Muhammad Ali was an inspiring and, at times in his life, a polarizing larger than life figure.

He was so much more than a boxer — and I say that with due respect to his awesome skills in that arena.

Here is one of my favorite quotes from a man who knew how to turn a phrase:

“Impossible is just a word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

The most re-quoted part of this saying are these three words: “Impossible is nothing”.

But the part that I like is “Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary”.

What if we believed this to our core and managed people with these empowering words in mind?

What if we raised our children to be less self-absorbed and more certain that impossible is just a place on the road to possible when they chase their dreams.

What if …

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My friend is a psychologist who flatly states that relationships are everything.

My students at USC used to be focused on beginning their careers and making money to get started (and pay student loans).   That is understandably.

But sometimes we get stuck in the money making part despite Gallup polls that show the average American is happiest when a couple’s household income is $70,000 (less in Mississippi, a lot more in Hawaii – but $70,000 is the sweet spot).

That means, according to the research, that for those of us who kill ourselves trying to make $30,000 more, we may be more comfortable, but by our own admission (at least in polling) we are no happier.

In fact, the more we make, the less happy we get.

The pure gold is relationships.

And this doesn’t mean we have to break records to add friends (example:  Facebook or Instagram).

It means investing in solid, healthy, caring relationships is why we are on this earth.

For each relationship worth having, what are we willing to put into them?

What is our emotional investment?

How much time are we willing to invest?

There is nothing worse than doing something well that doesn’t need to be done at all which means – being a great earner only goes so far without relationships that make it all worthwhile.

I’m not going to finish my day today consciously trying to make less money, but even writing about the importance of relationships suggests when it comes to happiness, there is a greater return from investing time in relationships than assembling a larger bank account.

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We often think of being a better person by concentrating on how we can improve.

All of us can always benefit from being better but that doesn’t necessarily make us more likeable to others.

I have a challenge for you this morning.

Try this sincerely and honestly and you may have discovered the “gene” you’ve long been looking for.

Ready?

People like those who are interested in them.

Someone who listens to them.

Who puts distractions aside and makes every attempt to be with others in the present.

To become more likeable, leave the self-improvement to you – that’s a life’s journey for everyone.

Focus on someone – anyone – other than yourself.

Some examples …

• Break the ice, start a conversation with someone you don’t know or are familiar with but generally have no time for.  Listen in the present.  Don’t feel obligated to match everything they say to you.

• Take your child for a walk alone – put your phone down on the table and ask them to do the same thing.  Then start walking.  Your mission:  don’t come home until you learn three things from them you didn’t know.

• Ask your spouse or partner to tell you about their day without the need to share yours (even if they ask).

Ironically two ears are the most potent way to become more likeable instantly.

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In my book Out of Bad Comes Good – The Advantages of Disadvantages I condemn jealousy as one of the worst traits we or those around us can have.

In fact, I call for a Jealousy Diet.

• Let go of the fear that you don’t have value.  Put all your energy into building your personal and emotional security.  When others focus their jealousy on you, remember the pain and reach out to them.

• Repeat this often:  “jealousy hurts me more than it hurts them”.  William Penn said “the jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves”.

• Count jealousy like calories.  Make a list of people of whom you have jealous tendencies.

• Focus on your accomplishments.

Harold Coffin nailed it:  “Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessing instead of your own”.

A quick guide to putting jealousy in its place starting today:

Build your own security to defend against someone else’s jealousy.

And focus on all you are, not what you are not or that someone else may represent to you.

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Why is it that some of life’s biggest letdowns seem to immediately follow its highs?

One of my college professor’s would be gratified to know that I actually learned something from his class on semantics.

Keep your motivations high and expectations low to avoid letdowns.

Just last week I let my expectations get the better of me again so it is probably a human condition to misplace hope for expectations.

Hope is unbridled optimism that often trips us up.

So, to avoid the lows, we also have to avoid the highs.

Feel the joy for sure but don’t let hopes and expectations run away with reality.

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The Facebook COO shared her struggles since the sudden death of her husband at a University of California at Berkeley commencement message:

Write down 3 moments of joy before going to bed each night.

Sandberg says “This simple practice has changed my life. Because no matter what happens each day, I go to bed thinking of something cheerful.”

The author Dr. Amit Sood who works in the area of stress reduction has long suggested thinking of several people you are grateful for before you get out of bed in the morning.

And grief counselors say it helps to focus your attention on others rather than obsess about your own problems when they are beginning to adversely take over your life.

Three moments of joy helps overcome pain and grief.

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John Bradshaw, the prolific self-help author and fixture on PBS passed away recently.

