s next success.  Thomas Edison tried thousands of times to invent the light bulb but he never gave up.  That victory must have been sweet.
4. Here’s something you can do to prepare yourself for taking more risks.  Target a successful person you admire and see if she or he just walked into their success or learned from taking risks that could lead to failure.

Nothing succeeds like success, but success is built on the back of risks taken, lessons learned.

Incivility is increasingly fanned by social media.

Trolling – the mostly anonymous and often in mobs – upends decent social discussions.

Zelda Williams gave up.  With days of her late father, comedian Robin Williams’s death, she had to close her social media accounts rather than endure fake pictures of her father who committed suicide with marks around his neck.

Sadly, the more this practice of trolling comes to light, the more people do it.

What has happened to our world?

My theory is that we spend so much time interacting with our screens that we become insensitive to how people respond to us – both negatively and positively. And that emboldens some people who would never behave in this fashion if they had to look you in the eye face to face.

Most people are nice and considerate.

As rudeness proliferates in our digital world the best defense may be to do as Zelda Williams did and step back.

But rudeness occurs on airplanes, in hair salons where cell phones are pressed to the ears of heads being washed and many, many other situations.

Immediate contact via social media requires the same courtesy that we show to others in person.

It is not an excuse for bad behavior.

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