It will indeed be a black mark on American history.

And as much as I feel their loss and grieve with those families, I still believe that citizens have a right and duty to maintain our constitutional second amendment rights according to the founding era original intent.

At the time of this tragedy, President Obama tasked Vice President Biden with finding a solution in thirty days so this never happens again. 

Vice President Biden has offered his recommendations, and as a result we have or will have a slew of new executive orders limiting the inalienable right to bear arms for self-protection.

During this process, the vice president was explaining the attitude of the president concerning this issue and said,

“And as the president said, if our actions result in only saving one life, they’re worth taking.”

Wow. If we were to take that logic seriously, if it only saves one life, we should ban cars.

If it saves only one life, we should ban electricity.

If it only saves one life, we should ban alcoholic beverages, hammers, and knives.

If it only saves one life, we should ban travel, mountains, and water.

If it only saves one life, we should consider banning everything but sitting around.

But also by that same logic, if it saves just one life we should arm every citizen.

If it only saves one life, we should encourage all citizens to take gun safety courses.

If it only saves one life, the government should encourage all fathers and mothers to stay married and love each other.

If it only saves one life, fathers should spend more time with and showing true affection to their sons and daughters.

If it only saves one life, families should start going back to church.

If it only saves one life, we should stop the spending and start living within our means.

The real question is not so much if it saves one life, but do we give up liberty for security?

The immortal words of John Stuart Mill answer that question for us:

“A people may prefer a free government, but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they will not fight for it when it is directly attacked, if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it, if by monetary discouragement, or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet, even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions, in all these cases, they are more or less unfit for liberty: and though it may be for their good to have had it for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it.”

**********************************

Shanon Brooks is the President of Monticello College, the Director of Education and Training for Humanitarian Visions International, S.A., and a contributing editor of the Center for Social Leadership. He co-authored Thomas Jefferson Education for Teens.

Shanon and his wife Julia are raising their six children in Monticello, Utah.

But there’s a deeper principle at the heart of those two clues.

Those two clues shine light on the path. But they are not the path.

The path is bliss.

It’s ironic, I know. But think it through.

Underlying what angers and scares us is what brings us the most rapturous joy.

Anger is a manifestation of passion. Passion is the fuel of purpose. And living on purpose is sheer bliss.

Swat your butterflies and push through to the other side of fear, and waiting for you is ecstasy, euphoria, exultation.

Follow your anger and fear to discover your path. Then walk the path by following your bliss.

The scholar Joseph Campbell happened upon the power of bliss by studying an ancient Sanskrit word. In The Power of Myth he explains:

“Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat-Chit-Ananda. The word ‘Sat’ means being. ‘Chit’ means consciousness. ‘Ananda’ means bliss or rapture.

“I thought, ‘I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.”

He continues:

“I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time — namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.

“I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

It seems so easy: To find success simply do the things that make you happy.

But why is it so hard, and why do so few people do it? Why are the vast majority of people bored and discontent in jobs they can’t stand, leading “lives of quiet desperation,” as Thoreau said?

Simple: We’re afraid of our bliss.

As Marianne Williamson wrote,

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us…”

You know the quote.

To appease our conscience — guilty for not following our bliss and living on purpose — we make up stories like: “Following your bliss is self-indulgent and irresponsible. Life isn’t a bed of roses, and responsible adults just have to do things they don’t like.”

To the contrary, following our bliss is the most responsible thing we can do with our lives.

Ignoring and stifling it is not only irresponsible — it is a direct affront to our Creator, who planted the seeds of our unique bliss in our heart.

There are problems only we can solve, wounds only we can heal.

Those problems remain unsolved, the wounds are gaping, the good team is losing while we’re jabbering on the sidelines about being a “responsible adult.”

We have a sacred duty to God and to humanity to follow our bliss.

Think of what our world would be if people like Thomas Edison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Marie Curie, Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and Albert Einstein stifled their bliss in the name of “responsibility,” or caved to fear.

And let’s be clear: Following our bliss is no bed of roses. As Joseph Campbell clarified:

“When I taught in a boys’ prep school, I used to talk to the boys who were trying to make up their minds as to what their careers were going to be. A boy would come to me and ask, ‘Do you think I can do this? Do you think I can do that? Do you think I can be a writer?’

“‘Oh,’ I would say, ‘I don’t know. Can you endure ten years of disappointment with nobody responding to you, or are you thinking that you are going to write a best seller the first crack? If you have the guts to stay with the thing you really want, no matter what happens, well, go ahead.’”

Following our bliss doesn’t guarantee instant success. It doesn’t mean a pain-free, challenge-less life.

It simply guarantees bliss through the process, which means we’ll push through the obstacles as long as we stay on the path of bliss.

10 Power Questions to Discover & Follow Your Bliss

The following ten questions come from Brian Johnson in his book A Philosopher’s Notes: On Optimal Living, Creating an Authentically Awesome Life, and Other Such Goodness.

Write your answers in detail. Your bliss awaits:

1. How can you use your strengths in greatest service to yourself, your family, your community, and the world?
2. How can you get paid to do what you love?
3. What five things are you most proud of? What five things will you be most proud of?
4. If you had all the time and all the money in the world, what would you do?
5. What’s your ideal day look like? When do you get up? What do you do? With whom? For whom? Imagine it in vivid detail!
6. Who are your heroes? Why? How are you like them?
7. What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
8. If you were guaranteed to succeed, what’s the #1 thing you would do?
9. What is it that you and only you can do for the world?
10. How can you live in more integrity with your ideals? What’s the #1 thing you could start doing that would have the most positive impact in your life? What’s the #1 thing you could stop doing that would have the most positive impact in your life?