Bradshaw’s powerful personal struggle helped lead the way toward resolution for millions of people – he sold 12 million books.

His work focused on the inner child – the starting point for lifelong unhappiness and dysfunction that comes from emotional and physical abuse in childhood.

Bradshaw, himself a recovering alcoholic said “everything I write about I struggle with myself”.

What Bradshaw preaches is: “to get you to come to peace with the past and finish it”.

Here is how I deal with it:

• Live in the present but don’t just arrive there, be fully present with life and those around you.

• Visit the past for reference the way you might do for a file on your computer.  After you get what you want, return to the present.

• Think about the future only for planning purposes.  Then back to the present not back to the future.

• Be mindful that the unused portion of life – that we still expect is ahead of us – is a blank canvas where we have the ability to create anything we want.

Nothing is more empowering than the constant thought that there are more journeys ahead.

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Paying attention focused on the present moment in a non-judgmental way is the essence of mindfulness.

I attended a mindfulness seminar once and didn’t last 30 minutes before I raised my hand and admitted I have tried it and I cannot do it.

Surprisingly, many others then chimed in and admitted the same thing.

Mindfulness does not have to mean meditation if you cannot or do want to meditate.

This was empowering and here’s what I have discovered since that seminar two years ago.

• Being mindful can be as simple as leaning forward and looking another person in the eye while they talk and you listen.
• Or turning off digital devices and rejoining the world.  You may blame Millennials for losing themselves in their digital devices but, really, everyone does it today.  A conscious decision on when to go digital and when to go analog (so to speak) aids practical mindfulness.
• Not having an opinion right away encourages mindfulness.  Full confession: this one is going to kill me.  But, I have seen progress.  I have begun to learn how to delay judgmental responses long enough to actually be able to repeat in my mind what the other person is saying.  Previously, I jumped in, interrupted or laid in wait to give my take.

What I learned from the seminar was just trying to be mindful in ways like I have discovered above, is mindfulness that actually works and everyone can do it.

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I love to speak to audiences and rarely if ever do I lack the confidence to get up before a crowd.

But once in addressing a music industry conference, I was suddenly surprised to be struck with fear.

It wasn’t the size of the group that was estimated to be 800 – it was the speaker who preceded me.

He was one of the best I have ever heard and he had the audience in the palm of his hands.  I was so rattled, I stepped out from backstage to the auditorium to view his expert talk the way the audience was obviously enjoying it.

What I learned that day not only saved the day for me.  I made it one of the tenants that I now hold dear to confront the fear of failure.

Would you like to know what I told myself?

“Jerry, you have earned the right to be here.  Only you could talk about this topic.  The group doesn’t want to hear one good talk, they want to hear two”.

And with that I returned backstage to await my introduction, but before I said a word, I stood at the podium in silence for a few seconds looking left, right and center as if to gather my listeners in while saying to myself “you have earned the right to be speaking”.

Fear of failure is useless.

It is 100% always self-inflicted.

Fear of failure can be cured by thinking of yourself as bringing a special gift to the audience and you will never let them down.

By the way, this approach works in presentations, one-on-one meetings and even in the privacy of your own mind when unwanted negativity creeps in.

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 My music industry students at USC used to beg me not to use PowerPoint which I define as the only thing that can put a student with two lattes in them right to sleep.

I always heeded their advice instead putting my notes online to those who actually attended each class.

I have toyed with PowerPoint at my media conferences and have concluded, they hate them too.

But I promised you the PowerPoint presentation that will change your life.

And it is the one I make vividly in my own mind many times a day when I review “slides” of things I want to do and want to accomplish.

• Why am I working today? I slap a slide up in my peripheral vision that has no words only a picture of say – a vacation in Vermont’s mountains. Warning: a dollar sign will not motivate you no matter how badly you need money.

• Who do I want to be? My father was one of the most honest people I have ever met. A straight arrow. Guess what flashing a picture of my dad in his military uniform in the memory of my mind does to me?

• What’s my biggest gift? No, not to crow about it but to use it. So if you are good with people, why not use that gift, for example, to help them break the ice?

• What’s my biggest challenge? I have a few personal ones I hope to share with you one day soon but I can tell you now that dissolving to a slide with an image that represents that challenge helps bolster me for it.

• And what do I fear the most? I could probably do 50 slides on this one but just to focus on the one that comes to mind first as I write this – the fear of not being relevant. Once I see the slide, it opens my mind, motivates me to pay a price and directs me to a place where I can attain my goal. The next time, another fear will rise to the surface and I will give it the same treatment.

