Starbucks invades Parisian cafe culture ................................................................................... 1
The beauty industry .............................................................................................................................. 2
Holiday Headache ................................................................................................................................... 2
Arthritis all-clear for high heels ..................................................................................................... 3
Disney World ............................................................................................................................................. 4
Secrets to a Great Life ......................................................................................................................... 5
The 50-Percent Theory of Life ......................................................................................................... 6
The Road to Happiness ........................................................................................................................ 7
Six Famous Words .................................................................................................................................. 8
Write Your Own Life .............................................................................................................................. 8
Starbucks invades Parisian cafe culture
A form of alien civilisation has finally landed in Paris - unfamiliar green and black signs have appeared on the Avenue de L'Opera.
It is the first Starbucks cafe to boldly go where no Starbucks has gone before, onto potentially hostile French territory.
Its advertising posters on the Champs Elysee announce "Starbucks - a passion pour le cafe".
But is the company aware of the risk it is taking by challenging the very birthplace of cafe society?
"I think every time we come into a new market we do it with a great sense of respect, a great deal of interest in how that cafe society has developed over time," Bill O'Shea of Starbucks says.
"We recognise there is a huge history here of cafe society and we have every confidence we can enjoy, augment and join in that passion."
And he may be right. Despite some sniffiness in the French press, some younger French are expressing their excitement that they will finally be able to visit the kind of cafe they love to watch on the US TV series Friends.
In fact, for some, it is an exotic rarity, far more exciting than the average French cafe. Melissa, aged 18, says she can hardly wait: "I love Starbucks caramel coffee - it's very good and I like the concept that they're opening in Paris. I think Starbucks will be OK for French people."
An American tourist is equally excited when she spots the sign - this could be just the thing to help her get over the occasional twinge of homesickness.
"I love the French cafes, but Starbucks is so popular in the States and it's become part of American culture and now it's come to France, and that's OK," she said.
But that is the problem for many French, who do not want France to be just like the rest of the world: with standardised disposal cups of coffee - identical in 7,000 branches around the world - even if they are termed handcrafted beverages.
At the traditional cafes, customers worry that the big US coffee house chains could drive out small, family-owned cafes.
Others here think they could come round to the idea of Starbucks, though for them it would never replace the corner cafe or the typical Parisian petit noir coffee.
The beauty industry
The one American industry unaffeted by the general depression of trade is the beauty industry. American women continue to spend on their faces and bodies as much as they spent before the coming of the slump--about three million pounds a week. These facts and figures are 'official', and can be accepted as being substantially true.
The modern cult of beauty is not exclusively a function of wealth. If it were, then the personal appearance industries would have been as hit by the trade depression as any other business. But, as we have seen, they have not suffered.Women are retrenching on other things than their faces.
Women, it is obvious, are freer than in the past. Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions hithero reserved to the male, but also freer to exercise the more pleasing, feminine privilege of being attractive. The fortunes are made justly by face-cream manufacturers and beauty-specialists, by the sellers of rubber reducing-belts and massage machines, by the patentees of hair-lotions and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.
It is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past. The Portrait of the Artist's Mother will come to be almost indisinguishable, at future picture shows, from the Portrai of the Artist's Daughter. The success is part due to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, and in part due to impoved health. So for some people, the campaign for more beauty is also a compaign for more health. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of heslth is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing. Every middle-in-come preson can afford the cosmetic apparatus and more knowledge of the way in which real herlth can be achieved is being universally aced upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful-as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features? The answer is apparent: No,for real beauty is as much an affair of the inner as of the outer self.
Holiday Headache
All I wanted was a cozy log cabin in the state of Maine, somewhere deep in the woods, to hang out under the stars. It was to be my first vacation with my boyfriend, and I wanted it to be perfect.
So rather than waste money on a guidebook that was bound to be outdated before it appeared on the shelves of my local bookstore, I decided to search online. Little did I know that when I typed the words “Maine log cabin rental”at altavista.com, I was stepping into 48 hours of Internet hell. Forget dinner, forget work, forget sleep. I was glued to my computer for hours clicking from one listing to another to find the perfect hideaway.
I was wrong. The first site that I tried, cyberrentals.com, grouped rentals by region but had no map to tell me where such romantic-sounding, places as Seal Cove or Owl’s Head were. So I had to log on to mapblast.com to locate each one, then return to slogging through listings.Another site, vacationspot.com, let me find 50 cabins and cottages right off, but most of the rentals turned out to be closed for the winter.