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Stephen Palmer is a writer and entrepreneur devoted to helping people conquer limitations, maximize their potential, and achieve true freedom.

He is a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, the founder of Life Manifestos, and the author of Uncommon Sense: A Common Citizen’s Guide to Rebuilding America.

He co-authored the New York Times bestseller, Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity. He is also the co-author of The Conscious Creator: Six Laws for Manifesting Your Masterpiece Life.

Stephen and his wife are raising their four children in southern Utah.

The literal definition of the original word was “caught in the act.”

The Latin root manus, meaning hand, seems symbolic of man using hands for conscious actions, or making choices.

Its accompanying root festus, meaning “able to be seized or handled,” suggest thoughts made real and concrete.

In other words, that which is manifested can be felt, touched, realized as tangible.

Thus, to manifest is to reveal one’s true thoughts, desires, and character through action. It is to be “caught in the act” of who we are.

Of course, this applies to both improvement and degeneration. One can be caught in the act of anonymous service, or caught in the act of adultery.

No matter where or how we’re caught in action, understand that no action can be taken without forming first as a thought.

As Plutarch wrote,

“An idea is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of manifestation.”

The Proverb states it more succinctly:

“As a man thinketh, so is he…”

What we do is a manifestation of what we think.

To manifest a better life, we must first envision a better life.

In other words, we need a clear, concrete, and compelling manifesto of our ideal life.

A bold declaration of our noblest ideals and highest aspirations, which saturates our thoughts and leads to the manifestation of heroic actions.

Without such a conscious guide, we will manifest the programmed, contradictory, and limiting junk of our subconscious mind.

We will be caught in the act of operating on autopilot: blindly accepting social programming, submitting to false labels, believing negative self-talk, accepting unquestioningly what is “known” to be impossible.

By default, every human being is a manifester — whether consciously or unconsciously.

If we’re going to manifest anyway, why not manifest consciously and positively?

Knowing thoughts manifest as actions, why entertain limiting and degenerate thoughts?

Eternal vigilance, taught the American Founders, is the price of liberty.

This principle is as true for personal liberty as it is true of political and economic freedom. As we think, so shall we become.

We must guard our thoughts vigilantly, for they will manifest as either tragic or triumphant actions.

As James Allen wrote in his classic As a Man Thinketh,

“Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes,
And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes
The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,
Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills:
He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:
Environment is but his looking-glass.”

Every moment of every day we are caught in the act of manifesting our thoughts.

Will we feel embarrassed or excited, guilty or honorable to be caught in action?

**************************

Stephen Palmer is a writer and entrepreneur devoted to helping people conquer limitations, maximize their potential, and achieve true freedom.

He is a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, the founder of Life Manifestos, and the author of Uncommon Sense: A Common Citizen’s Guide to Rebuilding America.

He co-authored the New York Times bestseller, Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity. He is also the co-author of The Conscious Creator: Six Laws for Manifesting Your Masterpiece Life.

Stephen and his wife are raising their four children in southern Utah.

In fact, it’s a serious crisis in the making. And unlike the Y2K scare in 1999, this crisis is a sure thing.

The crisis is this: In January, many companies will be required to extend Obamacare health care to their employees.

The costs of this are significant, and will force many small and larger business to make some very tough choices. The result will be a lot of layoffs, downsizing, reduced pay, and outsourcing. Service will suffer, and response times will plummet.

Most families and individuals plan on a yearly basis, running January 1 to December 31, so they may not know how that a lot of businesses run on a fiscal year — from April 1 to April 1, July 1 to July 1, or October 1 to October 1.

This is very important, because we just witnessed the first big round of businesses (whose fiscal year is April to April) factoring in the costs of the January 2014 Obamacare requirements. The number of layoffs and cuts is a serious concern.

But those who run April to April have only had to factor in three months of Obamacare costs so far, so the damage has been minimal.

It’s going to get increasingly worse on July 1, and then by October 1 it will start having a major impact. By the first of January, when everyone will have to pay the higher costs, the effect will be huge.

Again, because this is a numerical concern, most people aren’t paying attention. Here’s the crux of the problem:

• Our economy is already struggling with a weak recovery.
• The increasing tax and regulatory burden on business has dampened innovation.
• The schools seldom teach innovation or initiative — indeed they usually promote the opposite.
• International innovation is on the rise.
• Business is reticent to invest or spend, because the current environment in Washington is highly uncertain.
• Big business, which has a high surplus right now, is finding better political environments in other nations — so the money will naturally flow to where business is treated better.
• The Obamacare requirements are making business a lot more costly, and they mostly kick in this coming January.

A lot of businesses are scrambling. For example, in the past few months I’ve received email from a number of friends who are business owners or who consult with small businesses, saying that their only choice is to either lay off a lot of employees or shut down their business.

One company, for example, is trying to prepare for next year, but has realized that the additional cost of Obamacare for their firm will be at least $18,000 a month.

This is a fairly small company, with close ties to its people. The last thing it wants to do is lay off employees. But what to do? The costs are simply prohibitive. Laying off is the obvious option; and after digging deeper, it may be the only option.

How would you counsel companies in this predicament? (Note that most companies are dealing with this right now.) What ideas do you have? I’m sincerely asking for input.

What can they do?

Thousands of companies are asking the same thing right now, and many others will do so before the end of 2013. This is going to be a real shock to the economy.

But back to the question. How can small companies that are already financially tight comply with the new regulations — without laying off or cutting salaries?