• Add a few of your own slides here. Try it if you like. Seeing the life you have, the life you fear and yes, the life you want in a daily slideshow of the mind is so powerful I’ll bet you share it with someone you care about.

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Thing problems:

Your car broke down, you lost your job, you have to have an operation, someone broke into your house and robbed you and the worst possible scenario – your phone fell in the toilet.

People problems:

A divorce, visiting children on the weekend, having someone stab you in the back, not getting the raise and/or promotion or being shamed or bullied.

Thing problems – as bad or inconvenient as they are – are better than people problems.

People problems are the worst because there is never a tangible solution and often emotions come into play to foul up or complicate matters.

But both people problems and thing problems are solved the same way.

1. Get the facts.
2. Weight the facts.
3. Do not avoid the problem, dive in and solve it.
4. Identify your goal and pursue it.

So that broken phone, won’t work.  You’ve tested it.  And now you try to recall whether you have AppleCare or not.  You decide when you’re going to make a trip to the Apple Store to get them to fix it or replace it.  Eventually, you’re back on Instagram again.

But if you’re being bullied or fat-shamed, emotions make it harder to use the formula above that always works.

But persist.

You will channel your hurt and anger into power.  Push back against bully-shamers and commit to not avoiding this as painful as it may be but confronting it.  You identify your goal as stopping the personal abuse and reinforcing the good feelings you have about yourself.

My best friend use to say to me, “JD, thank God that’s a thing problem” at which point I learned to love flat tires or missed flights.

But people problems deserve the same well thought out plan to solve them even though they are usually complicated by emotions. 

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Suffering hurts.

No one wants to suffer.

We hate to see our loved ones suffer.

Yet suffering is transformational.

It brings us from pain to pleasure.

From bad to good.

From despair to hope.

I’m not about to sign a list that makes me available to further suffering but when painful issues affect our lives, it helps to keep in mind that suffering transforms us to someone better.

Viktor Frankl, the psychologist who was incarcerated in a World War II concentration camp and documented his journey in Man’s Search for Meaning said:

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

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Almost everyone knows how to thank another person for a favor or a nicety.

But if you’re hardcore and want to be even more responsive about showing your thanks, here are a few more ways.

• Tell someone else who knows the person you want to thank about how you feel about them.  Watch how fast that gets back to them in a positive way.

• The next time you want to reward an employee or fellow worker for doing something outstanding, give a gift to their spouse and say something like “to the husband of our company’s best salesperson in May”.

• Pay the compliment in front of as many people as possible in person, through social media or by email.

• Privately look them in the eye and show them your humanity as you express your gratitude – no distractions, phones or screens.

• Put a note or a card in a place where they’ll find it and bring a smile to their face.

“Never let the things you want make you forget the things you have”.

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It is no secret that almost every survey conducted about fear puts the fear of speaking at the top of the list.

Loss of a job, a divorce – all fall under that.

People surveyed even fear speaking in public more than death.

Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.

A couple of thoughts can help change the way you look at public speaking and help deal with the fear.

• If you have confidence in yourself as a person, you have mastered the number one attribute to speaking successfully in front of groups.

• Speak on the right topic.  Everyone is eloquent on what they know.

• As TED founder Chris Anderson reminds us (from TED Talks) find something worth saying that a listener would receive as a gift.

• Narrow the topic – speakers almost always try to cover too much.  You can always make details available on online platforms such as Google Drive but you don’t have to cover everything.

• Keep it short.

• Never fear being nervous.  Get the butterflies to fly in formation.

• Practice your talk or presentation three times and then forget it.  Once you know that you can deliver the talk, it doesn’t have to come out the same way every time.  This is the fun of speaking.

The goal is to get a person to challenge their belief system not to get them to change their minds or think your way.

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I never thought I would use joy and cancer in the same phrase.

A few weeks ago while waiting my annual stress test, I sat next to a delightful woman with a British accent.  Her granddaughter, 32 years old, was by her side agitated and in tears.

She was upset because the nurse asked her to fill out a form that among other things wanted to know whether she was pregnant.  Her grandmother later told me her granddaughter couldn’t have children.

She had terminal cancer with anywhere from six months to five years to live and her ovaries were removed because the cancer was spreading.

While she was having her tests, her grandmother spoke in such a loving and caring way that it was inspirational.

Her granddaughter married five years ago when the cancer was first discovered, and her husband was still by her side as supportive as ever.

She wanted to be a writer someday so that instead of dallying any longer, she started a blog to document the feelings she was having as she faced her own mortality.

