Being a Good and Happy Person

Over at the Life Learning today blog there is a post about how to teach children to be good and happy people.

The best way is to be a role model: "Practice what you preach".

Many of these objectives should be obvious but isn't it worthwhile to have the list to remind ourselves sometimes of the legacy we want to leave?

Technorati Tags: attitude, Habits

How to change the world: clean water

Guy Kawasaki was one of the original Mac evangelists for Apple computer and now is a venture capitalist who plays hockey.

On his blog he has a video on a clever idea to use the energy from a children's play structure to provide clean water for a village.
The importance of clean water is explained in many dimensions including allowing young girls to attend school.

Playpumps international sounds like a good charity to support.

Technorati Tags: Environment

The ABCs of Remaining Cool in a Crazy World

Stephen Covey in the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People writes about the gap between stimulus and response where we have free will to chose and take responsibility for our response. This is habit 1 Be Proactive. To quote from the 7 Habits wikipedia article:

1. Be Proactive. Here, Covey emphasizes the original sense of the term "reactive" as coined by Victor Frankl. You can either be proactive or reactive when it comes to how you respond to certain things. When you are reactive, you blame other people and circumstances for obstacles or problems. Being proactive means taking responsibility for everything in your life. Initiative and taking action will then follow. Covey also shows how man is different from other animals in that he has self-consciousness. He has the ability to detach himself and observe his own self; think about his thoughts. He goes on to say how this attribute enables him: It gives him the power not to be affected by his circumstances. Covey talks about stimulus and response. Between stimulus and response, we have the power of free will to choose our response.

Albert Foong (www.urbanmonk.net) in a guest post on zen habits describes this as the ABC's and D's of responding to the crazy world we live in.

Here is what he says about how to stay cool.

Technorati Tags: attitude, Habits