Best Life Lessons

BLOG MAP

2008-09-16T13:50:00.000-07:00

Rich Dad's Prophecy

2008-09-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

Robert Kiyosaki

Rich Dad's Prophecy: Why the Biggest Stock Market Crash in History Is Still Coming… and How You Can Prepare Yourself and Profit from It!

Rich Dad's Prophecy predicts that the market will crash around 2016 when the oldest Baby Boomers start cashing out their 401(k) plans. Individuals whose savings are locked into 401(k) plans will suffer because these retirement plans are not flexible and do not do well in a bear market. Robert Kiyosaki believes this may be his most important book yet.

For ebook Email to: myrichdadpoordad@gmail.com
It send to your Email after 24 hours

Rich Kid Smart Kid

2008-09-16T13:37:00.000-07:00

Robert Kiyosaki

Rich Dad's Rich Kid, Smart Kid: Giving Your Children a Financial Headstart.

Rich Kid, Smart Kid is a retelling of Kiyosaki's views, condensed and clarified to try and help parents better understand and teach their children key financial concepts. It includes a series of activities that a parent can do with their child to make them aware of property, finance and the various ways and places businesses make money.

For ebook Email to: myrichdadpoordad@gmail.com
It send to your Email after 24 hours

Rich Dad's CASHFLOW Quadrant

2008-09-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

Robert Kiyosaki

Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom.

Cashflow Quadrant is a personal finance and investing book written with Sharon Lechter, C.P.A. as the sequel to Rich Dad, Poor Dad. In it, Kiyosaki discusses what he calls the cashflow quadrant: a grid consisting of the letters "E", "S", "B", and "I". The cashflow quadrant itself is just an illustrative tool to show the difference between Employees, Self Employed/Small Business owners, Business owners (not directly involved in the day-to-day operation of the company), and Investors. Kiyosaki discusses the differences between concepts and ideas characteristic of each quadrant, particularly as they relate to passive income and tax advantages. Again, as a self-help author, he invites readers to consider their own ideas about money.

For ebook Email to: myrichdadpoordad@gmail.com
It send to your Email after 24 hours

Rich Dad Poor Dad

2008-09-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

Robert Kiyosaki

Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money—That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!

Originally self-published before being picked up commercially to become a best seller, the central concept of the book is an anecdotal comparison of his "two fathers." His "poor dad" was his biological father, who became Superintendent of the Hawaii State Department of Education but had very little real net worth. Contrasted with this is his (arguably fictitious, see "Criticism and controversy" section of this article) "rich dad," advocates tax-advantaged investment vehicles, such as real estate or businesses, rather than ownership of securities. This idea is further developed in his later books and "Rich Dad" became Kiyosaki's personal brand for various publishing ventures.

For ebook Email to: myrichdadpoordad@gmail.com
It send to your Email after 24 hours

Rich Dad's Guide to Investing

2008-09-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

Robert Kiyosaki

Rich Dad's Guide to Investing: What the Rich Invest in, That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Rich Dad's Guide to Investing, has been on the top 10 best-seller lists simultaneously on The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the New York Times.

Rich Dad's Guide to Investing gives the reader a roadmap to becoming the Ultimate Investor, one who uses other peoples' money to create investments that people want to buy into. While the first two books use broad strokes, this one goes into much more detail about actually implementing some of the strategies heretofore discussed.

For ebook Email to: myrichdadpoordad@gmail.com
It send to your Email after 24 hours

Daniel Keyes

2008-08-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

Daniel Keyes

Daniel F. Keyes (born August 9, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York) is an American author best known for his Hugo award-winning short story and Nebula award-winning novel "Flowers for Algernon". Keyes was given the Author Emeritus honor by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2000.

Biography

Early life and career

At age 17, Daniel Keyes joined the U.S. Maritime Service as ship's purser. He obtained a B.A. in psychology from Brooklyn College, and after a stint in fashion photography, earned a Master's degree in English and American literature at night while teaching English in New York City public schools during the day and writing weekends.

In the early 1950s, he was editor of the pulp magazine Marvel Science Fiction for publisher Martin Goodman, who also published the comic book lines Timely Comics and Atlas Comics, the 1940s and 1950s precursors, respectively, of Marvel Comics. After Goodman ceased publishing pulps in favor of paperback books and men's adventure magazines, Keyes became associate editor of Atlas Comics, under editor-in-chief and art director Stan Lee. Circa 1952, Keyes was one of several staff writers, officially titled editors, who wrote for such horror and science fiction comics as Journey into Unknown Worlds, for which Keyes wrote two stories with artist Basil Wolverton. From 1955-56, Keyes wrote for the celebrated EC Comics, including its titles Shock Illustrated and Confessions Illustrated, under both his own name and the pseudonyms Kris Daniel and Dominik Georg.

Keyes went on to teach creative writing at Wayne State University, and in 1966 became an English and creative writing professor at Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, where he was honored as a professor emeritus in 2000.

A 1988 edition of his novel Flowers for Algernon states he was a member of the English department at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, circa that year.

Keyes' other books include Fifth Sally, The Minds of Billy Milligan, The Touch, Unveiling Claudia, and the memoir Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer's Journey

FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON

2008-08-16T04:22:00.000-07:00

FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON
Daniel Keyes

The short story and subsequent novel, Flowers for Algernon, is written as the diary of a mentally retarded man, Charlie, who undergoes experimental surgery and briefly becomes a genius before the effects tragically wear off. The story was initially published in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The title character is a mouse that had undergone the surgery first.
The story won the science fiction field's Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction. The novel, which added several new story threads including a sexual relationship between Charlie and his former teacher, was joint winner of the Nebula Award in 1966. The novel has been adapted several times for other media, most prominently as the 1968 film Charly, starring Cliff Robertson (who won an Academy Award for Best Actor) and Claire Bloom.

You read amount of Story

progress report 7-mar 19

Nothing is happining. I had lots of tests and different kinds of

races with Algernon. I hate that mouse. He always beats me. Dr.
Strauss said I got to play those games. And he said some time I got to
take those tests over again. Those inkblots are stupid. And those
pictures are stupid too. I like to draw a picture of a man and a
woman but I wont make up lies about people…

Good-by Miss Kinnian and Dr Strauss and evreybody. And P.S.
please tell Dr Nemur not to be such a grouch when pepul laff at him
and he would have more frends. Its easy to make frends if you let
pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go.
P.P.S. Please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave
in the bak yard....

For complete story Email to: charlie.flowers.algernon@gmail.com
It send to your Email after 24 hours

Neale Donald Walsch

2008-08-15T00:03:00.000-07:00

Neale Donald Walsch

Neale Donald Walsch (also known as Neale Marshall-Walsch) (b. September 10, 1943 in Milwaukee) is an American author of the series Conversations with God. The books so far in the series are Conversations With God (books 1-3), Friendship with God, Communion with God, The New Revelations, Tomorrow's God, What God Wants, Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends, and his newest book, Happier than God.

Biography

Walsch was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 10, 1943, and brought up as a Roman Catholic by a family who encouraged his quest for spiritual truth. He studied The Bible, the Rig Veda and the Upanishads. He says his books are not channelled, but rather that they are inspired by God and that they can help a person relate to Him from a modern perspective. The God in his books, for example, says that "there is nothing you have to do." Walsch believes in a panentheistic God, who tries to communicate Himself as being unselfish. Walsch's vision is an expansion and unification of all present theologies to render them more relevant to our present day and time. He created Humanity's Team as a spiritual movement whose purpose is to communicate and implement his New Spirituality beliefs, particularly that we are all one with God and one with life, in a shared global state of being.

Walsch has met with some criticism for what some see as appearing overly zealous in finding ways to make money for his spin-off organizations. He has also been met with much praise for what others see as a tremendous effort to help humankind.

Career

Before the Conversations With God series in the early 1990s, Walsch suffered a series of crushing blows — a fire that destroyed all of his belongings, the break-up of his marriage, a car accident that left him with a broken neck. Once recovered but alone and unemployed, Walsch was forced to live in a tent in Jackson Hot Springs, just outside Ashland, Oregon, collecting and recycling aluminium cans in order to eat. At the time, Walsch thought his life had come to an end. Despondent, Walsch began his writings after working his way out of homelessness following a short-lived job as a radio talk show host.

In 2003, the film Indigo, written by Neale Donald Walsch and James Twyman and directed by Stephen Simon was released. It chronicled the fictional story of the redemption of a grandfather, played by Walsch, through his granddaughter, who is an indigo child.

Conversations With God: The Movie opened in U.S. theaters Friday, October 27, 2006 and in Canada, November 10. The film was released on dvd February 27, 2007.

Bibliography

Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue (Book 1) (October 1, 1996)
Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue (Book 2) (May 1, 1997)
Meditations from Conversations With God, Book 2: A Personal Journal (December 1, 1997)
The Little Soul and the Sun: A Children's Parable Adapted from Conversations With God (April 1, 1998)
Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue (Book 3) (October 1, 1998)
Neale Donald Walsch on Relationships (September 30, 1999)
Neale Donald Walsch on Holistic Living (September 30, 1999)
Neale Donald Walsch on Abundance and Right Livelihood (October 1, 1999)
Friendship with God: An Uncommon Dialogue (October 1, 1999)
Questions and Answers on Conversations With God (October 1, 1999)
The Wedding Vows from Conversations With God (April 1, 2000)
Recreating Your Self (June 1, 2000)
Signals: An Inspiring Story of Life After Life (April 9, 2001) (by Joel Rothschild, foreword by Neale Donald Walsh)
Moments of Grace (July 2001)
Conversations With God for Teens (November 1, 2001)
The New Revelations: A Conversation with God (September 30, 2002)
Communion With God (October 1, 2002)
Tomorrow's God: Our Greatest Spiritual Challenge (March 2, 2004)
What God Wants: A Compelling Answer to Humanity's Biggest Question (March 22, 2005)
The Little Soul And The Earth: A Children's Parable Adapted From Conversations With God (August 1, 2005) (with Frank Riccio)
The Complete Conversations with God (October 20, 2005)
Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends (March 29, 2006)
Happier Than God: Turn Ordinary Life into an Extraordinary Experience (February 29, 2008)

Mike Dooley

2008-08-15T00:02:00.001-07:00

Mike Dooley

Mike Dooley is a real world "life adventurer." He has successfully navigated both the corporate and entrepreneurial arenas, and gleaned priceless lessons from each about life, dreams, and happiness. In 1983 he joined Price Waterhouse after graduating from the University of Florida. As a CPA he worked in their Tampa, Riyadh, Cairo, New York, and Boston offices specializing in international taxation. In 1989 he co-founded, as President, Totally Unique Thoughts (TUT) to retail and wholesale its own line of products. Mike is a much sought after author and speaker. In addition to his groundbreaking work, Infinite Possibilities, Mike is also the author of Totally Unique Thoughts, Reminders of Life's Everyday Magic and Lost in Space.

Marie Diamond

2008-08-14T23:59:00.000-07:00

Marie Diamond

Marie Diamond is an internationally known Feng Shui Master. She has been practicing for more than 20 years, refining the knowledge given to her at an early age. Born in Belgium , she was trained as a lawyer and criminologist and worked for the Belgian and European governments and then as a project manager for a multinational publishing company. She has training and experience in all forms of management including Human Resources, Marketing, Safety, and Sales.

She is now one of the top transformational leaders in the world, consulting with and teaching people in more than 30 countries. She has recently been recognized by other top transformation leaders, including Rhonda Byrne, director of the movie "What Is the Secret?" Rhonda interviewed 70 of the most powerful transformational teachers and thinkers in the world -- Marie was included on this distinguished list.

Her unique approach of combining eastern philosophies with her traditional training led her to connect with a variety of businesses. Her work with Heinen Safety, one of the top safety management companies in Europe , included consulting with petrochemical giants BP-Amoco and Total Fina. She used her Diamond Feng Shui tools and her unique approach to energy to impact the environment of the employees and workspace, creating a place of safety and well-being. As a result, these companies logged a unique result: over 5 million man hours over 5 years without a major accident.

Marie moved to the U.S. five years ago and since then, has connected with numerous Hollywood celebrities, major film directors and producers, music giants, and famous authors. She has helped many well-known public figures create more success in all areas of their lives. Clients that allow their names to be used by Marie include the author Jack Canfield from Chicken Soup for the Soul and Success Principles; a product sales company, Learning Strategies; and the music icon, Barbara Orbison of Roy Orbison Productions. Her Diamond Team consists of 30 consultants in 10 different countries who are trained in her methods. Marie provides on-going support for their world-wide consulting. Together, she and her team have helped companies increase yearly profits by a minimum of 25% up to 1100% in just one year!

She is part of the Transformational Leadership Council created by Jack Canfield, which includes such respected members as Bill Harries, John Gray, John Assaraf, DC Cordova, Paul Scheele, and many others.

She has been featured in several TV and Film projects including “The Secret” (2006), “I Married a Princess” (2005), and “The Jerry Hall Heaven and Earth Show” (2005). Her current projects include writing books, creating several large real estate projects and the creation of an e-commerce site. She is a wonderful speaker for business and special events with a focus on how to create abundance and happiness in business.

Marie is the Feng Shui specialist and the Chinese astrologer for Tarot.com and Aol.com.

Marie has been happily married for 15 years to a wonderful, supportive husband and has three beautiful children. She is surrounded by wonderful friends and supporters and continually meets wonderful people wherever she travels in the world. She has indeed manifested a life that is loving, abundant, and supported.

Marci Shimoff

2008-08-14T23:57:00.000-07:00

Marci Shimoff

Marci Shimoff is the woman's face of the biggest self-help book phenomenon in history, Chicken Soup for the Soul. Her six bestselling titles in the series, including Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul and Chicken Soup for the Mother’s Soul, have met with stunning success, selling more than 13 million copies worldwide in 33 languages and have been on the New York Times bestseller list for a total of 108 weeks. Marci is one of the bestselling female nonfiction authors of all time. In addition, she’s a featured teacher in the international film and book phenomenon, The Secret. Her new book, HAPPY FOR NO REASON: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out, offers a revolutionary approach to experiencing deep and lasting happiness.

A celebrated transformational leader and one of the nation's leading experts on happiness, success, and the law of attraction, Marci has inspired millions of people around the world, sharing her breakthrough methods for personal fulfillment and professional success. President and co-founder of the Esteem Group, she delivers keynote addresses and seminars on self-esteem, self-empowerment, and peak performance to corporations, professional and non-profit organizations, and women's associations. She has been a top-rated trainer for numerous Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T, General Motors, Sears, Kaiser Permanente, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

As an acclaimed authority on success and happiness, Marci is often approached by media for her insights and advice. She has been on more than 500 national and regional television and radio shows and has been interviewed for over 100 newspaper articles nationwide. Her writing has appeared in national women's magazines, including Ladies Home Journal and Woman's World.

Marci earned her MBA from UCLA and holds an advanced certificate as a stress management consultant. She is a founding member and on the board of directors of the Transformational Leadership Council, a group of 100 top leaders serving over ten million people in the self-development market.

Through her books and her presentations, Marci's message has touched the hearts and rekindled the spirits of millions of people throughout the world. She is dedicated to fulfilling her life’s purpose of helping people live more empowered and joy-filled lives.

Lee Brower

2008-08-14T23:55:00.000-07:00

Lee Brower

Lee Brower is founder and CEO of Empowered Wealth, LC, an international consulting firm headquartered in Bountiful, Utah. With over 30 years’ experience, Lee advises successful businesses, families, trusts, foundations, professional athletes, and celebrities on how to protect and empower their human, intellectual, civic, and financial assets.

His paradigm-breaking initiatives have resulted in The Empowered Wealth System*, The Family Empowered Bank* concept, The “Relevant” Living Trust*, and The Quadrant Living System*. These breakthrough innovations have become cornerstones that transition a family’s “true wealth” to future generations.

Lee is founder and chairman of The Empowered Wealth TEEM, an international association of Empowered Wealth Architects who are qualified to coach individuals, families, and institutions in establishing unique solutions, strategies, and systems that optimize true assets. Co-author of Wealth Enhancement & Preservation*, he is recognized in Who’s Who in the West and Who’s Who Worldwide. His new book, Lost In Wealth, is scheduled for publication in fall 2007.

Born and raised in California, Lee attended Brigham Young University and the University of Redlands, where he majored in business administration and Spanish. He also earned the CLU and ChFC designations from American College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

A participant in the Strategic Coach® Program since 1995, Lee is currently in the Strategic Coach® Masters program and also attends Coach2® workshops, an advanced program focused on the unique packaging of the entrepreneurial business. Lee coaches workshops in Chicago and Salt Lake City.

Lee’s entrepreneurial pursuits include ownership in several national and international companies that focus on real estate, communication, health, and education. He continues to be actively involved as a founder or board member of numerous charitable, community, and corporate organizations.

Joe Vitale

2008-08-14T23:52:00.000-07:00

Joe Vitale

Joe Vitale is a "certified" metaphysical practitioner, a "certified" Chi Kung healer, an ordained minister, a "certified" hypnotherapist and an author.

His books include The Attractor Factor, The Greatest Money-Making Secret in History!, Life's Missing Instruction Manual, the Nightingale-Conant audio program, The Power of Outrageous Marketing, a business book on circus showman P.T. Barnum, There's a Customer Born Every Minute. His most recent books are Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace and More, Hypnotic Writing, and Buying Trances: A New Psychology of Sales and Marketing.

Joe Vitale attended Niles McKinley High School. After graduation he attended Kent State University, majoring in public relations and journalism, but failed to graduate. He holds a "doctorate" in metaphysical science from the University of Metaphysics in Sedona, Arizona, an unaccredited institution of higher learning. He was awarded an honorary doctorate, based on his books, from Belford University, an online "college" that has been described as a diploma mill. The university states "Accreditation is optional for all colleges and universities."

He claims he was once homeless and broke.

Vitale has created a software program called "Hypnotic Writing Wizard". He was the keynote speaker at the 2007 National Speakers Association annual convention.

He is President of Hypnotic Marketing, Inc based outside Austin, Texas. He lives in Wimberley, Texas, with his pets and his girlfriend, Nerissa Oden. He was featured in the widely distributed film, "The Secret," and has appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live" program and "Extra TV." He was also featured in a Newsweek interview on The Secret, and The New York Post wrote an article for one of his P.T. Barnum-esque publicity stunts: "The Canine Concert."

Hale Dwoskin

2008-08-14T23:51:00.001-07:00

Hale Dwoskin

HALE DWOSKIN is the author of the New York Times Best Seller, The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-being. Hale is one of the 24 Teachers from the movie The Secret and a founding member of the Transformational Leadership Council. He is the CEO and Director of Training of Sedona Training Associates, an organization headquartered in Sedona, Arizona. He co-founded the company in 1996 to teach courses based on the emotional releasing techniques originated by his mentor, Lester Levenson. Hale Dwoskin is an international speaker and featured faculty member at Esalen and the Omega Institute. For over a quarter century, he has regularly been teaching The Sedona Method to individuals and corporations throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, and leading facilitator trainings and advanced retreats since the early 1990s. He is also the co-author with Lester Levenson of Happiness Is Free: And Its Easier than You Think (a five-book series).

Sedona Training Associates is an educational training organization that was created to continue fulfilling Levenson’s wish to share the practical and powerful methods he discovered for removing an individual’s personal blocks to abundance, health, happiness, and success. Many thousands of people from all walks of life worldwide have benefited from this work during the almost three-decade history of The Sedona Method Course. Sedona Training Associates currently offers seminars throughout the US, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Eastern and Western Europe, and Japan. It also publishes audio programs that are distributed worldwide. In addition, the organization publishes a quarterly newsletter called Release.

Here is Hale’s Story, excerpted from The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-being, Sedona Press September 2003.

In 1976, I met Lester Levenson, the man who inspired the creation of The Sedona Method who would also become my mentor. Back then, I was an ardent, although confused, seeker who had gone to numerous seminars led by teachers from both the East and the West. I had studied various body-centered disciplines, including yoga, tai chi, and shiatsu. I had actively participated in numerous personal growth courses, including EST, Actualism, Theta Seminars, and Rebirthing. At these seminars, I had many nice experiences and heard and understood—at least intellectually—many useful concepts. Still, I felt incomplete. I longed for a simple and powerful answer to some important yet vexing questions like: “What is my life’s purpose?” “What is truth?” “Who am I?” and “How can I feel at home and at peace with my life?” Much of what I heard and experienced only added to my questioning. No one seemed to have truly satisfying answers or to have truly satisfied themselves about their true nature. There was also a strong, almost universal belief that growing was hard work that required baring your soul and reliving painful, unresolved issues. That all changed during my very fortunate encounter with this remarkable man. I met Lester at a seminar led by a well-known speaker that Lester was attending as the leader’s guest. That day, a group of us went out to lunch together. Lester’s presence immediately struck me as unique. He was in total peace and equal-mindedness, very comfortable with himself. He was unassuming and easy to talk to and treated everyone as his friend—even me, a complete stranger. It was obvious that he’d ended his search by discovering the answers I’d been seeking. I knew I had to find out more.

When I asked Lester what he did, he invited me to a seminar that was being held the next weekend. All he would tell me was that “a group of people is going to sit around a table and release.” I wasn’t sure what releasing meant, but I knew if it could even point me in the direction of the qualities of which Lester was the living embodiment, I definitely wanted it. I took a leap of faith and signed up on the spot.