I learned only after reading a lot of fine print. One day and hundreds of listings later, I was ready to throw my computer out the window. For every 10 vacation spots I looked into, I found maybe one that sounded good and more often than not, it was booked, too far away, or outrageously priced. Searching on line was really giving me a headache.I finally decided to put our log-cabin Web dreams on hold and search the old-fashioned way at a bookstore. I bought a paperback book called America’s Favorite Inns, B&Bs, and Small Hotels. I was relieved to see that each city was neatly pinpointed on a detailed map, and most had good descriptions to help me figure out where in Maine we should go in the first place.
Then I found it: an old inn on the southern coast of Maine that rented us one of its best rooms for $100 a night. Guess what? It didn’t have a Website. I took my chances based on a good review, a great location and a bargain price. It wasn’t a log cabin, and it was far from the woods, but there were lace curtains, a hardwood floor and a quilt on the bed. With the ocean outside our window and a fireplace in the room, my holiday was just as cozy as I dreamed it would be.
Arthritis all-clear for high heels
Fears that wearing high-heeled shoes could lead to knee arthritis are
unfounded,sayresearchers.
But being overweight,smoking,and having a previous knee injury does increase the risk,the team from Oxford Brookes Universtity found.
They looked at more than 100 women aged between 50 and 70 waiting for knee surgery, and found that choice of shoes was not a factor
The study was published in the Journal of Epidemilology and public health.
More than 2% of the population aged over 55 suffers extreme pain as a result of osteoarthrits of the knee.
The condition is twice as common in 65-year-old women as it is in men of the same age. Women's and men's knees are not biologically different, so the reserachers wanted to find out why twice as many women as men develop osteoarthritis in the joint.
Some researchers have speculated tha high-heeled shoes maybe to blame.
The women in the study were quizzed on details of their height and weight when they left school, between 36 and 40 and between 51 and 55.
They were asked about injuries, their jobs, smoking and use of contraceptive hormones. Howere, while many of these factors were linked to an increased risk over the years was not.
The researchers wrote:"Most of the women had been exposed to high heeled shoes over the years-nevertheless, a consistent finding was a reduced risk of osteoarthritis of the knee.
There was an even more pronounced link between regular dancing in three-inch heels and a reduced risk of knee problems.
The researchers described this finding as "surprising", but said that they would not expect a larger-scale study to overturn their findings.
Disney World
Disney World, Florida, is the biggest amusement resort in the world. It covers 24.4 thousand acres, and is twice the size of Manhattan. It was opened on October 1 1971, five years after Walt Disney’s death, and it is a larger, slightly more ambitious version of Disneyland near Los Angeles.
Foreigners tend to associate Walt Disney with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and with his other famous cartoon characters, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
There is very little that could be called vulgar in Disney World. It attracts people of most tastes and most income groups, and people of all ages, from toddlers to grandpas. There are two expensive hotels, a golf course, forest trails for horseback riding and rivers for canoeing. But the central attraction of the resort is the MagicKingdom.
Between the huge parking lots and the MagicKingdom lies a broad artificial lake. In the distance rise the towers of Cinderella’s Castle. Even getting to the MagicKingdom is quite an adventure. You have a choice of transportation. You can either cross the lake on a replica of a Mississippipaddlewheeler, or you can glide around the shore in a streamlined monorail train.
When you reach the terminal, you walk straight into a little square which faces Main Street. Main Street is late 19th century. There are modern shops inside the buildings, but all the facades are of the period. There are hanging baskets full of red and white flowers, and
there is no traffic except a horse-drawn streetcar and an ancient double-decker bus. Yet as you walk through the MagicKingdom, you are actually walking on top of a network of underground roads. This is how the shops, restaurants and all other material needs of the MagicKingdom are invisibly supplied.
Secrets to a Great Life
A great life doesn’t happen by accident. A great life is the result of allocating your time, energy, thoughts, and hard work towards what you want your life to be.Stop setting yourself up for stress and failure, and start setting up your life to support success and ease.
A great life is the result of using the 24/7 you get in a creative and thoughtful way, instead of just what comes next. Customize these “secrets” to fit your own needs and style, and start creating your own great life today!