I’m hoping you see some real solutions. The obvious one is to innovate — to expand sales into new markets and make a lot of extra cash. The regulatory challenges of such a strategy are, alas, a serious problem — at least in the United States.

So, thinking like an owner, what would you do? I know you don’t have financials or details in front of you for any one company facing this challenge, but take a stab at this problem anyway — because almost all businesses are doing the same thing right now. It’s the only realistic way to look at Obamacare, because it’s the way pretty much every business owner is looking at it.

Specifically: Costs are going up significantly, with no offsetting increases in income. In fact, higher taxes and increased regulations make growth even more difficult.

In this environment, how can you absorb the Obamacare costs without laying off a bunch of employees? Or letting them go and hiring all new people who are desperate for jobs and will work for much lower pay? Or simply taking your business to Brazil or India or some other country where growth is actually rewarded?

Please send me your responses. What can be done?

You were beamed to earth, “trailing clouds of glory,” for a purpose.

You have something noble and profound to accomplish. None other can take your place.

“Let your light shine,” commanded Jesus.

Your unfulfilled mission is a gaping black hole of squandered potential. Statues will be erected to honor your name when you fulfill your mission.

The challenge is that finding mission in the first place is usually tougher than actually living mission.

How many times have you asked God in desperation what to do, while telling Him you’ll do whatever He asks if He just shows you the way?

I can’t speak for you, but for me His answer is almost always, “You think I’d make it that easy for you?” spoken with a sly grin and a hearty chuckle.

Thanks to His calculated evasiveness, I’ve had to uncover my own clues revealing my mission.

I’m certain that the two greatest clues I’ve unearthed are universal.

You can know with conviction that you’ve been shown the path to mission by:

1. What upsets and angers you about society.
2. What you fear the most.

Fix What Angers You

Reading the backs of cereal boxes chaps my hide.

The bland and insipid clichés make me want to strangle each and every obtuse member of the bureaucratic corporate committee who had a hand in castrating the message.

You undoubtedly find it silly that I would even mention something so trivial.

But I’m a writer. I notice things like that. In fact, I can’t not notice them. It’s tattooed into my DNA. It’s my mission to convey meaning, pierce minds, transform hearts.

You can’t help but notice and be angered by certain things, too. Things that other people are clueless about. Things far more important than cereal box ads.

Go fix them; it’s your mission to do so. Leap from the couch. Yank the TV cord from the wall. Flee from Facebook. Go. Fix. Them.

As Michael Strong wrote in Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems:

“…we welcome dissatisfaction as the source of craving for the good. But we never accept whining or criticizing of others or critiques of society.

“If you don’t like it, go fix it, go create a world, a community, a subculture in which your ideals can be instantiated, realized, in which you can show us what your vision of beauty and nobility looks like.

“Create a new social reality, so that I can see your dreams come true. I want to see a world in which billions of dreams are coming true constantly.

“Criticize by creating.”

Trust & Follow Your Fear

In The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, Steven Pressfield writes:

“Are you paralyzed by fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator.

“Fear tells us what we have to do…The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

“Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of the Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.

“That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.”

Seth Godin concurs:

“…if you’re afraid of something, of putting yourself out there, of creating a kind of connection or a promise, that’s a clue that you’re on the right track. Go, do that.”

What are you desperately afraid of?

I’m not talking about primal fears like snakes and heights.

I’m talking about those intuitions screaming from your soul that you’ve slammed into a box, locked tightly, buried deeply.

I’m talking about every great idea you’ve ever had that you’ve talked yourself out of because the prospect of failure paralyzed you.

I’m talking about those venomous butterflies swarming in your gut every time you think of doing ____________.

Those fears are a laser pinpointing the exact source and nature of your mission. They are not the storm; they are the lighthouse.

Set your course to point straight at them. Man your rudder, adjust your sails. Square your shoulders. Grit your teeth. Strap on a diaper if necessary.

Bellow “Banzai!” and kamikaze through them.

You won’t die. You’ll come alive for the first time. The universe will shift. And you will know what you were born to do.

No more armchair criticizing. No more fearful paralysis. No more fumbling in the dark groping for mission.

Follow the clues of what angers you and what scares you. And through darkness and confusion will burst the brilliant light of mission.

**************************

Stephen Palmer is a writer and entrepreneur devoted to helping people conquer limitations, maximize their potential, and achieve true freedom.

He is a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, the founder of Life Manifestos, and the author of Uncommon Sense: A Common Citizen’s Guide to Rebuilding America.

He co-authored the New York Times bestseller, Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity. He is also the co-author of The Conscious Creator: Six Laws for Manifesting Your Masterpiece Life.

Stephen and his wife are raising their four children in southern Utah.

For me, as a young boy, it represented the ability to practice word magic.

Soon I was labeling anything within reach with my well-used label maker. Toys, books, furniture, even pictures were soon clearly labeled for anyone who may have been wondering.

Eventually my labels fell off and were forgotten. As I grew, I discovered another kind of labeling method.

As my friends and I labeled each other and our classmates, we used no adhesives, but the labels stuck like super glue.

We thought we were just being helpful. How would people know that Jim was a stoner, that Mary was a snob, that Mike was shy, if we didn’t label them so? We had a label for every characteristic, deformity, or personal challenge. Once applied, the person often became what we had labeled them.

Our word magic was stronger than we realized.

The realization hit me like a freight train at my 20th class reunion. To this day, some still carried the labels we gave them. Sometimes the label eventually fell off, though emotional residue remained.

