Welcome to the 1st edition of the Carnival of the Life Worth Living. I hope this will be a monthly event. What do you think? (Leave a comment, please.)

My new favorite tag line: “Life is a game where you make the rules – so why aren’t you winning?” passed on to me by Meredith Hamilton from expertcommunications.blogspot.com

There were several great submissions! I’m glad I didnt’ offer a prize for the best one – I would have had a tough time of it. There were also some sumissions which I declined to include in the carnival. Those had nothing to do with the theme of the carnival at all.

So now, in no particular order, I present to you, the

Carnival of the Life Worth Living

Dan Taylor presents Five Steps to Peace? posted at The 45-Year Old Six Pack.

Gabriella Kortsch, Ph.D. presents Your Beliefs and Your Health posted at Psychology, Transformation & Freedom

Nadege presents Unlock your potential in three difficult steps (made easy). posted at Clearly Envision.

Ali Hale presents How to Stop Making Excuses and Start Making Changes posted at The Office Diet.

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Possibly Good, Albeit Annoying Advice posted at Mad Kane’s Humor Blog.

woopi clients presents VOLUNTEER PROGRAM posted at Arts and Movie Ramblings.

Mike Remer presents Wish Exercise wasn’t so Hard? | My Path To Fitness Blog posted at My Path To Fitness Blog.

Christine presents two submissions: Wants vs Needs: A Look at Personal Consumption, and Is Marriage Outdated?. Both are posted at Me, My Kid and Life: An American Single Mom Living in France.

Matthew Spears presents I ’should’ heal and grow. posted at Loving Awareness.

gia combs-ramirez presents Your Life’s Purpose posted at The Science of Energy Healing.

parna presents Is daydreaming good for you? posted at Beauty and Personal Grooming.

Rio presents Living Your Best Life posted at Get Financially Fit!.

Rose Walbrugh presents Beliefs of happy people posted at FreeMyMind.Net.

therapydoc presents Separation Anxiety posted at Everyone Needs Therapy.

David B. Bohl presents Life Balance or Life Juggling? posted at Slow Down Fast Today!.

Alvaro Fernandez presents The Power of Mindsight-by Daniel Goleman posted at Brain Fitness.

Terry presents Why Traveling Makes You A Better Person posted at Complete and Creative.

Rich Vosler presents Pruning makes growth for new life and Don’t let your struggles defeat you. Both are posted at Sales Training Tips.

Jenny presents Take Time For Yourself posted at the so called me.

Rebecca Suzanne Dean presents Why Japan, Rebecca? posted at Rebecca Dean.

Chris Guillebeau presents How to Be Unremarkably Average posted at The Art of Nonconformity.

Albert Foong presents The Art of Giving What You Don’t Have » Personal Development – The Urban Monk posted at Urban Monk.

Gary Evans presents Why Won’t The Law of Attraction Work For Me? posted at Good To Feel Good.

Dana presents Unexpected encouragement posted at Principled Discovery.

nicole presents 84 Things To Live By posted at Makeitbetter’s Weblog.

Taylor Coburn presents How Are You Dividing Your Attention? posted at Internet Business at ProcessToProfits.

Semi-Charmed Wife presents Questions That May Help You Find Your Purpose | Semi-Charmed Wife posted at Semi-Charmed Wife.

Bragoo presents We Have To Start Pushing Each Other Up The Ladder posted at Life Improvement Tips For Thin and Small People.

These are submissions that didn’t really fit. I include them here as an honorable mention.

Joshua Seth presents Leap Year Lasik and Life, Love, and Martians… posted at Joshua Seth Blog.

GP presents Montana on my Mind posted at Innstyle Montana- Come on Inn.

Rose Walbrugh presents Depression – Is a new perspective needed? posted at FreeMyMind.Net.

Dave presents Shen’s Scribbles and Thoughts: My Autobiography.. Who Am I? posted at Shen’s Scribbles and Thoughts.

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• Dead man walking?
• Making time for self-improvement
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Money. 

It’s been called the root of all evil.  

Money has never really been my friend. We’ve had more of a long-distance relationship. Everytime I wanted to get closer to money, the farther away it seemed to run. :)

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned more about my relationship with money. I grew up with a misunderstanding about money because my parents didn’t teach me about the importance of saving or investing. I can’t blame them for it, though. They didn’t know how to use money either, so how could they have taught their children?

My family was not dirt poor, but finances were always tight. I look back on my family’s use of money, and I now understand our lack of money was not due to not having any, it was about the attitude we had about money and how we used it.

As soon as money came into our lives, it was spent right away. If somehow there was extra money, we found something to spend it on.

There was never a discussion of saving for the future. Or investing. Investing was something only rich people did because they had extra money to invest.

I’ve now learned that saving and investing is something we must all do if we ever hope to escape the rat race. I’ve learned Money is the tool we use to achieve our goals. Money, itself, should never be the goal.

