General Archives

How to Achieve Success

There are some keys to success in an online business or activity.

It starts with determination.

In order to succeed, you have to take action, and again, and again, and again. It isn’t a case of starting, doing something once and then doing nothing more. It requires continuous creation. Can be fun, sometimes just hard grind. But if you don’t do enough of it and keep at it, success will not be able to find you.

That brings us to persistence.

By doing a little often through time, we can achieve greater things. It takes time for action to build into volume. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time. It’s like exercise: going to the gym every day for a week, for 30 mins a day brings more result than doing 3 hours on a Friday.

A Colourful Change in Afghanistan

This short video from the BBC caught my eye.

A change taking place in Afghanistan in an unexpected direction shows a colourful scene in Afghanistan

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/must_see/41754605/rainbow-paint-job-to-cheer-up-people-in-kabul?SThisFB

Outlander

“Outlander” brings to life a Scotland past and a Scotland present.

Watching Jamie in his traditional kilt enacting the part of a Scottish laird in the 1740′s
popularises the Scottish culture and ethos around the world. With his Scottish Highlander
integrity and values of honour, hospitality, friendship, loyalty, he give inspiration to a
way of life that was suppressed by the English then event until now. The Gaelic language,
once widespread throughout the country, nowadays, is spoken only in a few parts of the country,
mostly the more remote and rural areas in the West and North.

It is interesting that a Gaelic speaker once told me, there is no word in Gaelic for enemy.
There is only an “unfriend” and no word for “hate”

It is also interesting that a film series about characters living in Scotland during the
time of the Scottish Wars of Independence, the Jacobite Rebellion and the various battles
that took place around that time such as the Battle of Culloden and the Battle of Prestonpans
should be so popular around the world.

Apparently, David Cameron, as Prime Minister, had not wanted the series to be shown in the
United Kingdom, as he didn’t want to increase the popularity of Scottish Independence ahead
of the Scottish Independence Referendum. And so, it was produced by Hollywood, filmed in
Scotland and released worldwide, but unknown in Scotland for quite some time after its
release.

Earlier this year, I met a group of Chinese teachers visiting the UK from a city I had never
heard of in central China. But they had watched “Outlander” — and loved it whilst I had never
heard of it nor seen it.

Later in the year, I paid a visit to Doune Castle in Central Scotland, where my nieces had once
played hide and seek as children near the village where they grew up.

Doune Castle was used as the location for Castle Leoch. This time, it was mobbed by tourists
and visitors from all over the world, Japanese, American, German, French visiting the locations
of Outlander or following the Jacobite trail. With parking (which was full) and copies of Diane
Galbadon’s Outlander series of books for sale, the Castle has taken on a new life.

A man with American accent approached: “Do you speak English?” Relieved that we did, he wanted
to know, Do you know what the name of that pretty pink flower is that’s growing by the roadside?
We did and could tell him. It’s Rosebay Willow Herb.

All along the roadsides leading up to the Castle and for miles around, the verges were thick
with vast swathes of willow herb, turning hills and lochsides pink, next to mounds of purple
heather just unfolding its tiny bells. And rowan berries turning scarlet as they ripened.

Claire would have been happy with all the herbs and plants.

So with that in mind, here are some of the favourite Scottish locations of the artist and crew
working on Outlander.

Here is Jamie’s favourite, and I have to agree with him, even my blog header is based on photos
I took of Skye. And Skye is one of my favourite places in Scotland.

http://www.travelandleisure.com/culture-design/tv-movies/outlander-cast-and-crew-favorite-locations#isle-of-skye-scotland

And to add to that is Kinloch Rannoch, used for the setting of the standing stones scenes where Claire
is transported back to the past.

http://www.travelandleisure.com/culture-design/tv-movies/outlander-cast-and-crew-favorite-locations#kinloch-rannoch-scotland

It would only be appropriate that the character who plays Prince Charles Stuart, Andrew Gower, would love
Stirling Castle, the childhood home of the Stuart Kings just before the Union of the Crowns when a Stuart king of the
Scots became the King of England.

http://www.travelandleisure.com/culture-design/tv-movies/outlander-cast-and-crew-favorite-locations#stirling-castle-scotland

How Tom Cruise Creates Films

The way that Tom Cruise works is something fascinating to find out more about. This short video interview is very revealing. It shows how he works, how he adapts his story line as he creates a film, how he creates the character. Inspiring stuff.

In this interview with Marc Fennel we here from Tom how he develops his story and what makes him tick.

I wanted to share this story with you.

I came across a new viewpoint about the world we live in and to say the least it was quite a surprising and totally fascinating glimpse of things.

