A good ingredient for success:

Strive to spend your time on one of two things: what you’re incredibly good at or what you absolutely love. Ideally, both will merge into the same things as you become incredibly good at what you absolutely love.

And lastly, learn to share what you are incredibly good at and what you absolutely love. I believe success is in the sharing of those things.

Growth pains

The essence of nature, the essence of humanity, is to live. What is to live? To live is to expand, to grow, to learn, to evolve, to experience.

In anything that grows, there will be growing pains. Stretch marks. Each stage of growth may REQUIRE growth pains of some kind. If you expect them, you'll likely be better prepared to deal with them.

You have no right to correct me now

You didn't ask me questions about what I was struggling with.
You didn't get curious about how I felt or what I knew.
It scared you to ask.

So you didn't try to find out what I thought or why.
And you weren't there for me when I was on my own.
You pushed ideas at me to try to calm me down instead of listening.

Well, Karma is Karma, my friend.
You didn't talk to me when I was a believer.
I won't listen to you chastise me now that I'm not.

I won't listen to you tell me I'm wrong for finding something that works better, sounds more reasonable, makes me hopeful, and meets my needs.

I won't listen when you tell me I'm a sinner when I look at a sunrise with a clear conscience for once in my life.

I won't listen when you tell me I'm to be shunned because I finally found peace where I used to find turmoil.

Making money online through "programs"

If you want to make money online and you see some program that looks like it's going to teach you all the tips and tricks to making millions online - STOP! Erch. Halt.

Let me let you in on a secret. They WILL give you value, but there is WAY MORE VALUE in watching HOW they present their material and deriving the systems and programs out of it than in the material they provide. Don't get sucked in to the marketing - observe the marketing. Notice when you feel sucked in - that's what good marketing looks like. What did they do to get you hooked? Did they use a video? What was in the video? What did the person say in the video? What did they offer?

You can learn more sometimes by watching what they do than repeating what they tell you to do.

I'm a "FAILURE", and proud of it!

What is a failure? Really? 

When we think of failing, what are we really talking about? We are talking about someone who took a risk, lived and tried something. So what is a "Failure"? A failure is someone who makes a HABIT out of taking a risk, living, and trying things. A Failure could be said to be someone who experiments, fails, experiments, fails, experiments, fails, and eventually they will experiment and succeed.

Another word for Failure: Learner.

I wear the badge proudly: I am a Failure.

The bond without self is empty

Don't you ever forget -
Don't you dare forget, my love...
Don't forget...
Today, forever and always,
You are married first and foremost to yourself.

For, without you -
There can be no relationship.
It takes two for a bond,
And if you forget yourself,
You have taken yourself out of the bond,
Out of the equation.

To forget yourself -
In order to love someone else,
Is to kill off a main character
In the relationship you seek to have.

So do me a favor,
Don't forget -
Today, forever and always,
You are married first and foremost to yourself.

Elizabeth Gilbert suggested writing a letter "From Fear"

I did your suggested exercise of allowing my fear to write a letter to me, and thought the insight might be worth sharing in case anyone else relates:

Dearest Lizzie-Lynn,

I hate you. You will be the death of us all! Maybe.

But admittedly, you get things right sometimes and then I don’t hate you so much. And honestly, you get things right more often than I'd like to admit. You seem to prove me wrong often enough, but that doesn’t give you the right to ignore me. I’m trying to protect us, you know, and you keep telling me to shut up. I’m tired of it. I want you to listen. To really listen to me. Get curious and ask me questions about why I’m saying what I’m saying so that we can figure out a solution together. There’s usually a solution, but you seem to just give up if I mention a concern. Please stop that.

I think the reason you do that is because sometimes you give WAY too much meaning to what I tell you. Sometimes I tell you "I don't know what will happen!" and you think I said, "the world's doom is upon us." All I'm asking is that you listen to what I tell you and we arm ourselves with the info, so we can plan our next moves together! And please remember, I DO mean to alert you, but not IMMOBILIZE you. I simply want you to LOOK at the things I bring to your attention. Sometimes I say something because I'm SUPER sure we've both been here before, and it was really painful, so I’m just trying to say "Let's not do that again!” which in my mind means we can figure out together how to proceed, but you often default to giving up on your idea.

And lastly, I think you're braver than I am, which honestly is scary because I think I'm right most of the time and in spite of my opinion, you put us into unnecessarily precarious situations when you ignore me. The painful results could be avoided if you'd just LOOK at what I'm trying to point out to you.

I simply want you to be aware of and then decide what you'll do about the topics I bring up. I'm sure you can figure out ways of keeping us all safe. You're pretty creative, you'll figure something out... As long as you actually LISTEN to me and stop IGNORING me, that is.

With hate sometimes, and love sometimes,

Your Ever-present Fear

Elizabeth Gilbert suggested writing a letter... This is the link to that post.