1. S—Simplify.
A great life is the result of simplifying your life. When you focus on simplifying your life, you free up energy and time for the work that you enjoy and the purpose for which you are here. In order to create a great life, you will have to make room for it in yours first.
2. E—Effort.
A great life is the result of your best effort. Creating a great life requires that you make some adjustments. It means looking for new ways to spend your energy that coincide with your particular definition of a great life. Life will reward your best effort.
3. C—Create Priorities.
A great life is the result of creating priorities. It’s easy to spend your days just responding to the next thing that gets your attention, instead of intentionally using the time, energy and money you have in a way that’s important to you. Make sure you are honoring your priorities.
4. R—Reserves.
A great life is the result of having reserves—reserves of things, time, space, energy, money. With reserves, you acquire far more than you need. Reserves are important because they reduce the fear of consequences, and that allows you to make decisions based on what you really want instead of what the fear decides for you.
5. E—Eliminate distractions.
A great life is the result of eliminating distractions. Look around at someone’s life you admire. What do they do that you would like to incorporate into your own life? Ask them how they did it. Find ways to free up your mental energy for things that are more important to you.
6. T—Thoughts.
A great life is the result of controlling your thoughts so that you accept and allow for the possibility that it actually can happen to you! Your belief in the outcome will directly dictate how successful you are. Motivated people have specific goals and look for ways to achieve them.
7. S—Start.
A great life is the result of starting. There’s the old saying everyone’s familiar with “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. There’s no better time to start than today.
Don’t wait for a raise, or until the kids get older, or the weather is better. It’s what you do TODAY that will make a difference in your life tomorrow.
The 50-Percent Theory of Life
I believe in the 50-percent theory. Half the time things are better than normal; the other half, they are worse. I believe life is a pendulum swing. It takes time and experience to
understand what normal is, and that gives me the perspective to deal with the surprises of the future.
Let’s benchmark the parameters: Yes, I will die. I’ve dealt with the deaths of both parents, a best friend, a beloved boss and cherished pets. Some of these deaths have been violent, before my eyes, or slow and agonizing. Bad stuff, and it belongs at the bottom of the scale. Then there are those high points: romance and marriage to the right person; having a child and doing those Dad things like coaching my son’s baseball team, paddling around the creek in the boat while he’s swimming with the dogs, discovering his compassion so deep it manifests even in his kindness to snails, his imagination so vivid he builds a spaceship from a scattered pile of Legos.
But there is a vast meadow of life in the middle, where the bad and the good flip-flop acrobatically. This is what convinces me to believe in the50-percent theory.One spring I planted corn too early in a bottomland so flood-prone that neighbors laughed. I felt chagrined at the wasted effort. Summer turned brutal—the worst heat wave and drought in my lifetime. The air-conditioner died, the well went dry, the marriage ended, the job lost, the money gone. I was living lyrics from a country tune—music I disliked. Only a surging Kansas City Royals team, bound for their first World Series, buoyed my spirits.Looking back on that horrible summer, I soon understood that all succeeding good things merely offset the bad. Worse than normal wouldn’t last long. I am owed and savor the peaceful and happy times. They reinvigorate me for the next nasty surprise and offer assurance that I can thrive.
The 50 percent theory even helps me see hope beyond my Royals’ recent slump, a field of struggling rookies sown so that some year soon we can reap an October harvest. Oh, yeah, the corn crop? For that one blistering summer, the ground moisture was just right, planting early allowed pollination before heat withered the tops, and the lack of rain spared the standing corn from floods. That winter my crib overflowed with corn—fat, healthy
three-to-a-stalk ears filled with kernels from heel to tip—while my neighbors’ fields yielded only brown, empty husks.
Although plantings past may have fallen below the 50-percent expectation, and they probably will again in the future, I am still sustained by the crop that flourishes during the drought.
The Road to Happiness
It is a commonplace among moralists that you cannot get happiness by pursuing it. This is only true if you pursue it unwisely. Gamblers at Monte Carlo are pursuing money, and most of them lose it instead, but there are other ways of pursuing money, which often succeed. So it is with happiness. If you pursue it by means of drink, you are forgetting the hangover.
Epicurus pursued it by living only in congenial society and eating only dry bread, supplemented by a little cheese on feast days. His method proved successful in his case, but he was a valetudinarian, and most people would need something more vigorous.
