If you choose to go to the gym today, you are shaping your destiny of becoming a healthy and strong individual. If you choose to help a friend in need, you are also fulfilling your destiny. You are creating a perception in their mind that you are a caring and loving friend they can count on. Let’s say you choose to go to a one-day job fair just to check out your options. It may only be a couple of hours out of your entire life, but it could change your destiny.
Refuse to let chance rule your destiny. Be aware of your choices today and remember that the small decisions have just as much power to shape your destiny as the big ones.
177
What will you do with the gift of a brand new day? Think about the way John Wayne describes it in the quote above. It is brand new when it arrives, and it is placed right in the palms of your hands. You can do whatever you want with a new day. What’s it going to be?
The pristine nature of a perfect new day is exciting. It is brimming with potential. When you wake in the morning, absolutely anything can happen to shape your destiny. You might discover something you never knew about yourself, or you could get the satisfaction of conquering a big problem at work or at home. Maybe you will spend some quality time with your family and remember how important those people are in your life and how much they add color and vibrancy to your days.
Your assignment today is to write down some of the things you learned from yesterday. It’s so important not to waste the gift of a new day by repeating old mistakes. Life is too short to play reruns of the less-than-perfect parts of your life. Write down the lessons you’ve learned, and apply them to this new day.
The universe wants you to learn from life and take each new morning in your hands like the precious gift that it is and mold it into your destiny. Be prepared to shape today into a beautiful day, no matter what outside forces blow through your life. Today is perfect, and tomorrow will be, too. They are in your hands. Have you learned from yesterday?
178
Dawn was miserable 99 percent of the time. She was a beautiful, smart woman brimming with potential, but she refused to step up and try something new or change the way she had always lived her life. She sat over coffee with her friends and complained about her weight, her job, and her relationships at least once a week. They offered ideas and advice from their own life experiences, but she looked at them skeptically as if to say, “well, you’re lucky. I’m not. This is just the way my life is.”
As a direct result of her actions (or inaction), Dawn was completely unhappy with the direction her life was headed. She had been in a string of mediocre relationships, never meeting anyone who was captivating enough to consider marrying. Her job was reliable but boring. At work her own clients told her she could do better, but their comments fell on deaf ears.
One day when Dawn returned from work to her small apartment, she sank to the floor like a wilted flower. “Will I ever know happiness?” she sighed to herself through tears of frustration.
Dawn held the secret of happiness within her all along, but she had to get up off the floor and be willing to choose life.
What do you do to choose life today? Are you happy? If the answer is no, you now have the secret of happiness. Choose life.
179
You have been considering your choices in life for several days now. If you’ve actively participated in the exercises of the last 178 days, you realize by now that this book will offer you no chance to pass the buck. You can’t blame anyone but yourself for your present circumstances. That can be a slightly depressing thought, but it is also liberating. It doesn’t mean that everything is your fault. It means that you have the power to change anything you want from here on out.