Read

One way to change your view of money is to read books like The Richest Man in Babylon or Think and Grow Rich or Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Money is like a seed

Back before there were genetically engineered crops, a farmer would harvest his corn, save some of it for planting the following year, and sell or eat the remaining. If he didn’t save some seeds for the future, he would end up with nothing. He would have to go out to beg, borrow or buy more so he could feed his family. In otherwords, if he didn’t invest some of his corn this year, he couldn’t grow a crop next year.

This is the same lesson we need to know about money. Most of us (at least most of the people I have known) live paycheck to paycheck. They spend everything they make, and save nothing for the future. So they have to continually work, spend, work, spend, work …. You get the idea. But what happens when you can’t work anymore? What then?

The investment-minded worker knows to set aside a portion of his pay for the future. As described in The Richest Man in Babylon, each of your dollars is a soldier you can put to work to earn more soldiers.

One of the best things that happened for my future was investing in a 401k. I didn’t like it at first. It was forced on me by municipal government I worked for after college. They had no retirement plan, so everyone was forced to contribute at least 6% to a 401k. They contributed 3%. I hated it at first. Then as the money began to grow, I saw the wisdom of it. Had they not forced me to save, would I have had anything at all for my future? Probably not.

Financial education is something they don’t teach in school. I belive if every grade had a mandatory class on saving, investing, and business, we would all be better off.

It’s generally accepted that the older you get, the harder it will be to save enough. The Simple Dollar just posted this review of Start Late, Finish Rich that may give hope to those who think it’s too late.

I encourage all of you to think about your financial future. It’s never too soon. As a matter of fact, if the average 18-year-old started a reasonable retirement plan, they could retire as a millionaire without much difficulty. And if they were aggressive about it, they could retire well before the normal retirement age.

This guest post is from Fredrik Öhrn, a writer, based in Bangkok, Thailand, who blogs in English at www.careofasia.com and in Swedish at http://www.ifred.se.

I signed up for an Adventure race a while back. Adventure racing in Thailand means, Jungle- running, Mountainbiking, Kayaking, swimming and a few other surprise obstacles along the way. The duration of the race is usually somewhere around 6 hours.

So I had signed up, I ha a partner (you do adventure racing, usually in teams of two or more) and the date of the race was drawing closer. One week before, I got a cold. I was not feeling up for this race at all. Three days to go, and the cold was worse than ever.

Then I let go, I saw myself off the cold, running through the Jungle with a perfect stride, jumping on my bike just to see myself flying down (and up) the hills surrounding The River Kwai. The only thing I did not see myself doing was kayaking – but that is another story. Of course I was not going to have a cold at the time of the race.

The Race
Raceday came, it had been raining heavily the day before and we were all kind of excited to get muddy, working ourself through the jungle and The River.

The race started at 8.40 – we all took off on our bikes, after about 20 minutes we reached the first transition area and we switched to running.

No trails, just trees, leaves and grass. And hills. It started going uphill shortly after the start, up, up and up. Exhusting most of the time and at times it was tricky to get by the rolling rocks without causing an avalanche. We had to run with our helmets on for protection – but there is really only so much a bicycle helmet can do against falling rocks after all.

We reached a part where it flattened out a bit and we got on a nice trail, I was feeling strong and took a moment to look around – WOW! Fantastic! It was almost like running indoors, in a corridor. Bamboo trees covering both the sides of the trail and we were almost totally covered by the same trees from above, it was magic.

We were jogging, not very fast, I got goosebumps all over my body – there I was running in the jungle, beautiful landscape surrounding me, I felt good, this is life – I am truly alive!

We finished the run, got back on our bikes and rode them to the river.

The River Kwai
Everyone knows about this river, everyone has seen the movie, heard about the bridge and we all know the name of this river. The River – The River Kwai.

We stopped for some drinking water, got ourselves a kayak and jumped in. We were now paddling on the River Kwai.

My arms started aching after about 7 minutes in the kayak, the trip down the river became more of a pain that it should have been. It was quiet, we passed a couple of beautiful monestaries where the nuns were sitting on huge porches overlooking the river, probably wondering what we all were doing.

I could have told them: We were alive and kicking, having a blast, feeling the pain in our bodies and enjoying it, thanks to the endorphines, the river, the mountains and the great outdoors.

After kayaking and then swimming in the same river, we went on a long jungle run, running in rivers, climbing rope ladders and at times it felt like you were on a set of an old Vietnam-war movie, minus the guns.

We finished the race after 5 hours and 21 minutes in 6th place out of many teams. We were tired and we were hungry but very happy!

Sometimes you have to take the effort, to sign up, buy the ticket, get out of the couch, turn off your TV, go somewhere and see something different. It may be a struggle at first, you might be a little bit intimidated or even afraid, but do it anyway. It will put a big smile on your face and you will feel so much more alive afterwards that you would wonder why you even considered not doing it.

