Inspirational / Uplifting Stuff

Forwarded to me by a family member:
--------------------
The following is the philosophy of Charles Schultz, the creator of the "Peanuts" comic strip. You don't have to actually answer the questions. Just read the e-mail straight through, and you'll get the point.

1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.

2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.

3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America.

4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.

5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winner for best actor and actress.

6. Name the last decade's worth of World Series winners.

How did you do?

The point is, none of us remember the headliners of yesterday. These are no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Acheivements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners.

Here's another quiz. See how you do on this one:

1. List a few teachers who aided your journey through school.

2. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult time.

3. Name five people who have taught you something worthwhile.

4. Think of a few people who have made you feel appreciated and special.

5. Think of five people you enjoy spending time with.

Easier?

The lesson: The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones that care.

Pass this on to those people who have made a difference in your life. "Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." (Charles Schultz)

I like this, it really puts things in perspective!

YEAH I CAN ANSWER THE 2 ND QUIZ BETTER ,

very thought provoking , good questions .

I had posted this thing months before but bumped it to the top of the page. I think we all need to see positive, uplifting things from time to time.

An inspirational person:
Life Without Limbs

I've seen this guy on TV before, he's very uplifting. Has no arms, no legs, but he's at peace with himself and with life (though he did struggle early on, had depression, etc.)

Fwded to me by a friend:

Law of the Garbage Truck

One day I hopped in a taxi and we took off for the airport. We were driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches!

The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us. My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy. And I mean, he was really friendly.

So I asked, 'Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!' This is when my taxi driver
taught me what I now call, 'The Law of the Garbage Truck.'

He explained that many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment.

As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they'll dump it on you.

Don't take it personally.

Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Don't take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets.

The bottom line is that successful people do not let garbage trucks take over their day.

Life's too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so...Love the people who treat you right.

Pray for the ones who don't. Life is ten percent what you make it and ninety percent how you take it!

Have a blessed, garbage-free day!

5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)

I'm pasting in only a few items from the list:

FAME

Go to the little girls' aisle at the department store, if you're not there already. On the shelves you'll see the dominant little girl fantasy isn't Cinderella or even Dora the Explorer. It's Hannah Montana. Playsets come complete with a camera, makeup and a mirror for Hannah to admire herself in.

The girls play with that when they're eight, and by 16 they're on MySpace, pouting at the camera in their underwear and watching the friend requests pour in. In a recent survey of high school kids, 51 percent said their ultimate goal was to become famous.

This is brand new to humanity; for thousands of years, material goods and security dominated. Now, fame is at the top.

Obviously part of the reason is the perception that anybody can get famous these days--reality TV and YouTube have proven that you can become a celebrity for doing not a goddamned thing. But there's another, less obvious factor.

And it explains why so many famous people are miserable.

So What's the Problem?

Experts say where you find kids who desperately want to be famous, you find a history of neglect at home. Parents were either absent completely or, at best, emotionally distant dicks.

It turns out the whole surge in aspirations for fame came right along with the explosion of single parents and "broken" homes. Only half of today's children live with their original two parents.

You can see how this sad mechanism works in the attention-starved mind. The kid is programmed by biology to love a parent, but the parent doesn't return the love. Fame lets them turn the tables on that arrangement.

When you're famous, millions love you, but you don't even know their names.

It's purely one-sided. They wait for hours in the cold for your autograph, you barely glance at them on the way to your limo.

You get to take their love and wipe your ass with it, the same as your parents did to you.

But it turns out that kind of massive, paper-thin adoration is a poor substitute. Famous people are four times as likely to commit suicide as the rest of us (Hell, you'd think it'd be higher--everybody reading this has seen more than one of their favorite performers self-destruct).

Wait, it Gets Worse...

If you're saying that your parents were awesome and that fame still looks pretty freaking cool, well, we're not done.

Studies show nothing is more stressful for a human than when their goals are tied to the approval of others.

Particularly when those "others" are an enormous crowd of fickle strangers holding you up to a laughably unrealistic ideal built by publicists, thick makeup and heavily Photoshopped magazine covers.

You could seek comfort from your circle of friends, only now your friends have been replaced Invasion of the Body Snatcher's-style with hangers-on, vultures, unscrupulous characters and plain dumbasses who only want a piece of the spotlight. . . even if it means selling you out later.

For example, have you ever lit up a bong at a party? Were you worried that one of your friends would snap a photo of you, sell it to a tabloid for thousands of dollars and ruin your career?

Well become famous, and then try it.

WEALTH

....Most of us get out of bed everyday purely because it edges us one step closer to some kind of financial future we want.

If we won the lottery, most of us would show up to the office the next day wearing an ankle-length fur coat and enough bling to make Mr. T look Amish, and only stay just long enough to take a dump in our boss's inbox.

So What's the Problem?

Hey, remember when we said earlier that most people wouldn't do the body-switching thing for fear they'd wake up in Nigeria?

Well according to surveys, Nigerians are happier with their lives than the people of any other country.

The USA came in 16th.

Hey, did we mention that the average Nigerian makes $300 a year? That's less than a hundredth of what the average American makes. America being the country that hands out 120 million prescriptions for anti-depressants every year.

China is turning into a great object lesson in this, as their economy explodes and incomes skyrocket, but levels of happiness and personal satisfaction are dropping at the same rapid rate.

There's a couple of reasons for it. First, your brain adjusts feelings of happiness downward after you've reached some goal or other. It regulates the good feelings, presumably so that you have motivation to reach the next goal instead of just lounging by the pool for the rest of your days.

The second one is that as social creatures, we compare ourselves to our neighbors. This is why executives can cry about the $500,000 salary cap that comes with taking government bailout money.