That weekend I was in essentially the same position you’re in right now. I was about to embark on a journey for which I felt a little bit of trepidation. I wasn’t sure exactly with what I was getting involved, and, since I had done so many seminars, I also had a healthy degree of skepticism. I found myself wondering, “Oh my God, is this going to be another one of those disappointments along the way?” As the course unfolded, however, I watched myself and other people in the class shedding long-held beliefs and limitations with amazing ease and speed, yet without having to relive or explain their life stories.

Almost overnight, I knew that I’d found what I was looking for. In fact, deep inside, I knew that this process of releasing was what I had been born to do and share with the world—and to this day I have never wavered. In the past 26 years, I’ve watched thousands of other people change their lives, radically yet gently, for the better just by learning one elegantly simple, yet powerful technique.

How Releasing Has Influenced My Life

From the beginning, my relationship with Lester felt like being with a good friend. I was immediately so drawn by him and his teaching that I rapidly took all three of the courses he offered: the Basic Course in November, the Advanced Course in January, and the Instructors Training in February. I was in a rush to learn everything I could. I also started working with Lester on sharing his teachings with the world.

Working with Lester afforded me the opportunity to spend more time with him, observe him in action, and see how he dealt with life’s inevitable challenges. I was very impressed. One of the ways we related was by sitting in coffee shops and speaking at length. He consistently enjoyed sitting and chatting over a cup of coffee, right up until shortly before his death. He frequently stated, “My office is my brief case, and the nearest place to get a good cup of coffee.” Our meetings were always a little comical, and sometimes frustrating to me, because I always thought it was important to discuss the truth, whereas Lester would invariably steer the conversation to as mundane a topic as possible. Nonetheless, every time we were together, my understanding and direct experience of truth would deepen—even if we never spoke about it. He was a living example rather than a pontificator. This helped me discover the opportunity to release and experience greater freedom in every moment, a practice that stays with me to this day.

I was so engaged that I even started holding support groups for people using The Sedona Method in the living room of my Upper West Side apartment. But it wasn’t long before I realized that I needed to mature and grow personally before I could be of much use to Lester and his budding organization. I decided to support him as a volunteer and active participant instead of as an employee while continuing to explore in different ways how releasing would affect my everyday life.

Soon after that, I started my own business selling jewelry. The success of this venture afforded me the opportunity to work part-time while exploring life and my releasing full-time. I continued this venture and my more casual involvement with Lester until around 1981. As I worked with the Method in my business and personal life, I became ever more convinced that I’d found a technique that could help anyone. In the late ‘70s Lester moved out to Arizona. Except through his teachings, my contact with Lester during this period was occasional, but it continued to influence me profoundly.

Then, in 1981, I was invited to fly to Phoenix to participate again in an Instructors Training. This seminar began a new phase of our relationship. It also rekindled my desire to work closely with Lester on sharing the Method with the world. I started leading workshops for Sedona Method graduates on a regular basis in New York City and flew to Arizona several times a year for more training and to participate in weeklong or longer retreats called Intensives. Leading the workshops and participating in the Trainings and Intensives greatly accelerated my personal use of the Method. I noticed profound results in myself and in friends who were also participating.

During this same period, I decided to participate more actively, full-time, in the world of business. I briefly worked for my father selling industrial real estate in and around New York City, but I didn’t feel the job suited me. Then I joined a firm in Manhattan that sold co-ops and condominiums. I was quickly able to use the Method to support my sales ability and became one of their top salespeople. For a while I enjoyed doing this, but then an opportunity presented itself to join my brother in establishing an investment division back in my father’s real estate firm. I happily made the transition to selling office buildings, shopping centers, and other real estate investments.

For the first time in our lives, my brother and I became friends. I was able to release the old baggage that I had been carrying around about our earlier relationship, and we became a terrific business team. We were having a recurring problem, however, of starting many more deals than we were actually closing. Then, one day out of the blue, Lester called me up to see how I was doing. I explained what was happening. He said one sentence that totally turned around our closing ratio and the rest of my business career. He simply said, “Bank in the bank, not in your head.” Without me saying anything about it, he had picked up on a tendency that I and most other people in the sales profession have, which is “head banking.” I was so busy imagining how great it was going to be when I closed each deal that I was neglecting actually closing them. As soon as I started releasing instead of fantasizing, we started to close a lot more deals.

Another important lesson about letting go was learned when I received a listing for nine shopping centers from what was affectionately known in the industry then as a Xerox broker. A Xerox broker is someone who gets written listings on properties from other brokers, then copies and sends them to other brokers and principals without ever bothering to check the facts or get in contact with the actual owner or listing agent.

I sent a copy of the listing to one of my better customers, and he shot me back an immediate, almost full-priced offer. Of course I was excited, so I picked up the phone to call the man I thought was the principal, only to discover that the listing had come from a Xerox broker with no way of contacting the true owner.

Distraught, I realized that there was nothing I could do but let go. So I did. I cleared my mind and released all my feelings about the situation until I reached the point where it was okay whether or not I ever made the deal. The very next phone call in our office was from the actual principal of the shopping centers, responding to an ad looking for properties that we just happened to have running in the Wall Street Journal. When he offered us the listing on the very same property, I nearly fell over.

This is only one of many events that have led me to understand that a statement I’d heard repeatedly from Lester is absolutely true: “Even the impossible becomes completely possible when you are fully released on it.”

I also got to practice using the Method right while closing deals, sometimes when people were renegotiating multimillion dollar contracts and trying to cheat me or each other by making up a whole new story of what we’d agreed on, instead of simply signing the papers and exchanging checks. These were tense occasions, as a lot of money was at stake. Nonetheless, because I was releasing, I knew when to be quiet—which is very difficult for a broker. I also knew when to stand up for what was correct. The financial rewards were beyond my expectations.

By early 1987, I’d saved enough money to move to Arizona to rejoin Lester and support him in sharing his wonderful technique with the world. Much to the consternation of my brother and father, I relocated to Phoenix and became a full-time volunteer for his non-profit organization, the Sedona Institute, doing whatever was needed to get the word out. I spent most of the remaining years of Lester’s life working closely with him on his mission, almost entirely without monetary compensation. The reason I didn’t mind working for free was that I could see how much good I was doing, and how much I was personally changing for the better.

In 1989, Lester asked me to move to Sedona to help him sell some of the organization’s real estate holdings to graduates in order to raise money. It was there that I met my wife Amy. I saw her in a karate class and immediately recognized who she was to me, so the next day I asked her out. She was dating another man at the time, however, and asked for my card in case her situation changed. A few months later, I got a call from her and we went out on a date. That was a Wednesday. By that Saturday she was taking The Sedona Method Course.

Today, Amy and I have a beautiful, loving relationship, but it wasn’t always that way. It was tough in the beginning. Honestly, Amy was interested in other men at the time we met, so I had to do a lot of releasing for her finally to pick me. Once we married, we still had our disagreements—which of course still happens, that’s only natural. But because we both use The Sedona Method, when something happens that causes an upset, we let it go. From my perspective, our relationship is very unusual in that it just keeps getting better and more loving.

By the early ‘90s, my relationship with Lester had grown to a place of such mutual trust and respect that he decided to turn over the copyrights of his teachings to me and asked me to continue his work. I maintained the organization that he’d established towards this end until two years after his death. Then, in 1996, I decided it would be much more effective for Amy and me to start a new company, Sedona Training Associates, to convey the Method to the world in an even bigger way.

One of the things that impresses me most about the process of releasing is that it has resulted in a sense of unshakable peace, happiness, joy, and calmness that is always with me, no matter what’s going on around me. Not that there still aren’t ups and downs, but, as Lester used to say, this is really the “bottoms-up method.” I know from my own direct experience that what I used to think was a peak experience, or something really terrific, is now normal, and my peaks just keeping getting higher and higher. I have no idea how far “up” is, and I’m looking forward to finding out.

Fred Alan Wolf

2008-08-14T23:49:00.001-07:00

Fred Alan Wolf

Fred Alan Wolf (born December 3, 1934) is a theoretical physicist and writer on the subjects of quantum physics, consciousness, and their relationship. He is a science popularizer on the Discovery Channel, and has authored a number of books. His theories about the interrelation of consciousness and quantum physics have been described in a Newsweek editorial as "on the fringes of mainstream science."

Biography

Wolf's interest in physics began as a child when he viewed a newsreel depicting the world's first atomic explosion. Wolf received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from UCLA in 1963 and began researching the field of high atmospheric particle behavior following a nuclear explosion.

Dr. Wolf has appeared as the resident physicist on the Discovery Channel program The Know Zone, was a participant in the PBS series Closer to Truth, and has appeared on radio talk shows and television shows across the United States and abroad. Wolf also appeared in the films What the#$*! Do We Know!? (2004), The Secret (2006) and Spirit Space (2008). He has lectured on subjects related to quantum physics and consciousness since the 1960s, often under the name Dr. Quantum or Captain Quantum. He is also featured in the documentary about the Dalai Lama entitled Dalai Lama Renaissance, which is narrated by Harrison Ford.

His book "Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists" won the National Book Award as science paperback for 1980 from the National Book Foundation.

Wolf has taught at San Diego State University, the University of Paris, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of London, and Birkbeck College. He is sometimes criticized for blending verifiable scientific evidence for quantum phenomena with unfalsifiable metaphysical connections, often without differentiating between the two.

Bibliography

Wolf has published a number of books, including:

Space-Time and Beyond (1982, with Bob Toben and Jack Sarfatti) Paperback by Bantam; (July 1, 1983) ISBN 055326656X, ISBN 978-0553266566
Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists (1982) Harper Perennial (Revised edition January 25, 1989) ISBN 0060963107, ISBN 978-0060963101
Star Wave: Mind, Consciousness and Quantum Physics (1984) Harper Perennial (Revised edition January 25, 1989) ISBN 0060963107, ISBN 978-0060963101
The Body Quantum: The New Physics of Body, Mind and Health (1986) Macmillan Pub Co ISBN 0026308908, ISBN 978-0026308908
Parallel Universes: The Search for Other Worlds (1988) Simon & Schuster (Reprint edition February 15, 1990) ISBN 0671696017, ISBN 978-0671696016
The Eagle's Quest: A Physicist's Search for Truth in the Heart of the Shamanic World (1991) Touchstone (Reprint edition November 1, 1992) ISBN 0671792911, ISBN 978-0671792916
The Dreaming Universe : A Mind-Expanding Journey Into the Realm Where Psyche and Physics Meet (1994) Simon & Schuster ISBN 0671749463, ISBN 978-0671749460
The Spiritual Universe: One Physicists Vision of Spirit, Soul, Matter, and Self (1996) Published by Simon & Schuster. (Moment Point Press; 2Rev Ed edition October 1, 1998) ISBN 0966132718, ISBN 978-0966132717
Mind into Matter: A New Alchemy of Science and Spirit (2000) Moment Point Press ISBN 0966132769, ISBN 978-0966132762
The Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time (2004) Quest Books ISBN 083560828X, ISBN-13: 978-0835608282
Dr. Quantum's Little Book of Big Ideas: Where Science Meets Spirit (2005) Moment Point Press ISBN 1930491085, ISBN 978-1930491083

Discography

Dr. Quantum Presents: A User's Guide To Your Universe (2005) Sounds True Audio CD (ISBN 978-1591793489)

John Demartini

2008-08-14T23:47:00.001-07:00

John Demartini

Dr. John Demartini is a world leading behavioral expert, speaker and author at the forefront of the burgeoning personal and professional development industry. His scope of knowledge and experience is a culmination of 34 years of research and studies of more than 28,000 texts into over 200 different disciplines ranging from psychology, philosophy, metaphysics, theology, neurology and physiology.

Born in Houston, Texas Dr. Demartini was one of two children. At the age of seven he was told he had a learning disability and would never read, write or communicate. At fourteen he was a high school dropout living on the streets and panhandling for food to survive. After a near-death-experience at seventeen, due to a severe strychnine poisoning, Dr. Demartini made a decision that would change his life forever.

“After being given a second chance I made the decision to dedicate my life to becoming a teacher, healer and philosopher. This has been my mission for thirty years. I became a doctor of chiropractic and clinical researcher to understand the essence of healing. I became a professional speaker to master the art of teaching, and I became a student of science, theology and philosophy to understand our connection with the divine.”
- Dr. John Demartini

Dr. Demartini, was also one of the featured philosopher/teachers in the world renowned hit movie, “The Secret” and was interviewed on the CNN-Larry King Live show for his portrayal in the hit movie. He is considered foremost in the field of philosophy, transformation and expanding global consciousness.

Today Dr. Demartini speaks 300 days a year in over fifty countries across the globe. He is also the author of over forty books. Some of his bestselling titles include The Breakthrough Experience- a Revolutionary New Approach to Personal Transformation, Count Your Blessings, How to Make One Hell of a Profit and Still Get to Heaven, Heart of Love, You Can Have an Amazing Life in Just 60 Days, Riches Within and recently The Gratitude Effect.

In recent times Dr. Demartini has captured the attention of celebrities, international sport personalities, and political figures as the result of a self help methodology he developed and coined as The Demartini Method ®. Derived from a study of Quantum Physics, The Demartini Method ® is now being studied around the world.

As a presenter, Dr. Demartini has shared the stage with such noted speakers as Stephen Covey, Dr. Donald Beck, Les Brown, Mark Victor Hansen, Deepak Chopra, Richard Branson, Wayne Dyer, Dr. Patch Adams and many others. He has been a welcomed guest on over 2000 radio and television talk shows including: CNN’s Larry King Live, CBS's The Early Show, PBS's This is America with Dennis Wholey, CNBC's Alive and Wellness, Mornings with Kerrianne, Good Morning Australia, Carte Blanche, 3 Talk, and Voice of America.

He offices in Houston, Texas. Williams Tower, 52nd floor, and maintains his residence on The World, the only resort community to continually circumnavigate the globe.

Esther Hicks

2008-08-14T23:45:00.000-07:00

Esther Hicks

Esther Hicks is an inspirational speaker and best-selling author. A former secretary, she now claims to channel the dead, specifically beings called Abraham. Hicks has stated that her published works The Teachings of Abraham are translations from these beings. She has co-authored eight books with her husband Jerry Hicks and has presented workshops on the Law of Attraction.

Hay House, Inc. published the Hicks' best-selling book, Ask and It is Given, in 2004. Since that book they have also published three more New York Times Best-sellers: The Law of Attraction, The Astonishing Power of Emotions and the Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent as well as the fictional children series of Sara books.

Hicks grew up in the mountains of Utah near the ski resort of Park City, Utah . She married her current husband, Jerry Hicks, in 1980 and has one daughter by her former marriage.

Outline of Abraham-Hicks' Teachings

Hicks asserts that we create our own reality through our thoughts, that our emotions are constantly guiding us toward where we want to go and that life is supposed to be fun. The essence of Hicks teachings since 1986 has been presented as follows:

You are a Physical Extension of that which is Non-physical.

You are here in this body because you chose to be here.

The basis of your life is Freedom; the purpose of your life is Joy.

You are a creator; you create with your every thought.

Anything that you can imagine is yours to be or do or have.

You are choosing your creations as you are choosing your thoughts.

The Universe adores you; for it knows your broadest intentions.

Relax into your natural well-being. All is well.

You are a creator of thoughtways on your unique path of joy.

Actions to be taken and money to be exchanged are by-products of your focus on joy.

You may appropriately depart your body without illness or pain.

You can not die; you are Everlasting Life.

Publications

Since 2004 Hay House has published numerous books by Esther and Jerry Hicks including Ask, And It Is Given, The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham, The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent, The Astonishing Power of Emotions and translations in Spanish and Dutch. Three children's books titled Sara (Books 1-3) are also available.

Their first two books entitled A New Beginning I and A New Beginning II were published by their company Abraham-Hicks Publishing. Abraham-Hicks' output over the past 20 years includes over 600 audio tapes, video tapes, and DVDs on various issues.

A 75 minute introductory audio released under the Creative Commons license is available for download at the official Abraham-Hicks site. It summarizes how the Hicks' were introduced to Abraham.

The Secret

Esther Hicks appeared in The Secret. However, the original footage featuring her was later removed in the "Extended Edition" of The Secret after Hicks complained about her share of the films profits as well as disagreements over marketing tactics. Esther Hicks commented on the second version of the movie as well as her meeting with Rhonda Byrne, the creator of The Secret, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey on XM radio. Abraham-Hicks Publications has also posted a video on YouTube explaining the circumstances under which they decided to pull out of The Secret.

A DVD entitled Introducing Abraham:The Secret behind the "The Secret" was released by Hay House Studio on April 20,2007

Denis Waitley

2008-08-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

Denis Waitley

Denis E. Waitley (born 1924), is an American motivational speaker and writer, psychologist, consultant and best-selling author.

Waitley claims He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, and a former Navy pilot. And that he has studied and counseled leaders in every field: Apollo astronauts, Fortune 500 top executives, Olympic gold medalists, Super Bowl champions, returning POW's.

He has authored 15 books and lectured hundreds of audio programs

Résumé controversy

In 2007, Denis Waitley resigned from his post as a member of the board of directors of Usana, after it was discovered that he did not have a Master's degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.. In addition to this USANA informed the Wall Street Journal that they were unable to verify Waitley's Ph.D. from the unaccredited La Jolla University.

Works

Books

The Psychology of Winning Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated, (1995) ISBN 0425099997, 192 pages
Seeds of Greatness Simon & Schuster, (1983) ISBN 067149936X,
New Dynamics of Winning: Gain the Mind-Set of a Champion for Unlimited Success in Business and Life HarperCollins Publishers, (1995) ISBN 0688142273, 224 pages
Empires of the Mind W. Morrow, (1995) ISBN 0688140335, 266 pages
The Dragon And The Eagle
Safari to the Soul Éditions GoTopShape, (2004) ISBN 2923209036,
The Seeds of Greatness Treasury
The Psychology of Winning for Women 271 pages, (1999) ISBN 189000913X,
Being the Best Simon & Schuster, Limited, (1988) ISBN 0671701673,
The Winners Edge: The Critical Attitude of Success Berkley Books, (1985) ISBN 0425082822, 183 pages
The Joy of Working Ballantine Books, (1986) ISBN 0345334876, 320 pages
The New Dynamics of Goal Setting: Flextactics for a Fast-changing World HarperCollins, (1996) ISBN 0688126685, 177 pages
Psychology of Success: Developing Your Self-esteem Irwin Career Education Division, (1996)ISBN 0256194777, 288 pages
Quantum Fitness: Breakthrough to Excellence Pocket Books (Mm), (1986) ISBN 0671618253,
Empires of the Mind: Lessons to Lead and Succeed in a Knowledge-based World W. Morrow, (1995) ISBN 0688140335, 266 pages

CDs and Audio books

The Winning Generation
The Subliminal Winner
The Seeds of Greatness System
Wordmaster
The Seven Sacred Truths
Empires Of The Mind
How to Handle Conflict and Manage Anger
The New Dynamics of Goal Setting

David Schirmer

2008-08-14T23:41:00.000-07:00

David Schirmer

David Schirmer is a wealth coach, entrepreneur and private share investor and trader, regularly trading shares, options, warrants, CFD's and futures on the Australian and overseas markets. He is also a market commentator with articles published in various media including being a contributor to the ODDS Data weekly stock report, The Australian Investor magazine and the Melbourne Herald Sun.

David Schirmer's business activities are currently under investigation by the Australian Securities Investment Commission (ASIC). This was reported on 1 June 2007 by A Current Affair in a segment titled "The Secret Con" with those words and the logo from the film The Secret appearing in the background behind the newscaster. The show initially confronted Schirmer in a segment titled "The Secret Exposed", aired on 28 May 2007, with complaints from people who say Schirmer owed them money.

On February 12, 2008 Bob Proctor's company, Lifesuccess Productions, L.L.C. filed a lawsuit against Schirmer, his wife Lorna, and their several companies (including Life Success Pacific Rim PTY LTD, Schirmer Financial Management PTY LTD, Life Success Productions PTY LTD, Excellence in Marketing PTY LTD, and Wealth By Choice PTY LTC) for "mislead. or deceptive conduct".

Milton H. Erickson

2008-08-14T08:08:00.001-07:00

Milton H. Erickson

Milton Hyland Erickson, MD (born 5th December 1901 in Aurum, Nevada, died 25th March 1980 in Phoenix, Arizona) was an American psychiatrist specializing in medical hypnosis and family therapy. He was founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychopathological Association. He is noted for his approach to the unconscious mind as creative and solution-generating and for his influence on solution focused brief therapy, family systems therapy and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).

Approach

Erickson is noted for his often unconventional approach to psychotherapy, such as described in the book Uncommon Therapy, by Jay Haley, and the book Hypnotherapy: An Exploratory Casebook, by Milton H. Erickson and Ernest L. Rossi (1979, New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc.). He developed an extensive use of therapeutic metaphor and story as well as hypnosis and coined the term Brief Therapy for his approach of addressing therapeutic changes in relatively few sessions.

Erickson's use of interventions influenced the strategic therapy and family systems therapy practitioners beginning in the 1950s among them, Virginia Satir and Jay Haley. He was noted for his ability to "utilize" anything about a patient to help them change, including their beliefs, favorite words, cultural background, personal history, or even their neurotic habits.

