Chapter 9: A Complementary Dimension--Getting More Out of Life

Chapter 9

A Complementary Dimension:

Getting More Out of Life

 

Zip a dee doo dah,

Zip a dee ay,

My, oh my, what a wonderful day.

— Allie Wrubel and Ray Gilbert

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth

Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord,

and He will lift you up.

—. James 4:10 (NKVJ)

Let me reveal how I became a Christian so you’ll know where I’m coming from with regard to improving the quality of your life. As a youngster, my mother regularly took me to Sunday school. It was my least favorite activity; sleeping was much preferred. I did enjoy listening to sermons, but it was frowned on to take youngsters to adult services.

If I pretended to be asleep, mom would sometimes let me sleep in on Sundays. I was pretty good at pretending so I soon was the biggest backslider in my Sunday school grade. Fortunately, it was an evangelical church so my classmates were always cooking up schemes to get me to attend again.

By the time I turned 13, I was pretty full of myself. There wasn’t much room for God in there alongside my exaggerated opinion of myself. One day while my family was away for a drive, I felt really sick. By the time they got home, I was delirious. Within an hour I was in the hospital where I would stay for two weeks as I barely survived a bad case of double pneumonia.

My physician, Dr. Helmsley, was a good Christian and worried about my soul because my life was in jeopardy. He talked to me about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit twice a day when he stopped by to check on me. After I recovered, he took my mom and me to a tent revival meeting.

Having recovered from the illness, I soon pushed God out of my life again. During the next year, I was very caught up instead in athletics. When I was in ninth grade, I desperately wanted to make a contribution to our junior high track team, which had a remote chance of winning the big meet. Our coach, Mr. Layman, told each of us exactly what had to be accomplished for the team to win. I was determined to do my part. I had to come in first!

But that wasn’t likely to happen. Based on past performances, there were at least two people who could out leap me in the standing broad jump, my main event. To make such a jump you stand on a slightly raised, tilted board and spring forward as far as you can into a sand-filled pit. After two of the three jumping rounds, I knew it was hopeless. I was in sixth place and four of the competitors’ jumps were longer than I had ever gone before. I also didn’t like the board we were using.

Remembering that we should call on God when we need help, I thought of praying … but what I wanted was so trivial in God’s terms that I didn’t think it was worthy of prayer. So I decided to make God an offer instead: “Dear God, help me win this event, and I’m yours forever.” After all, if He came through, any doubts I had about God would be dispelled.

I got onto the broad-jump board and felt very calm. I did my routine and took off into the air. Suddenly, I felt light as a feather with a large, gentle hand lifting under me. I was dropped softly at the end of the pit. I had out leaped everyone, and gone more than six inches past my best jump ever. I couldn’t believe it. Then I remembered my promise to God, thanked him, repented my sins, accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, and ran off to tell everyone on the team.

What was even more remarkable was that I was the only person on the team who performed up to the plan. Knowing what had to be done had probably given us performance anxiety, and people underperformed because they didn’t believe they could do what the team needed.

After a few days, I started to think that perhaps I’d just developed a new broad jump technique and God didn’t have a role at all. God soon dispelled that thought by making sure that my jumps for the rest of my life were shorter than I had jumped when He lifted me up.

Since then, God has been speaking to me on a regular basis. I’ve learned to pay attention and act promptly. When I follow His orders, things work out great. That’s my secret to high performance, and I just wanted to share it with you so you could benefit, too. He knows the answers, even when you and I don’t … which is most of the time.

Having been told to start the 400 Year Project by God, I continued to receive instructions. In 2005, for example, God told me to start explaining to people how to live their lives by gaining more joy from what they already have.

You may be wondering why I put this Christian testimony into what’s mostly a secular book. It’s simple. God has been telling me to put my testimony into this book every day lately, and I just found a good place to fit it in my story.

If you already gain high performance from your spiritual experiences, that’s great. Even if such spiritually based performance is the case, based on my experiences I believe you are missing out if you don’t know Jesus as your Lord and Savior. I encourage you to find out about and consider what you’re missing: That message is an important part of what God told me He wants you to think about as you read this chapter.

Life without Jesus can be pretty lonely and scary. Wouldn’t you like to find out how to enjoy His love, peace, and guidance? A good book to help you start exploring this spiritual opportunity is Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now (FaithWords, 2004).

Inspired by Creative Living

Everybody’s an artist.…

It’s just that they’re inhibited.

— Yoko Ono

There’s an old saying about how happiness is spending a little less than you earn, and agony is spending more. Would all of the improvements the project aimed to achieve be a blessing or a curse? The 400 Year Project needed another dimension: Make wise choices to capture a more worthwhile life. Otherwise, huge increases in abundance and wealth would only generate exponential increases in dissatisfaction resulting from even larger gains in envy, overspending, and excess borrowing.