For most people, the pursuit of happiness, unless supplemented in various ways, is too abstract and theoretical to be adequate as a personal rule of life. But I think that whatever personal rule of life you may choose it should not, except in rare and heroic cases, be incompatible with happiness.If you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy, will see that they all have certain things in common. The most important of these things is an activity which at most gradually builds up something that you are glad to see coming into existence.
Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children can get this kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family. Artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this way if their own work seems good to them. But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure. Many men who spend their working life in the city devote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated toil in their gardens, and when the spring comes, they experience all the joys of having created beauty.
The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion, been treated too solemnly. It had been thought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion. Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory may need a better theory to help them to recover, just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill. But when things are normal a man should be healthy ]without a tonic and happy without a theory. It is the simple things that really matter.
If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work, and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn, he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be. If, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his children’s noise unendurable, and the office a nightmare; if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day, then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen—a different diet, or more exercise, or what not.
Man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.
Six Famous Words
“To be or not to be.” Outside the Bible, these six words are the most famous in all the
literature of the world. They were spoken by Hamlet when he was thinking aloud, and they are the most famous words in Shakespearebecause Hamlet was speaking not only for himself but also for every thinking man and woman.
To be or not to be, to live or not to live, to live richly and abundantly and eagerly, or to live dully and meanly and scarcely. A philosopher once wanted to know whether he was alive or not, which is a good question for everyone to put to himself occasionally. He answered it by saying: “I think, therefore I am.”But the best definition of existence I ever saw was one written by another philosopher who said: “To be is to be in relations.” If this is true, then the more relations a living thing has, the more it is alive.
To live abundantly means simply to increase the range and intensity of our relations. Unfortunately we are so constituted that we get to love our routine. But apart from our regular occupation how much are we alive? If you are interested only in your regular occupation, you are alive only to that extent. So far as other things are concerned—poetry and prose, music, pictures, sports, unselfish friendships, politics, international affairs—you are dead. Contrariwise, it is true that every time you acquire a new interest—even more, a new accomplishment—you increase your power of life.
No one who is deeply interested in a large variety of subjects can remain unhappy, the real pessimist is the person who has lost interest. Bacon said that a man dies as often as he loses a friend. But we gain new life by contacts and new friends.
What is supremely true of living objects is only less true of ideas, which are also alive. Where your thoughts are, there will your life be also. If your thoughts are confined only to your business, only to your physical welfare, only to the narrow circle of the town in which you live, then you live in a narrow-circled life. But if you are interested in what is going on in China, then you are living in China—if you’re interested in the characters of a good novel, then you are living with those highly interesting people, if you listen intently to fine music, you are away from your immediate surroundings and living in a world of passion and imagination.
To be or not to be—to live intensely and richly, merely to exist, that depends on ourselves. Let widen and intensify our relations. While we live, let live!
Write Your Own Life
Suppose someone gave you a pen—a sealed, solid-colored pen. You couldn’t see how much ink it had. It might run dry after the first few tentative words or last just long enough to
create a masterpiece (or several) that would last forever and make a difference in the
scheme of things. You don’t know before you begin. Under the rules of the game, you really never know. You have to take a chance!
Actually, no rule of the game states you must do anything. Instead of picking up and using the pen, you could leave it on a shelf or in a drawer where it will dry up, unused. But if you do decide to use it, what would you do with it?
How would you play the game?
Would you plan and plan before you ever wrote a word? Would your plans be so extensive that you never even got to the writing? Or would you take the pen in hand, plunge right in and just do it, struggling to keep up with the twists and turns of the torrents of words that take you where they take you? Would you write cautiously and carefully, as if the pen might run dry the next moment, or would you pretend or believe (or pretend to believe) that the pen will write forever and proceed accordingly?And of what would you write: Of love? Hate? Fun?Misery?Life?Death?Nothing?Everything?
Would you write to please just yourself?Or others? Or yourself by writing for others? Would your strokes be tremblingly timid or brilliantly bold? Fancy with a flourish or plain? Would you even write? Once you have the pen, no rule says you have to write.
Would you sketch? Scribble? Doodle or draw?
Would you stay in or on the lines, or see no lines at all, even if they were there? Or are they?