Through conceptualizing the unconscious as highly separate from the conscious mind, with its own awareness, interests, responses, and learnings, he taught that the unconscious mind was creative, solution-generating, and often positive.

He was an important influence on Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), which was in part based upon his working methods.

Personal History

Erickson's personal history is remarkable, and he frequently drew upon his own experiences to provide examples of the power of the unconscious mind. He was largely self-taught and a great many of his anecdotal and autobiographical teaching stories are collected by Sydney Rosen in the book My Voice Will Go With You. Erickson identified many of even his earliest personal experiences as hypnotic or autohypnotic.

Erickson grew up in Lowell, Wisconsin in a modest farming family, and intended to become a farmer like his father. He was a late developer, and was both dyslexic and color blind. He overcame his dyslexia, and had many other inspirations via a series of spontaneous autohypnotic "flashes of light" or "creative moments", as described in the paper Autohypnotic Experiences of Milton H. Erickson

At age 17, he contracted polio, and was so severely paralysed that the doctors believed he would die. On the critical night where he was at his worst, he had another formative "autohypnotic experience".

E: As I lay in bed that night, I overheard the three doctors tell my parents in the other room that their boy would be dead in the morning. I felt intense anger that anyone should tell a mother her boy would be dead by morning. My mother then came in with as serene a face as can be. I asked her to arrange the dresser, push it up against the side of the bed at an angle. She did not understand why, she thought I was delirious. My speech was difficult. But at that angle by virtue of the mirror on the dresser I could see through the doorway, through the west window of the other room. I was damned if I would die without seeing one more sunset. If I had any skill in drawing, I could still sketch that sunset.
R: Your anger and wanting to see another sunset was a way you kept yourself alive through that critical day in spite of the doctors' predictions. But why do you call that an autohypnotic experience?
E: I saw that vast sunset covering the whole sky. But I know there was also a tree there outside the window, but I blocked it out.
R: You blocked it out? It was that selective perception that enables you to say you were in an altered state?
E: Yes, I did not do it consciously. I saw all the sunset, but I didn't see the fence and large boulder that were there. I blocked out everything except the sunset. After I saw the sunset, I lost consciousness for three days. When I finally awakened, I asked my father why they had taken out that fence, tree, and boulder. I did not realize I had blotted them out when I fixed my attention so intensely on the sunset. Then, as I recovered and became aware of my lack of abilities, I wondered how I was going to earn a living. I had already published a paper in a national agricultural journal. "Why Young Folks Leave the Farm." I no longer had the strength to be a farmer, but maybe I could make it as a doctor.

Recovering, still almost entirely lame in bed, and unable to speak, he became strongly aware of the significance of non-verbal communication - body language, tone of voice and the way that these non-verbal expressions often directly contradicted the verbal ones.

I had polio, and I was totally paralyzed, and the inflammation was so great that I had a sensory paralysis too. I could move my eyes and my hearing was undisturbed. I got very lonesome lying in bed, unable to move anything except my eyeballs. I was quarantined on the farm with seven sisters, one brother, two parents, and a practical nurse. And how could I entertain myself? I started watching people and my environment. I soon learned that my sisters could say "no" when they meant "yes." And they could say "yes" and mean "no" at the same time. They could offer another sister an apple and hold it back. And I began studying nonverbal language and body language.
I had a baby sister who had begun to learn to creep. I would have to learn to stand up and walk. And you can imagine the intensity with which I watched as my baby sister grew from creeping to learning how to stand up.

He began to recall "body memories" of the muscular activity of his own body. By concentrating on these memories, he slowly began to regain control of parts of his body to the point where he was eventually again able to talk and use his arms. Still unable to walk, he decided to train his body further, by embarking - alone - on a thousand mile canoe trip with only a few dollars. After this grueling trip, he was able to walk with a cane. This experience may have contributed to Erickson's technique of using "ordeals" in a therapeutic context. (See below).

Erickson was an avid medical student, and was so curious about and engaged with psychiatry that he got a psychology degree while he was still studying medicine.

Much later, in his fifties he developed post-polio syndrome, characterized by pain and muscle weakness caused by the chronic over-use of partially paralyzed muscles. The condition left him even more severely paralysed, but having been through the experience once before, he now had a strategy for recovering some use of his muscles, which he employed again. After this second recovery, he was obliged to use a wheelchair, and suffered chronic pain, which he controlled with self-hypnosis:

It usually takes me an hour after I awaken to get all the pain out. It used to be easier when I was younger. I have more muscle and joint difficulties now... Recently the only way I could get control over the pain was by sitting in bed, pulling a chair close, and pressing my larynx against the back of the chair. That was very uncomfortable: But it was discomfort I was deliberately creating.

In the early 1950s, anthropologist/cyberneticist Gregory Bateson involved Erickson as a consultant as part of his extensive research on communication. The two had met earlier, after Bateson and Margaret Mead had called upon him to analyse the films Mead had made of trance states in Bali. Through Bateson, Erickson met Jay Haley, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, amongst others, and had a profound influence on them all. They went on to write several books about him.

In 1973, Jay Haley published Uncommon Therapy, which for the first time brought Erickson and his approaches to the attention of those outside the clinical hypnosis community. His fame and reputation spread rapidly, and so many people wished to meet him that he began holding teaching seminars, which continued until his death.

Milton H. Erickson died in March 1980, aged 78, leaving four sons, four daughters, and a lasting legacy to the worlds of psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, pedagogics and communications.

Trance and The Unconscious Mind

Erickson believed that the unconscious mind was always listening, and that, whether or not the patient was in trance, suggestions could be made which would have a hypnotic influence, as long as those suggestions found some resonance at the unconscious level. The patient can be aware of this, or can be completely oblivious that something is happening. Erickson would see if the patient would respond to one or another kind of indirect suggestion, and allow the unconscious mind to actively participate in the therapeutic process. In this way, what seemed like a normal conversation might induce a hypnotic trance, or a therapeutic change in the subject. It should be noted that "[Erickson's] conception of the unconscious is definitely not the one held by Freud."

Erickson was an irrepressible practical joker, and it was not uncommon for him to slip indirect suggestions into all kinds of situations, including in his own books, papers, lectures and seminars.

Erickson also believed that it was even appropriate for the therapist to go into trance.

I go into trances so that I will be more sensitive to the intonations and inflections of my patients' speech. And to enable me to hear better, see better.

Erickson maintained that trance is a common, everyday occurrence. For example, when waiting for buses and trains, reading or listening, or even being involved in strenuous physical exercise, it's quite normal to become immersed in the activity and go into a trance state, removed from any other irrelevant stimuli. These states are so common and familiar that most people do not consciously recognise them as hypnotic phenomena.

The same situation is in evidence in everyday life, however, whenever attention is fixated with a question or an experience of the amazing, the unusual, or anything that holds a person's interest. At such moments people experience the common everyday trance; they tend to gaze off to the right or left, depending upon which cerebral hemisphere is most dominant (Baleen, 1969) and get that faraway or blank look. Their eyes may actually close, their bodies tend to become immobile (a form of catalepsy), certain reflexes (e.g., swallowing, respiration, etc.) may be suppressed, and they seem momentarily oblivious to their surroundings until they have completed their inner search on the unconscious level for the new idea, response, or frames of reference that will restabilize their general reality orientation. We hypothesize that in everyday life consciousness is in a continual state of flux between the general reality orientation and the momentary microdynamics of trance...

Because Erickson expected trance states to occur naturally and frequently, he was prepared to exploit them therapeutically, even when the patient was not present with him in the consulting room. He also discovered many techniques for how to increase the likelihood that a trance state would occur. He developed both verbal and non-verbal techniques, and pioneered the idea that the common experiences of wonderment, engrossment and confusion are, in reality, just kinds of trance. (These phenomena are of course central to many spiritual and religious disciplines, and are regularly employed by evangelists, cult leaders and holy men of all kinds).

Clearly there are a great many kinds of trance. Many people are familiar with the idea of a "deep" trance, and earlier in his career Erickson was a pioneer in researching the unique and remarkable phenomena that are associated with that state, spending many hours at a time with individual test subjects, deepening the trance.

That a trance may be "light" or "deep" suggest a one dimensional continuum of trance depth, but Erickson would often work with multiple trances in the same patient, for example suggesting that the hypnotised patient behave "as if awake", blurring the line between the hypnotic and awake state.

Erickson believed there are multiple states that may be utilized. This resonates with Charles Tart's idea (put forward in the book Waking Up) that all states of consciousness are trances, and that what we call "normal" waking consciousness is just a "consensus trance". NLP also makes central use of the idea of changing state, without it explicitly being a hypnotic phenomenon.

Indirect Techniques

Where classical hypnosis is authoritative and direct, and often encounters resistance in the subject, Erickson's approach is permissive, accommodating and indirect. For example, where a classical hypnotist might say "You are going into a trance", an Ericksonian hypnotist would be more likely to say "you can comfortably learn how to go into a trance". In this way, he provides an opportunity for the subject to accept the suggestions they are most comfortable with, at their own pace, and with an awareness of the benefits. The subject knows they are not being hustled, and takes full ownership of, and participation in their transformation. Because the induction takes place during the course of a normal conversation, Ericksonian hypnosis is often known as Covert or Conversational Hypnosis.

Erickson maintained that it was not possible to consciously instruct the unconscious mind, and that authoritarian suggestions were likely to be met with resistance. The unconscious mind responds to openings, opportunities, metaphors, symbols and contradictions. Effective hypnotic suggestion, then, should be "artfully vague", leaving space for the subject to fill in the gaps with their own unconscious understandings - even if they do not consciously grasp what is happening. The skilled hypnotherapist constructs these gaps of meaning in a way most suited to the individual subject - in a way which is most likely to produce the desired change.

For example the authoritative "you will stop smoking" is likely to find less leverage on the unconscious level than "you can become a non-smoker". The first is a direct command, to be obeyed or ignored (and notice that it draws attention to the act of smoking), the second is an opening, an invitation to possible lasting change, without pressure, and which is less likely to raise resistance.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder identified this kind of "artful vagueness" as a central characteristic of their 'Milton Model', a systematic attempt to codify Erickson's hypnotic language patterns.

Confusion Technique

In all my techniques, almost all, there is a confusion.

A confused person has their conscious mind busy and occupied, and is very much inclined to draw upon unconscious learnings to make sense of things. A confused person is in a trance of their own making - and therefore goes readily into that trance without resistance. Confusion might be created by ambiguous words, complex or endless sentences, pattern interruption or a myriad of other techniques to incite transderivational searches.

James Braid, who coined the term "hypnosis", claimed that focused attention ("Look into my eyes...") was essential for creating hypnotic trances; indeed, his thesis was that hypnosis was in essence a state of extreme focus. But it can be difficult for people wracked by pain, angst or suspicion to focus on anything at all. Thus other techniques for inducing trance become important, or as Erickson explained:

... long and frequent use of the confusion technique has many times effected exceedingly rapid hypnotic inductions under unfavourable conditions such as acute pain of terminal malignant disease and in persons interested but hostile, aggressive, and resistant...

The Handshake Induction

Confusion is the basis of Erickson's famous hypnotic handshake. Many actions are learned and operate as a single "chunk" of behavior: shaking hands and tying shoelaces being two classic examples. If the behavior is diverted or frozen midway, the person literally has no mental space for this - he is stopped in the middle of unconsciously executing a behavior that hasn't got a "middle". The mind responds by suspending itself in trance until either something happens to give a new direction, or it "snaps out". A skilled hypnotist can often use that momentary confusion and suspension of normal processes to induce trance quickly and easily.

By interrupting the pattern of a "normal" handshake in some way, the hypnotist causes the subject to wonder what is going on. If the handshake continues to develop in a way which is out-of-keeping with expectations, a simple, non-verbal trance is created, which may then be reinforced or utilized by the hypnotist. All these responses happen naturally and automatically without telling the subject to consciously focus on an idea.

The various descriptions of Erickson's hypnotic handshake, including his own very detailed accounts, indicate that a certain amount of improvisation is involved, and that watching and acting upon the subject's responses is key to a successful outcome. The most important thing is that the "normal" handshake is subverted in such a way to cause puzzlement, which may then be built upon.

· Initiation: When I begin by shaking hands, I do so normally. The "hypnotic touch" then begins when I let loose. The letting loose becomes transformed from a firm grip into a gentle touch by the thumb, a lingering drawing away of the little finger, a faint brushing of the subject's hand with the middle finger - just enough vague sensation to attract the attention. As the subject gives attention to the touch of your thumb, you shift to a touch with your little finger. As your subject's attention follows that, you shift to a touch with your middle finger and then again to the thumb.

· This arousal of attention is merely an arousal without constituting a stimulus for a response.

· The subject's withdrawal from the handshake is arrested by this attention arousal, which establishes a waiting set, and expectancy.

· Then almost, but not quite simultaneously (to ensure separate neural recognition), you touch the undersurface of the hand (wrist) so gently that it barely suggests an upward push. This is followed by a similar utterly slight downward touch, and then I sever contact so gently that the subject does not know exactly when - and the subject's hand is left going neither up nor down, but cataleptic.

· Termination: If you don't want your subject to know what you are doing, you simply distract their attention, usually by some appropriate remark, and casually terminate. Sometimes they remark, "What did you say? I got absentminded there for a moment and wasn't paying attention to anything." This is slightly distressing to the subjects and indicative of the fact that their attention was so focused and fixated on the peculiar hand stimuli that they were momentarily entranced so they did not hear what was said.

· Utilisation: Any utilisation leads to increasing trance depth. All utilisation should proceed as a continuation of extension of the initial procedure. Much can be done nonverbally; for example, if any subjects are just looking blankly at me, I may slowly shift my gaze downward, causing them to look at their hand, which I touch and say "look at this spot.". This intensifies the trance state. Then, whether the subjects are looking at you or at their hand or just staring blankly, you can use your left hand to touch their elevated right hand from above or the side - so long as you merely give the suggestion of downward movement. Occasionally a downward nudge or push is required. If a strong push or nudge is required, check for anaesthesia.

Richard Bandler was a keen proponent of the handshake induction, and developed his own variant, which is commonly taught in NLP workshops.

Any habitual pattern which is interrupted unexpectedly will cause sudden and light trance. The handshake is a particularly good pattern to interrupt because the formality of a handshake is a widely understood set of social rules. Since everyone knows that it would be impolite to comment on the quality of a handshake, regardless of how strange it may be, the subject is obliged to embark on an inner search (known as a transderivational search, a universal and compelling type of trance) to identify the meaning or purpose of the subverted pattern.

Resistance

Erickson recognised that many people were intimidated by hypnosis and the therapeutic process, and took care to respect the special resistances of the individual patient. In the therapeutic process he said that "you always give the patient every opportunity to resist". Here are some more relevant quotes pertaining to resistance:

Whatever the behaviour offered by the subjects, it should be accepted and utilized to develop further responsive behaviour. Any attempt to "correct" or alter the subjects' behaviour, or to force them to do things they are not interested in, militates against trance induction and certainly deep trance experience.

If the patient can be led to accept one suggestion, they will more readily accept others. With resistant patients, it becomes necessary to find a suggestion that they can accept. Resistance is always important, and should always be respected, so if the resistance itself is encouraged, the patient is made to feel more comfortable, because they know that they are allowed to respond however they wish.

Many times, the apparently active resistance encountered in subjects is no more than an unconscious measure of testing the hypnotist's willingness to meet them halfway instead of trying to force them to act entirely in accord with his ideas.

Although the idea of working with resistance is essentially a hypnotic one, it goes beyond hypnosis and trance. In a typical example, a girl that bit her nails was told that she was cheating herself of really enjoying the nail biting. He encouraged her to let some of her nails grow a little longer before biting them, so that she really could derive the fullest pleasure from the activity. She decided to grow all of her nails long enough that she might really enjoy biting them, and then, after some days, she realised that she didn't want to bite them anyway.

Ericksonian Therapy

Erickson is most famous as a hypnotherapist, but his extensive research into and experience with hypnosis led him to develop an effective therapeutic technique. Many of these techniques are not explicitly hypnotic, but they are extensions of hypnotic strategies and language patterns. Erickson recognised that resistance to trance resembles resistance to change, and developed his therapeutic approach with that awareness.

Jay Haley identified several strategies, which appeared repeatedly in Erickson's therapeutic approach.

Encouraging Resistance - For Erickson, the classic therapeutic request to "tell me everything about..." was both aggressive and disrespectful, instead he would ask the resistant patient to withhold information and only to tell what they were really ready to reveal:

I usually say, "There are a number of things that you don't want me to know about, that you don't want to tell me. There are a lot of things about yourself that you don't want to discuss, therefore let's discuss those that you are willing to discuss." She has blanket permission to withhold anything and everything. But she did come to discuss things. And therefore she starts discussing this, discussing that. And it's always "Well, this is all right to talk about." And before she's finished, she has mentioned everything. And each new item - "Well, this really isn't so important that I have to withhold it. I can use the withholding permission for more important matters." Simply a hypnotic technique. To make them respond to the idea of withholding, and to respond to the idea of communicating.

Many people's reaction to a direction is to think "why should I?" or "You can't make me", called a polarity response because it motivates the subject to consider the polar opposite of the suggestion. The conscious mind recognizes negation in speech ("Don't do X") however the unconscious mind pays more attention to the "X" than the injunction "Don't do". Erickson used this as the basis for suggestions that deliberately played on negation and tonally marked the important wording, to provide that whatever the client did, it was beneficial: "You don't have to go into a trance, so you can easily wonder about what you notice no faster than you feel readyyour hand is slowly rising....." to become aware that

Providing a Worse Alternative (The 'Double Bind') - Example: "Do you want to go into a trance now, or later?" The 'double bind' is a way of overloading the subject with two options, the acceptance of either of which represents acceptance of a therapeutic suggestion.

My first well-remembered intentional use of the double bind occurred in early boyhood. One winter day, with the weather below zero, my father led a calf out of the barn to the water trough. After the calf had satisfied its thirst, they turned back to the barn, but at the doorway the calf stubbornly braced its feet, and despite my father's desperate pulling on the halter, he could not budge the animal. I was outside playing in the snow and, observing the impasse, began laughing heartily. My father challenged me to pull the calf into the barn. Recognizing the situation as one of unreasoning stubborn resistance on the part of the calf, I decided to let the calf have full opportunity to resist, since that was what it apparently wished to do. Accordingly I presented the calf with a double bind by seizing it by the tail and pulling it away from the barn, while my father continued to pull it inward. The calf promptly chose to resist the weaker of the two forces and dragged me into the barn.

Communicating by Metaphor - This is explored extensively in Sydney Rosen's My Voice Will Go With You, but a beautiful example is given in the first chapter of David Gordon's book Phoenix:

I was returning from high school one day and a runaway horse with a bridle on sped past a group of us into a farmer's yard looking for a drink of water. The horse was perspiring heavily. And the farmer didn't recognize it so we cornered it. I hopped on the horse's back. Since it had a bridle on, I took hold of the tick rein and said, "Giddy-up." Headed for the highway, I knew the horse would turn in the right direction. I didn't know what the right direction was. And the horse trotted and galloped along. Now and then he would forget he was on the highway and start into a field. So I would pull on him a bit and call his attention to the fact the highway was where he was supposed to be. And finally, about four miles from where I had boarded him, he turned into a farm yard and the farmer said, "So that's how that critter came back. Where did you find him?" I said, "About four miles from here." "How did you know you should come here?" I said, "I didn't know. The horse knew. All I did was keep his attention on the road."

Compare Erickson's metaphorical strategies with the teaching tales of the Sufis (those of for example the Nasreddin) and the Zen tradition of Koans, each also designed to act on the unconscious mind.

Encouraging a Relapse - To bypass simple short-lived "obedience" which tends to lead to lapses in the absence of the therapist, Erickson would occasionally arrange for his patients to fail in their attempts to improve, for example by overreaching. Failure is part of life, and in that fragile time where the patient is learning to live, think and behave differently, a random failure can be catastrophic. Deliberately causing a relapse allowed Erickson to control the variables of that failure, and to cast it in a positive therapeutic light for the patient.

Encouraging a Response by Frustrating It - This paradoxical approach acts directly on the patient's own resistance to change. Obese patients are asked to gain weight, or in a family therapy session, a stubbornly silent family member is ignored until the frustration obliges them to blurt out some desperate truth. Once again, this approach has its roots in Erickson's hypnotic language patterns of the form "I don't want you to go into a trance yet".

Compare this with "Prescribing the Symptom" (below).

Utilizing Space and Position - Hypnosis and therapy are experienced subjectively by the patient, and any part of their total experience can be used to reinforce an idea. The physical position or even the posture of the patient can be a significant part of the subjective experience. Manipulating these factors can contribute to a therapeutic transformation.

If I send someone out of the room - for example, the mother and child - I carefully move father from his chair and put him into mother's chair. Or if I send the child out, I might put mother in the child's chair, at least temporarily. Sometimes I comment on this by saying, 'As you sit where your son was sitting, you can think more clearly about him.' Or, 'If you sit where your husband sat, maybe it will give you somewhat of his view about me'. Over a series of interviews with an entire family, I shuffle them about, so that what was originally mother's chair is now where father is sitting. The family grouping remains, and yet that family grouping is being rearranged, which is what you are after when changing a family."