I had always been impressed to see how much others could do with little. My strongest early memory of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear came in elementary school. In fifth grade, I was cautioned not to take a paper doily on my own for the art project because the doilies stick together; there wouldn’t be enough for everyone if I took more than one. Being about two hours behind the rest of the class in starting, I stayed in during recess to catch up. But our teacher, Mr. Hendricks, had headed down to the teacher’s lounge before I was ready to begin. Although two classmates cautioned me not to take a doily, I insisted that I would be careful and there was no problem. I even had my classmates check to be sure that I hadn’t taken any extra doilies. Unknowingly having peeled off three extra doilies, I confidently headed back to my seat and started cutting.

When Mr. Hendricks came back, he quickly spotted that I had a doily when I should not have. He chewed me out and inspected my doily, revealing to my shock that I had taken four doilies instead of one. Oops!

But he took pity on me and said he would redistribute those doilies to other students who would just have to live with my cutting. Two hours later I watched with amazement as all of the best art projects turned out to be ones that used my initial cuts … but my own wasn’t one of the elite. Mine was a mess. You could have given me 50 uncut doilies, and I couldn’t have done as well as my classmates did by starting with my cuts. 

Another epiphany along these lines occurred in my early 20s. A couple I knew who were desperately poor invited me over for dinner. I didn’t expect much. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Their apartment was gorgeous. The clothes they wore were amusingly camp. The food was tasty. I couldn’t ever remember being more impressed.

I had to ask how they did it. It was a triumph of imagination, hard work, and taste over money. The lovely curtains had been hand sewn from material bought for ten cents a yard at a close-out sale. The candles were homemade from melted-down stubs carried home by a friend who worked in a restaurant. The lovely fragrance came from boiling herbs found in the forest. The clothes came from a used clothing store where stylish people sold off their clothes after wearing them once or twice. The furniture had been rebuilt and recovered after being picked up off the sidewalk to be thrown away. The food was prepared based on recipes in a terrific cookbook borrowed from the library. The flourishing plants had been grown from shoots or seeds that friends have given them. The plant containers were dressed up with scraps of fabric to cover up their humble origins as various used packages. And, of course, the couple’s lovely manners simply reflected their natural grace and style. Mentally adding up the cost of everything, I estimated that they had furnished their apartment in this stunning fashion for less than what I had paid for my mattress and box spring set.

Thinking that I couldn’t have done what any of these people did, I tended not to take those doing-lots-with-little experiences very seriously until I noticed that I, too, had the ability to turn very little into something pretty special. My skill turned out to be in entertaining for special occasions.

Suite Fifty

All the people at this party,

they’ve got a lot of style.

— Joni Mitchell

My first chance to try my hand at enjoying more while spending less came when my mother, Felice, turned 50. My work at the time frequently required me to be in California. I coordinated my travel schedule to be near my parents’ home on the appointed day. Having learned from my do-lots-with-little friends to keep expectations low, I asked mom to bring dad and my sister, Anna, for dinner in Beverly Hills. Unfortunately, dad had to work that night, but he told us to go ahead without him. Mom invited my Aunt Velda to join us. Velda invited my cousin Lonnie’s ex-wife. That made for a potentially odd fivesome, but the mix was actually a good one because everyone was in a good mood.

My mother’s favorite comment to me at the time went along these lines, “Now, son, you have a family. Don’t go spending any money on the old folks. You’ll need it for your family. Now, I’m serious about this, son.” From those warnings I realized that my budget had to be modest or I would have a guilty, grumpy mother on my hands. I decided to spend no more than I would to take four people out to dinner in mom’s hometown and give her a modest gift similar to what I would normally have mailed from Boston.

My imagination was first stimulated when I noticed that mom’s birthday fell on the same day as the Academy Awards. I arranged to stay in the hotel where most of the stars would be getting dressed and where most of the after-awards parties would be held.

Knowing that you often get the best room if you arrive either very early (when the place is pretty empty) or very late (when the place is full and only the Presidential suite may be left), I showed up very early. I explained to the desk clerk that I wanted a room where it would be easy to entertain my mother and my family for her 50th birthday. He asked me if I liked swimming pools and cabanas. I wasn’t quite sure what a cabana was but I said, “Sure.”

I had a nice surprise. The bellman led me around the corner past a stylish restaurant to the pool area where I entered a lovely suite with a sheltered area outside facing the pool. From the best sofa, I had a perfect view of the red carpet where the celebrities would soon be arriving for the Academy Awards. The suite had a bar, a huge dining area, and everything you could imagine for a great party. And I had been upgraded at no extra cost!