I’d made a conscious decision to visit with every classmate I could. As we talked, I recognized how terribly I had misjudged or underestimated them. It wasn’t just me — I could see it in their eyes, too.

Our labels had reduced remarkable human beings to mere objects. But our childish labeling couldn’t begin to describe the true depth and value of these individuals.

We couldn’t see them as they really were. In their book, Leadership and Self-Deception, the Arbinger Institute describes this self-deception as “being in the box.” We leaped into the box, and it hurt not just our targets, but us as the labelers.

I wish I knew then what I know now. I would have used my word magic not to reduce and denigrate, but rather to build and uplift.

But I still wonder if I’ve learned my lesson. What will be the lasting effects of the labels I slap on my children through words of frustration and disappointment? How will they begin to see themselves after I perceive them as objects? And what can I inspire them to live up to by seeing them for who they really are?

And my relationship with my children is just the tip of the iceberg.

We can also inflict damage on ourselves by how we label other adults. For instance, when faced with a contrary point of view, how often do we grab our label maker and get to work?

It’s a lot easier to label someone a “right-winger” or a “bleeding-heart liberal” than it is to actually consider his or her point of view and find truth and common ground in it. Labels devalue people and blind us to truth. We may have much to learn from that “left-wing radical” or “tree-hugging hippie” if we remove the label and truly see the person.

Everyone we meet is fighting a private battle. Using word magic to pigeonhole another does nothing to lighten their burden. But an encouraging word at the right moment can provide the necessary spark that kindles a roaring fire of determination in the struggling person’s heart.

Some people may look like just another piece of junk thrown on the trash heap of humanity. But we know better.

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Bryan Hyde is a husband, father, disciple, teacher, guardian, reader, writer, truth seeker, stirrer of pots, radio talk show host, and PITA to those who seek dominion over others. He’s also a proud member of the Pro-Freedom Conspiracy.

He does professional voice work through his company One Clear Voice. He is also a frequent and popular contributor to St. George News.

Bryan and his wife Becky are raising their six children in Cedar City, Utah.

Subscribe to Bryan’s blog here.

Others, however (and most, as it turns out), are not so gifted. This second group has to work harder to do what the first group was able to do naturally.

Over time, however, the differences between starting points fade away.

How?

First, a little background.

Most people are average. While this is true statistically, it’s hard to swallow emotionally. As a result, most people think they are above average.

Consider the Dunning-Kruger Effect:

“a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a meta-cognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.”

How many of us have known people who suffered from “illusory superiority?”

Researchers Dunning and Kruger report that people who overestimated their ability at a task adjusted their opinion of themselves upward when confronted with data depicted the ability level of others sampled.

In other words, people generally think they are pretty good at something even when they are not, and when shown data of how others perform at the same task, they increase their “illusory superiority” to an even higher level!

Those of us who teach and coach others in the topic of success and high achievement never cease to be amazed at the response of certain people when they are forced to confront the reality of their performance (or lack thereof) in an objective fashion – that is, when they must face a true scoreboard of their performance.

Among others, the reactions of such people include the following:

1. Anger at the scoreboard.
2. Claims that the game is stupid or unfair.
3. Excuses along the lines of, “I’m just not competitive.”
4. Denial that others are really scoring better than them and the claim that those who appear to do so must be “cheating.”
5. Quitting the task altogether in favor of a retreat to an endeavor where their individual performance can be masked, hidden or unobserved.

But none of us need fear the scoreboard. Instead, we should embrace it as the positive-pressure cooker of our personal improvement.

So, how do the differences between starting points and talent levels of individuals fade away over time?

Consider the chart below. Although drawn arbitrarily, it mirrors the principle of the power of exertion, over time.

Note that a large range of effort brings roughly the same in terms of results. In that band is “mediocrity,” an average amount of results from most participants. For any given endeavor, this is where most people live.

But for some reason there is a small, self-selected group of individuals who push harder, who consistently give more effort, who take the endeavor much more seriously.

This extra 10 percent push (again, an arbitrary estimation) brings perhaps twice as much results (represented by the 2X on the Y axis). This is where people leave the zone of mediocrity and enter into “good” or “very good.”

The greatest achievers, however, push even further.  Just 5 percent more effort, taking them to the maximum of 100 percent, is enough to generate as much as 10X the result.

The closer one gets to maximum effort, the more of an exponential one can expect to see in results (given enough time).

This is instructive in the following ways:

1. If you are the type of person who has always felt a little behind others, a little less gifted, or a little put down, the good news is that with exertion into the upper ranges of effort, sustained over time, you can achieve excellent results. No matter your starting point, you can make it, if you work hard enough, consistently enough, and long enough.

2. If you are the type of person who has always felt a little ahead of others, a little more gifted, who have always had a little easier path, the bad news is that you cannot rest on that as a sustainable advantage. If you don’t eventually push yourself into the exertion zone toward excellence, those who are working harder will eventually pass you by. However, if you can somehow adopt their hunger and work ethic, you might just be uncatchable.

Either way, don’t learn the wrong lesson. The less gifted should never feel permanently disadvantaged because of their starting point, while the gifted should never count on their natural advantages to sustain them long term.

Over time, excellence goes to the consistent hard worker.

Jerry Rice is often talked about as the best wide receiver in the history of the NFL, and sometimes even considered to be the best all around football player ever.

Yet in his youth he was only able to garner collegiate scholarship from the relatively small and unknown school, Mississippi Valley State.

His professional prospects were quite a bit better, based upon his collegiate performance, but still, he had not been expected to be taken until the sixth or seventh round in the NFL draft.