The 7 steps:

1. Pick a goal

2. Make necessary preparations

3. Take small steps towards your goal

4. As you approach it – make sure you are relaxed.

5. Have fun along the way, feel how you are alive.

6. Have fun reaching the goal

7. Enjoy finding a new goal and a new challenge.

This is true for any goal as well as for life – it’s really 7 steps – where the goal is what you want to do with your life. Don’t feel stressed, feel relaxed and keep taking small steps towards your goal.

Fredrik Öhrn

I added something fun to the 125 x 125 pixel ads you see on the right sidebar. The 6th spot will rotate randomly. At least 5, but no more than 24 ads will be held in the ‘Random Queue’ to be selcted from.

I thought it would be entertaining (for me anyway) and economical (for advertisers).

If you are interested in advertising rates or blog stats, click here.

I was sad to find out Gary Gygax had died. Gygax was a co-creator of the game Dungeons and Dragons. I never looked up to him like a hero or anything, but I have always been appreciative of what roleplaying has done for my life.

I was a very shy kid in Jr. High. I didn’t really come out of my shell until High School, when I started roleplaying. I became one of those AD&D geeks.

I played AD&D through High School and for several years thereafter when I joined the Air Force. I played with different groups of people from all over the country and outside our country.

Why am I telling you this? Because believe roleplaying games are one way to develop imagination and social skills. I know, I know. You’re probably thinking, “Geeks are not known for their social skills.” Let me give you an example.

Roleplaying games are good for development

In Jr. High when it came time for speech class, I was frozen. I mumbled my speech, couldn’t make eye contact, and my heart would nearly beat out of my chest. I hated public speaking. Outside of the classroom I didn’t make eye contact with others. I didn’t feel comfortable speaking to people I didn’t know, or even those I kinda knew.

Then, as I began to roleplay, I found it easier to speak in front of groups. It was simple: I just had to pretend it wasn’t me speaking. I became someone else, a politician, a wiseman, an expert. I even pretended to be someone else who was pretending to be me, if that makes any sense. I “steped out of myself” and in so doing, I left my fear of speaking behind.

Soon, public speaking became natural. Eventually I realized I wasn’t even pretending anymore. It was me speaking. And I liked it.

Some could say it wasn’t roleplaying in particular that helped me overcome my fear of public speaking, but just the fact that I joined a social group that happended to be composed of roleplayers. Joining a social groups is one of the points Scott Young writes about in his post You Won’t Get Anywhere With Poor Social Skills at Pick The Brain.

I choose to believe it was roleplaying, at least in my case.

Develop creativity

Roleplaying games helped develop a my creativity. Soon, instead of playing in a game, I was running them. I was devising my own adventures for groups of friends. I even created a series of adventures based on the book, The Shattered World, that drew notice from the author, Michael Reaves.

My creative nature has helped me to “think outside of the box” on many projects in my career. I’ve often been complimented, and given an occasional reward, for my creative approaches to problems.

I don’t believe I would have followed the same path had I not been a roleplayer. I have no idea where I would have ended up if I hadn’t been able to overcome my fear of public speaking. Maybe I would have overcome it another way, but I’m not so sure. I know that roleplaying helped exercise and develop my creative nature.

It’s now been years since I’ve played. I’ve grown out of it I guess.

Thank you, Gary Gygax. Your spearheading the table-top roleplaying genre helped one shy kid become a self-confident man.

Readers, tell me, what is your experience with roleplaying games?

]]> http://www.daniel-ailean.com/blog/lessons-from-roleplaying/feed 0 http://www.daniel-ailean.com/blog/problogger-traffic-spike http://www.daniel-ailean.com/blog/problogger-traffic-spike#comments Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:01:50 +0000 Shawn http://www.doyouliveorsimplyexist.com/2008/03/04/problogger-traffic-spike/

My recent guest post on Problogger.net was good for traffic over all. The graphic at the top is the statistics from the wordpress dashboard. The lower graphic is from statcounter.com. I believe the difference in the count is due to statistcs be gathered in different timezones.

The end result: 2 to 3 times more daily visitors and RSS subscribers.

Thank you all for coming!

The theme of this carnival is “Carpe Diem” Seize the Day: strategies to live the rest of your life by.

The deadline for entries is March 15, 2008. You may submit your entry at http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_3683.html (I will update the URL as soon as the carnival entry is live.)

I hope to see your submission!

It was quite confusing because feedburner showed me that subscription by email was enabled, and yet no one could subscribe. Turns out I mis-typed the feed ID when I created the link on my blog. I was sending everyone to someone else’s feed!

I’m glad the other feed didn’t have email subscriptions enabled. Who knows what you would have received. Ha ha.

Here is the direct link for those who prefer to subscribe by email rather than rss.

Thanks to everyone who pointed it out to me.

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You may also like:

• Participate in the Carnival of the Life Worth Living
• Does “Nofollow” do any good for a blog?
• Would you like to write a guest column?
• Guest Column: Are You Unconsciously Limiting Your Wealth Potential?
• My guest spot on ProBlogger.net

I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.