Their friends are making $3 million a year and live in igloo made out of cocaine.

We can laugh at their complaints, but of course then you're giving the Nigerian permission to laugh at yours.

That guy made 100 times more than you, you make 100 times more than the Nigerian.

Once you start hanging around the other high earners, you'll want all the stuff they have.

No, that's not right--you'll want the stuff that's so much better than their stuff that they'll vomit with envy.

As one magazine for Wall Street bigshots put it, you want the stuff that will be "a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home."

But what about sudden wealth, like if you won the lottery, or sold your novel for $10 million?

That'd be cool, right, because you'd still remember your former life and appreciate your new riches! Well, just ask William "Bud" Post, who wound up broken and bankrupt after he won $16 million in the lottery.

It turns out that while he knew how to handle the stress of being poor thanks to a lifetime of experience, he had no concept of how to handle the new and alien stresses of wealth.

Wait, it Gets Worse...

Remember the whole Invasion of the Body Snatchers phenomenon we talked about with famous people, where suddenly all of your friends turn into leeches? Same here, only worse.

With your newfound riches, suddenly "friends" pop up from all over. Cousins who you've never met, forgotten classmates from school, women who'd never even look your way before, all suddenly in your orbit, complimenting you, doing you favors.

Then they casually slip it into conversation that they're going to have to default on their mortgage unless somebody helps out.

Suddenly every relationship is in doubt. Do they actually care about you? Or do they just want a seat on the Bling Train? Would they sell you out to get to your cash?

That lottery winner we mentioned above . . . somebody hired a hitman to take him out, to get to his money. That somebody was his own f*cking brother.

BEAUTY

We know all about this one first-hand. That old stereotype about how comedy writers and heavy Internet users tend to have bodies chiseled out of solid sex? It's true. One visitor remarked that the Cracked office "Looked like a Manowar album cover came to life."

Yes, being physically attractive has concrete advantages.

Attractive people earn more, get better grades, have better jobs and find more successful partners than average or ugly people.

Strangers are more likely to help them in a crisis.

They have wider social circles.

So What's the Problem?

Remember, we're talking about happiness here, not success.

For one, attractive people have the same self-esteem problems the ugly people do.

Like money, attractiveness is relative and if you're hotter than your friends, at that stage you start comparing yourself to people in the media.

You know, like the magazine covers we mentioned before, the ones that that have had the living sh** Photoshopped out of them.

In other words, they've adjusted to the experience of being attractive the same as our high income earners have adjusted to having money; they just pick other flaws to worry about.

Sure, if you used the magical artifact up there to become Angelina Jolie tomorrow, you'd notice the difference over how you're treated now.

But if you were born Angelina Jolie, you'd have no way of grasping it, the same as right now you don't realize what it's like to live life with some kind of horrible deformity (if you do have a horrible deformity, then you don't know what it's like to live with a worse one. Work with us here).

Wait, it Gets Worse...

You know how when the hot girl at the bar tells an unfunny joke, all the guys laugh anyway? Or when the office stud makes a mistake, the female boss laughs it off?

Attractive people live in a world where most feedback they get is BS. The compliments mean nothing--they've learned that's just the sound people make when they walk by.

That's why studies show they tend to dismiss the genuine compliments they get in other areas (their work, personality, sense of humor, creativity) because it gets lumped in with the same counterfeit flattery they've been getting their whole lives.

On a somewhat related note:

Scientists identify 'happiness' gene

Feb 25, 3009

London: If life looks joyful in spite of recession, job insecurity and expanding waistline, then you should consider thanking your "brightside" gene.

A gene that affects if we're cheery or gloomy has been tracked down by British researchers, reports The Guardian.

The groundbreaking study claims that individuals who carry the gene don't pay much attention to negative things happening in their lives and, instead, focus on the happier aspects of life.

In the process, they end up becoming more sociable and are generally in better shape psychologically.

Elaine Fox, head of psychology at Essex University, said:
"We've shown for the first time that a genetic variation is linked with a tendency to look on the bright side of the life. This is a key mechanism underlying resilience to general life stress."

To reach the conclusion, the research team checked how long it took people to react to good and bad images that flashed up on a computer screen.

Scientists develop self-sanitising plaster with wide scope

The study involved more than 100 volunteers.

The positive snaps were that of a couple hugging and someone sailing along in a boat. The negative images included a photo of someone being mugged.

Volunteers' genetic tests revealed that a tendency to ignore negative images and dwell on the positive ones was strongly linked to a variation in a gene that controls serotonin, which also branded as the brain's main "feel-good" chemical.

Every individual inherits two versions of the gene, either two short ones, two long ones, or one of each.

People who had two longs versions were most likely to focus on the positives, according to the study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Study: Optimistic Women Live Longer

Stay Positive And Live Longer, Study Suggests

Optimism Is the Key to a Long and Healthy Life

The Glass is Half Full

March 9, 2009

Women who look on the bright side of life have longer and healthier lives than their pessimistic peers, while women who tend not to trust other people die sooner than their less cynical counterparts, a large study of attitudes and health found.

....After eight years, optimistic women had a 14 percent lower risk of dying from any cause than their pessimistic counterparts, according to research Tindle presented last week.

Women who scored high on cynical hostility had a 16 percent higher risk of death than their counterparts. These differences were more extreme in black women: optimists had a 44 percent lower risk of cancer-related death and cynically hostile women had a 142 percent higher risk of cancer death.

Study Shows People Who Are Optimistic Live Longest

Optimists live longer and healthier lives: study

Optimism Helps You Live Longer and Healthier Lives

Study Shows Optimists Live Longer Than Pessimists

Optimistic women live longer, study finds

Positivity linked to longevity of life: a study