One coach, however, understood his worth. Bill Walsh of the San Francisco Forty-Niners was looking for exactly the kind of player Rice had made himself into: quick, precise, and incredibly hard working.

With these basic foundations, Walsh knew he had found what he was looking for to complete his high-percentage offense featuring the accurate and precise quarterback, Joe Montana.

For the next twenty years Jerry Rice continued to work at an intimidating pace to perfect his craft. Even after winning multiple Super Bowls and MVP awards, Rice demonstrated an uncommon hunger to push himself to maximum effort in the pursuit of excellence.

A man with perhaps only above average talent, with literally hundreds of others “ahead” of him on the talent scale, had worked himself into icon status.

Exertion –→ over time  -→ massive results

So how does one keep himself in this “exertion zone?” How does one stay at high effort over time?

1. A Deep and Abiding Purpose: The more noble your cause the more your efforts will be able to withstand the lure of distraction, the pain of discouragement, and the poison of critics.

2. Informational Reinforcement (see the LIFE portfolio of subscription products for this purpose): e need a constant, consistent flow of information and motivation to sustain us in our quest.

3. Relational Reinforcement (see the LIFE Live seminar events): We need to surround ourselves with people who lift us up, encourage us, and inspire us to be better.

4. Self Talk (and personal affirmation statements): It’s important to control what we say to ourselves.

5. Remember that you are NOT average, by choice: Excellence is attainable through exertion, no matter where you begin on the talent scale.

So get yourself into the Exertion Zone now, and stay there! Excellence awaits you!

*******************************

Chris Brady co-authored the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Weekly, USA Today, and Money Magazine best-seller Launching a Leadership Revolution.

He is also in the World’s Top 30 Leadership Gurus and among the Top 100 Authors to Follow on Twitter. He has spoken to audiences of thousands around the world about leadership, freedom, and success.

Mr. Brady contributes regularly to Networking Times magazine, and has been featured in special publications of Success and Success at Home. He also blogs regularly at Chris Brady.

He is an avid motorized adventurer, pilot, world traveler, humorist, community builder, soccer fan, and dad.

Ludwig Von Mises, an Austrian economist, stood for truth against the economic trends of his day.

He defended free enterprise and classic liberalism when nearly all were stumbling over each other to receive perks and preferment offered by governments looking for professors to teach the joys of government intervention and economic controls.

Many economists understood intellectually the errors in the Keynesian policies, knowing that government spending sprees would only lead to massive debt and unemployment.

But through choosing preferment over principles, the Keynesian economists surrendered their convictions for conveniences, riding the Keynesian wave to career advancement.

Conversely, Mises, steeled by his character and resolve, was a lone voice crying in the wilderness. He refused to go along with the deceit and repeatedly pointed out the logical fallacies inherent in Keynesian economic policies.

Persecuted by Statists

This wasn’t a popular stand in the first half of the twentieth century. In fact, Ludwig and his wife, Margit, barely made it out of Europe ahead of the Nazi blitzkrieg.

Jorg Hulsmann, author of The Last Knight of Liberalism, writes:

“Mises was two months shy of his fifty-ninth birthday. He was on the invaders’ list of wanted men. Two years earlier, they had ransacked his Vienna apartment, confiscating his records, and freezing his assets. Mises then hoped to be safe in Geneva. Now nowhere in Europe seemed safe. Not only was he a prominent intellectual of Jewish descent; he was widely known to be an arch-enemy of National Socialism and of every other form of socialism. Some called him ‘the last knight of liberalism.’

“He had personally steered Austria away from Bolshevism, saved his country from the level of hyperinflation that destroyed inter-war Germany, and convinced a generation of young socialist intellectuals to embrace the market. Now he was a political refugee headed for a foreign continent.

“The couple arrived in the United States with barely any money and no prospects for income. Mises’s former students and disciples had found prestigious positions in British and American universities (often with his help), but Mises himself was considered an anachronism. In an age of growing government and central planning, he was a defender of private property and an opponent of all government intervention in the economy. Perhaps worst of all, he was a proponent of verbal logic and realism in the beginning heyday of positivism and mathematical modeling. No university would have him. Margit began to train as a secretary.”

Over the next decade, husband and wife would slowly rebuild their lives in America with Mises find new allies in his fight for truth.

In the midst of these challenges, he published his most important book, Human Action. It would earn him a following whose admiration and devotion were beyond anything he had known in Europe.

With his courage and logic, Mises identified the long-term consequences of socialist and fascist errors, strengthening the growing intellectual resistance to Statism.

Mises was a man of character, a man without a price, living his life by Virgil’s Roman motto, “Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito,” which translates, “Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.”

Mises proceeded to do just that. The late Dean of the Austrian School, Murray Rothbard, one of the greatest economic minds and good friend of Mises wrote:

“Holding these views, and hewing to truth indomitably in the face of a century increasingly devoted to statism and collectivism, Mises became famous for his ‘intransigence’ in insisting on a non-inflationary gold standard and on laissez-faire.

“Effectively barred from any paid university post in Austria and later in the United States, Mises pursued his course gallantly. As the chief economic adviser to the Austrian government in the 1920s, Mises was single-handedly able to slow down Austrian inflation; and he developed his own ‘private seminar’ which attracted the out­standing young economists, social scientists, and philosophers throughout Europe.

“As the founder of the ‘neo-Austrian School’ of economics, Mises’s business cycle theory, which blamed inflation and depressions on inflationary bank credit encouraged by Central Banks, was adopted by most younger economists in England in the early 1930s as the best explanation of the Great Depression.”

