You are old when you outgrow the zest for enthusiasm.

Young people are naturally enthusiastic.

They haven’t been fully indoctrinated by the workaday world that often muzzles enthusiasm and discourages happiness.

Yet I know college students who are older than a 60-year old in their attitude and I have known 60-year olds who have the enthusiasm and curiosity of a teenager.

Botox erases lines but doesn’t infuse enthusiasm.

Personal trainers can get our muscles optimized in all the right places but they cannot show us how to be forever curious.

The world is youth oriented with 95 million Millennials coming of age and as old as 32, but there are a few things that belie age.

1. Smiling more is the best surgery for your face – it makes others open to relating to you.
2. The good old days were never that good, just old.  The real “good old days” are the ones we haven’t lived yet – the ones that are ripe with promise.
3. Diversity in interests, friends and passion are the true age interrupters.
4. An open mind is an eternally youthful mind
5. Humor is the great elixir that heals life’s hurts.

Or as Katy Perry sings:  “We can dance until we die, you and I…we’ll be young forever”.

We’re looking in the wrong place.

You will never find the right person for you by casting a net and hoping to snag them.  The divorce courts are filled with people who tried that trick one time too many.

Finding the right person is about finding what’s right for you or as the author Melody Beattie says, “to meet the right person you have to be the right person”.

1. Instead of checking the dating sites looking for the qualifications of others, sit down and take a look at your qualifications.  What makes you you?
2. Be able to name the five qualities that are most important to you in another person in order of importance.   Believe it or not, this isn’t easy to do. Knowing that, say, honesty, ethics, sense of humor, shared values or whatever may matter most to you is what you desire most in another.
3. Love at first sight happens because the people falling in love know exactly what they are searching for – no accident there.

Ironically, the more we look inward at ourselves, the more we attract people who possess the qualities we desire.

One more thing.

After a losing streak of bad relationships, take six months off – no dating, just hanging out with friends.  Spend the time to answer and embed the 5 qualities that you value most into your head.

Then when you start dating again, don’t be surprised if your luck changes.

I know.

It worked for me.

We all value being real and being honest.

The latest trend is young girls making YouTube videos and asking if they are pretty or not.

The New York Times recently ran an article on a 13-year old girl named Sammie who posted a video “Am I Ugly Or Pretty”.  She received 72,000 views in just a few months and 2,000 comments.

Sammie said she learned a lot about how cruel people can be.

Especially people who don’t know you.

Let’s put this one in perspective right now.

Beauty is hard to define and this is not really about beauty.  It’s about insecurity and looking to strangers to get that which many of us do not have.

1. Everyone is beautiful in their own way.  Is the second runner up in a beauty contest chopped liver?  Is a beauty contest even worth entering? If I ask you to tell me the most beautiful person you know, will you describe someone physically striking or the essence of a special person?
2. The only opinion that matters is yours – really.  Look into the mirror and see your soul. That is how to judge beauty.  Did you ever have a grandma who was ravaged by the years, hard of hearing and a mere shadow of what she used to be in her youth but you thought she was the most beautiful person ever.  She was.
3. Never, ever give control of your self-esteem to another person – not even a trusted one.  You are the guardian of all that is good about you.  This responsibility is not to be outsourced to another person.
4. Life is not a beauty pageant.  Can you name anyone more beautiful than Mother Teresa of Calcutta?
5. Don’t confuse good looks with self-esteem.  “Good looking” people are sometimes not nice.  And nice people are not always “good looking”.

If you must ask anyone to be honest with you and say whether you are beautiful, make that person you.

And the answer is yes.

I worked in television news where your likability is the most marketable asset.

TV stations and networks use what is called a Q Score to determine likeability.

Robin Roberts and Ellen DeGeneres are among the national TV figures who have high Q Scores and local TV anchors, sports and weather personalities are also tested because likeability means everything.

It also means everything to the rest of us.

Tom Brady, the New England Patriot’s star quarterback, is well liked in spite of the fact that he is good looking and has a beautiful wife.  We should hate him, right?

Here is Brady’s secret according to media consultant Randy Lane:

1. Be self-deprecating — “I’m the worst speller on the planet…”
2. Share your inner-dialogue — “I suddenly realized that I looked like a jerk…”
3. Be vulnerable — “I don’t think you ever have it all figured out.” Tom Brady

In short, be humble.

Humility allows people to get to know us and like us.

That’s what we all want – the two “A’s”.

We look for it when we do presentations.

We crave it in family and relationships.

It is the secret to being loved by others and encouraging love of self.