Next I called catering to see what could be done to have a cocktail party put together. (Normally, it’s a good idea to call ahead, but I didn’t think of that.) They apologized and said that because of the Academy Awards it wasn’t possible to handle any more parties. But they suggested that I head to the hotel’s restaurant around the corner to see what they could do for me.

I wandered in and found a friendly host and explained what I wanted to do. He asked me when I wanted to hold my mom’s party. I told him it was planned for early and he smiled. He kindly offered to have two waiters work with us. They would come take orders for cocktails and hors d’oeurves, and later pass out dinner menus. The waiters would simply serve us in the room rather than in the restaurant so we could watch the red carpet activities.

With that taken care of, I headed to Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills’ most famous shopping street. I walked into boutiques where everyone sipped champagne while beautiful models slinked up and down showing the clothes. After visiting about six places where everything was outrageously expensive, I found an older saleswoman and explained that I wanted to do something nice for my mom … but it couldn’t look expensive. She took me by the hand and was soon laying out dozens of gorgeous silk scarves. She said, “No woman can ever have enough silk scarves.” Of course, I knew my mom didn’t have any silk scarves, so I was pretty sure she wouldn’t know what they cost. Soon, I had a scarf wrapped in package that looked like a million dollars.

I sat down in the lobby to wait for the family. I didn’t know if they would know how to find my room otherwise. They had never been in such a nice hotel.

My mother was astonished when I led her to the room. She began making comments about how I had spent a fortune. I assured her that I had only spent what a normal night’s lodging would cost and that the room was a business expense.

Fortunately, the restaurant was not an expensive one and my relatives ordered modestly priced items. So I was safe on that front, too.

It was a great evening for all, and I had only overspent my gift budget by about $20.

In future years I repeated such amazing events at little cost for various occasions such as my parents’ 50th and 60th wedding anniversaries, my in-laws’ 60th wedding anniversary, and trips for clients. No one would ever believe how little I spent; those who attended felt like they had been treated like billionaires. Now there was an interesting thought. How else could extraordinary experiences be created on budgets that many could afford? My blogging, which I describe later in the chapter, was eventually inspired by all of those appreciative comments.

Meditate on This

My corns ache, I get gouty, and

my prejudices swell like varicose veins.

— James Gibbons Huneker

It’s not just letting expenses get ahead of income that can create unhappiness. Physical ailments, especially those that deliver chronic pain, can make you miserable, too.

How do I know? It happened to me. After my daughter was born in 1986, I found myself riding a whirlwind of activity doing consulting, selling business, building our organization, developing new concepts, and burping my baby daughter when I was home. She liked to stay up all night (she still does), so there wasn’t much sleep.

One Saturday, I found myself entertaining the whole family in very hot weather at a miniature golf course for a tournament. Feeling exhausted afterwards, I nevertheless agreed to play a few holes of golf with my son, Mark. Soon after the second hole, I was having trouble walking. I was getting woozier and woozier, but didn’t want to alarm Mark. Staggering into my car, I called home and told my wife that someone needed to take me to the hospital.

I began losing feeling on the left side of my body and was shivering uncontrollably despite the heat. Eventually the episode passed, but I was very weak for months and rarely got out of bed. And I had a new sensation: burning pain if anything touched the left side of my body … including the bed sheets.

As an optimist, I knew I would overcome whatever the problem was, but no one seemed to know what that problem might be. Physicians ran lots of tests that assured me that I hadn’t had a heart attack, stroke, or seizure and didn’t have any blood clots or tumors to account for the problem.

I made a decision: I would try anything anyone suggested that might help until I found something that did. Chiropractic treatments and acupuncture did a lot for the pain, but I was pretty hard to get along with (as all of my family will attest). Burning continual pain turned into periodic pain and numbness. What would give me back my joy? While orthotics made the physical symptoms better, I was grumpier than ever. What would make me happy again?

Someone told me about Transcendental Meditation® (TM), the practice the Beatles had learned back in the 1960s. I went to exploratory classes, liked the experience, and started taking lessons. Now we are up to where I started my story about announcing the 400 Year Project at the beginning of Chapter 2. TM was great for sweetening my temper, making me see my pain and discomfort as an observer, and opening my heart wider than ever to God.