At a time when the crowd was streaming toward Statism, whether in the form of Nazism, Fascism, Socialism, Communism, New Deal, Fair Deal, etc., Mises rejected the blatant errors in each, overcoming the tides of the time through thinking deeply on the underlying principles.

Regardless of the personal and professional cost, Mises refused to teach what he knew wasn’t true, even though opportunities abound if would would go with the economic flow. Mises could not do this and maintain his intellectual integrity, for he knew in his heart that Keynesianism was wrong.

Rothbard again, shares:

“For Mises was able to demonstrate (a) that the expansion of free markets, the division of labor, and private capital investment is the only possible path to the prosperity and flourishing of the human race; (b) that socialism would be disastrous for a modern economy because the absence of private ownership of land and capital goods prevents any sort of rational pricing, or estimate of costs, and (c) that government intervention, in addition to hampering and crippling the market, would prove counter-productive and cumulative, leading inevitably to socialism unless the entire tissue of interventions was repealed.”

Today, Mises looks prophetic having predicted the severe economic disruptions in the economy by society’s acceptance of Keynesian errors.

With the West economic malaise in full bloom, gutted through years of inflationary spending and soaring debt loads, nearly everyone now recognizes that Mises was right all along.

Few will ever comprehend the level of courage it required for Mises to sustain the personal and professional abuses he received. Yet somehow, he never wavered in his belief that time would eventually prove him right, even if that meant from the grave.

Intellectual truth meant more to Mises than anything else, because a person of character understands that following truth is more important than rewards, recognition, or professional perks.

Time has certainly proven Mises right. Government intervention, far from being a modern day elixir, has damaged economies and markets wherever its poison has been imbibed.

Sadly though, once economic error sinks into the mind of the body politic, rooting it out takes time and effort, but it must be done. As Mises stated in Human Action,

“Economics deals with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen.”

All citizens should study the history of political, economic and spiritual freedoms, the very freedoms that undergird the liberties enjoyed today in the West.

Follow the Money

If Mises pointed out the fallacies of inflationist and socialist policies in the 1920’s, then why did the West proceed for nearly a century on a spending and borrowing binge, resulting in the near bankruptcy for most governments of the West? The answer revolves around character, or more pointedly, lack of character.

“Follow the money” (FTM) is the motive behind most politician’s questionable behaviors. FTM along with its brother “something for nothing” (SFN) combine to make a powerful force in overcoming principles and character wherever they are allowed to prosper unchecked.

Since most people have a price, educators and politicians FTM into supporting Keynesian policies and are rewarded for selling out their character and supporting faulty economics rationalizing their sell out by the pot of gold offered to them at the end of the rainbow.

This behavior created the current that Mises opposed in his battle for truth against errors. Mises insisted on a gold standard to end political-induced inflation.

Inflation: The Hidden Tax

Politicians sell out their character for inflation because they are always short of two things in modern democracies – money to buy votes and votes to obtain further money.

In the past, a politician could not spend government money unless he raised revenues through increased taxes. Since tax hikes were highly unpopular, he feared losing his elected position; therefore, he restrained his appetite for spending in order to remain popular with his voters.

Today, however, through the “joys” of Keynesian economics, this check to poor behavior is gone. Politicians can now spend more money than taxes raise indefinitely, without having to even suggest increasing taxes.

They do this by inflating the money supply through printing fiat paper money (monopoly money), calling it legal tender. Keynesian policies have given Western governments an unlimited money supply to buy further votes without raising taxes, thus avoiding the ire of the fooled electorate.

The inflated money loses its monetary value as it’s diluted within the economy, but Keynesian politicians don’t seem to mind. They are willing to sacrifice the citizen’s wealth through inflation for their personal benefit in money and votes.

What makes inflationary policy so devious is that it isn’t easily understood by the people. Politicians hide behind their Keynesian soundbites while in office, then leave a bankrupt governments as their legacy, long after they are retired.

Indeed, Keynesian economics provided an amenable world-view for current politicians because it condones their SFN inflationary money policies (a secret tax on citizen’s money) without having to risk an election day disaster.

Keynesians can even proclaim to their voters that they didn’t raise taxes, yet secretly they inflate the money supply which is taxing everyone and hurting those most who live on a fixed income and cannot afford the higher prices that inflation produces.

Most politicians, however, are not concerned with the citizens’ long-term wealth, focused instead, upon their short-term need of money and votes to get reelected. In the politician’s mindset, why worry about the country’s long-term viability when he will be out of office and not responsible for the crash?

Politicians quickly learn the game, pandering to the needs of the current voters, even promising more benefits to them, ignoring the long-term consequences of their irresponsible behavior. Their concern for being elected today trumps the downside damage to the country years, if not decades, hence.

Nonetheless, John Maynard Keynes, understood the long-term consequences of his policies, but when confronted, he answered, “In the long run, we are all dead.”

A humorous quip perhaps, but avoiding the underlying issue. Any system that provides current politicians access to future tax dollars in order to buy an election today is immoral on its face.

Indeed, both parties become bidders of other people’s money, promising gifts to current constituents to be paid for by future tax payers, many not yet even born.

When a person comprehends this point, he will understand why Mises was persecuted so vehemently, because he pointed out the illicit nature of the alliance between the State and the Keynesian economic professors, refusing to go along with the inflationary charade parade at the tax-payers expense.

The economists sell out their character for comfort, money, and power gained through supporting popular Keynesian policies. Individuals, in the pursuit of gain, can advance by writing, teaching, and supporting Keynesian theories of government intervention.