This may be directly compared with Fritz Perls' use of an "empty chair" as a context for imagined interactions (where the client was often invited to occupy the chair and thus take on the role of the person imagined to be sitting there); Bert Hellinger's approach, which requires the client to arrange family members (played by volunteers) in a row or pattern which matches the client's internal understanding, and then to reorganise the row; and Virginia Satir's work with tableaux and posture.

Emphasizing the Positive - Erickson claimed that his sensory "disabilities" (dyslexia, colour blindness, being tone-deaf) helped him to focus on aspects of communication and behavior which most other people overlooked. This is a typical example of emphasizing the positive.

Erickson would often compliment the patient for a symptom, and would even encourage it, in very specific ways. In one amusing example, a woman whose in-laws caused her nauseous feelings in the gut every time they visited unexpectedly was "taught" to puke spectacularly whenever the visits were especially inconvenient. Naturally the in-laws would always sympathetically help her clean up the vomit. Fairly soon, the annoying relatives started calling in advance before turning up, to see if she were "well enough" to see them.

The subject of dozens of songs, "emphasizing the positive" is a well known self-help strategy, and can be compared with "positive reformulation" in Gestalt Therapy.

Prescribing the Symptom and Amplifying a Deviation - Very typically, Erickson would instruct his patients to actively and consciously perform the symptom that was bothering them (see the nailbiting example under #Resistance), usually with some minor or trivial deviation from the original symptom. In many cases, the deviation could be amplified and used as a "wedge" to transform the whole behaviour.

INTERVIEWER: Suppose someone called you and said there was a kid, nineteen or twenty years old, who has been a very good boy, but all of a sudden this week he started walking around the neighborhood carrying a large cross. The neighbors are upset and the family's upset, and would you do something about it. How would you think about that as a problem? Some kind of bizarre behavior like that.
ERICKSON: Well, if the kid came in to see me, the first thing I would do would be to want to examine the cross. And I would want to improve it in a very minor way. As soon as I got the slightest minor change in it, the way would be open for a larger change. And pretty soon I could deal with the advantages of a different cross - he ought to have at least two. He ought to have at least three so be could make a choice each day of which one. It's pretty hard to express a psychotic pattern of behavior over an ever increasing number of crosses.

Seeding Ideas - Erickson would often ensure that the patients had been exposed to an idea, often in a metaphorical form (hidden from the conscious mind) in advance of utilizing it for a therapeutic purpose. He called this "seeding ideas", and it can be observed to occur at many levels both coarse and fine grained, in many of his case histories. In a simple example, the question "Have you ever been in a trance before?" seeds the idea that a trance is imminent - the presupposition inherent in the word before is "not now, but later".

Avoiding Self-Exploration - In common with most brief therapy practitioners, Erickson was entirely uninterested in analysing the patient's early psychological development. Occasionally in his case histories, he will briefly discuss the patient's background, but only as much as it pertains to the resources available to the patient in the present.

INTERVIEWER: You don't feel that exploring the past is particularly relevant? I'm always trying to get clear in my mind how much of the past I need to consider when doing brief therapy.
ERICKSON: You know, I had one patient this last July who had four or five years of psychoanalysis and got nowhere with it. And someone who knows her said, "How much attention did you give to the past?" I said, "You know, I completely forgot about that." That patient is, I think, a reasonably cured person. It was a severe washing compulsion, as much as twenty hours a day. I didn't go in to the cause or the etiology; the only searching question I asked was "When you get in the shower to scrub yourself for hours, tell me, do you start at the top of your head, or the soles of your feet, or in the middle? Do you wash from the neck down, or do you start with your feet and wash up? Or do you start with your head and wash down?"
INTERVIEWER: Why did you ask that?
ERICKSON: So that she knew I was really interested.
INTERVIEWER: So that you could join her in this?
ERICKSON: No, so that she knew I was really interested.

Shocks and ordeals

Erickson is famous for pioneering indirect techniques, but his shock therapy tends to get less attention, perhaps because it is uncomfortable for us to hear such uncharacteristic stories about an inspirational and gentle healer. Nonetheless, Erickson was prepared to use psychological shocks and ordeals in order to achieve given results:

When the old gentleman asked if he could be helped for his fear of riding in an elevator, I told him I could probably scare the pants off him in another direction. He told me that nothing could be worse than his fear of an elevator.
The elevators in that particular building were operated by young girls, and I made special arrangements with one in advance. She agreed to cooperate and thought it would be fun. I went with the gentleman to the elevator. He wasn't afraid of walking into an elevator, but when it started to move it became an unbearable experience. So I chose an unbusy time and I had him walk in and out of the elevator, back in and out. Then at a point when we walked in, I told the girl to close the door and said, "Let's go up."
She went up one story and stopped in between floors. The gentleman started to yell, "What's wrong!" I said, "The elevator operator wants to kiss you." Shocked, the gentleman said, "But I'm a married man!" The girl said, "I don't mind that." She walked toward him, and he stepped back and said, "You start the elevator." So she started it. She went up to about the fourth floor and stopped it again between floors. She said, "I just have a craving for a kiss." He said, "You go about your business." He wanted that elevator moving, not standing still. She replied, "Well, let's go down and start all over again," and she began to take the elevator down. He said, "Not down, up!" since he didn't want to go through that all over again.
She started up and then stopped the elevator between floors and said, "Do you promise you'll ride down in my elevator with me when you're through work?" He said, "I'll promise anything if you promise not to kiss me." He went up in the elevator, relieved and without fear - of the elevator - and could ride one from then on.

Influenced

One of his first students and developers of his work was Stephen Gilligan. Other important followers include Jay Haley and Jeffrey K. Zeig.

Erickson was modeled (see Milton model) by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the co-founders of Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).

In the sphere of business coaching and training, he influenced the methods that behaviour training companies, such as Krauthammer, Gustav Käser Training International or Dynargie used in communicating with coachees and training participants.

Books

Erickson was a prolific writer, often working in collaboration with others. His chief collaborator was Ernest L. Rossi. His books include:

Hypnotic Realities ISBN 0-8290-0112-3 (With Ernest L. Rossi)
Hypnotherapy - An Exploratory Casebook ISBN 0-8290-0244-8 (With Ernest L. Rossi)
Experiencing Hypnosis ISBN 0-8290-0246-4 (With Ernest L. Rossi)
The Practical Application of Medical and Dental Hypnosis ISBN 0-87630-570-2 (with Seymour Hershman and Irving I. Secter) (out of print)
Time Distortion in Hypnosis ISBN 1-899836-95-0 (With Linn F. Cooper)

His clinical papers have been collected into a four volume work:

Collected Papers on Hypnosis: Volume 1 - Nature of Hypnosis and Suggestion ISBN 0-8290-1206-0 (Ernest L. Rossi, Editor)
Collected Papers on Hypnosis: Volume 2 - Sensory, Perceptual and Psychophysiological Processes ISBN 0-8290-1207-9 (Ernest L. Rossi, Editor)
Collected Papers on Hypnosis: Volume 3 - Hypnotic Investigation of Psychodynamic Processes ISBN 0-8290-1208-7 (Ernest L. Rossi, Editor)
Collected Papers on Hypnosis: Volume 4 - Innovative Hypnotherapy ISBN 0-8290-1209-5 (Ernest L. Rossi, Editor)

- note, these four volumes are sometimes made available digitally under the misleading (and erroneous) name 'Complete Works'.

Some books collecting transcriptions of his lectures and seminars:

My Voice Will Go With You - The Teaching Stories of Milton H. Erickson ISBN 0-393-30135-4 (Sydney Rosen, Editor)
Seminars, Workshops and Lectures of Milton H. Erickson Volume 1 - Healing in HypnosisFlorence Sharp, Editors) ISBN 1-85343-405-1 (Margaret O. Ryan &
Seminars, Workshops and Lectures of Milton H. Erickson Volume 2 - Life Reframing in Hypnosis ISBN 0-8290-1581-7 (Florence Sharp, Editor)
Seminars, Workshops and Lectures of Milton H. Erickson Volume 3 - Mind-Body Communication in Hypnosis ISBN 0-8290-1805-0 (Ernest L. Rossi, Editor)

Other Works which collect specific parts of Erickson's output

The Wisdom of Milton H Erickson: The Complete Volume ISBN 1-904424-17-1 (Ronald A.Havens, Editor)
An Uncommon Casebook: Complete Clinical Work of Milton H.Erickson, M.D. ISBN 0-393-70101-8 (William Hudson O'Hanlon & Angela L. Hexum)

Many books have been written about Erickson and his techniques, which typically include extended citations from his papers, lectures and workshops, including:

Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H.Erickson: Volume 1 ISBN 1-55552-052-9, John Grinder & Richard Bandler
Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H.Erickson: Volume 2 ISBN 1-55552-053-7, John Grinder, Richard Bandler & Judith DeLozier
Milton H.Erickson (Key Figures in Counselling & Psychotherapy Series) ISBN 0-8039-7575-9 (Jeffrey K. Zeig & W. Michael Munion)
Uncommon Therapy: Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H.Erickson, M.D. ISBN 0-393-31031-0 (Jay Haley)
Phoenix: Therapeutic Patterns of Milton H.Erickson ISBN 0-916990-10-9 (David Gordon, Maribeth Meyers-Anderson)
Taproots: Underlying Principles of Milton Erickson's Therapy and Hypnosis ISBN 0-393-70031-3 (William Hudson O'Hanlon)

John Hagelin

2008-08-14T07:59:00.001-07:00

John Hagelin

Dr. John Hagelin, scientist, educator, and three-time third-party candidate for President of the United States, is Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management, and Minister of Science and Technology of the Global Country of World Peace, a virtual community with the stated goals of worldwide peace and prosperity. In 1992, Hagelin was honored with a Kilby International Award for his work in particle physics leading to the development of supersymmetric grand unified field theories, for his innovative applications of advanced principles from control systems theory and optimization theory to digital sound reproduction, and for his research of human consciousness. Hagelin attributes his unusual career path from physicist to spokesman for global human concerns to his practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique and to his studies with the founder of the technique, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Early life

John Samual Hagelin was born in 1954, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. According to a 1992 biographical article, as a child Hagelin won a scholarship to the elite Taft School, where he earned a reputation as both a genius (receiving a perfect score of 165 on a school-administered IQ test) and a reckless thrill-seeker. In 1970 he was involved in a motorcycle crash that led to hospitalization. While he was confined to a body cast, one of his teachers introduced him to quantum mechanics and a teacher of Transcendental Meditation taught him the technique, both of which have had a major impact on his life.

Hagelin later graduated from Taft and attended Dartmouth College, where he participated in athletics, earned an undergraduate degree with highest honors (summa cum laude) in three years, co-authored and published research, and won a fellowship to study physics at Harvard. While at Harvard, Hagelin worked under the noted physicist Howard Georgi, best known for his work in Grand Unification and gauge coupling unification within SU(5) and SO(10) groups. Hagelin received first a Master's degree from Harvard in 1976, and in 1981, graduated with a Ph.D. Fixing hi-fi equipment in summer school breaks would later evolve into his innovations in digital audio reproduction (see below).

After his freshman year at Dartmouth, a continued interest in Transcendental Meditation led him to Vittel, France where he completed the studies necessary to become a qualified teacher of the Transcendental Meditation technique.

Professional/Career development

In 1982, after graduating from Harvard, Hagelin became a researcher at CERN (the European Center for Particle Physics) in Switzerland, and from 1983 to 1984 was appointed to a post doctoral research position at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). In 1984, Hagelin shifted his appointment from SLAC to Maharishi International University, where he continued research in physics, pursued a long-time interest in brain and cognitive science research, and established a graduate program in theoretical physics.

He remained in contact with colleagues from Harvard, Stanford, and CERN, and continued to collaborate with several. While at MIU, his continued contributions to the field of theoretical physics were supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.

In 1992, in a temporary career shift, Hagelin was nominated as a presidential candidate for the Natural Law Party, and ran three times for president of the United States. Hagelin participated in What the Bleep Do We Know, an independent film released in 2004. He has also been featured on a film called The Secret.

Dr. Hagelin continues to teach physics as Professor of Physics at Maharishi University of Management (formerly MIU), and to serve as Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management, and as Minister of Science and Technology of the Global Country of World Peace.

Research

In the years 1979-1996, Hagelin published seventy papers in the fields of particle physics and cosmology. This work includes the so-called "flipped SU(5), heterotic superstring theory,” which he developed in collaboration with CERN researchers John Ellis, D.V. Nanopoulus, and others. The theory is considered one of the more successful unified field theories or “theories of everything” and was highlighted in a feature article in Discover magazine. Hagelin was a co-author on a paper which is included in a list of the 103 articles in the physical sciences which were cited the most times during the years 1983 and 1984.As of 2007, the article has been cited over 500 times. As a result of this work, in 1992 Hagelin received the Kilby Award awarded to "individuals who make extraordinary contributions to society through science, technology, innovation, invention and education."

In 1987 and 1989, Hagelin published two papers on the relationship between physics and consciousness. These papers discuss the Vedic understanding of consciousness as a field and compare it with theories of the unified field derived by modern physics. Hagelin argues that these two fields have almost identical properties and that the most parsimonious explanation is that they are one and the same.

Part of the evidence he presents for this explanation is the body of research on the effects that practitioners of certain advanced meditation techniques claim to have on measured parameters in society. In these two papers he refers to numerous such studies, and in the summer of 1993, he himself conducted a controversial study of this type. He imported some 4,000 practitioners to the Washington D.C. area where they practiced these techniques twice daily in a group. Using data reported by the D.C. Police Department, scientists followed the changes in crime rates for the area before, during, and after the 6 weeks the group was in place. In 1999, the study was published in Social Indicators Research.

In 1994, Hagelin was selected for the Ig Nobel Prize for Peace, an annual parody award given for achievements that “first make people laugh and then make them think." The award was given for the experimental conclusions drawn from the Washington, D.C. study.

Hagelin's linkage of quantum mechanics and unified field theory with consciousness and, particularly, with the "Maharishi Effect," was critiqued in the journal Social Forces

In July, 2007, Dr. Hagelin predicted a major drop in crime in the United States in the 12 month period following July, due to a course entitled Invincible America Assembly in which course participants practice the TM-Sidhi program as members of a large group.

Enlightened Audio Designs

In 1990, Hagelin founded Enlightened Audio Designs (EAD) with electronic engineer Alastair Roxburgh in Iowa. Working with EAD, Hagelin co-designed a high-end digital to analog (D-to-A) system that was commercially marketed. In 2001, the company was sold to the Oregon-based company Alpha Digital Technologies.

Natural Law Party

According to then press secretary Robert Roth, the Natural Law Party was founded in 1992 in the United States by a group of educators, business leaders, and lawyers in Fairfield, Iowa, who desired to elect a national administration that would promote field-tested solutions to the nation's problems. This group chose the academics, Dr. Hagelin and Dr. Michael Tompkins, as its Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates that year, and the same pair won the nomination again in 1996. Hagelin also ran for President in the 2000 Presidential election, being nominated both by the Natural Law Party and by the Perot faction of the Reform Party, which disputed the nomination of Pat Buchanan. Hagelin’s running mate in the 2000 election was Nat Goldhaber, a wealthy businessman who, like Hagelin and Tompkins, was a longtime practitioner of the Transcendental Meditation program.

After a legal battle with the supporters of Buchanan, the Federal Election Commission ruled in September of 2000 that Buchanan was the official candidate of the Reform Party and, hence, that Buchanan was eligible for federal election funds. As part of the ruling, the Reform convention that nominated Hagelin was declared invalid, and Hagelin lost the Reform spot on many state ballots to Buchanan. However, Hagelin remained on several state ballots as the Reform Party nominee, due to the independent nature of various state Reform parties, and on the ballot in many other states as the Natural Law Party nominee.

Hagelin's Presidential electoral results:
1992 - Ballot status in 32 states - 39,000 votes - 0.04%.
1996 - Ballot status in 44 states - 110,000 votes - 0.1%.
2000 - Ballot status in 39 states - 83,000 votes - 0.08%.

In the 2004 primary elections, Hagelin endorsed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich. In April of 2004, the U.S. Natural Law Party officially disbanded its national organization, although a few state parties still remained active.

Best electoral showing

Hagelin, who now resides in Fairfield, Iowa, performed exceptionally well in Jefferson County, Iowa, the home county of Fairfield. He received 23.94% in 1992, 22.82% in 1996, and 16.31% in 2000.

In 2000, Hagelin received over 30 percent of the vote in the precinct that serves northern and eastern Ketchum, Idaho.

Charles Fillmore

2008-08-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

Charles Fillmore 1854- 1948

The Unity movement was founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in the late 1880s. They were down and almost out when they conceived the idea that became Unity.

Charles Fillmore was born August 22, 1854 on an Indian reservation near St. Cloud, Minnesota. His father was a Chippewa trader there. Myrtle Fillmore was born in Pagetown, Ohio on October 6, 1845. They met in Texas. He was a railroad freight clerk suffering from tuberculosis. She was a school teacher, also in fragile health. They married, had three sons, and they roamed the west seeking a cure for Charles' illness.

In 1884 the Fillmores came to Kansas City. They invested what little money they had in real estate. And they lost it. It was then they decided that spiritual work would be their future. Together they launched the Modern Thought Publishing Company in 1889, and the Unity School of Christianity in 1914.

Unity leaned heavily on their printed pieces. They sold them at cost for "love offerings." They started a magazine called Modern Thought, and Unity Magazine was launched in 1889. By 1906 Unity had its own publishing plant. Their preaching, printing and broadcasting were combined with their Unity Inn's vegetarian meals. It was also from here that Silent Unity was broadcast on their radio station, and the magazines Wee Wisdom for kiddies and Daily Word for adults were published.

In 1929 Unity moved to what eventually became over 1300 rolling acres at Lee's Summit, Missouri. They named it Unity Village in the 1950s, and the name remains today. It became their world headquarters, with a landmark Unity Tower. A fountain, crossed by the Bridge of Faith, runs lengthwise of the manicured grounds.

Eighty-six year old Myrtle Fillmore died October 6, 1931. Charles Fillmore remained active at Unity until his death at age 93 on July 5, 1948. The ashes of both founders were reportedly scattered from the Bridge of Faith into the flowing waters below.

W. Clement Stone

2008-08-14T07:49:00.001-07:00

W. Clement Stone (1902-2002)

William Clement Stone (May 4, 1902 – September 3, 2002) was a prominent businessman, philanthropist and self-help book author. Stone is remembered for contributing $2 million to President Richard Nixon's election campaigns in 1968 and 1972—these were cited in Congressional debates after Watergate to institute campaign spending limits.

W. Clement Stone was born in and grew up on Chicago’s South Side. From an early age, he demonstrated the entrepreneurship, tenacity and optimism that were hallmarks of his life. To help support his family, Mr. Stone began selling newspapers on the street at the age of six. When older youth drove him away from the busiest corners, he moved his sales to restaurants where he eventually won over owners and customers.

At age 19, Stone started working with his mother selling accident policies. He evidently had enormous energy and drive. At age 19, he averaged selling 48 policies per day. Later in his life, he reached a nine-day average of 72 policies per day, and sold 122 policies in one day. He did this using a cold canvass system at office buildings, meaning he had no pre-arranged appointments. Most of us can't conceive of talking to that many people in one day. He might have made some sales of multiple policies for some families, but he must have seen an awful lot of customers in a day to make those sales.

One of the decisions that Stone made to increase his production was to limit the time he would spend on his sales effort. If a customer wouldn't make the commitment in the designated time, he would move on to the next call.

When Stone reached the 72 policy per day level, he started concentrating on building his own sales force. When the Great Depression hit, he devoted more of his attention to creating a sales training program to improve the effectiveness of his sales team, including spending some initial time with new salespersons in the field. He also developed custom insurance policies that would be easy to sell and renew.

Through these experiences, Mr. Stone developed his lifelong philosophy of Positive Mental Attitude (PMA), which he viewed as the cornerstone of his success. He believed in the power of optimism and that even in adversity lay seeds of success.

He was highly successful and eventually started the Combined Insurance Company of America with a modest initial investment of $100. Combined Insurance grew into a multimillion dollar enterprise that became Aon Corporation in the 1980s.

W. Clement Stone married his high school sweetheart, Jessie Verna Tarson, in 1923 and they had three children. The Stones were committed, lifelong philanthropists who supported countless civic and community groups as well as political and humanitarian causes.

In its early years, the Stone Foundation promoted PMA and distributed grants focused on four key areas: mental health, education, children/youth and religion. It also created and coordinated operating programs such as self-improvement projects in prisons and consulting services in management and positive mental attitude training for nonprofit organizations.

Since the late 1990s, the Foundation has concentrated its grantmaking in three areas: early childhood development, youth development and education (with an emphasis on teacher quality and principal leadership). Today, the Foundation has an asset base of over $80 million and distributes almost $2 million in grants each year primarily in Chicago, Boston, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.

W. Clement Stone died in September 2002 at the age of 100. Their son, Norman Stone, President of the Foundation, and many of their grandchildren and several other family members, who serve as Trustees, Corporate Officers and Committee Members, sustain the Stones’ family tradition of philanthropy and their steadfast conviction that every individual can make a significant contribution to improving the quality of life for others.

Throughout his life Mr. Stone donated an estimated $275 million to various charitable organizations. His political contributions were also enormous; twice Mr. Stone, a member of the John Evans Club and an Alumni Merit Award recipient, was the largest single contributor to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaigns.

