August 5, 2004

• Topic: Reasons for me to be optimistic

  
  

  Just watched the Bill Maher episode w/ Michael Moore on it…starting to believe that we’re entering a new age of political awareness, and I’m growing confident that Bush will be voted out, and that Michael Moore, a college dropout who wrote a few books, and made a movie, will be largely responsible for that happening.

  
  

  I’ve sold 30 copies of my book “College Daze” so far at camp, and I’m growing pretty confident that I will meet my goal of selling 500 copies over the next few months.  I’m growing pretty confident that once I get one or two important people to support my project, we will begin to see programs popping up all over the place that will result in a better educated, more motivated, more adventurous, fun-going, and happier culture.

  
  

  In about 7 days I will be done with summer camp.  I will have a paycheck that will enable me to live and travel the US and Canada for about 3 months.  This will allow me to live in the real world, to be at Washington University in St. Louis for one of the presidential debates, to visit a few other universities to discuss my book and my ideas, and to contact book publishers about either having them help in marketing and selling my book, or to assist me in writing a second book.

  
  

  I started this site in November 2003, and it’s now about 9 months later, and I feel like i’ve accomplished so much.  I attribute nothing to luck, to fate, etc., but to a simple mindset of what life is all about, and about how one should treat it.  On Outward Bound courses, part of their educational model is to put students in challenging situations, where they will either succumb, cope, or thrive.  It’s usually pretty obvious what stage people are in.  OB exists to be a metaphor for life, and as such, life is just a giant set of challenges, albeit (i’ve never actually used that word before, hope it makes sense here) an undefined set of challenges, but the same 3 stages occur.  You can either succumb, cope, or thrive in life.  We generally focus on the first two.  Depression would be people succumbing to the various challenges of life.  Coping is harder to define, but is basically a going through the motions type of approach.  It’s an approach described in the book “Tuesday’s With Morrie,” where people keep themselves occupied with a zillion different things, work, food, money, job, gym, but never take a step back to conemplate what the point of it all is, at least, not until they’re old and dying.  Then, there’s thriving.  And in the same way that it used to be ugly to consider oneself a liberal, it probably sounds ugly for me to say, “I’m thriving in life.”  It’s like putting salt in other people’s wounds, but that’s not what i want.  I think all people should honestly love every second of life, there jobs, school, relationships, everything.  And all it really comes down to is mindset and personal philosophy of life, and that’s what I hope to continue to spell out in a clearer manner for people, and that’s what I hope to promote through the creation of educational programs that help people realize what it means to thrive in life, versus simply coping, or, sadly, succumbing to the challenges of life.  And, part of thriving in life means being optimistic, and as I started this all of with, right now is an optimistic time to be alive.  It’s not only an optimistic time because of the opportunities available to us, but it’s an optimistic time to be alive because change in our culture is happening right now.  As Michael Moore put it, it’s suddenly cool to be political, where as 4 years ago it was cool to be apathetic.  Change has occured without us really noticing, without any crazy revolution, and it will continue to change for the better.

  
  

  As always, comments, both postive and constructive are welcome.

  
  

  -Dan

  
  

   

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