But why do most Universities support government intervention in the economy? Can you say FTM? Who is funding nearly every universities in America and the Western world? Is it the same Western governments who benefit from the Universities teaching the flawed Keynesian economics?

The same government, who partners with educators, convincing the masses of the benefit of Keynesian inflationary policies, then rewards the educators through money grants, prestigious university posts, and government advisory roles in the Statist governments. All the professor has to do is promote the popular Keynesian policies to move ahead.

If a person were to FTM, it flows something like this in a simplistic rendition:

1. government prints paper money,
2. stealing value from all Americans,
3. taking some of the money to reward the economic educators (doctrinaires), who write mighty tomes (propaganda) in support of said governments,
4. creating a virtuous cycle of advancement for exploiters in both the political and educational fields.

All of these benefits are paid for by the masses, who being ignorant of the scheme, merely wonder why it becomes tougher every year to make a living.

Politicians win by spending money that doesn’t belong to them; economists win by receiving advancements through teaching flawed doctrine; the citizens lose by declining wealth and opportunities, surrendering “we the people” to “we the exploited.”

Mises pointed out the scheme and refused to participate, paying the price for his character-based stand, blackballed from every major university teaching post even though he is recognized as one of the greatest economists of all-time.

Bankrupting the West

Young and impressionable students, not trained to recognize the fallacies of Keynesianism, become susceptible to the propaganda, despite the fact that after five thousand years of recorded history, Statist policies have never worked anywhere.

Even the Kings of Propaganda, both Hitler and Lenin, would be proud of the level of deceit here. Hitler taught, “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it,” along with, “How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.” Not to be outdone, Lenin espoused, “A lie told often enough becomes truth.”

If economists are rewarded for following the company line, and the companies, in this case, are funded by the government, then it doesn’t take a grand conspiracy theory, but merely an understanding of FTM and SFN, to see why our present economic policies support further government interventions regardless of whether they are bankrupting the Western Nations or not.

What other valid explanation could explain the United States multi-trillion dollar national debt?

It’s hard for anyone to make a character-based stand in the workplace when the boss rewards the bad behaviors and punishes the good ones. People are left in a moral quandary, pitting their money against their morals.

Millions of people surrender their morals for money, engulfing the world in darkness. But when one person sets his soul on fire with truth, his light radiates a path out of the darkness.

This is exactly what Ludwig Von Mises did: He lit a path out of the darkness for others to follow.

Where is the next generation of men and women willing to set their soul on fire for truth?

Where are the courageous citizens, who cannot tolerate falsehoods any longer, who bravely choose to live by Virgil’s quote, “do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it”?

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Orrin Woodward co-authored the New York Times bestseller Launching a Leadership Revolution. His first solo book, RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE, made the Top 100 All-Time Best Leadership Books List. Orrin was awarded as the 2011 IAB Leader of the Year.

Orrin has co-founded two multi-million dollar leadership companies and serves as the Chairman of the Board of the LIFE Business. He has a B.S. degree from GMI-EMI (now Kettering University) in manufacturing systems engineering. He holds four U.S. patents, and won an exclusive National Technical Benchmarking Award.

He follows the sun between residences in Michigan and Florida with his lovely wife Laurie and their children. Orrin’s leadership thoughts are shared on his blog, orrinwoodwardblog.com.

For over a year now, people of all political views have been at high pitch on politics. They geared up for the Republican primaries, then the question of who would be the Vice President, and then the general election dominated the fall season.

The election took over October and November, and people were still closely focused during December and January. The State of the Union address in February kept a lot of people involved, but if we follow historical patterns, interest in what our government is doing will fade through spring, summer and into fall.

The problem, this time around, is that some real battles are just getting started because the economy is headed for a major shock.

Specifically, next January some of the most significant elements of Obamacare will go into effect. While January may seem a long way off, businesses are right now figuring out how to deal with the coming changes — and their reactions will have a major impact on the economy in the second, third and fourth quarters of 2013.

This is a huge concern, though most Americans haven’t clearly recognized it yet.

For example, almost every business with fifty or more employees will have to spend a lot more on health care starting in January. Many companies that are close to the fifty mark are deciding not to grow this year, and others are strategizing how to lay off and get below the fifty line.

Still others are debating the merit of breaking up into several smaller companies, and others are running the numbers on sending a lot of their business to other countries.

Some are looking at outsourcing more of their work to temp agencies, and many bigger companies are looking at simply laying off a lot of employees to keep rising costs within their budgets.

And none of this deals with the many uninsured people who are going to see their costs go significantly up — at the same time incomes are being pushed in the other direction.

The media isn’t saying much about this, but business is taking a huge economic hit in the months ahead, and it is looking at a number of responses — nearly all of which will directly impact employees, unemployment rates, and how many business stay in the United States. This will influence where investors put their money, sending a lot of capital abroad.

Serious economic concerns are coming.

In short, now is not the time to let down. Now is a time for real citizen involvement in what government does.

We can wait for the media to start talking about major economic challenges in the fall and next winter, but by then it will too late to do much about this reality.

But there is a lesser known side of our curriculum — the manual arts, which are not something the average American thinks about in the 21st century.

But a hundred years ago, the vast majority of Americans were engaged in the manual arts everyday.

In fact, excluding the last 60 years of developed nations, manual arts were the reality for nearly the entire global population.

Without the manual arts, most of what we enjoy almost unconsciously, would not exist.  In our high-tech, synthetic, and artificial world, we have reached a “roman” sense of existence — the only difference from then to now — we just have more sophisticated slaves.*

In his thought-provoking ebook, The Future of American Education: 8 Trends Every Parent Should Understand, Oliver DeMille explains that we now outsource most things that traditionally have been handled by families and communities.