W. Clement Stone shared his belief in the power of optimism in three books that continue to be read today: Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude (co-authored with Napoleon Hill), The Success System That Never Fails, and The Other Side of the Mind (co-authored with Norma Lee Browning).

Mr. Stone's inspirational self-help books, which have reached a world-wide audience, reinforce the conviction that anyone can become successful “no matter how poor his start in life.”

W. Clement Stone was survived by his wife Jessie who passed away in 2004; a son, Norman; 12 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

Alan Cohen

2008-08-14T07:44:00.001-07:00

Alan Cohen

Alan Cohen is the author of over a dozen popular inspirational books, including the classics, The Dragon Doesn't Live Here Anymore and I Had It All the Time. He is a contributing writer for the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul series. The Celestine Prophecy author, James Redfield describes Alan as "the most eloquent spokesman of the heart," and Dr. Wayne Dyer declares, "Alan Cohen is a major, major player in the spiritual transformation taking place on the planet today. I love his work and want people to read and APPLY his message." Alan's column "From the Heart" appears in many New Thought newspapers and magazines internationally.

Mr. Cohen resides in Maui, Hawaii, where he conducts seminars on spiritual awakening and visionary living. The Mastery Training is a highly focused small group intensive for individuals seeking to bring greater authenticity, love, and integrity to their chosen goals. Celebrating Paradise invites participants to reclaim their inner riches in a spirit of greater joy and aliveness. Alan also keynotes and presents workshops at many conferences and expos throughout the United States and abroad.

Alan brings a warm blend of wisdom, intimacy, humor, and vision to the spiritual path. He loves to extract spiritual lessons from the practical experiences of daily living, and find beauty in the seeming mundane. Many readers and seminar participants have reported that his teachings have brought them deep comfort, encouragement, and empowerment as they moved through a difficult or transitional phase of their life.

Florence Scovel Shinn

2008-08-14T07:39:00.000-07:00

Florence Scovel Shinn(1871-1940)

WHO WAS FLORENCE SCOVEL SHINN?...... Ms. Shinn was an artist and a metaphysics teacher in New York in the early part of the 20th century. Her books are truly incredible. They are relatively short, but they are profound. In her books she shows that we can enjoy a winning streak of health, prosperity, and happiness. She shares real-life stories with us from her many clients to illustrate how positive attitudes and affirmations invariably succeed in making one a "winner" in life--able to control life's conditions and release abundance through a knowledge of spiritual law. Florence Shinn is one of last century's most popular Success teachers. Apparently, she had quite a following in her "heyday" too, for her lectures were well attended and her books were popular not only in America, but also abroad.

Florence Scovel was born Septemer 24, 1871, in Camden, New Jersey. Her mother was the former Emily Hopkinson of Pennsylvania. Her father was Alden Cortlandt Scovel, and he practiced law in Camden. Besides Florence there was an older daughter and younger son. Florence was educated in Philadelphia at the Friends Central School and studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1889 to 1897. It was there that she met her future husband, Everett Shinn (1876 - 1953), who was a fairly celebrated painter of impressionistic canvases and realistic murals. Although Florence was educated at the art Academy, her pen and ink drawings are the result of her natural talent and not technical training.

Shortly after Florence's graduation from the Academy, she and Everett were married. The Shinns moved to New York City where they pursued separate careers in art. Everett was interested in the theatre and not only designed and painted for it but built a small theatre in the courtyard behind their studio home at 112 Waverly Place, near Washington Square. He organised the Waverly Players and wrote three plays in each of which Florence played the title role.

Before World War one she was an illustrator of popular children's literature in magazines and books. In 1912, after fourteen years of marriage, Everett requested a divorce.

In 1925, having been unable to find a publisher for "The Game of Life and How to Play It" she published it herself. "Your Word is Your Wand" was published in 1928 and "The Secret Door to Success" was published in 1940 shortly before her death on October 17, 1940. The "Power of the Spoken Word" is a compendium of her notes, gathered by a student and published postumously in 1945.

Florence Scovel Shinn had the ability to explain her success principles and how they work in an entertaining and easy-to-read style. By sharing real-life stories she illustrates how positive attitudes and affirmations invariably succeed in making one a "winner" in life, able to control life's conditions and release abundance through a knowledge of spiritual law.

Ms. Shinn passed on to a broader sphere in the "game of life" in 1940, but through her artistry and inspired writings has left an indelible mark on the canvas of life on planet earth which will live on to broaden the horizons of men and women the world over for generations to come.

Prentice Mulford

2008-08-14T07:34:00.000-07:00

Prentice Mulford (1834-1891)

Although Prentice Mulford was one of the earliest pioneers of the New Thought teaching, he is still comparatively little known or read, chiefly on account of the high price of the six volumes known as "The White Cross Library," in which form are published his essays in America.

Prentice Mulford was born in Sag Harbor, Long Island, USA in 1834. He was described as the strangest of men. He envisioned the airplane and radio and prophesized mental telepathy and practiced it. At 22 Prentice sailed to California. In Jamestown, California he was a gold miner, cook, school teacher, lecturer and observer of human nature, but made his fortune not from gold but by his interesting and imaginative articles and books. He was a fixture in San Francisco literary circles with the likes of Twain, Harte, and the Bohemian set in the 1860's. He wrote dozens of humorous short stories for the Overland Monthly, Golden Era, Californian, and other local journals. He referred to himself as "Dogberry".

In 1865 he became interested in mental and spiritual phenomena and lived in an old whaleboat cruising San Francisco Bay. After returning from a trip abroad, Prentice Mulford lived for the next 17 years as a hermit in the swamps of Passaic, New Jersey. It was there he wrote some of his finest works on mental/spiritual laws including his "The White Cross Library" dealing in the topic Thought Currents and How to Use Them

His essays embody a particular philosophy, and represent a peculiar phase of insight into the mystery which surrounds man. The essays were the work, as the insight was the gift, of a man who owed nothing to books, perhaps not much to what is ordinarily meant by observation, and everything or nearly everything to reflection nourished by contact with nature. To many his thoughts may seem but dreams; to others they are priceless truths.

That he was a wise teacher and no dogmatist is apparent from his own words "In the spiritual life every person is his or her own discoverer, and you need not grieve if your discoveries are not believed in by others. It is your business to push on, find more and increase your own individual happiness."

To him, at any rate, is due the credit of having been a pioneer in the thought that is now influencing people throughout the world, and his influence is very apparent in the writings of all the teachers of the same school that have followed him.

At age 57, Mulford decided to return to Sag Harbor and write about Long Island after the Gold Rush but he passed away peacefully, without any apparent illness or pain, alone in his boat en route. After 30 years in an unmarked grave, Mulford's body was taken to Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor where a large stone was placed on his grave with these words, "Thoughts are Things".

Charles F. Haanel

2008-08-14T07:29:00.000-07:00

Charles F. Haanel (1866-1949)

Charles F. Haanel was a noted American author and businessman who belonged to the American Scientific League, The Author’s League of America, The American Society of Psychical Research, the St. Louis Humane Society and the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce.

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Charles F. Haanel began his business career in St. Louis. He resigned his position in order to start his own company and eventually founded one of the largest conglomerates of his time.

He wrote several books which were published in St. Louis by Psychology Publishing and by his Master Key Institute in New York. Mr. Haanel put into books the ideas and methods he used to gain his success. Besides the "Master Key System," which he wrote in 1912, he also wrote "Mental Chemistry" and "The New Psychology"

By 1933 The Master Key System had sold over 200,000 copies and then seemingly disappeared. The Master Key System is one of the finest studies in self-improvement, mind-stuff, and higher consciousness ever written. Covering everything from how to get wealthy to how to get healthy, Mr. Haanel leaves no stone unturned. With precision, he elucidates on each topic with logic and rigor that not only leaves you feeling good, but also thinking good. The book was banned by the Church in 1933 and has been hidden away for seventy years!

Rumor has it that while he was attending Harvard University, Bill Gates discovered and read The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel. It was this book that inspired Bill Gates to drop out of the University and pursue his dream of "a computer on every desktop." You probably know the results. . .

It is Silicon Valley's secret that almost every entrepreneur who made a fortune in recent years did so by studying the words Mr. Haanel penned over eighty years ago! Almost every millionaire and billionaire in the Valley read The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel. Since this book was no longer in print until recently, copies of The Master Key System became a hot commodity in the Valley.

The Master Key System is a system that teaches the ultimate principles, causes, effects, and laws that underlie all attainment and success. When you want to attain something, The Master Key System will show you how to get it. The results you will attain from using this system are so startling as to appear incredible. For this reason, more and more people are becoming students of The Master Key System than ever before

In 24 parts, The Master Key sets out the fundamental principles of life and creative living, as Haanel came to understand and apply them. Basic to his teaching is the correct development and use of mental power -- the key to truly creative power and action, harmony and health, love and happiness, and abundant possibilities. Each part is meant to be studied like a correspondence course lesson, but this is also a book that can be opened at random for whatever gem of advice your eyes happen to fall upon.

This age-old wisdom was written by someone who could perceive and tap into Universal Mind but who seems to have no particular allegiance to any specific system of knowledge. Haanel's numbered common-sense messages still have a freshness 89 years after they were first assembled.

Mr. Haanel died in 1949 and is buried in Bellafontaine Cemetery, St. Louis. Walter B. Stevens described Mr. Haanel as "a man of mature judgement, capable of taking a calm survey of life and correctly valuing its opportunities, its possibilities, its demands and obligations."

Christian D. Larson

2008-08-14T07:20:00.000-07:00

Christian D. Larson

Christian D. Larson was an outstanding and highly influential early New Thought leader and teacher as well as a prolific writer of New Thought books who believed that people have tremendous latent powers, which could be harnessed for success with the proper attitude.

Christian Daa Larson, of Norwegian extraction, was born in Iowa in 1874. He attended Iowa State College and a theological school (Unitarian) in Meadville, Pa. In his early twenties he became interested in the Mental Science teachings of Helen Wilmans, Henry Wood, Charles Brodie Patterson, etc. Little is known about his personal life and what originally led him to take up his intensive study of Mental Science, but its logical teachings clearly suited young Larson's analytical mind and provided a point to him where theology and science could meet and combine to provide a practical and systematic philosophy of life.

Larson located in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1898. In January, 1901, he organized the New Thought Temple, at his residence, 947 West 17th St. In September of that year Mr. Larson began to publish Eternal Progress, for several years one of the leading New Thought periodicals, carrying it to a circulation of over a quarter of a million. While acting as editor of Eternal Progress, he began his prolific book writing career. Forty of his books have been published. Among the best known are: Poise and Power, The Great Within, The Hidden Secret, Mastery of Self, Mastery of Fate, The Ideal Made Real, Thinking for Results, Your Forces and How to Use Them, How to Stay Well, and The Pathway of Roses.

A one time honorary president of the International New Thought Alliance, along with such stalwarts as W.W. Atkinson, Horatio Dresser, Charles Brodie Patterson, and Annie Rix Militz, he was one who exercised considerable influence over Religious Science founder, Ernest Holmes, in his early career. Holmes had been studying the Christian Science textbook, Science & Health, but was particularly impressed with the New Thought writings of Larson. According to Fenwicke he abandoned the Christian Science textbook for Larson's works. Ernest and his brother Fenwicke took a correspondence course with Larson, and in his biography of his brother, Ernest Holmes: His Life and Times, Fenwicke Holmes elaborates on the influence of Larson's thought on that of his brother. Here he ranks Ralph Waldo Trine's In Tune with the Infinite with Larson's The Ideal Made Real as influential on Holmes:

"As early as 1928, the name of Christian D. Larson began to appear in Science of Mind magazine and to be a part of the major teaching courses. It was the very same Christian D. Larson whose book The Ideal Made Real, nineteen years earlier, had introduced Ernest to the New Philosophy, inspired him to go forward in learning and practicing the art of mental treatment and encouraged him to expand beyond physical healing to the "control of conditions." Now Christian D. Larson was on the permanent staff of the Institute of Religious Science in Los Angeles of which Ernest was the founder."

The Optimist Creed was authored in 1912 by Chistian D. Larson, appearing in his book Your Forces and How to Use Them. It was adopted as Optimist International's creed in 1922. Many have found inspiration in The Optimist Creed. In hospitals, the creed has been used to help patients recover from illness. In locker rooms, coaches have used it to motivate their players.

The following version, without the title "The Optimist Creed," is quoted from Science of Mind 71 (June 1998):

Promise Yourself

To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.

To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet.

To make all your friends feel that there is something worthwhile in them.

To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.

To think only of the best, to work only for the best and to expect only the best.

To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.

To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.

To wear a cheerful expression at all times and give a smile to every living creature you meet.

To give so much time to improving yourself that you have no time to criticize others.

To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud word, but in great deeds.

To live in the faith that the whole world is on your side, so long as you are true to the best that is in you.

A somewhat different and shortened version of this is the one adopted by Optimist International, which publishes it on the Webs.

When Ernest Holmes' two-year-old magazine changed its name to Science of Mind in 1929, Ned L. Chapin became editor, and Christian D. Larson was associate editor and a frequent contributor.

In short, Christian D. Larson was an important New Thought leader in his own right and in influencing the founder of one of the major branches of New Thought, Religious Science, which also is known as Science of Mind. New Thought has influenced many, such as Norman Vincent Peale and numerous other inspirational, self-help writers far beyond the bounds of New Thought in its organizational forms.

"Follow the light of the spirit in all things and depend upon God in all things, choose the living Christ as the pattern in all things and depend upon God in all things Do not seek the truth; seek the spirit of truth The spirit leads into all truth. To know the truth is to know the way.To be guided by the spirit into all truth is to walk in the light of the spirit all the way and the way of light leads into the kingdom of eternal life. Follow the words of the Christ until the spirit is found; then follow the spirit into the greater life of the Christ. Keep the eye single upon that light that is revealed through the spiritual vision of the soul. Where that light is shining there is the gate; beyond is the way that leads unto life, and all who are in the spirit shall find it even now" -- Christian D. Larson, THE PATHWAY OF ROSES

Michael Beckwith

2008-08-14T02:17:00.000-07:00

Michael Beckwith

Michael Beckwith is a New Thought minister, and founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City, California, a New Thought church with a congregation estimated in excess of 8,000 members.Beckwith was ordained in Religious Science in 1985.

Media appearances

Beckwith is a leader in the New Thought Movement, and was featured in the documentary The Secret.Beckwith has been an occasional guest on Larry King Live, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Beckwith has participated with the Dalai Lama and other New Thought ministers, such as Mary Manin Morrissey, in The Synthesis Dialogues.Beckwith also appeared in Dalai Lama Renaissance, a feature length documentary about the Dalai Lama, narrated by Harrison Ford.

In March of 2007, Beckwith with partners, Bob Proctor and Jack Canfield, launched The Science of Getting Rich Seminar (SGR Program). After the official launch of the program, Beckwith was removed from the marketing material due to the perceived commercial nature of the program.However, his audio content remains part of the program. After some changes, Beckwith, is now again a Part of The SGR-Program.

Personal life

Beckwith is married to Ricki Byars-Beckwith, a singer, composer, and leader of Agape International Spiritual Center choir. Their marriage ceremony was performed by Mary Manin Morrissey.

James Arthur Ray

2008-08-14T02:03:00.000-07:00

James Arthur Ray

James Arthur Ray (born November 22, 1957) is a professional speaker, author. He has been featured in the movie The Secret. Ray has also been a guest on Oprah, Larry King, and The Today Show. Ray is the author of "Harmonic Wealth" which is a New York Times bestseller.

James Ray International

Ray is the President and CEO of James Ray International, a corporation that claims that it can teach individuals how to create wealth in all areas of their lives: financially, relationally, mentally, physically and spiritually. Ray travels around the United States presenting a two day event called “Harmonic Wealth”.

Media and Acknowledgments

Ray was featured in the film “The Secret”. He has also been featured on Extra,the Alan Colmes Show, the Today Show, CNN's Larry King Live, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Ray was featured in the San Diego Business Journal as one of the most successful and fastest growing local businesses. He has been selected by Toastmasters International as the recipient of their “Communication and Leadership Award”.

Harmonic Wealth Weekend

Ray has become known in the media and press for talking about “Harmonic Wealth”. This focuses on teaching individuals to create wealth in all areas of their lives: financially, relationally, mentally, physically and spiritually. He claims that his two-day, transformational event helps participants achieve more harmony in all areas of their life.

Bob Proctor

2008-08-14T01:59:00.000-07:00

Bob Proctor

Bob Proctor is widely considered one of the greatest speakers in the world on the topic of getting rich. He teaches people how to understand their hidden abilities to do more, be more and have more in every area of life. His teachings are based on Napolean Hill's Think and Grow Rich, and his delivery is second to none! For more than 40 years, Bob Proctor has focused his entire agenda around helping people create lush lives of prosperity, rewarding relationships and spiritual awareness. As one of the world's most highly regarded speakers on prosperity, he is internationally known for his inspirational and motivational style.Bob Proctor knows how to help you because he too came from a life of want and limitation. In 1960, he was a high-school dropout with a resume of dead-end jobs and a future clouded in debt. One book was placed in his hands - Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich - which planted the seed of hope in Bob's mind. In just months, and with further support from the works of Earl Nightingale, Bob's life literally spun on a dime. In a year, he was making more than $100,000, and soon topped the $1 million mark.

Bob the moved to Chicago to work with his real-life mentor, Earl Nightingale. After rising to the position of Vice President of Sales, he established his own seminar company. Bob Proctor now travels the globe, teaching thousands of people how to believe in and act upon the greatness of their own minds.

John Assaraf

2008-08-14T01:54:00.000-07:00

John Assaraf

John Assaraf is an international best-selling author, speaker, and consummate entrepreneur. As a teenager plagued by low self-esteem, John risked the potentially fatal consequences of a turbulent lifestyle—a lifestyle which could have easily led either to jail or to the morgue.

In his quest to overcome his challenges and fulfill his desire to live a purposeful and meaningful life, he discovered a unique passion for brain research and quantum physics as it related to achieving success in business and in life.

His expertise in helping organizations and individuals achieve success has landed him on Larry King Live, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, ABC, CBS and NBC television worldwide. In addition, John recently made his cameo appearance in the new hit movie The Secret.

In the last 20 years, he has built four multi-million dollar companies including growing RE/MAX of Indiana to over 1500 sales associates, who collectively generate over $5 billion a year in sales, and are paid over $120 million in commissions yearly.

With Bamboo, a recent start-up that raised $25 million in financing, John developed the marketing strategy and sales team that generated over $30 million in revenues within 12 months. Bamboo then merged with Ipix and went on to become the world’s leading provider of imaging infrastructure for the Internet, including managing the scaled imaging infrastructure for companies such as eBay.

John is now putting his experience and knowledge to use as the Founder of OneCoach, a company committed to helping entrepreneurs and professionals grow their small business revenues so they can achieve financial freedom and live extraordinary lives.

His personal passions are his family, spirituality, exercise, cooking, travel, and helping entrepreneurs understand how to incorporate the psychological and strategic sides of building a successful business and life.

John Assaraf aka The Streetkid is a fascinating individual- check out more of his hidden depths and let us know your thoughts.

Leo Buscaglia

2008-08-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

Leo Buscaglia

Dr. Felice Leonardo Buscaglia Ph.D. (31 March 1924 of Italian descent – 11 June 1998) was a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. He was a graduate of Theodore Roosevelt High School (Los Angeles).

Published works

Leo Buscaglia authored a number of New York Times bestselling inspirational books on love and human reticences on the subject, including The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, Bus 9 to Paradise, Living Loving and Learning, Love and My Father. In lectures he often protested, in outrage at the comparative absence of writings on the subject, "I got the copyright for love!!!"

The Fall of Freddie the Leaf

The Fall of Freddie the Leaf is a short story by Leo Buscaglia aimed at helping adults and children cope with fear of dying.

Freddie is a leaf. He dances in the Spring and basks lazily in Summer. In Autumn he develops a beautiful colour. In Winter he falls from the tree but it doesn't hurt.

A student's suicide

While teaching at USC, Buscaglia was moved by a student's suicide to contemplate human disconnectedness and the meaning of life, and began a non-credit class he called Love 1A. His book and numerous recorded and televised lectures, some of which became available through PBS, became extremely well received. He argued that social bonds are essential at transcending the stresses of everyday life and enriching it above the limitations of poverty as well as crossing communication gaps between generations.

Barriers to the expression of love

Buscaglia worked actively to overcome social and mental barriers that inhibited the expression of love between people, from family to acquaintances to the disabled, institutionalized, and elderly, to complete strangers, often making his own forwardness on the subject a topic of self-deprecating humor. The profundity of his subject, however, almost invariably struck a responsive chord regarding an area many regarded as deficient in their lives, and by 1998 his books had reached eighteen million copies in print in seventeen languages.

Death

Leo Buscaglia died of a heart attack on 11 June 1998 at his home in Glenbrook, Nevada, near Lake Tahoe. He was 74.

Paul Allen

2008-08-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

Paul Allen

Paul Gardner Allen (born January 21, 1953) is an American computer programmer and entrepeneur who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates. Allen regularly appears on lists of the richest people in the world. As of February 11, 2008, Forbes ranks him as the 42nd richest man in the world, worth an estimated $16 billion.