There’s a lot to think about here, isn’t there? Now, suppose someone gave you a life…
Starbucks invades Parisian cafe culture ................................................................................... 1
The beauty industry .............................................................................................................................. 2
Holiday Headache ................................................................................................................................... 2
Arthritis all-clear for high heels ..................................................................................................... 3
Disney World ............................................................................................................................................. 4
Secrets to a Great Life ......................................................................................................................... 5
The 50-Percent Theory of Life ......................................................................................................... 6
The Road to Happiness ........................................................................................................................ 7
Six Famous Words .................................................................................................................................. 8
Write Your Own Life .............................................................................................................................. 8
Starbucks invades Parisian cafe culture
A form of alien civilisation has finally landed in Paris - unfamiliar green and black signs have appeared on the Avenue de L'Opera.
It is the first Starbucks cafe to boldly go where no Starbucks has gone before, onto potentially hostile French territory.
Its advertising posters on the Champs Elysee announce "Starbucks - a passion pour le cafe".
But is the company aware of the risk it is taking by challenging the very birthplace of cafe society?
"I think every time we come into a new market we do it with a great sense of respect, a great deal of interest in how that cafe society has developed over time," Bill O'Shea of Starbucks says.
"We recognise there is a huge history here of cafe society and we have every confidence we can enjoy, augment and join in that passion."
And he may be right. Despite some sniffiness in the French press, some younger French are expressing their excitement that they will finally be able to visit the kind of cafe they love to watch on the US TV series Friends.
In fact, for some, it is an exotic rarity, far more exciting than the average French cafe. Melissa, aged 18, says she can hardly wait: "I love Starbucks caramel coffee - it's very good and I like the concept that they're opening in Paris. I think Starbucks will be OK for French people."
An American tourist is equally excited when she spots the sign - this could be just the thing to help her get over the occasional twinge of homesickness.
"I love the French cafes, but Starbucks is so popular in the States and it's become part of American culture and now it's come to France, and that's OK," she said.
But that is the problem for many French, who do not want France to be just like the rest of the world: with standardised disposal cups of coffee - identical in 7,000 branches around the world - even if they are termed handcrafted beverages.
At the traditional cafes, customers worry that the big US coffee house chains could drive out small, family-owned cafes.
Others here think they could come round to the idea of Starbucks, though for them it would never replace the corner cafe or the typical Parisian petit noir coffee.
The beauty industry
The one American industry unaffeted by the general depression of trade is the beauty industry. American women continue to spend on their faces and bodies as much as they spent before the coming of the slump--about three million pounds a week. These facts and figures are 'official', and can be accepted as being substantially true.
The modern cult of beauty is not exclusively a function of wealth. If it were, then the personal appearance industries would have been as hit by the trade depression as any other business. But, as we have seen, they have not suffered.Women are retrenching on other things than their faces.
Women, it is obvious, are freer than in the past. Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions hithero reserved to the male, but also freer to exercise the more pleasing, feminine privilege of being attractive. The fortunes are made justly by face-cream manufacturers and beauty-specialists, by the sellers of rubber reducing-belts and massage machines, by the patentees of hair-lotions and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.
It is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past. The Portrait of the Artist's Mother will come to be almost indisinguishable, at future picture shows, from the Portrai of the Artist's Daughter. The success is part due to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, and in part due to impoved health. So for some people, the campaign for more beauty is also a compaign for more health. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of heslth is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing. Every middle-in-come preson can afford the cosmetic apparatus and more knowledge of the way in which real herlth can be achieved is being universally aced upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful-as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features? The answer is apparent: No,for real beauty is as much an affair of the inner as of the outer self.
Holiday Headache
All I wanted was a cozy log cabin in the state of Maine, somewhere deep in the woods, to hang out under the stars. It was to be my first vacation with my boyfriend, and I wanted it to be perfect.
So rather than waste money on a guidebook that was bound to be outdated before it appeared on the shelves of my local bookstore, I decided to search online. Little did I know that when I typed the words “Maine log cabin rental”at altavista.com, I was stepping into 48 hours of Internet hell. Forget dinner, forget work, forget sleep. I was glued to my computer for hours clicking from one listing to another to find the perfect hideaway.
I was wrong. The first site that I tried, cyberrentals.com, grouped rentals by region but had no map to tell me where such romantic-sounding, places as Seal Cove or Owl’s Head were. So I had to log on to mapblast.com to locate each one, then return to slogging through listings.Another site, vacationspot.com, let me find 50 cabins and cottages right off, but most of the rentals turned out to be closed for the winter.