Having spent the twelve years since my introduction to TM deepening my spiritual experiences through meditation, prayer, and Bible reading, I am convinced that the main problem that holds back improvement is what I call spiritual malnutrition. A person with a malnourished spirit feels needy and draws comfort from what’s familiar, enjoys gratifying the body and ego, and looks out for poor little ole me. When you feel spiritually well nourished, by contrast with spiritual malnutrition, you see the tried and true as potentially worn out and needing updating, glutting yourself with spending and physical items seems unattractive, and you want to do the most you can for others.

Meditate on my pain-driven experiences: Regardless of what you have or don’t have, feel or don’t feel, appreciate your challenges and blessings, and praise God for them! That lesson can be the most important information for you in this book.

Today, I have no residual pain. In fact, I only get a headache about once every three years. I still wear orthotics, but don’t seek acupuncture or chiropractic treatments. What happened to make me sick and then to heal me? I don’t know, but to me it feels like God just wanted to get my attention so He could prepare me for the overwhelming world-improving commission He wanted me to take on. While I meditate, pray, and read the Bible each day, great insights strike me like beautiful, soul-filling rays from Heaven.

Reveal the Secrets of Your Illusions

What makes us so bitter against people who outwit us is that

 they think themselves cleverer than we are.

— François de La Rochefoucauld

Having realized that there are many hidden paths to enjoying life more, regardless of the blessings and setbacks you experience, I decided to look into the psychology of helpfully sharing those hidden paths with others. Magicians provided me with an instructive example of how trust is earned.

Some take great pleasure in watching illusions created by magicians: It’s like stepping into a warm, fuzzy fairy tale for a few minutes as you suspend disbelief and imagine that the Statue of Liberty can suddenly disappear. For others, the fun is in figuring how the illusions are created. For still others, the appeal is in imagining ways to create even more powerful illusions.

Most of us happily pursue one of those three roles because we know from the beginning that the magician wants to entertain us. Things we don’t understand can be easily accepted as long as we sense that there’s no harmful intent.

If the magician doesn’t wear a cape and a top hat and wield a magic wand, most of us are instantly suspicious of any illusions. Why? We know from experience that a good illusionist can keep us from understanding what’s really going on. If the illusionist is looking to take advantage of us, we’re in trouble. In fact, even if illusionists don’t take advantage of someone in displaying an illusion, people may be resentful: They don’t like to think that they are any less than the illusionist is in any dimension. Perhaps it’s that psychology that so powerfully impels people toward wanting more widespread suffrage and potential participation in government, even if many don’t avail themselves of these rights and privileges.

Many people feel deprived and suspicious because they believe that those who have and accomplish more in a physical sense have access to resources denied to ordinary people. Sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it isn’t.

How can you tell if you are being helped or taken advantage of? Most important activities require thoughtful cooperation among lots of people who don’t know one another well. We trust others to check things out that matter to us as carefully as we would have. I didn’t know what brand of lens my cataract surgeon was going to put in my eyes, but I trusted him to do the right thing. One reason I trusted him was because he told me little secrets of my choices that wouldn’t have occurred to me. Because he shared those secrets, I got a sense that he was willing to be totally open if I wanted to take the time to go over something. The goal was also pretty unambiguous, better vision. At the end of the process, an eye test would tell me the quality of his decisions and work. Those objective standards made me even more confident that my surgeon was trying to accomplish the same results that I was.

Sometimes, we don’t have any idea what’s in our best interest before or after we are faced with a choice. As a result, there is no objective test that can be applied to make a decision or to be sure the right consequence has occurred.

That lack of knowledge can cause a lot of problems. Good living in the United States has long been associated with “Keeping up with the Joneses.” That means matching your lifestyle to that of your neighbors and friends without looking into whether that’s a good idea or not; it’s a form of envy, pure and simple. Pastor Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, jokingly argues that you don’t have to keep up with the Joneses any more because the Joneses have gone bankrupt. Spending based on what you see others doing is like being in an unlimited arms race: There’s no relief until someone runs out of money, as the Soviet Union did in the 1990s. In the process, a lot of time, money, and effort are squandered.

We would be better off living according to an objective standard of what’s good for us, but many people can’t figure out what is good for them. They need help.

Who can help them? Someone who is an expert, shares secrets, and acts in a trustworthy way. I think that’s one reason why so many people are attracted to blogs written by objective, well-known experts: There appears to be little opportunity to have a hidden agenda as the expert blogger unveils what’s not known behind the public perception of events and possibilities.

If I Had a Blog, I’d Write It in the Morning

If I cannot overwhelm you with my quality,

I will overwhelm you with my quantity.

— Émile Zola

Blogs were hot in 2005. I decided that a blog would be a good way for a prolific writer like me to share my views on the simple, good life. Also wanting to demonstrate that you can do a lot without spending money, blogs appealed to me because you could host a blog at no cost and put as much as you wanted into it.

