Tag: life advice

Recently I came across the Dalai Lama’s "18 Rules of Living,” which he shared with the world at the beginning of the new millennium. Here, 18 years later, it seemed relevant to revisit them.

In particular, I was struck by his rule: "Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it." At first I thought, "What?” As women, for example, many of us had been told umpteen times that we couldn’t have both a thriving family life and a successful career. Fortunately, that has been changing (although I still wonder why men were exempt from that contradiction!).

If you feel that your stress levels are constantly rising, you’re in good company. I used to be a busy, stressed-out professional who didn’t have time for anyone—and then I was laid off from my job. Being in such a vulnerable position made me realize what it felt like to be the person who couldn’t get anyone to call back, and who felt like the world was against him.

During the process of getting back on my feet, there were certain people who stood out from the crowd because they purposefully helped to build me up—or gave me a break when I needed it the most. I realized that to be really meaningful, acts of compassion don’t have to be grand gestures.

Some of you may remember who Betty Crocker was. For those of you who don’t, Betty Crocker was a fictional character, created in the 1920s to give a friendly face to cooking and baking products. She was a cultural icon right through the mid-90s. To many over the decades, she represented kindness and goodness personified.

Life on planet Earth is riddled with problems. Little problems, big problems, we all have them, pretty much every day. But what matters isn’t the problem, it’s the solution! And oh, how easy it is to lose sight of that. My phones went down a couple of months ago. Since we don't get cell reception where I live, I am completely dependent on my landlines. That's why I have two of them, in case one of them goes wacky. Except this time both lines went out, and given how important communication is in my line of work, I was in full-blown panic mode.