I learned only after reading a lot of fine print. One day and hundreds of listings later, I was ready to throw my computer out the window. For every 10 vacation spots I looked into, I found maybe one that sounded good and more often than not, it was booked, too far away, or outrageously priced. Searching on line was really giving me a headache.I finally decided to put our log-cabin Web dreams on hold and search the old-fashioned way at a bookstore. I bought a paperback book called America’s Favorite Inns, B&Bs, and Small Hotels. I was relieved to see that each city was neatly pinpointed on a detailed map, and most had good descriptions to help me figure out where in Maine we should go in the first place.
Then I found it: an old inn on the southern coast of Maine that rented us one of its best rooms for $100 a night. Guess what? It didn’t have a Website. I took my chances based on a good review, a great location and a bargain price. It wasn’t a log cabin, and it was far from the woods, but there were lace curtains, a hardwood floor and a quilt on the bed. With the ocean outside our window and a fireplace in the room, my holiday was just as cozy as I dreamed it would be.
Arthritis all-clear for high heels
Fears that wearing high-heeled shoes could lead to knee arthritis are
unfounded,sayresearchers.
But being overweight,smoking,and having a previous knee injury does increase the risk,the team from Oxford Brookes Universtity found.
They looked at more than 100 women aged between 50 and 70 waiting for knee surgery, and found that choice of shoes was not a factor
The study was published in the Journal of Epidemilology and public health.
More than 2% of the population aged over 55 suffers extreme pain as a result of osteoarthrits of the knee.
The condition is twice as common in 65-year-old women as it is in men of the same age. Women's and men's knees are not biologically different, so the reserachers wanted to find out why twice as many women as men develop osteoarthritis in the joint.
Some researchers have speculated tha high-heeled shoes maybe to blame.
The women in the study were quizzed on details of their height and weight when they left school, between 36 and 40 and between 51 and 55.
They were asked about injuries, their jobs, smoking and use of contraceptive hormones. Howere, while many of these factors were linked to an increased risk over the years was not.
The researchers wrote:"Most of the women had been exposed to high heeled shoes over the years-nevertheless, a consistent finding was a reduced risk of osteoarthritis of the knee.
There was an even more pronounced link between regular dancing in three-inch heels and a reduced risk of knee problems.
The researchers described this finding as "surprising", but said that they would not expect a larger-scale study to overturn their findings.
Disney World
Disney World, Florida, is the biggest amusement resort in the world. It covers 24.4 thousand acres, and is twice the size of Manhattan. It was opened on October 1 1971, five years after Walt Disney’s death, and it is a larger, slightly more ambitious version of Disneyland near Los Angeles.
Foreigners tend to associate Walt Disney with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and with his other famous cartoon characters, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
There is very little that could be called vulgar in Disney World. It attracts people of most tastes and most income groups, and people of all ages, from toddlers to grandpas. There are two expensive hotels, a golf course, forest trails for horseback riding and rivers for canoeing. But the central attraction of the resort is the MagicKingdom.
Between the huge parking lots and the MagicKingdom lies a broad artificial lake. In the distance rise the towers of Cinderella’s Castle. Even getting to the MagicKingdom is quite an adventure. You have a choice of transportation. You can either cross the lake on a replica of a Mississippipaddlewheeler, or you can glide around the shore in a streamlined monorail train.
When you reach the terminal, you walk straight into a little square which faces Main Street. Main Street is late 19th century. There are modern shops inside the buildings, but all the facades are of the period. There are hanging baskets full of red and white flowers, and
there is no traffic except a horse-drawn streetcar and an ancient double-decker bus. Yet as you walk through the MagicKingdom, you are actually walking on top of a network of underground roads. This is how the shops, restaurants and all other material needs of the MagicKingdom are invisibly supplied.
Secrets to a Great Life
A great life doesn’t happen by accident. A great life is the result of allocating your time, energy, thoughts, and hard work towards what you want your life to be.Stop setting yourself up for stress and failure, and start setting up your life to support success and ease.
A great life is the result of using the 24/7 you get in a creative and thoughtful way, instead of just what comes next. Customize these “secrets” to fit your own needs and style, and start creating your own great life today!