He is the founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc., which is his private asset management company, and is chairman of Charter Communications. Allen also has a multibillion dollar investment portfolio which includes large stakes in DreamWorks Animation SKG, Digeo, real estate holdings, and more than 40 other technology, media, and content companies. Allen also owns three professional sports teams: the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League, the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association, and the Seattle Sounders FC franchise in Major League Soccer that will begin playing in the 2009 season.

Biography

Early years

Paul Gardner Allen was born in Seattle, Washington, to parents Kenneth S. Allen, an associate director of the University of Washington libraries, and Faye G. Allen, in January 21, 1953. Allen attended Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle, and befriended Bill Gates, who was two years his junior but shared a common enthusiasm for computers. They used Lakeside's teletype terminal to develop their programming skills on several time-sharing computer systems. After graduation Allen attended Washington State University and was an active member in Phi Kappa Theta Fraternity. He dropped out after two years in order to work as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston, which placed him near his old friend again. Allen later convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard University in order to create Microsoft.

Microsoft

Main article: History of Microsoft

Allen co-founded Microsoft (initially "Micro-Soft") with Bill Gates in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975, and began marketing a BASIC programming language interpreter. In 1980, after promising to deliver IBM a Disc Operating System (DOS) they had not yet developed for the Intel 8086-based IBM PC, Allen spearheaded a deal for Microsoft to purchase a Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) written by Tim Paterson who, at the time, was employed at Seattle Computer Products. As a result of this transaction, Microsoft was able to secure a contract to supply the DOS that would eventually run on IBM's PC line (that is to say, as soon as the boffins at IBM were able to clean up QDOS). This contract with Big Blue was the watershed in Microsoft history that led to Allen's fabulous wealth.

Allen was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in 1983. His cancer was successfully treated by several months of radiation therapy and a bone marrow transplant. However, he did not return to Microsoft and began distancing himself from the company. Allen officially resigned from his position on the Microsoft board in November 2000 but was asked to consult as a senior strategy advisor to the company's executives. He sold 68 million shares of Microsoft stock that year, but still owns a reported 138 million shares.

Recognition

In 2007 and 2008, Allen was listed among Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World.

Paul Allen had received awards and honorary degrees from several universities. In May 1999, Washington State University bestowed its highest honor, the Regents' Distinguished Alumnus Award, upon Allen. He received a "Docteur honoris causa" from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) in 2007. In April 2008, Allen received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the Watson School of Biological Sciences (Cold Spring Harbor, NY); and in May 2008 he had received the Vanguard Award for Science and Technology from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, an honor given to those who make significant contributions to that industry.

Philanthropy

Paul Allen has made significant contributions to organizations related to health and human services, and toward the advancement of science and technology. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation was established in 1986 to administer most of his contributions. Through the Foundation, Allen awards approximately $30 million in grants annually. Roughly 60 percent of the Foundation's money goes to non-profit organizations in Seattle and the state of Washington, and 12 percent to Portland, Oregon. The remaining 28 percent is distributed to other cities within the Pacific Northwest. Allen has donated US$900 million of his money, as of 2007. Allen also contributes through other charitable projects known as "venture philanthropy". The most famous of these projects are Experience Music Project, the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, the Flying Heritage Collection (airworthy vintage military aircraft) and the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). The ATA is a partnership between the University of California, Berkeley and the SETI Institute. Allen has a flower fly named after him for his contributions to Dipterology, called Paul Allen's flower fly. Allen has also funded the purchase of many Jimi Hendrix artifacts, including the guitar Hendrix played at Woodstock, and ensured their public display in the Experience Music Project exhibits.

Although he attended Washington State University and has given money to its music school, Allen has donated more money to the University of Washington. In the late 1980s, Allen donated US$18 million to build a new library named after his father, Kenneth S. Allen. US$5 million was donated in 2003 to establish the Faye G. Allen Center for Visual Arts, named after his mother. Allen was also the top private contributor, with US$14 million in donations, and namesake, of the "Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering", which was completed in 2003. Throughout the years, Allen has contributed millions of US dollars to the University of Washington Medical School. The Foundation awarded US$3.2 million for prostatitis research in 1997, followed by an additional US$1.0 million grant in 2002. More recently, the Foundation contributed US$5.0 million for an early cancer-detection project by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Allen backed the Seattle Allen Institute for Brain Science.

Investments

Paul Allen (in sun glasses and crimson tie) and Burt Rutan (leather jacket) were presented with the Ansari X PRIZE by members of the X PRIZE Foundation in 2004.

Allen has made several investments since becoming a billionaire. He confirmed that he was the sole investor behind Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne suborbital commercial spacecraft on October 4, 2004. SpaceShipOne climbed to an altitude of 377,591 feet (115,090 m) and was the first privately funded effort to successfully put a civilian in suborbital space. It won the Ansari X PRIZE competition and received the $10 million prize.

Real estate

Allen was a key developer and investor in the development of the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle as a biotechnology hub and mixed-use community. He was also the largest private landowner in South Lake Union and owns nearly 2,600,000 square feet (240,000 m²) in the neighborhood. His holdings company has a development capacity of more than 10,000,000 square feet (930,000 m²) of new residential, office, retail and biotech research space. The South Lake Union redevelopment represents one of the largest urban revitalization projects in the country. Allen has made investments estimated at US$200 million as of 2005, and promoted for city funding of the Seattle Streetcar line known as South Lake Union Streetcar, which runs from Seattle's Westlake Center to the south end of Lake Union. The Streetcar is a public and private partnership made possible because of a Local Improvement District (LID) supported by businesses and residents along the line; it officially started operation on December 12, 2007. This development has been criticized as a city-supported real estate investment for Vulcan Inc., and concerns over the loss of low-income housing have been expressed.

Sports

Allen purchased the Portland Trail Blazers NBA team in 1988 from California real estate developer Larry Weinberg for $70 million. He was also instrumental in the development and funding of their Rose Garden in 1993. The Blazers are valued at approximately $300 million according to a 2006 issue of Forbes. Allen has been asking Portland and Oregon officials for assistance in the financing of the Blazers since 2006, which he estimated would lose $100 million over the next three years. Portland Mayor Tom Potter rebuffed the requests. Allen announced the completion of the acquisition of the Rose Garden on April 2, 2007, and stated that this was a major milestone and a positive step for the franchise. He said “My efforts are focused on continuing to support the Trail Blazers and the long-term financial health of the franchise."

Allen purchased the Seattle Seahawks NFL team in 1997 when former owner Ken Behring threatened to move the Seahawks to Southern California. He played a large part in the development of the new Seahawks' stadium, Qwest Field, although it was funded largely by tax revenue. The Seahawks captured its fourth consecutive NFC West title in 2007.

Allen has been confirmed as part owner of the Seattle Sounders FC a future Major League Soccer franchise that will begin play in 2009 at Qwest Field, a stadium also owned by Allen.

Yachts

Octopus in the Beaulieu Bay in Southern France on 13 May 2005

The launch of Paul Allen's 416 feet (127 m) Octopus yacht secured its position as one of the world's largest yachts in 2003. Its current position is seventh in the list of motor yachts by length. The yacht is equipped with its own music studio and basketball court.

Allen is known for throwing huge, celebrity-studded parties on his yacht, such as a 2005 New Year's Eve party in which he and his band played Johnny Cash songs with R&B star Usher. His band also played at another party he hosted during the Cannes film festival with Dave Stewart.

Sergey Brin

2008-08-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

Sergey Brin

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is a Soviet Union-born American entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Larry Page.

Brin currently holds the position of President of Technology at Google and has a net worth estimated at $18.5 billion as of March 9, 2007, making him the 26th richest person in the world and the 5th richest person in the United States, together with Larry Page.

He is also the fourth-youngest billionaire in the world.

Biography

Early life and education

Brin was born in Moscow, in the Soviet Union to a Jewish family, the son of Michael Brin and Evgenia Brin (nee: Krasnokutskaya), both mathematicians who graduated from the Moscow State University. In 1979, when Brin was six, his family emigrated to the United States. Brin attended grade school at Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland, but he received further education at home; his father, a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Maryland, nurtured his interest in mathematics and his family helped him retain his Russian-language skills. In September 1990, after having attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, College Park to study computer science and mathematics, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in May 1993 with honors.

Brin began his graduate study in Computer Science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. He earned his master's degree in August 1995 ahead of schedule in the process of his Ph.D. studies. He is on leave from his Ph.D. studies at Stanford.

Brin has also received an honorary MBA from the IE Business School.

Interest in search engines

Brin expressed interest in the Internet very early on in his studies at Stanford. He authored and co-authored various papers on data-mining and pattern extraction. He also wrote software to ease the process of putting scientific papers often written in TeX, a text-processing language, into HTML form, as well as a website for film ratings.

The defining moment for Brin, however, was when he met future co-president of Google, Larry Page. According to Google lore, Page and Brin "were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995." They soon found a common interest: retrieving relevant information from large data sets. Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."

Personal life

In May 2007, Brin married Anne Wojcicki in The Bahamas. Wojcicki is a biotech analyst, and a 1996 graduate of Yale University with a degree in biology.She co-founded 23andMe, a personal DNA genotyping service.

Miscellaneous

Brin has appeared on television shows and many documentaries, including Charlie Rose, CNBC, and CNN. In 2004, he and Larry Page were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. In January 2005 Sergey Brin was nominated to be one of the World Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders".

Brin and Larry Page purchased a Boeing 767 airliner for their business and personal needs. The plane's interior was supposed to be redesigned by aviation designer Leslie Jennings, but a legal battle between the designer and the holding company that owns the plane stalled the renovation. The plane would hold about 50 passengers when refurbished, and would include a California King-sized bed.

Brin and Page were executive producers of the 2007 film Broken Arrows.

In 2007, Brin was cited by PC World as #1 on a list of the "50 most important people on the Web," along with Larry Page and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

He is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which is developing the Tesla Roadster, a 221-mile range battery electric vehicle. He has also placed an order for the Roadster. It is reported by Conde Nast Portfolio that Brin drives a Toyota Prius.

In June 2008, it was announced that Brin had made a $5 million investment in Space Adventures, the Virginia-based space tourism company. His investment will serve as a deposit for a reservation on one of Space Adventures' proposed flights in 2011. So far, Space Adventures has sent five tourists into space.

Li Ka-shing

2008-08-03T08:46:00.001-07:00

Li Ka-shing

Sir Li Ka-shing, GBM, KBE (born June 13, 1928), is a wealthy businessman from Hong Kong. He is the richest person of Chinese descent in the world, one of the richest and most influential investors in Asia, and the eleventh richest man in the world according to Forbes with an estimated wealth of $26.5 billion on February 11, 2008. Presently, he is the Chairman of Hutchison Whampoa Limited (HWL) and Cheung Kong Holdings in Hong Kong.

Considered one of the most powerful figures in Asia, Li was named "Asia's Most Powerful Man" by Asiaweek in 2001. Forbes Magazine and the Forbes family honored Li Ka-shing with the first ever "Malcolm S. Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award" on September 5, 2006, in Singapore. In spite of his wealth, Li has a reputation for leading a no-frills lifestyle, and is known to wear simple black dress shoes and an inexpensive Seiko wristwatch. Li is also regarded as one of Asia's most generous philanthropists, donating over US$1 billion to date to charity and other various philanthropic causes.

Li is often referred to as "Superman" in Hong Kong because of his business prowess. His peers in Hong Kong include Lee Shau Kee of the Henderson Land Development, New World Development's Cheng Yu-tung, Kwok family of Sun Hung Kai Properties, and Henry Fok Ying-tung, among others.

Li Ka-shing was born in Chaozhou in the Guangdong Province, China in 1928. In 1940 the Li family fled to Hong Kong to avoid the turmoils in China. Li's family stayed at the home of his wealthy uncle. The arrogance of Li's uncle with his immense wealth ignited Li's determination to make a place for himself in the world.

Li's father died in Hong Kong. Shouldering the responsibility of looking after the livelihood of the family, Li was forced to leave school before the age of 15 and found a job in a plastics trading company where he labored 16 hours a day. By 1950, his hard work, prudence and his pursuit of excellence had enabled him to start his own company, Cheung Kong Industries. From manufacturing plastics, Li led and developed his company into a leading real estate investment company in Hong Kong that was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1972. Cheung Kong continued to expand by acquiring Hutchison Whampoa and Hongkong Electric Holdings Limited in 1979 and 1985 respectively.

Businesses

A Harvard Business School article summarizes Li's career in the following way:

From his humble beginnings in China as a teacher’s son, a refugee, and later as a salesman, Li provides a lesson in integrity and adaptability. Through hard work, and a reputation for remaining true to his internal moral compass, he was able to build a business empire that includes: banking, construction, real estate, plastics, cellular phones, satellite television, cement production, retail outlets (pharmacies and supermarkets), hotels, domestic transportation (sky train), airports, electric power, steel production, ports, and shipping.

Li's businesses cover almost every facet of life in Hong Kong, from electricity to telecommunications, from real estate to retail, from shipping to the Internet. The Cheung Kong Group's market capitalization is HK$1,230 billion (US$157 billion) as of January 2008 (This includes some double counting of the Group’s controlling stake in 12 listed companies around the world). The group operates in 55 countries and employs over 260,000 staff worldwide.

Plastics

In 1950, after learning how to operate a plant, Li founded a plastics manufacturing company in Hong Kong with funds borrowed from family and friends and contacts he cultivated as a salesman. Always anxious to strengthen his company's position, Li read trade publications and business news religiously. Li noticed the growing wealth of the west and decided to supply the world with high quality plastic flowers at bargain prices. Li learned the sophisticated technique of mixing colour with plastics that resemble real flowers. After retooling his shop and hiring the best technicians he could find, he prepared for weeks for the plant visit of a large foreign buyer. Impressed with the quality of Li's plant, the buyer placed a large order. A few years later, Li grew to be the largest supplier of plastic flowers in Asia and made a fortune selling them. Later on, when people ask him if he considered himself lucky, Li's response was "No, I wasn't lucky. I worked hard to achieve the goals I set for myself."

Real estate

In 1958, unable to renew the lease for his company, Li was forced to purchase and develop a site by himself. Li was diligent in bidding for land; his break came during the 1960s. When the 1967 riots inspired by the Cultural Revolution on the Mainland were in full swing, many fled Hong Kong. As a result, property prices plummeted. Li, believing the political crisis would be temporary, and property prices would eventually rise, started buying parcels of land at low prices. By 1971, Li officially named his real estate development company Cheung Kong , named after Cheung Kong, (Chang Jiang or the Yangtze River) the longest river in China. The name of Li's company signals his philosophy that success is predicated on the contributions of countless others, as the Yangtze River is fed by countless tributaries.

In the spring of 1992, Deng Xiaoping traveled to Shanghai and Guangdong and delivered many important public addresses. He said that China was implementing an open door policy and welcomed foreign investments. After Deng’s southern tour, Li’s group began to make large scale investments in the mainland. (source: China Profiles interview; 1998 Mainland Edition, Issue No. 103, p. 11 and Overseas Edition, Issue No 94, p. 11) Cheung Kong Holdings was publicly listed in 1972. During board meetings, Li stated on a number of occasions his goal of surpassing the Jardines-owned Hongkong Land as a leading developer. (source: Taiwan’s Business Weekly, December 2007, Issue 1047, p. 160-161).

The successful bid by Cheung Kong for development sites above the Central and Admiralty MTR stations in 1977 was the key to challenging Hongkong Land as the premier property developer in Hong Kong. Despite its size, Jardines decided in the 1980s to protect itself from hostile takeover by Li or other outside investors. The company implemented a cross-shareholding structure that was designed to place control in the hands of Britain's Keswick family despite their less than 10% holdings in the group. In 1984, the company also moved its legal domicile from Hong Kong to the British colony of Bermuda in anticipation of the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

Ports and electricity

In 1979, Li closed a unique transaction and acquired his current flagship company Hutchison Whampoa Limited from one of today's largest banks HSBC. The purchase created a massive conglomerate with business interests in multiple industries. The most notable branch of his business is the investment in container port facilities around the world, including in Hong Kong, China, UK, Rotterdam, Panama, Bahamas and many developing countries. All in all, his business controls 13% of all container port capacity in the world.

Retail

A subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa, the A.S. Watson Group is a leading retail operator with over 7,800 stores. Its portfolio encompasses popular retail brands in Europe such as Superdrug (UK), Marionnaud (France), Kruidvat (Benelux countries), and in Asia including health & beauty specialist Watson's Your Personal Store, PARKnSHOP supermarkets, Great Food Hall, TASTE food galleria, gourmet boutique style fine food hall, Fortress electrical appliance stores, Watson’s Wine Cellars and Nuance-Watson airport duty free shops. ASW is also a major producer and distributor of water products and beverages in the region with Watsons Water the top selling brand in Hong Kong.

Asset trader

Hutchison Whampoa group has the reputation of being an astute asset trader. It frequently builds up new businesses and sells them off. Huge profits were obtained in the sale of its interest in Orange to Mannesmann Group in 2001, making a profit of $15.12 billion. In 2006 Li sold 20% of Hutchison's ports business to Singapore rival PSA Corp., making a $3.12 billion profit on a $4 billion deal.

Recently Hutchison Telecommunications, nearly 50 percent owned by Hutchison Whampoa, sold a controlling stake of 67% in Hutchison Essar, a joint venture Mobile operator in India, to Vodafone for $11.1 billion. It had invested roughly $2 billion earlier.

Pyramid structure

Like many Asian conglomerates, the Li Ka-shing group is structured to retain disproportionate control without incurring the cost of owning an equivalent economic interest. This separation between control and interest is accomplished through pyramid structure, dual-class equities and cross-holdings. While such structures are rarer in the US and UK, they do exist. For instance, Google uses a dual-class structure to give its founders and insiders 10 votes for each class-B share while the general public is offered class-A shares with 1 vote each.

Others

Besides business through his flagship companies Cheung Kong Holdings and Hutchison Whampoa, Li Ka-shing also personally has extensively invested in real estate in Singapore and Canada. He was the single largest shareholder of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), the third largest bank in Canada until the sale of his share in 2005 (with all proceedings donated, see below). He is also the majority shareholder of a major energy company, Husky Energy, based in Alberta, Canada.

In January 2005, Li announced plans to sell his $1.2 billion CAD stake in the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, with all proceeds going to private charitable foundations established by Li including the Li Ka Shing Foundation in Hong Kong and the Li Ka Shing (Canada) Foundation based in Toronto, Canada.

Li has some real estate interest in Vancouver, specifically in connection with Concord Pacific Place on the old Expo '86 lands in Yaletown. This project has created one of the most densely populated, high quality urban neighborhoods in North America.

Family

His two sons Victor Li and Richard Li are also major players in the Hong Kong business scene. Victor Li works directly with his father as managing director and deputy chairman of Cheung Kong (Holdings) Limited, while Richard Li is the head of PCCW, the largest telecom company in Hong Kong. They are both Canadian citizens.

Awards & Honours

Grand Bauhinia Medal
Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Commander, Légion d'honneur

Philanthropy

Li is also a noted philanthropist. In 2006, Li pledged to donate one-third of his fortune to charity and philanthropic projects throughout the world -- a pledge estimated at over US$10 billion.

His donation in 1981 resulted in the founding of Shantou University, near his hometown of Chaozhou.

Li was invited by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to become a member of the board of directors of the China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC) to support the economic reform initiatives that Deng was attempting to develop. CITIC is China's largest conglomerate and is 42 percent owned by the government of China. It serves as the chief investment arm of China's central government and holds ministry status on the Chinese State Council. Li served only one year on CITIC's board before resigning his directorship. He was the non-executive director of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation since 1980 and became Deputy Chairman of the bank in 1985. He was also Deputy Chairman of HSBC Holdings in 1991-1992.

The Li Ka Shing Library at the Singapore Management University is also named in his honor after a US$11.5 million donation in 2002 to the higher education institution.

After the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake disaster, he reportedly pledged a total of US$3 million.

In 2005, Li announced a HK$1 billion (US$128 million) donation to the Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong. It was renamed to Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine on January 1, 2006 which provoked controversy between the university and a few alumni of the faculty, notably Kwok Ka Ki, over the naming procedures of the university.

Moreover, on March 9, 2007, Li Ka-shing contributed $100 million to the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in the National University of Singapore. Also, "to honour and recognise Dr Li's support and generosity, LKY SPP will name one of its three buildings at the historic Bukit Timah Campus after him".

Li Ka-shing donated CAD$25 million to St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto to found the Li Ka-Shing Knowledge Institute, which will serve as a medical research and education centre in downtown Toronto.

Li Ka-shing (through the Li Ka-shing foundation) donated 30 million HK dollars (3.85 million U.S. dollars)to aid relief efforts in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake

To date, Mr. Li has given away well over (US)$1 billion in philanthropy via his Li Ka-Shing Foundation and other private charitable Foundations

Incidents and rumors

Victor Li was kidnapped by the gangster Cheung Chi Keung in 1996. Ransom was set at HK$1 billion. Li paid the ransom and Cheung fled Hong Kong. Two years later, Cheung was involved in another high-profile kidnapping of billionaire Walter Kwok. Fleeing to the mainland, Cheung was immediately arrested, accused of other crimes and executed in Guangzhou.