Sick and taking a course of chemotherapy, the young girl flew to Europe with her grandmother to attend a wedding in London.  On the way home she got so sick an ambulance had to meet the plane at the gate in Atlanta where she spent another week in a hospital.

You get the point.

This poor girl was happier than most people that surrounded her because she valued and lived her life, overcame her difficulties and lived in the present one day at a time because she had no other option.

I have always wondered how people with significant and/or terminal illnesses can be so happy when those of us blessed to be otherwise healthy could struggle with happiness.

Now I know the answer.

This girl with pancreatic cancer is living one day at a time and it is working out better for her than for those of us who live like tomorrow is guaranteed.

What a gift I received that afternoon.

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Today show someone that you care.

Show them your humanity.

Get the focus off of you and project it on the needs of others.

Our world is so self-absorbed for many reasons but unfortunately getting what we want does not bring us happiness.

It’s actually the other way around.

Helping others get what they want always brings us happiness.

Help someone pay a bill.

Help someone get what they want while you temporarily pass up an opportunity to have it your way.

Give the gift of your time to someone else even if you’re stressed and have little time to give.

Lift someone else out of depression or a bad mood by being positive and do it by not mentioning the word “I” once.

Listen to someone else’s story without having to then tell one of your own.

Let someone have your way (after all, that’s my definition of diplomacy).

Because when we give away our power even when we don’t feel like it, we are almost always happy we did it.

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Some of us just cannot concentrate on the positive long enough to leave toxic negative thoughts behind.

Ask anyone about their job and you are likely to hear more of what is wrong than what is right.

But here is a very effective way to deal with your faults – real and perceived.

Consider your three biggest faults and make a note of them.

Then, work to eliminate them as many times as you can in a day.

For example, say you want to stop interrupting people, want to be a better friend and not criticize others too much.

Being mindful of these faults, count the number of times in a day that you interrupted someone.  If it is three today and one tomorrow, you can feel the progress.

Want to be a better friend?  Count the number of times in a day that you did things a friend would do – reach out, listen, care.  If at the end of the day that number is zero, then progress has not been made.  But if you texted a friend, spent time listening to their problems, initiated getting together face to face, then you have three successes.

If you hate that you’re so critical of others, count how many times you have been critical of someone else in a given day.  If it was five yesterday and three today, you’re making progress.

People don’t automatically change, or improve or re-invent themselves.

But we do make choices that matter every minute of the day.

To count the progress in a tangible way like this, encourages you to stick to a plan that helps you battle your faults.

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New statistics indicate that the average time spent on Facebook, Instagram and/or Facebook Messenger each day is almost an hour (50 minutes).

That’s almost as much as we spend eating.

Far more than the average person exercising.

Competitive with TV time (over two hours), which skews higher for older people and less for 28-34 year olds.

And Facebook is trying to come up ways to increase the average time people spend on Facebook.

As we become more buried in our screens, something has to be done.

And here it is.

For every minute you spend on Facebook products described above, make sure you spend at least that amount of time being present in real conversations with others.

It’s easy for us to increase our obsessive addiction to social media but it is not fruitful.

So use social media all you like, but balance it off with face-to-face contact with people where you are there in the present and without a mobile device nearby.

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The political pundits were wrong about Donald Trump.

Prognosticator Nate Silver gave him odds that were “higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20 percent.”

Even Las Vegas bookmakers can’t call the winner of a sporting event all the time.

And I sat on a New Jersey beach last year with a weather radar app on my phone  as a wicked thunderstorm headed right toward me.  By the time I packed my things up, the storm passed to the north although the app showed it hitting us square on.

My point – Never rely on anyone else to tell you the outcome of your life’s story.

When anyone says you can’t – your response should be “watch me”.

In a world fixated on metrics, even Billy Bean can’t win the World Series studying statistics.

Let today be the day when you replace “can’t” with “can” because no one knows it for sure but you.

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“Whether you think you can or you can’t – either way, you’re right” – Henry Ford.

That’s why Napoleon Hill said you can achieve what the mind can conceive and believe.

On the other hand, you can fail because you don’t believe in yourself or your ideas.

It’s not on someone else – it’s on us.

Do we instill in our children the default setting that if you think you can, you most likely can?

Do we practice this ourselves?

When working in toxic workplaces (and many people do in the current economy), are you a sponge soaking up the negativity of those around you or do you believe that once you set your mind to something, you will achieve it – even for bosses who are incompetent on workplaces that are negative.

Back to Henry Ford’s quote.

I have it on my desk where I can see it every day.

Why tie your own hands behind your back when you can free yourself to achieve that which you want to accomplish.

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