1. S—Simplify.
A great life is the result of simplifying your life. When you focus on simplifying your life, you free up energy and time for the work that you enjoy and the purpose for which you are here. In order to create a great life, you will have to make room for it in yours first.
2. E—Effort.
A great life is the result of your best effort. Creating a great life requires that you make some adjustments. It means looking for new ways to spend your energy that coincide with your particular definition of a great life. Life will reward your best effort.
3. C—Create Priorities.
A great life is the result of creating priorities. It’s easy to spend your days just responding to the next thing that gets your attention, instead of intentionally using the time, energy and money you have in a way that’s important to you. Make sure you are honoring your priorities.
4. R—Reserves.
A great life is the result of having reserves—reserves of things, time, space, energy, money. With reserves, you acquire far more than you need. Reserves are important because they reduce the fear of consequences, and that allows you to make decisions based on what you really want instead of what the fear decides for you.
5. E—Eliminate distractions.
A great life is the result of eliminating distractions. Look around at someone’s life you admire. What do they do that you would like to incorporate into your own life? Ask them how they did it. Find ways to free up your mental energy for things that are more important to you.
6. T—Thoughts.
A great life is the result of controlling your thoughts so that you accept and allow for the possibility that it actually can happen to you! Your belief in the outcome will directly dictate how successful you are. Motivated people have specific goals and look for ways to achieve them.
7. S—Start.
A great life is the result of starting. There’s the old saying everyone’s familiar with “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. There’s no better time to start than today.
Don’t wait for a raise, or until the kids get older, or the weather is better. It’s what you do TODAY that will make a difference in your life tomorrow.
The 50-Percent Theory of Life
I believe in the 50-percent theory. Half the time things are better than normal; the other half, they are worse. I believe life is a pendulum swing. It takes time and experience to
understand what normal is, and that gives me the perspective to deal with the surprises of the future.
Let’s benchmark the parameters: Yes, I will die. I’ve dealt with the deaths of both parents, a best friend, a beloved boss and cherished pets. Some of these deaths have been violent, before my eyes, or slow and agonizing. Bad stuff, and it belongs at the bottom of the scale. Then there are those high points: romance and marriage to the right person; having a child and doing those Dad things like coaching my son’s baseball team, paddling around the creek in the boat while he’s swimming with the dogs, discovering his compassion so deep it manifests even in his kindness to snails, his imagination so vivid he builds a spaceship from a scattered pile of Legos.
But there is a vast meadow of life in the middle, where the bad and the good flip-flop acrobatically. This is what convinces me to believe in the50-percent theory.One spring I planted corn too early in a bottomland so flood-prone that neighbors laughed. I felt chagrined at the wasted effort. Summer turned brutal—the worst heat wave and drought in my lifetime. The air-conditioner died, the well went dry, the marriage ended, the job lost, the money gone. I was living lyrics from a country tune—music I disliked. Only a surging Kansas City Royals team, bound for their first World Series, buoyed my spirits.Looking back on that horrible summer, I soon understood that all succeeding good things merely offset the bad. Worse than normal wouldn’t last long. I am owed and savor the peaceful and happy times. They reinvigorate me for the next nasty surprise and offer assurance that I can thrive.
The 50 percent theory even helps me see hope beyond my Royals’ recent slump, a field of struggling rookies sown so that some year soon we can reap an October harvest. Oh, yeah, the corn crop? For that one blistering summer, the ground moisture was just right, planting early allowed pollination before heat withered the tops, and the lack of rain spared the standing corn from floods. That winter my crib overflowed with corn—fat, healthy
three-to-a-stalk ears filled with kernels from heel to tip—while my neighbors’ fields yielded only brown, empty husks.
Although plantings past may have fallen below the 50-percent expectation, and they probably will again in the future, I am still sustained by the crop that flourishes during the drought.
The Road to Happiness
It is a commonplace among moralists that you cannot get happiness by pursuing it. This is only true if you pursue it unwisely. Gamblers at Monte Carlo are pursuing money, and most of them lose it instead, but there are other ways of pursuing money, which often succeed. So it is with happiness. If you pursue it by means of drink, you are forgetting the hangover.
Epicurus pursued it by living only in congenial society and eating only dry bread, supplemented by a little cheese on feast days. His method proved successful in his case, but he was a valetudinarian, and most people would need something more vigorous.