Combining my interest in books that offer inexpensive travel tips with my knowledge that many people were intrigued by billionaires, I decided to call my blog, “Live Better than a Billionaire on Five Dollars Extra a Day.” (If you would like to check this site out, it’s at: http://livebetterthanabillionaireon5dollars.blogspot.com/. You can also find links there to the other blogs.) I also wanted to learn the reactions to my subjects and writing, so I put a few ads on the page (to get visit tracking information) and invited comments (so I could find out opinions). Then I began crafting small online ads to encourage people to visit my blog. Based on what messages best pulled people to the site, I adjusted my content to provide more coverage in that area. (I had a secondary focus for my blog: I wanted to create another series of books and materials built around the idea of beautiful living on a budget. My year of testing helped me create a book proposal that I recently completed.)

Pretty soon I had more than one blog going. My other blogs looked at subjects like spirituality, visiting mansions, watching football, starting a large business, becoming a world hero, and creating 2,000 percent solutions. From this blog writing, I realized that most people crave the experience of feeling special. Add that element to their lives, and they brighten up considerably regardless of what comes next. (Actually, all of us are all special in God’s eyes, but that comforting thought often isn’t enough for those of little faith.) Most people, however, have no idea how to inexpensively provide themselves with that desired feeling of being special.

Here was an opportunity for me to share the secrets of what wealthy, powerful, and famous people had told and shown me about the most special moments in their lives. By revealing those secrets, I could help remove a lot of the potential for the overspending people indulged in. Provide high quality experiences at an affordable cost, and much of the spending that gets people into financial trouble would probably decline. Why? Because the joy from extraordinary experiences isn’t just limited to the time you experience those moments; it also includes the time you spend planning and preparing for the activities … as well as your reflections after the fact. Your cost per minute of enjoyment is minuscule when looked at in those terms.

By sharing these secrets I’d accumulated over so many decades, I could establish trust and help people to find out what they should want to get out of life: That connection would add a very important dimension to the 400 Year Project.

Blog-writing is one of those extraordinary experiences. If you just jot down something every day that happens or you think of that strikes you as interesting, you’ll have a larger readership than all but the most popular book authors. If you tie into some popular subject, like how celebrities embarrass themselves or the latest political shenanigans, you can have a huge audience and make news. With enough of an audience, you can even make a living with your blog jottings. Charles Dickens would have understood and approved.

Nonetheless, writing blogs every day is arduous work. Even at a thousand words a day, you’re writing the equivalent of four books a year. The upside of so much work is that it’s a mind-expanding experience to explain so much of your thinking. In my mind, the steps to do something are often little more than an instinctive habit. For instance, I know that if you are planning a special event for a parent, most people will want to help in any way they can. But you have to ask them for help or you won’t receive most of the benefits you can receive. From experience I’ve learned that the more people who tell you something can’t be done, the closer you are to accessing something marvelous. So I just happily keep pushing.

Just telling someone to keep pushing in new ways doesn’t give that person enough guidance if they lack experience persisting in pursuit of a worthy goal. Next to experience, people learn best from stories, and I wrote lots of them. With each added story, I also learned things I hadn’t realized before.

In addition, kind people contacted me with offers of information and help that made the blogs and my learning even better. As a result, I found that I was using the blogs as a resource when I had something I wanted to work on.

Here’s an example: My wonderful in-laws, Sandy and Bernice Bruckner, had kindly taken Carol and me along on their 50th wedding anniversary for a once-in-a-lifetime visit to Lake Como and Rome. When their 60th anniversary was on the horizon, Carol and I wanted to do something extraordinary for them. Because of various aches and pains, it was hard for the two to travel. The event would have to be held in New York City where they live.

New York, of course, is one of those places where you can spend unlimited amounts of money in a few seconds. If you don’t believe me, just buy gifts in the jewelry stores on Fifth Avenue. Our challenge was to design something beyond what mere money could provide.

I had written a blog about entertaining in New York and described the idea of hosting an event in a museum. Armed with what my blog had turned up, we checked out all of the sites. There was a clear winner, but you had to have special permission to use it: Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York’s mayors, was available for tea parties if you had a good enough purpose. Fortunately, my in-laws’ long-time connections to New York, their business in the Bronx, and my father-in-law’s long-ago work on Miracle on 34th Street combined to do the trick.

I don’t think we would have arranged such a marvelous event if I hadn’t written my blog. So even the blogger can learn important lessons about where and what to ask by rereading their own writing.

Hopefully, as is the purpose of the 400 Year Project, millions will eventually benefit from these blogs and the books that will be developed from the lessons learned. 

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.