This idea of outsourcing seems to be a national pastime, albeit there does appear to be a small underground resurgence of the manual arts illustrated by websites such as theurbanfarmingguys.com.

One of the reasons we have disowned the use of the manual arts is due to the steady progression of technology.  The advent of labor saving devices (LSDs) has improved our lives in many ways.

It has also been the underlying source of a whole host of sedentary lifestyle diseases. Where is the balance?

From the advent of the Industrial Revolution, saving labor changed the world from mere survival to producing a cash crop beyond subsistence or allowing a farmer increased discretionary time for more favored pursuits.

By the 1970s the workingman was able to produce much more with a fraction of the backbreaking labor required a century before which stabilized into a 40-hour work-week…increasing discretionary time even further.

It also freed the American housewife of many undesirable chores, and like her spouse, freed up significant “my time”…but to what end?

If it was to allow them to relax a little more, no harm done. If it permitted more time to give to others or to develop talents that would be good too, but unfortunately for most of people, it led to their less ambitious side with copious amounts of time being devoted to the latest entertainment and diversion.

It allowed them more time to engage in recreation and entertainment on the weekends, often ignoring family, relationships, and service to neighbors, and expanding into long weekends which monopolized the traditional Sabbath for non-Sabbath day activities.

By the 1990s we were thoroughly absorbed by a numbing consumerism, life had gotten pretty easy so labor saving was really no longer the goal.

But keeping up with the “Jones,” and securing the latest fashions or gadget, or the newest car, or a bigger house was. This really exploded with the advent of computer technology, gaming, and home entertainment from the late 1990s to the present.

The latest chapter in our American LSDs story is resulting in skyrocketing obesity — 70% of all adults and 30% of children in America suffer from poor health and diseases not seen two decades ago.

According to Popular Mechanics (2011), every man should possess certain basic manual art skills.

They provided a list for men to become more manly, clearly an indication that males no longer possess these skills.

Removing anything on the list that was technology related, I am including the remaining 16 manual arts that the modern man has apparently lost:

1. Sharpen a knife
2. Patch a radiator hose
3. Frame a wall
4. Back-up a trailer
5. Build campfire
6. Use an ax properly to chop wood
7. Fix a dead outlet
8. Navigate with a compass and map
9. Fillet a fish
10. Get a car unstuck
11. Paint a room
12. Mix concrete
13. Clean a gun
14. Change oil in a car (and know that the filter needs to be changed too)
15. Paddle a canoe
16. Fix a bike flat

Today there are 184 million active Facebook users in America (that’s 60% of our entire population) spending more than two hours a week on Facebook. But if you factor in all online activities (all social media, all gaming,  all youtube viewing and other online videos, etc) the percentage sky rockets to almost 25 percent of our awake time.

For the average American over the age of 16 that can be as much as five hours a day, every day or the equivalent of an entire work week per month. This does not include texting, and playing games on our iPhones.

This is all time wherein we are distracted from our loved ones, our community and our social responsibilities.

How do we not see that this is a monumental waste of our national resource of labor, not to mention a decline of our national character?

LSDs and the specialization of the consumer age has not only made us inept to care for ourselves, it has driven the cost of living many times over what it was just fifty years ago.  Are our lives really better and more satisfying now compared to the 1940s?

Working as a youngster on a dairy farm in the mid 1970’s, I worked along side sixty year-old men who never had high cholesterol and very little arthritis. They had no weight problems (a little pudgy — they were in their sixties) and were active in every other way. They could put in a 12-hour day of hard farm work as easily as I could.

Yet today I see countless 30-something men who are overweight, soft, and would likely expire at the thought of hard physical labor.  What has happened to us?

We have forgotten the enjoyment of using our hands, the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes from “doing it ourselves” and the security of self-sufficiency.

We have forgotten that human beings are still needed for the most basic necessities of life — food still grows in the ground and must be harvested, fruits still needs to be picked from the tree, cloth is still manually fed into the sewing machine, and fossil fuels and natural resources are still wrenched from the earth — by hand.

Not having personal experience in the manual arts is one level of losing our humanity and threatens civilization.

Every congressman, police officer, corporate CEO, surgeon, diplomat, teacher, real estate agent — in short, every American citizen would make better decisions, have better morals, and lead happier lives if they were more engaged in the manual arts.

In fact, we challenge our readers to do just that — find ways more deeply engage in the manual arts.

The manual arts are a natural cure for egoism, self-deception, and obesity.  The manual arts are an instinctive remedy for a troubled mind and eliminate the need for sleep aids. The manual arts will increase health, vitality, and improve your view of the world.  The manual arts enhance our powers of observation and appreciation.

Many of the manual arts involve dirt or soil or being outside in the fresh air — it is spiritually grounding and emotionally balancing.

Some of the least stressed and happiest people I know are masters of the manual arts.

*At the peak of Roman culture there were seven slaves for every roman citizen. The Romans had for the most part completely shunned the manual arts, becoming increasingly dependent on slave labor and the importation of their food supply. We have reached a similar existence.  We are becoming more and more dependent on exports and even the manual labor done in this country is emotionally and culturally relegated to a certain segment of our population.

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Shanon Brooks is the President of Monticello College, the Director of Education and Training for Humanitarian Visions International, S.A., and a contributing editor of the Center for Social Leadership. He co-authored Thomas Jefferson Education for Teens.

Shanon and his wife Julia are raising their six children in Monticello, Utah.