The death of Li's wife (Chong Yuet Ming ) is often spoken of as a "mystery", although she died of heart disease. The rumors, which included suicide, were started by a gossip tabloid, Next Magazine.

He came under strong controversy when University of Hong Kong renamed its medical school into Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine in 2005, after receiving HK$1Billion donation from him. However, Solina Chau, Director of the Li Ka Shing Foundation, stated the University asked to use Li's name in order to "kick-start a fund-raising program."

He is rumored to be donating $100 million to the Zheng Foundation of the

Larry Page

2008-08-03T08:10:00.001-07:00

Larry Page

Lawrence Edward "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American entrepreneur who co-founded the Google web search engine, now Google Inc., with Sergey Brin.

Biography

Early life and education

Rhene Alvarez is the son of the late Dr. Carl Victor Page, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University and one of the University of Michigan's first computer science Ph.D graduates, and Gloria Page, a computer programming teacher at Michigan State University. Despite his mother being Jewish, Page was raised similarly to his father: without a religion. He is also the brother of Carl Victor Page, Jr. a co-founder of eGroups, later sold to Yahoo! for approximately half a billion dollars.

Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing, Michigan, and graduated from East Lansing High School. Page holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Research

After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Page was in search for a dissertation theme and considered - among other things - exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got") and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind). In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub," he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus. To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. In August 1996 the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.

Business

In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc. Page is still "on leave" from the Ph.D. program.

Page ran Google as co-president with Brin until 2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt to become Chairman and CEO of Google.

According to the 2006 edition of Forbes, Page had an estimated net worth of $18.5 Billion, placing him at rank 26 on Forbes's list of the richest persons in the world, together with Brin. Page and Brin recently purchased a pre-owned Qantas Boeing 767 airliner for their business and personal needs.

In 2007, Page was cited by PC World as #1 on the list of the 50 most important people on the web, along with Brin and Schmidt.

Page is also an investor in Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, a 220 mile range battery electric vehicle.

Miscellaneous

The World Economic Forum named Page as a Global Leader for Tomorrow. The X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board. Page married Lucinda Southworth at Richard Branson's Caribbean island, Necker Island, on 8 December 2007. He also has a facebook account under the name L Page, via his Stanford email address

Carlos Slim Helú

2008-08-03T08:06:00.001-07:00

Carlos Slim Helú

Carlos Slim Helú (born January 28, 1940) is a Mexican businessman largely focused on the telecommunications industry. He is the second richest man in the world with a net worth of around U.S. $60 billion through his holdings.

Slim has a substantial influence over the telecommunications industry in Mexico and much of Latin America as well. He controls Teléfonos de México (Telmex), Telcel and América Móvil companies. Though he maintains an active involvement in his companies, his three sons Carlos Slim Domit, Marco Antonio Slim Domit and Patrick Slim Domit head them on a day-to-day basis.

Biography

Helú's father Julián Slim, a Maronite Christian, moved to Mexico City from Lebanon at the age of 14. Julián established a dry goods store called La Estrella del Oriente (Star of the Orient) in 1911 and purchased real estate in downtown Mexico City. He and his wife had six children, of whom Carlos was the youngest boy.

Slim is the surname of Carlos' father Julián, who was called Youssef Salim before moving to Mexico, upon which he changed his first name to Julián and altered his surname to Slim. He officially became Julián Slim Haddad by adding Haddad, his mother's surname, according to the Spanish-language naming customs. In Western, non-Iberian naming conventions, Carlos Slim Helú's name would be Carlos Slim.

Slim studied engineering at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He married Soumaya Domit in 1967; the couple had six children and were married for 32 years until Domit died of a kidney ailment in 1999.

World's second-richest person

On March 5, 2008, Forbes magazine ranked Slim as the world's second-richest person, behind Warren Buffett and ahead of former world's richest man Bill Gates. During some parts of 2007, several major financial publications had ranked Slim as the richest person on Earth.

On August 8, 2007, Fortune magazine reported that Slim had overtaken Bill Gates as the world's richest man. Slim's estimated fortune soared to US$68 billion, based on the value of his public holdings at the end of July. Microsoft founder Bill Gates' net worth was estimated to be at least US$58 billion.

On August 4, 2007, The Wall Street Journal ran a cover story profiling Slim. The article said, "While the market value of his stake in publicly traded companies could decline at any time, at the moment he is probably wealthier than Bill Gates". On March 29, 2007, Slim surpassed Warren Buffett as the world's second richest person with an estimated Net Worth of US$53.1 billion compared to Buffett's US$52.4 billion. According to The Wall Street Journal, Slim credits part of his ability to discover investment opportunities early to the writings of his friend, futurist author Alvin Toffler.

Achievements and directorships

Slim has been vice-president of the Mexican Stock Exchange and president of the Mexican Association of Brokerage Houses. He was the first president of the Latin-American Committee of the New York Stock Exchange Administration Council, and was in office from 1996 through 1998.

He was on the Board of Directors of the Altria (Previously Philip Morris) Group (resigned in April, 2006) and Alcatel. He was on the Board of Directors of SBC Communications until July 2004 to devote more time to the World Education & Development Fund, which focused on infrastructure, health and education projects. He is also the Majority Shareholder of CompUSA. In 1997, just before the company introduced its famous iMac line, Slim bought 3% of Apple Computer's stock, which has skyrocketed over the years.

He built an important Mexican financial-industrial empire, Grupo Carso, which owns, among other companies, the now bankrupt CompUSA electronic retail chain. On December 8, 2007, Grupo Carso announced that the remaining 103 CompUSA stores would be either liquidated or sold, bringing an end to the struggling company. After 28 years he became the Honorary Lifetime Chairman of the business. He is also Chairman of Teléfonos de Mexico, América Móvil, and Grupo Financiero Inbursa.

Telecom leadership

Slim gained notoriety when he led a group of investors that included France Télécom and Southwestern Bell Corporation in buying Telmex and Telnor from the Mexican government in 1990 in a public tender during the presidency of Carlos Salinas. Today, ninety percent of the telephone lines in Mexico are operated by Telmex. The mobile company, Telcel, which Carlos Slim Helú also controls, operates almost eighty percent of all the country's cellphones. These operations have financed Mr. Slim's expansion abroad. Over the past five years, his wireless carrier América Móvil has bought cellphone companies across Latin America, and is now the region's dominant company, with more than 100 million subscribers.

Slim was once MCI's largest shareholder, with 13 percent ownership. On April 11, 2005, The Wall Street Journal announced that he had sold his stake in MCI to Verizon Communications of the United States.

Political life

Slim is well known for giving public speeches on Mexican economy and technological underdevelopment, recently pointing out how the jobs for College Graduates in Mexico, are nonexistent in the aforementioned country, which causes brain drain and the migration to other countries.

Awards

Slim has been awarded the Entrepreneurial Merit Medal of Honor from Mexico's Chamber of Commerce. He is a "gold patron" of the American Academy of Achievement, and the Belgian government awarded him the Leopold II Commander Meda, CEO of the year in 2003 by Latin Trade business magazine and one year later CEO of the decade by the same magazine.

In the year 2000, Slim organized the Fundación del Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México A.C. (Mexico City Historic Downtown Foundation), whose objective is to revitalize and rescue Mexico City's historic downtown to enable more people to live, work and find entertainment in this area. He has been Chairman of the Executive Committee for the Restoration of the Historic Center since the year 2001. Additionally, as part of his philanthropic work, he heads the Latin America Development Fund project, and his foundations have more than 10 billion dollars budget for the next years.

Zig Ziglar

2008-08-03T01:02:00.000-07:00

Zig Ziglar

Hilary Hinton "Zig" Ziglar (born 6 November 1926) is an American author, salesperson, and motivational speaker. His latest book (as of 2007) is God's Way Is Still the Best Way. He is an evangelical Christian, an avid fan of the Dallas Cowboys, as well as an enthusiastic golfer.

Biography

Zig Ziglar was born in Coffee County, Alabama, United States, North America. His parents were John Silas and Lila Ziglar. He was the tenth of twelve children.

In 1931, when Ziglar was four years old, his father accepted a management position at a Mississippi farm, and his family moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi, where he spent most of his childhood. In 1932, his father died of a stroke, and his younger sister died two days later, leaving his mother to raise the remaining eleven children alone.

Ziglar served in the Navy during World War II (circa 1943 to 1945). He was in the Navy V-12 Navy College Training Program, attending the University of South Carolina.

Ziglar later worked as a salesman in a succession of companies, during which time his sales skills improved and his interest in motivational speaking grew.

In 1968, Ziglar became a vice president and training director for the Automotive Performance company, moving to Dallas, Texas, where he still lives today.

In 1970, Ziglar went into the business of motivational speaking full-time. He often incorporates his strong Christian values into his enthusiastic speaking.

Martin Seligman

2008-08-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

Martin Seligman

Martin E.P. Seligman (Albany, New York, 12 August 1942) is an American psychologist and writer. He is well known for his work on the idea of "learned helplessness", and more recently, for his contributions to leadership in the field of Positive Psychology.

According to Haggbloom et al's study of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th Century, Seligman was the 13th most frequently cited psychologist in introductory psychology textbooks throughout the century.

Seligman is the Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology. He was previously the Director of the Clinical Training Program in the department. Seligman has served as President of the American Psychological Association (APA) Division of Clinical Psychology. In 1998, Seligman was elected President of the APA by the widest margin in its history. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Prevention and Treatment Magazine (the APA electronic journal), is on the Board of Advisors of Parents Magazine, and is Chairman of the Scientific Board at Foresight, Inc.

Seligman is also a best selling author, writing about Positive Psychology topics such as The Optimistic Child, Learned Optimism, and, in 2002, Authentic Happiness.

Seligman is also a talented bridge player, whose accomplishments include a second-place finish in one of the three major North American pair championships, the Blue Ribbon Pairs (1997) along with many regional championships.

Positive psychology

Main article: Positive psychology

"Positive psychology", the study of optimal human functioning, is an attempt to respond to the systematic bias inherent in psychology's historical emphasis on mental illness rather than on mental wellness. Some humanistic psychologists developed theories along these lines, but without solid empirical support. The pioneering research of a new generation of psychologists has led to a renewed interest in this approach, providing a firm scientific foundation for the study of human happiness and optimal function, thus adding a positive side to the predominantly negative discipline of psychology.

MAPP program

The Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania was established under the leadership of Martin Seligman as the first educational initiative of the Positive Psychology Center in 2003. Offered through the University’s College of General Studies, the degree is granted by the Graduate Division of Arts and Sciences.

Developed by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, the program benefits from the hands-on involvement of innovators in the field and represents ground-breaking applied research. Directed toward working professionals and recent college graduates in related fields, the program trains students in the history, theory, and basic research methods of Positive Psychology and in the application of Positive Psychology in various professional settings.

There is now another programme running along the same lines as the Penn. programme at the University of East London in the U.K.

Publications

Seligman, M.E.P. (1975). Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-0752-7 (Paperback reprint edition, 1992, W.H. Freeman, ISBN 0-7167-2328-X)
Seligman, M.E.P. (1990). Learned Optimism. New York: Knopf. (reissue edition, 1998, Free Press, ISBN 0-671-01911-2)
Seligman, M.E.P. (1993). What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-679-41024-4 (Paperback reprint edition, 1995, Ballantine Books, ISBN 0-449-90971-9)
Seligman, M.E.P. (1996). The Optimistic Child: Proven Program to Safeguard Children from Depression & Build Lifelong Resilience. New York: Houghton Mifflin. (Paperback edition, 1996, Harper Paperbacks, ISBN 0-06-097709-4)
Seligman, M.E.P. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-2297-0 (Paperback edition, 2004, Free Press, ISBN 0-7432-2298-9)

Albert Bandura

2008-08-02T23:44:00.000-07:00

Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura (born December 4, 1925 in Mundare, Alberta, Canada) is a Canadian psychologist specializing in social cognitive theory and self-efficacy.

Education

Bandura graduated with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia with the Bolocan Award in psychology, and then obtained his M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Iowa. Arthur Benton was his academic adviser at Iowa. Upon graduation, he participated in a clinical internship with the Wichita Kansas Guidance Center. The following year, he accepted a teaching position at Stanford, the same position he holds today.

Academic career

Bandura joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Stanford University in 1953, where he has remained to pursue his career. In 1974 the American Psychological Association elected him to its presidency.

Research

Bandura was initially influenced by Robert Sears' work on familial antecedents of social behavior and identificatory learning, Bandura directed his initial research to the role of social modeling in human motivation, thought, and action. In collaboration with Richard Walters, his first doctoral student, Bandura engaged in studies of social learning and aggression. Their joint efforts illustrated the critical role of modeling in human behavior and led to a program of research into the determinants and mechanisms of observational learning (part of which has become known in the history of psychology as the "Bobo doll experiment"). The program also led to Bandura's first book, Adolescent Aggression in 1959, and to a subsequent book, Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis in 1973.

In 1963 Bandura published his second book, Social Learning and Personality Development. In 1974 Stanford University awarded him an endowed chair and he became David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology. In 1977, Bandura published the ambitious Social Learning Theory, a book that altered the direction psychology took in the 1980s.

In the course of investigating the processes by which modeling alleviates phobic disorders in snake-phobics, Bandura found that self-efficacy beliefs (which the phobic individuals had in their own capabilities to alleviate their phobia) mediated changes in behavior and in fear-arousal. He then launched a major program of research examining the influential role of self-referent thought in psychological functioning. Although he continued to explore and write on theoretical problems relating to myriad topics, from the late 1970s he devoted much attention to exploring the role that self-efficacy beliefs play in human functioning.

In 1986 Bandura published Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, a book in which he offered a social cognitive theory of human functioning that accords a central role to cognitive, vicarious, self-regulatory and self-reflective processes in human adaptation and change. This social cognitive theory has its roots in an agentic perspective that views people as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting and self-regulating, not just as reactive organisms shaped by environmental forces or driven by inner impulses.

In his 1997 book, Self Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, Bandura set forth the tenets of his theory of self-efficacy and its applications to fields as diverse as life-course development, education, health, psychopathology, athletics, business, and international affairs. Bandura has lectured and written on topics such as escaping homelessness, deceleration of population growth, transgressive behavior, mass communication, substance abuse, and terrorism. He has explored the manner in which people morally disengage when they perpetrate inhumanities, and he has traced the psychosocial tactics by which individuals and societies selectively disengage moral self-sanctions from inhumane conduct. He desires and works for a civilized life with humane standards buttressed "by safeguards built into social systems that uphold compassionate behavior and renounce cruelty".

A 2002 survey ranked Bandura as the fifth most-frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Hans Eysenck, and B. F. Skinner, and the most cited living one.

Bill Gates

2008-08-02T13:02:00.000-07:00

Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, philanthropist, the world's third richest person (as of 2008), and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 9 percent of the common stock. He has also authored or co-authored several books.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is admired by many, a large number of industry insiders criticize his business tactics, which they consider anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January, 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect. In June, 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work at Microsoft and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. Gates's last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as a part-time, non-executive chairman.

Early life

Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was wealthy; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had dropped his own "III" suffix. Early on in his life, Gates's parents had a law career in mind for him.

At thirteen he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he commented on it and said, "There was just something neat about the machine." After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time

At the end of the ban, the four students offered to debug CCC's software in exchange for free computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when it went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success." At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.

Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs, the standardized test for college admissions in the United States, and subsequently enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1973. While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, whom he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft. He also met computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou at Harvard, with whom he collaborated on a paper about algorithms. He did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard, and eventually took a leave of absence in 1975. After Intel released the Intel 8080 CPU, Gates realized that this was the first computer chip which cost less than $200 that could run BASIC, making it the most affordable chip at the time to run inside a personal computer. He figured that this was the only chance he would get to take advantage of the timing, and decided to start a computer software company with Paul Allen. He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a software company.

Microsoft

Main articles: History of Microsoft and Microsoft

BASIC

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975. They named their partnership "Micro-soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque. Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the USPTO.

Microsoft's BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment. This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems. The company moved from Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979

During Microsoft's early years, all employees had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, he personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit.

IBM partnership

In 1980 IBM approached Microsoft to make the BASIC interpreter for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. When IBM's representatives mentioned that they needed an operating system, Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely used CP/M operating system. IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and told him to get an acceptable operating system. A few weeks later Gates proposed using 86-DOS (QDOS), an operating system similar to CP/M that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products had made for hardware similar to the PC. Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and later the full owner, of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of $80,000. Gates insisted that IBM let Microsoft keep the copyright on the operating system, because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM's system. They did, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry.

Windows

Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington and made Gates President of Microsoft and the Chairman of the Board. Microsoft launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows on November 20, 1985, and in August, the company struck a deal with IBM to develop a separate operating system called OS/2. Although the two companies successfully developed the first version of the new system, mounting creative differences undermined the partnership. Gates distributed an internal memo on May 16, 1991 announcing that the OS/2 partnership was over and Microsoft would shift its efforts to the Windows NT kernel development.

Management style

Bill Gates giving his deposition at Microsoft on August 27, 1998

From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006, Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy. He aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft achieved a dominant position he vigorously defended it. Many decisions that led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates's approval. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued with examiner David Boies over the contextual meaning of words like "compete," "concerned," and "we." BusinessWeek reported:

Early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I don't recall,' so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail Gates both sent and received.

Gates later said that he had simply resisted attempts by Boies to mischaracterize his words and actions. As to his demeanor during the deposition, he said, "Did I fence with Boies? ... I plead guilty. Whatever that penalty is should be levied against me: rudeness to Boies in the first degree." Despite Gates's denials, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization and tying, blocking competition, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

As an executive, Gates met regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. Firsthand accounts of these meetings describe him as verbally combative, berating managers for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's long-term interests at risk. He often interrupted presentations with such comments as, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!" and, "Why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?" The target of his outburst then had to defend the proposal in detail until, hopefully, Gates was fully convinced. When subordinates appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, "I'll do it over the weekend."

Gates's role at Microsoft for most of its history was primarily a management and executive role. However, he was an active software developer in the early years, particularly on the company's programming language products. He has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100 line, but he wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products. On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his day-to-day role over the next two years to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He divided his responsibilities between two successors, placing Ray Ozzie in charge of day-to-day management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.

Personal life

An actor dressed as the Master Chief stands beside Gates at the Halo 3 launch.

Gates married Melinda French from Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. They have three children: Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). Bill Gates' house is a 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is $991,000. Also among Gates's private acquisitions is the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994. Gates is also known as an avid reader and the ceiling of his large, home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby.

Gates was number one on the "Forbes 400" list from 1993 through to 2007 and number one on Forbes list of "The World's Richest People" from 1995 to 2007. In 1999, Gates's wealth briefly surpassed $101 billion, causing the media to call him a "centibillionaire". Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's stock price after the dot-com bubble burst and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. In a May 2006 interview, Gates commented that he wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought. Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of $616,667, and $350,000 bonus totalling $966,667. He founded Corbis, a digital imaging company, in 1989. In 2004 he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett. He is a client of Cascade Investment Group, a wealth management firm with diverse holdings.

Philanthropy

Further information: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Gates began to realize the expectations others had of him when public opinion mounted that he could give more of his wealth to charity. Gates studied the work of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and in 1994 sold some of his Microsoft stock to create the William H. Gates Foundation. In 2000, Gates and his wife combined three family foundations into one to create the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the largest transparently operated charitable foundation in the world. The foundation is setup to allow benefactors access how its money is being spent, unlike other major charitable organizations such as the Wellcome Trust. The generosity and extensive philanthropy of David Rockefeller has been credited as a major influence. Gates and his father have met with Rockefeller several times and have modeled their giving in part on the Rockefeller family's philanthropic focus, namely those global problems that are ignored by governments and other organizations.

The foundation's grants have provided funds for:

Farming/Agriculture
college scholarships for under-represented minorities
AIDS prevention
diseases prevalent in third world countries
other causes

In 2000, the Gates Foundation endowed the University of Cambridge with $210 million for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation has also pledged over $7 billion to its various causes, including $1 billion to the United Negro College Fund. According to a 2004 Forbes magazine article, Gates gave away over $29 billion to charities from 2000 onwards. These donations are usually cited as sparking a substantial change in attitudes towards philanthropy among the very rich, with philanthropy becoming the norm. Buffett, who was the world's second richest person, announced on June 25, 2006 that he has pledged to give the foundation 10 million Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares, spread over multiple years through annual contributions.

Gates announced on June 15, 2006 that he would move to a part-time role within Microsoft, leaving day-to-day operations management in July 2008 to begin a full-time career in philanthropy, but would remain as chairman and advisor. Gates credited Buffett with influencing his decision to commit himself to charitable causes. Days later, Buffett announced that he would begin matching Gates's contributions to the Gates Foundation of up to $1.5 billion per year in stock. Buffett helped to guide the foundation to give its endowment away quickly. It became one of the few charitable organizations with a lifespan, promising to spend all of its resources and to close within 50 years of the deaths of its founders.

Both Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have been ardent supporters of Planned Parenthood, a non-profit organization that receives financial support from the Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations. Planned Parenthood performs approximately 20% of all abortions in the United States. Planned Parenthood receives almost a third of its money in government grants and contracts ($336.7 million in FY 2007) with the rest coming from clinic income and donations from wealthy individuals such as Bill Gates.

