piscesagogo

I think I can honestly say I’ve reached this goal. I’m much more consistently happy than I’ve ever been and I understand where it all comes from now… Happiness is no longer this thing I pursue that’s outside my control or influence. I learned a lot from self-help books. In particular, I really liked the ones by Susan Jeffers. I also sought out a lot of “dating advice” because that’s where a lot of my insecurity was and still is. Most of what I found was worthless… interesting to read and kind of inspiring in that it paints a nice picture of “what could be yours”. But mostly it’s a bunch of guys saying “just do what I do”, “be like me”, but who don’t know or understand (or even recognize?) how to give you tools and show you the steps for getting from where you are to where you want to be. One exception was Carlos Xuma. I really liked his material because it ties success with women together with success with everything else in your life, and the real key is getting your shit together and being a whole, happy person in the first place. But I think it’s worth mentioning here (and I would highly recommend it to any one else here—women substitute in Christian Carter’s material) because even though I knew that looking for happiness in other people was not the right way to go, and that this was doubly true when it came to love/sex/dating, when it comes down to it, that stuff is important and is always going to be on your mind whether you like it or not. It’s good advice to “love yourself before trying to love someone else” and to avoid looking for happiness in a relationship, etc. But it doesn’t really work sequentially like that. So, for me anyway, listening to the Carlos Xuma material helped me channel all that thinking in a constructive way… It helped me see all the steps and gave me motivation for getting my shit together, pursuing my interests and having a balanced lifestyle. Some people reading this might say “shouldn’t those things be their own motivation?” and I would agree. I fully admit that at the time, the idea of being more attractive to women, being a better man because women would dig me because of it, was a stronger motivator than just wanting to be a better man for myself. But I think most people reading this would understand how strong that warped thinking can be. What can I say… it helped me start and stick to a process of improving myself and learning to appreciate and feel good about myself, and I feel good about that.

I couldn’t help the feeling amused at this page as soon as I added this goal to my list. Fortunately I already bought a new laptop. :)

I’ve done the following things to practice my French:

I have a long commute to work so I recorded the daily news from the internet to a cassette tape (yes, my car still has a tape deck) and listen to it on the way to work. Lately, I’ve been recording to my ipod and I bought a TuneCast transmitter on ebay for $30 so that my ipod plays on my radio.

FranceInter.com is my favorite station for doing this.

I also looked up meetup.com and found a group of people interested in getting together twice a month to speak French. This has been great! We’re planning potluck dinners at each other’s houses and doing other things in the same vein now as well.