Staying on Top When Your World's Upside Down
ArtsLost causes are only really lost when you stop fighting for them
“Lost causes are the ones most worth fighting for because they tend to be the most important, most humane ones. They require us to live up to the best that is in us, to perfect ourselves and our world. Lost causes cannot be won, but because they are so crucial to us, we nevertheless must try.”
Richard Farson: Management of the Absurd
In 1986 I was working fulltime as executive director of STAT (Stop Teenage Addiction to Tobacco), a nonprofit organization I’d founded to fight against unethical tobacco industry marketing practices, particularly those intended to influence children to become addicted to a product that would kill many of them.
I was on a cross-country flight working on the next edition of our Tobacco Free Youth Reporter when the person next to me lit a cigarette. I politely asked if he would wait until the plane landed to smoke – he took a long drag, blew it in my face, and said no. He smoked continuously for the rest of the flight – as did a significant number of other passengers. I was sick as a dog by the time we landed – as were a significant number of other passengers. And I almost gave up the fight. If people were allowed to poison the air in the tightly-confined space of an airplane, what chance did we have for preventing the white collar drug pushers at cigarette companies from addicting successive generations of replacement smokers for those they’d killed off?
When later that year Dr. C. Everett Koop (a true American hero) called for a smoke-free society, many people wondered what he’d been smoking. It truly did appear to be a lost cause.
The changes that came about in succeeding decades were nothing short of miraculous. Almost all public spaces are smoke-free, even in the heart of tobacco land; cigarette vending machines have been outlawed and tobacco products must be kept behind the counter; cigarette advertising has been banned from television, movies, and billboards, and the white collar drug pushers can no longer use characters like Camel Joe and the Marlboro Man to make smoking appear glamorous.
There are still far too many people smoking (almost all of whom eventually wish they could quit), far too many young people starting (many of whom will sicken and die as a result), and the tobacco industry has, in what can only be termed corporate evil at its worst, targeted third world countries as an expansion market. It is still in some sense a lost cause – there is no hope that tobacco addiction will somehow just go away, or that tobacco industrialists will see the evil of their ways and stop, in the words of author Thomas Whiteside, selling death. But it is still and always will be a cause worth fighting for.
When your world turns upside down, one of the first casualties is often the dreams you had for your future. Dreams of going back to school, of writing your first novel or starting a business doing work you love to do, dreams of traveling the world or retiring to a cabin in the north woods. Those dreams now seem like lost causes.
They might be – which is all the more reason why you should hang onto them tenaciously and fight for them ferociously.
- Staying on Top When Your World's Upside Down
- Introduction
- The Laws of Adversity
- The Great Divide – defining moments in adversity
- Carve the statue of you
- The four ways to handle brick walls
- Embrace the 4 personal freedoms
- Get clear about your values
- Align your goals with your values
- Have the courage to pursue your highest goal
- Thank God Ahead of Time (TGAoT) for whatever happens
- Use adversity as a platform for change
- Fear of failure is really fear of humiliation
- Congratulate yourself on being rejected and on failing
- You must overcome your fear of success
- Leadership is most important when the world is upside down
- The flip side of love is loss
- In grief seek comfort - and give comfort
- Imagine your organization as a support group
- Grieve – then move on
- There’s no such thing as false hope
- Practice a healthy humility
- Go off alone somewhere
- In the trials of adversity work on character strength
- Identify the problem behind the problem
- Change your questions
- Make the most of midlife crisis
- Stop doing what isn’t working and try something new
- When you put the pieces back together make the vessel stronger
- Stop thinking about yourself
- Stop ruminating
- Train your doubt
- When one door closes, push open another
- Ignore the nattering nabobs of negativity
- Utilize your gifts
- Hang tough!
- Don’t give in to apparent failure in the middle
- Rescue your failures
- There is no free lunch
- Raise your expectations
- Live into your potential
- You don’t need OPA
- Use DDQs to redirect your actions
- Use EDQs to redirect your moods
- Do good for others
- Practice Rafe’s Law
- Work until your mission is finished
- Bigger problems = better life
- The difference between courageous and crazy is often
- Escape prisons you’ve made yourself
- It’s not personal, permanent or pervasive
- Develop emotional power
- Get real by integrating ego and soul
- Do something!
- Get more sleep and practice Neuro-Attitudinal
- Practice strategic laziness
- Break your addiction to negative thinking
- Transform negative self-talk into positive affirmation
- Erase the graffiti of negative self-talk
- Pay attention to the metaphors by which you create your perception of reality
- Direct your dreams in a positive way
- Interpret dreams to your benefit
- Distinguish between problems and predicaments
- Create rituals
- Playing it safe can be a dangerous game
- Use the 6-A Formula to Create Memories of the Future
- Face the granddaddy of all fears
- Ignore the chatter of the world
- Stop whining
- The Pickle Pledge – a simple promise that will change your life
- Take The Pickle Challenge
- Build up your stamina
- Don’t pick fights you don’t need
- The steepest hills are in your mind
- Turn off the tragi-tainment
- Build upon The Pyramid of Self-Belief
- Act confident to earn confidence
- Stop waiting for someone else to “empower” you
- Take to heart The Self-Empowerment Pledge
- Monday’s Promise: Responsibility
- Tuesday’s Promise: Accountability
- Wednesday’s Promise: Determination
- Thursday’s Promise: Contribution
- Friday’s Promise: Resilience
- Saturday’s Promise: Perspective
- Sunday’s Promise: Faith
- Keep a personal journal
- Pay attention to the patterns in your life
- Overcome your own laziness
- Transform despair into determination
- Enthusiasm is the master value
- Stop awfulizing
- Adopt the Nedlog Rule
- Practice mutuality
- Say Yes to what matters by saying No to what doesn’t
- Write a poem
- Train your brain
- Replace anguish with hope
- Combine ignorant bliss with unearned confidence
- You can be a victim or a visionary but not both
- Work fast
- Caring is the root of courage
- See the world as it really is
- Fear can make you stupid
- Maintain your momentum
- The most important choice you ever make
- Illuminate the darkness
- Get out of stuck
- You cannot change the past but you can rewrite your memory of it
- Turn bad news into the best thing ever
- Write your own horoscope – a Youroscope
- Don’t hit the brakes when you hit the gravel
- Dealing with the energy vampires
- Be productive
- Your trajectory is more important than where you are at any point in time
- Forgive
- Even when the last thing you want to do is to forgive
- Forgive 360
- Stop abusing your imagination with delusions of grandeur and delusions of disaster
- Stop procrastinating
- Create something knowing there are no guarantees
- Get started
- Lost causes are only really lost when you stop fighting for them
- What doesn’t kill you…
- Expect a miracle