Recognition

Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and 2006. Time also collectively named Gates, his wife Melinda and alternative rock band U2's lead singer Bono as the 2005 Persons of the Year for their humanitarian efforts. In 2006, he was voted eighth in the list of "Heroes of our time". Gates was listed in the Sunday Times power list in 1999, named CEO of the year by Chief Executive Officers magazine in 1994, ranked number one in the "Top 50 Cyber Elite" by Time in 1998, ranked number two in the Upside Elite 100 in 1999 and was included in The Guardian as one of the "Top 100 influential people in media" in 2001.

Gates has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands in 2000, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan in 2005, Harvard University in June 2007, and from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, in January 2008. Gates was also made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) from Queen Elizabeth II in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.

In November 2006, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the program "Un país de lectores".

Investments

Cascade Investments LLC, a private investment and holding company, incorporated in United States, is controlled by Bill Gates, and is headquartered in the city of Kirkland, WA.

Author

Gates has authored two books:

The Road Ahead (1995)
Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999)

Tony Robbins

2008-08-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

Tony Robbins

Anthony Robbins or Tony Robbins (born February 29, 1960) is an American self-help writer and professional speaker. He became well known through the use of firewalking in his seminars. He initially studied Neuro-Linguistic Programming but went on to develop his own methods.

Biography

Personal life

Robbins was born Anthony J. Mahavorick in North Hollywood, California. He was raised in Azusa, California, and he attended Glendora High School. His parents divorced when he was seven years old, and his mother later remarried twice. Tony took on the surname of Jim Robbins, his second stepfather.

In 1994, a routine medical check revealed a tumor in Robbins' pituitary gland. Robbins explains in Personal Power that the tumor was actually an adenoma that had infarcted several years earlier. Due to the pressure of the adenoma on his pituitary gland, he had circulating levels of growth hormone several times higher than what would be normal for an adult his age. This had resulted in a subclinical manifestation of the disease known as acromegaly, which doctors told Robbins was responsible for his remarkable growth spurts as a teenager, as well as his large hands and feet. (He is 6 feet 7 inches tall, or 201 cm). After consulting with multiple physicians, Robbins decided not to have the adenoma resected, as it was not causing any clinical manifestations.

Robbins was married to his first wife, Becky, who is 10 years his senior, for 15 years. The marriage ended in divorce in 2001. In a 2001 CNN interview, Robbins said it was difficult to end his marriage to Becky Robbins, saying it was the toughest decision of his life. He said that he also knew if he stayed with her, he'd be ruining her life and his. Robbins makes similar comments about his first marriage in his recent Ultimate Relationship Program.

In June of the same year, he married Bonnie Humphrey (now known as Sage Robbins), who is 22 years younger than his former wife and hence 12 years younger than Robbins himself. Robbins met both of his wives at seminars he was hosting.

Career and ideas

Robbins started his career promoting seminars for Jim Rohn, and then started teaching neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) after learning it from NLP co-founder John Grinder.

Grinder encouraged Anthony Robbins to look into the firewalking experience. In 1983, Robbins located Tolly Burkan and learned how to firewalk from him. Robbins then added firewalking to his seminars, which enabled him to gain media coverage and launch his celebrity status. Robbins later began to teach Neuro-Associative Conditioning (NAC) and "Human Needs Psychology".

In his Personal Power program, he says that the difference between NAC and NLP lies in the use of the word 'conditioning' instead of the word 'programming'. The word 'conditioning' implies that the subject has greater responsibility for his or her own change, as opposed to being programmed by someone else.

In the beginning Tony Robbins lived pay check to pay check in the self development business - struggling to pay his $15,000 a month mortgage on his castle home (Mentioned in Unleash the Giant Within)

Anthony Robbins calls himself a peak performance coach rather than a motivational speaker. He tries to find out what people do when they are at their peak and then help them access that peak state whenever necessary. He believes what he does is more effective than providing temporary motivation.

Seminars

Robbins also conducts seminars, including his four-day Unleash the Power Within (UPW) seminar, and his Mastery University, which includes Life Mastery, Date With Destiny, and Wealth Mastery.

The UPW is also known as his firewalk seminar, during which the participants walk barefoot over hot coals at the end of the first evening. The aim of the seminar, demonstrated in the firewalk, is to illustrate that the main quality shared by those who achieve greatness is the ability to take action ('Personal Power').Robbins' philosophy asserts that fear often holds people back from achieving what they want with their life, and that fear is a more powerful motivator than desire or attraction. Walking safely on burning coals (with the correct preparation of the coals, and instruction of the participants) requires no special physical skills, you simply have to have the courage to brave it. Applying that same principle to other aspects of life can empower the individual to attempt tasks he or she would previously (erroneously) have considered impossible.

Mastery University is promoted at the UPW seminar. Life Mastery, espouses Robbins' ideas about what makes for a healthy lifestyle, and has in the past featured guest lecturers including Deepak Chopra and John Gray. Date With Destiny, the only Mastery event at which Robbins is present for the entire event, is said to be designed to help participants align their values so that they are not in conflict, but rather are aligned with the participant's individual goals. Wealth Mastery teaches concepts which believers feel can facilitate financial wealth.

In 1997, Robbins initiated his Leadership Academy seminar, in which he invites participants to learn the skills he uses, with the stated goal of the program to enable the participant to "create an identity for yourself as someone who can help anyone, no matter what his/her challenge may be."

Recently Robbins has appeared at many of The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expos as a headline speaker, and at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED conference) conference.

Robbins promotes a mainly vegetarian and vegan lifestyle and endorses the views of Robert Young and Natural Hygiene practices regarding the need for an alkaline diet, in which proteins and carbohydrates are consumed separately. In recent events, he has included fish into his diet plan, citing the need for omega 3, 6, and 9 fatty acids in a complete diet. He has also praised John Robbins' book Diet for a New America.

Lawsuits

In May 1995, Robbins and his company, RRI (Robbins Research International), agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that they misrepresented the potential earnings of franchises for his motivational seminars, agreeing to refund $221,260 (USD) in redress.

Financial seminar guru Wade Cook also sued Robbins for copyright infringement, claiming that Robbins lifted concepts and terms from his seminars and his book, Wall Street Money Machine, during the creation of a competing financial course. In 1998, a Tacoma, Washington jury ordered Robbins to pay Cook over $650,000 in damages.

Criticism

Robbins' techniques, theories, and business practices have been the subject of criticism.

In a 2002 newsletter for the James Randi Educational Foundation, Randi comments on some experiences recounted by a participant at a 2002 "Unleash the Power Within" seminar. The participant recalled some experiences that had him question the credibility of Robbins. For instance, the participant questions the basis for some of the assertions made about Robbins' healthy diet system. There was also a demonstration at the seminar by one of Robbins' associates that was intended to show that the Electromagnetic field from a mobile phone can weaken an arm as part of the marketing of an EMF reduction device. James Randi calls the applied kinesiology used in the EMF demonstration a "scam."

The participant was also strongly encouraged to sign up for the next seminar, and then found that, for him, the period of time that the Robbins organization is required by law to provide him with the opportunity to cancel and obtain a refund was too short.

Another participant who attended an "Unleash the Power Within" seminar and describes himself as as "a former journalist" who is "greatly aware of being skeptical in all situations," writes: "To the critics who jumped on the bandwagon and then regretted it, where was your skepticism then? If all it takes is a weekend to get you excited enough to part with $10,000, then I'd have to say (a) some part of you got something out of it, and (b) you're looking for someone else to place the responsibility on."

He concludes: "....I found value in the program, and ... I'm a natural skeptic. Some people are going to go, and hate it. Some people left by the 2nd day, and some on the 3rd. But everyone who stayed all the way through, I found, had a pretty rewarding experience. And I find it beyond insulting to think that everyone there was misled, stupid and/or ignorant enough to be mindlessly swayed as is being suggested."

Freelance writer Steve Salerno in his book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, states "NLP has shown up in many settings inside and outside SHAM" (his acronym for the Self-Help and Actualization Movement) but he particularly criticizes Anthony (Tony) Robbins, who he claims "made NLP his own, refining it and personalizing it into what he christened "neuroassociative conditioning" (a claim with which other proponents of NLP would disagree; see history section in NLP article). Salerno criticizes proponents of self-help, including Tony Robbins, stating it "actually fans the fires of discontent, making people feel impaired or somehow deficient as a prelude to (supposedly) curing them." Salerno opines that there are contradictions in Richard Bandler and John Grinder (the co-founders of NLP) ending up in court over who owned the rights to NLP given NLP's promotion in business for negotiations and conflict resolution and also in Tony Robbins having become divorced while marketing products for the "perfect marriage".

William T. Jarvis identifies what he believes are several flaws and misconceptions in the ideas, in particular about health and diet, in Robbins' US national best seller, Unlimited Power : The New Science Of Personal Achievement. Robbins believes that deep breathing activates the lymphatic system, and likens the lymphatic system to the sewerage system of the body. Jarvis states that there is no evidence that different breathing makes long-lasting changes in the lymphatic system, but that any effects are temporary. Jarvis agrees with Robbins' encouraging participants to eat more fruit, but criticizes the way it is presented. According to Jarvis, Robbins incorrectly argues that fruit is the perfect food. In contrast Jarvis argues that milk is the closest to being the most complete food. Jarvis states that some of the information about drinking distilled water gives an inaccurate view of how the body metabolic wastes system functions. Jarvis believes that there are misconceptions about health benefits of food combining, which are supposedly based on Herbert Shelton's ideas, and that Robbins' evidence of a positive effect of undereating is flawed. Jarvis also writes that Robbins makes inaccurate claims about dietary protein requirements.

Robbins also recycles an oft-cited but unsubstantiated reference to the "Yale Study of Goals" in Unlimited Power as scientific evidence of the power of positive thought. The anecdote claims that a survey was taken of the 1953 graduating class at Yale, and only 3% of the class had written goals regarding their financial situations. Twenty years later the class was interviewed again, and the 3% of the class who had written goals were worth more than the other 97% of the students combined. This was considered strong evidence of the power of written goal setting at the time Robbins wrote Unlimited Power, in 1986. Ten years after publication, however, in 1996, the alleged Yale study was shown to be an urban legend .

Celebrity meetings and endorsements

In his book Awaken the Giant Within, Robbins recounts meetings with public figures such as Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterand, and Lady Diana Spencer.

In his Personal Power and Get the Edge informercials, designed to sell audio programs through 30 minute television advertisements, celebrities who are reported to have appeared without compensation to endorse his work have included Fran Tarkenton, Pamela Anderson, Quincy Jones, Erin Brockovich and Anthony Hopkins.

It was reported in the New York Times that in December 1994 President Bill Clinton invited Robbins, along with Marianne Williamson and Dr. Steven R. Covey, to Camp David, though "all refuse to divulge the substance of their meeting with the Clintons. Mr. Covey said only that it was 'marvelous.'"

Sports figures and teams that Robbins has mentally coached to improve their performance include Greg Norman, Andre Agassi, Los Angeles Kings, and Mike Tyson.

Acting

In Shallow Hal Robbins appears in a scene with Jack Black's character in an elevator where Robbins hypnotizes Black's character in order to change Black's mental state. Black's character can now see people's outward appearance based on their inner personality. The scene is pivotal to the plot. In this scene, Black's character riffs on Robbins's large hands calling them "banana hands". Robbins also appears later in the movie and shares dialog with Jason Alexander.

Robbins also appears in the upcoming movie The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About The Future, which is based on the book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005) by Ray Kurzweil. In the movie, an AI hires Robbins to help her become more human. The movie is scheduled for 2009 release.

Anthony Robbins Foundation

Robbins is the founder of the Anthony Robbins Foundation, which proclaims its mission is to empower students, help prisoners to improve their lives, organize food drives, and fund Robbins' summer "Discovery Camp". According to the website, it has "products and programs in more than 2,000 schools, 700 prisons, and 100,000 health and human service organizations. The Foundation is committed to make a difference in the quality of life for children, the homeless, the prison population, and the elderly through its various programs." Charity Navigator gives the foundation an overall rating of four out of four stars.

Bibliography

Robbins, Anthony (1986). Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 448 pages. ISBN 0-684-84577-6.
Robbins, Anthony (1992). Awaken the Giant Within. New York: Simon & Schuster, 544 pages. ISBN 0-671-79154-0.
Robbins, Anthony (1994). Giant Steps. New York: Fireside, 416 pages. ISBN 0671891049.
Robbins, Anthony (1995). Notes from a Friend : A Quick and Simple Guide to Taking Control of Your Life. New York: Fireside, 112 pages. ISBN 068480056X.
Robbins, Anthony (2006). Inner Strength : Harnessing the Power of Your Six Primal Needs. New York: Free Press, 480 pages. ISBN 0-684-80903-6.

CD/DVDs

Robbins, Anthony (2006). The Edge: The Power to Change Your Life Now. Megaforce / Nightingale-Con, DVD. ISBN ASIN B000I5XD1K.
Lessons in Mastery. Simon & Schuster Audio / Nightingale-Con. ISBN 0-7435-2515-9.
Robbins, Anthony (2002). Live with Passion! : Stategies for Creating a Compelling Future. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7435-2521-3.

Living Health
The Time of Your Life
Get The Edge
Mastering Influence
The Ultimate Relationship Program (Robbins-Madanes)
Leadership In Times of Crisis (Robbins-Madanes)
Reclaiming Your True Identity (Robbins-Madanes)
Conquering Overwhelming Loss (Robbins-Madanes)
Personal Training System
Unleash The Power Within

Spencer Johnson

2008-08-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

Spencer Johnson

Spencer Johnson is known for his 1998 motivational book, titled Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life. It has stayed on the New York Times Bestseller list, and has remained on the Publishers Weekly Hardcover nonfiction list.

Johnson, born in South Dakota, received a B.A. degree in psychology from the University of Southern California in 1963, and his M.D. from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He currently lives in Hawaii.

Johnson also wrote the book "Yes" or "No": The Guide to Better Decisions (1992), which has been translated into a number of languages including Spanish, Korean and German . He co-authored the One Minute Manager series of books with management writer Ken Blanchard.

his latest book, which can make you happy and successful is The Present

His books have helped millions of people discover simple truths they can use to have healthier lives with more success and less stress. He has often been referred to as “the best there is at taking complex subjects and presenting simple solutions that work.”

Dr. Johnson is the author or co-author of nine New York Times Bestsellers, including the #1 Bestsellers Who Moved My Cheese?—An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change at Work and in Life and The One Minute Manager, the world’s most popular management method.

His education includes a B.A. in psychology from the University of Southern California, an M.D. degree from the Royal College of Surgeons, and medical clerkships at Harvard Medical School and The Mayo Clinic. Dr. Johnson was Medical Director of Communications for Medtronic, the inventors of cardiac pacemakers; Research Physician at The Institute for Inter-Disciplinary Studies, a think tank; and Consultant to the Center for the Study of the Person, and the School of Medicine, University of California. His books are often featured in the media, including CNN, The Today Show, Larry King Show, Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and United Press International.

Dr. Johnson’s books are available worldwide in twenty-six languages

Wayne Dyer

2008-08-02T07:24:00.000-07:00

Wayne Dyer

Wayne Walter Dyer (born May 10, 1940 in Detroit, Michigan) is a popular American self-help advocate, author and lecturer. His 1976 book Your Erroneous Zones has sold over 30 million copies and is one of the best-selling books of all time. It is said to have "[brought] humanistic ideas to the masses".

Biography

Dyer spent much of his adolescence in an orphanage. He received his D.Ed. degree in counseling from Wayne State University. He was a guidance counselor in Detroit at the high school level and a professor of counselor education at St. John's University in New York.

He first pursued an academic career, publishing in journals and running a successful private therapy practice, but his lectures at St. John's, which focused on positive thinking and motivational speaking techniques, attracted students beyond those enrolled. A literary agent persuaded Dyer to package his ideas in book form, resulting in Your Erroneous Zones; although initial sales were thin, Dyer quit his teaching job and began a publicity tour of the United States, doggedly pursuing bookstore appearances and media interviews ("out of the back of his station wagon", according to Michael Korda, making the best-seller lists "before book publishers even noticed what was happening"), which eventually led to national television talk shows including Merv Griffin, The Tonight Show, and Phil Donahue.

Dyer proceeded to build on his success with lecture tours, a series of audiotapes, and regular publication of new books. Dyer's audience was not limited to business as with Dale Carnegie or Stephen Covey, and so his message resonated with many in the New Thought Movement and beyond . He often recounted anecdotes from his family life, and repeatedly used his own life experience as an example. His self-made man success story was a part of his appeal. Dyer told readers to pursue self actualization, calling reliance on the self as a guide a "religious" experience, and suggested that readers emulate Jesus Christ, who he termed both an example of a self-actualized person, and a "preacher of self-reliance". Dyer criticized societal focus on guilt, which he saw as an unhealthy immobilization in the present due to actions taken in the past. He advocated readers to see how parents, institutions, and even themselves had imposed guilt trips on them.

Although Dyer resisted the spiritual tag, by the 1990s he was altering his message to include more components of spirituality, in Real Magic, and higher consciousness, in Your Sacred Self. Currently, his focus is on interpretations of Tao Te Ching and has many US speaking engagements.

Personal life

Dyer lives in Maui, Hawaii. He has been married twice, having seven of his eight children by his second wife, Marcelene.

Religious beliefs

"My belief is that the truth is a truth until you organize it, and then becomes a lie. I don't think that Jesus was teaching Christianity, Jesus was teaching kindness, love, concern, and peace. What I tell people is don't be Christian, be Christ like. Don't be Buddhist, be Buddha like."

"Religion is orthodoxy, rules and historical scriptures maintained by people over long periods of time. Generally people are raised to obey the customs and practices of that religion without question. These are customs and expectations from outside the person and do not fit my definition of spiritual."

Controversy

Since 2000, he has appeared several times on PBS during their pledge drives. Although PBS' local station managers believe that he is a popular speaker and successful in helping their stations raise money, some PBS viewers found the appearances disturbing in the sense "that PBS might be seen as lending its prestige to Dyer's spiritual views and aligning itself with his teachings".

Bibliography

Counseling Techniques That Work
Your Erroneous Zones
Pulling Your Own Strings
Group Counseling for Personal Mastery
The Sky's the Limit
Gifts from Eykis : A Story of Self-Discovery
What Do You Really Want for Your Children
The Awakened Life
Happy Holidays!
Real Magic: Creating Miracles in Everyday Life
Everyday Wisdom
How to Be a No-Limit Person
You'll See It When You Believe It: The Way to Your Personal Transformation
Your Sacred Self: Making the Decision to Be Free
A Promise Is a Promise: An Almost Unbelievable Story of a Mother's Unconditional Love and What It Can Teach Us
Manifest Your Destiny: The Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want
Wisdom of the Ages
There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem
10 Secrets For Success And Inner Peace
It's Never Crowded Along the Extra Mile
Getting in the Gap: Making Conscious Contact With God Through Meditation
The Caroline Myss & Wayne Dyer Seminar
Staying on the Path
The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-Create Your World Your Way
Incredible You!
Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling
Being in Balance: 9 Principles for Creating habits to Match Your Desires
Everyday Wisdom for Success
Making Your Thoughts Work for You
Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao
Living The Wisdom Of The Tao: The Complete Tao Te Ching and Affirmations
Excuses Begone

Best Life Lessons

BLOG MAP

Rich Dad's Prophecy

Rich Kid Smart Kid

Rich Dad's CASHFLOW Quadrant

Robert Kiyosaki

Rich Dad Poor Dad

Rich Dad's Guide to Investing

Daniel Keyes

Daniel Keyes

//<![CDATA[ if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } //]]> Biography

Early life and career

FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON

Neale Donald Walsch

Neale Donald Walsch

//<![CDATA[ if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } //]]> Biography

Career

Bibliography

Mike Dooley

Marie Diamond

Marci Shimoff

Lee Brower

Lee Brower

Joe Vitale

Joe Vitale

Hale Dwoskin

Fred Alan Wolf

Fred Alan Wolf

//<![CDATA[ if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } //]]> Biography

Bibliography

Discography

John Demartini

Esther Hicks

Esther Hicks

//<![CDATA[ if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } //]]> Outline of Abraham-Hicks' Teachings

Publications

The Secret

Denis Waitley

Denis Waitley

//<![CDATA[ if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } //]]> Résumé controversy

Works

David Schirmer

David Schirmer

Milton H. Erickson

Milton H. Erickson

//<![CDATA[ if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } //]]> Approach

Personal History

Trance and The Unconscious Mind

Indirect Techniques

Confusion Technique

The Handshake Induction

Resistance

Ericksonian Therapy

Shocks and ordeals

Influenced

Books

John Hagelin

John Hagelin

//<![CDATA[ if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } //]]> Early life

Professional/Career development

Research

Enlightened Audio Designs

Natural Law Party

Best electoral showing

Charles Fillmore

W. Clement Stone

Alan Cohen

Florence Scovel Shinn

Prentice Mulford

Charles F. Haanel

Christian D. Larson

Michael Beckwith

James Arthur Ray

Bob Proctor

John Assaraf

John Assaraf

Leo Buscaglia

Leo Buscaglia

//<![CDATA[ if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } //]]> Published works

The Fall of Freddie the Leaf

Biography

Biography

Biography

Outline of Abraham-Hicks' Teachings

Résumé controversy

Approach

Early life

Published works

Biography

Biography

Businesses

Biography

Biography

Positive psychology

Education

Early life