When we offer others unconditional acceptance and approval, we provide the glue that makes us stick close together.

Remember the power that we all have every day to offer those we care about the gift of approval and acceptance.

One of my readers tells me of a psychologist friend of his who has developed a way of shaking awake couples whose marriages are mired in arguing.

The first half hour is devoted to the litany of complaints from both the wife and her husband.

At that point, the psychologist asks the wife to leave the room while she (presumably) thinks he’s going to read the riot act to her husband.

Then he tells the husband “Buddy, you & your wife can come here once a week for a long time and do this and make my car payment for me or you can walk out of here today and never see me again if you answer this question correctly.  Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”

It could just as easily work the other way around – the advice delivered to the wife and this is not to say that real issues should be avoided.

When arguing becomes a sport in which both spouses look to rack up points, the marriage is not going to be happy.

Choose your poison.

Be right or be happy.

14-year old Carleigh O’Connell is a Jersey Girl and thereby special to this Jersey Boy.

Unfortunately she was denigrated by bullies who made fun of her butt by spray painting “Carleigh’s Ass” on a cement abutment at the Jersey shore.

This is New Jersey – they’re going down.

Carleigh shows us the textbook way to stand up to such cowards by harnessing the power of social media.

She posted a photo in Facebook snapped with the graffiti in the picture and told her mom to post it as well.

Here’s what Carleigh’s mother wrote:

“[Carleigh] decided that she was going to be stronger than hurtful words on the concrete and that she was going to be proud of her figure … She also told me that she feels complete sympathy for the teenagers across the country who face this everyday. She understands and wants all of them to find strength inside to rise above the nastiness and be empowered by who you are, how you are made and what is in your heart”.

Many commenters said they wish they had Carleigh’s butt.

Isn’t Carleigh beautiful?

Isn’t she smart?

That’s what Uber does.

The popular replacement for mundane taxicabs allows customers to rate their drivers and now it has become known that the drivers also get to rate their customers.

In one article I read on this, the author was concerned that this information could be used against customers who were continually rated as being less than the best.

The company might even one day discriminate against their call for a ride if Uber drivers as a group thought little of you.

Whatever happened to the notion that the customer is always right even if he or she is a jerk?

But take this issue to folks under 30 and you’ll see that they think vendors and service companies such as Uber have a right to rate customers.

It’s only fair.

This is also a generation that has pioneered rating college professors on their teaching abilities.  As a professor, I rather looked forward to my ratings at USC.

Got me to thinking.

What would my rating be if the people I came in contact with in daily life could rate me from A to F.

Even my wife?

Especially my wife.

360-degree input has arrived and is just as useful as a tool for all of us to up our game and bring out the best we have to offer in terms of humanity and human relations.

What do you think?

If we could devote 1/100^th of the time we spend to being physically fit and direct it toward training our core values, we would transform ourselves and realize our dream to become all that we can be.

Self-confidence doesn’t come from books or from pep talks.  It comes from the inner core of our being.  And the way we develop it is to get in touch with what our vision is for ourselves.

May I offer a few examples?

• Honesty – when we see ourselves as an honest person and picture it vividly all the time, we tend to make honest decisions and live up to the reputation we set for ourselves when life happens.
• Compassion – Just a word until we picture what kind of a compassionate person we want to be.  Often, we are compassionate to some people and not to others.  But when we visualize the type of compassion that we are striving for, the virtue unfolds.
• Self-confidence – Accept the fine person you are and don’t try to change it.  But what about becoming better?  We tend to do the right things automatically when we accept the gifts that make us unique and even different.
• Intimacy – The number one malady of most human beings is the failure to risk intimacy.  That is, to share our humanity with others.  We hold back in fear of being hurt.  If we see ourselves as individuals who want to show the warmth of our being to others, we become more approachable and happier.

All good training begins when we stop trying to fix everything that is wrong with us.

Focus on what is right.

The habitual action of making assumptions and responding as if they are facts stresses marriages.

When you’re sure you’re right, you are most often dead wrong.

When we fail to differentiate the difference between reality and our imagination, we guarantee failure to communicate.

So how to change?

A fact is something that can be observed and verified.

This month is August.

An assumption is something that is only accepted as true.

You can imagine how many misunderstandings we have had as husbands and wives over that which has been assumed rather than what is so.

There are lots of books on marriage.

And lots of psychiatrists and psychologists who will be happy to schedule you in for 45 minutes, but one of the best ways to eliminate the fuel for fighting is to take the time to get the facts first.