For most people, the pursuit of happiness, unless supplemented in various ways, is too abstract and theoretical to be adequate as a personal rule of life. But I think that whatever personal rule of life you may choose it should not, except in rare and heroic cases, be incompatible with happiness.If you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy, will see that they all have certain things in common. The most important of these things is an activity which at most gradually builds up something that you are glad to see coming into existence.
Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children can get this kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family. Artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this way if their own work seems good to them. But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure. Many men who spend their working life in the city devote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated toil in their gardens, and when the spring comes, they experience all the joys of having created beauty.
The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion, been treated too solemnly. It had been thought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion. Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory may need a better theory to help them to recover, just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill. But when things are normal a man should be healthy ]without a tonic and happy without a theory. It is the simple things that really matter.
If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work, and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn, he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be. If, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his children’s noise unendurable, and the office a nightmare; if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day, then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen—a different diet, or more exercise, or what not.
Man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.
Six Famous Words
“To be or not to be.” Outside the Bible, these six words are the most famous in all the
literature of the world. They were spoken by Hamlet when he was thinking aloud, and they are the most famous words in Shakespearebecause Hamlet was speaking not only for himself but also for every thinking man and woman.
To be or not to be, to live or not to live, to live richly and abundantly and eagerly, or to live dully and meanly and scarcely. A philosopher once wanted to know whether he was alive or not, which is a good question for everyone to put to himself occasionally. He answered it by saying: “I think, therefore I am.”But the best definition of existence I ever saw was one written by another philosopher who said: “To be is to be in relations.” If this is true, then the more relations a living thing has, the more it is alive.
To live abundantly means simply to increase the range and intensity of our relations. Unfortunately we are so constituted that we get to love our routine. But apart from our regular occupation how much are we alive? If you are interested only in your regular occupation, you are alive only to that extent. So far as other things are concerned—poetry and prose, music, pictures, sports, unselfish friendships, politics, international affairs—you are dead. Contrariwise, it is true that every time you acquire a new interest—even more, a new accomplishment—you increase your power of life.
No one who is deeply interested in a large variety of subjects can remain unhappy, the real pessimist is the person who has lost interest. Bacon said that a man dies as often as he loses a friend. But we gain new life by contacts and new friends.
What is supremely true of living objects is only less true of ideas, which are also alive. Where your thoughts are, there will your life be also. If your thoughts are confined only to your business, only to your physical welfare, only to the narrow circle of the town in which you live, then you live in a narrow-circled life. But if you are interested in what is going on in China, then you are living in China—if you’re interested in the characters of a good novel, then you are living with those highly interesting people, if you listen intently to fine music, you are away from your immediate surroundings and living in a world of passion and imagination.
To be or not to be—to live intensely and richly, merely to exist, that depends on ourselves. Let widen and intensify our relations. While we live, let live!
Write Your Own Life
Suppose someone gave you a pen—a sealed, solid-colored pen. You couldn’t see how much ink it had. It might run dry after the first few tentative words or last just long enough to
create a masterpiece (or several) that would last forever and make a difference in the
scheme of things. You don’t know before you begin. Under the rules of the game, you really never know. You have to take a chance!
Actually, no rule of the game states you must do anything. Instead of picking up and using the pen, you could leave it on a shelf or in a drawer where it will dry up, unused. But if you do decide to use it, what would you do with it?
How would you play the game?
Would you plan and plan before you ever wrote a word? Would your plans be so extensive that you never even got to the writing? Or would you take the pen in hand, plunge right in and just do it, struggling to keep up with the twists and turns of the torrents of words that take you where they take you? Would you write cautiously and carefully, as if the pen might run dry the next moment, or would you pretend or believe (or pretend to believe) that the pen will write forever and proceed accordingly?And of what would you write: Of love? Hate? Fun?Misery?Life?Death?Nothing?Everything?
Would you write to please just yourself?Or others? Or yourself by writing for others? Would your strokes be tremblingly timid or brilliantly bold? Fancy with a flourish or plain? Would you even write? Once you have the pen, no rule says you have to write.
Would you sketch? Scribble? Doodle or draw?
Would you stay in or on the lines, or see no lines at all, even if they were there? Or are they?
There’s a lot to think about here, isn’t there? Now, suppose someone gave you a life…