Better than perfect

Enjoy this excerpt from You Know What I Should Have Said?, this month’s featured title!

A long time ago, I think I must have been 9 years old, I overheard someone describing a piece of music. “It’s not beautiful,” she said in a tone that made it clear this was not a compliment. “It’s perfect, but it has no heart. So perfect, just not beautiful.”

For some reason, this stuck with me, and I think about it all these years later. That a piece of music (or anything or anyone) can seem perfect, but lack something that makes it fall short of beautiful. That there are important differences between perfection and true beauty that make striving for perfection not worth it.

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YES changes everything!

Yes Changes Everything!Please enjoy this excerpt from
the opening of Yes Changes Everything!

There is this amazing story about the day John Lennon and Yoko Ono met: in the Fall of 1966, Yoko was in London for an art exhibition. Already an accomplished avant-garde artist, Yoko was displaying her works at the Indica Gallery as part of an exhibition called Unfinished Paintings and Objects.

John visited the gallery the day before the show was scheduled to open. He was skeptical about the displays, and the artist herself, who greeted him with a card that read, literally, “Breathe.”

One piece got his attention, though…

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Let’s see what we think

Please enjoy this excerpt from the Introduction to The Becoming Journal!

There’s something really wonderful about putting our thoughts on paper where we can see them. Writing slows us down and gives us time to think. Intuition and random thoughts start joining into vivid pictures until all of a sudden, we see new connections, aha’s!, and fresh ideas.

Kind of like turning a sweater inside out so we can finally see the tag that’s been itching us, putting a vague idea that’s been drifting around in our heads down on paper gets it out where we can see it. In the light of day, it may look amazing; it may not. Either way, writing it down gives us power over what happens next.

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Dream your dream

Your dreams are one of the truest parts of you.

To have the energy and passion you need for any dream, it’s got to be first and foremost about what you want to bring into your life. It’s easy to get distracted by what other people think, even people we love and care about, or even by what the headlines say.

We tend to listen too hard to other people’s ideas about what we should and shouldn’t try or what we’re good at or how we should spend our time and lives. We take the headlines too seriously and immediately apply them to ourselves, when they don’t.

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Gratitude: the miracle-magnet

When the sky brightens, and the day is suddenly new…what do you dream of then?

A friend told me this amazing story: attendees at a seminar are shown a video of two people playing catch. They’re told just to focus on counting the number of times each person catches the ball.

In the middle of the clip, a gorilla walks into the frame and waves at the camera. When the clip ends, attendees are asked what they thought of the gorilla. Every single person is positive there was no gorilla, and when they look at the clip again, they swear they’re looking at a different video.

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