We are all used to hearing music though our tastes can differ about what we like to hear. And we are used to hearing the everyday sounds of the environment we live in, whether in a city or the country side, seaside or mountain side, there are cars, radios and tv’s, planes and trains, construction equipment, police sirens and ambulances, tractors and vacuum cleaners and till machines, and if we are lucky, birds and the sound of the waves on rocks, and wind in the trees and children laughing.

And we see the patterns of the waves in the sand, the clouds in the sky.

But what if there was a reeaally rrreeaally simple basic level that sound and vibration operated at to shape the physical world we inhabit.

What if the amount of vibration shaped the patterns or the forms in the physical universe.

A new science called Cymatics is exploring just exactly that.

Here are some fascinating youtube videos showing just how amazing this new look at the world is. It is described in a video called Amazing Resonance Experiment which you can find here:

and here in another fascinating glimpse into the transforming designs of sand particles in response to different vibration tones here: Incredible UV Sand Resonance Experiment:

Setting Up a Word Press Blog

Setting up a blog on word press is by far the easiest and most user friendly site for hosting your own blog. It’s free to use for a standalone blog on its own if you just want a bit of fun writing or to find a quick way to get started.

If you want to, you can also buy hosting and a domain name that matches your blog with one of the registered companies where they will register your domain name officially which will protect it from being used by someone else.

The company I use personally is called D9 Hosting. They have been completely reliable and delivered excellent service over the 5 years I have been with them. I know several internet marketers who use this company for their 6 and 7 figure internet businesses and recommend D9 for their great support.

Setting up a blog can be time consuming but it can be done in as little as 5-10 mins. Of course you can get interested in being more creative with your project and if you have the skills and the time, or the money to hire someone, there are a lot of interesting graphics that you can play with and add to your content.

Education – Some Thoughts About It

Been looking at education recently and seeing what some people of influence had to say about it.

Some amazing and fruitful quotes came to view when googling education and I felt I had to pass some of them on.

One of the best was the words of Martin Luther King, actually Dr Martin Luther King, a Doctor of Diviinity, a civil rights leader, an American man of colour as we would now say, who obviously thought long and hard about a great many things in his struggle to overcome segregation and racial prejudice in America. In his consideration

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”

He became a spokesman for more than the black civil rights movement. He became a leader of men on the world stage as these words show from his Nobel Peace prize acceptance speech in Oslo, 1964.

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway, 1964

So when talking about books and reading, and why we should teach little children to read and let them keep them at it, I came across this little priceless nugget of insight from another great voice of America. This time Oprah Winfrey, the talk host show, Number 2 on the Forbes list of the 10 Top Richest Self Made Women at an estimated 3.1 billion fortune.

“Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.”

Well that is certainly a shift of viewpoint. She grew up on a small farm, with her grandmother, where they grew everything. There were no shopping trips to town.

Oprah has this to say about herself.

“I don’t think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who, from an early age, knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.”

And so this brings me to another completely different story from the opposite end of the spectrum.

This is the incredibly inspiring story of Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Peace prize winner at the age of 17, in 2014. Malala was born in Pakistan where her father was an educator and had a school. Malala wanted to learn, and become educated which was not something the Taliban were in favour of.

Malala also had been blogging for the BBC since 2009 about life and conditions under the Taliban regime. This was not popular with them either.

One day on her way to school, some Taliban soldiers got on the bus taking her and her friends to school and asked which of the girls on the bus was Malala. When she was identified, she was shot at close range in the head. Miraculously, she did not die. She was flown to Birmingham in the United Kingdom, where doctors operated on her more than once to save her life. She is now living in the United Kingdom with her family and pursuing her education. Her story went viral and she rose to become a person of influence and speaker about matters of concern for her.

Malala was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for her actions her struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education. She shared the prize with Kailash Satyarthi.

She has this to say about her experiences.

“I don’t want to be remembered as the girl who was shot. I want to be remembered as the girl who stood up.

The one thing she said that I love best of all is this statement.

“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.

And so to close, these profound words.

“Extremists have shown what frightens them most. A girl with a book.”

“With guns you can kill terrorists, with education you can kill terrorism.”

A Different Point of View

A family visit over the Christmas festivities provoked a new look at things.

Two children came in tow with an older relative for a family visit over the festive season.

There wasn’t an option to say no, no opt -out was available. So, the only solution was to embrace the experience and make it enjoyable, make it as much fun as possible for the kids, the visitors and ourselves.

Mouths were fed. Hands washed. Out came the toys borrowed from a neighbour. We didn’t have any anymore.

We started entertaining our young guests. A ball and stick, a bit of space and a large helping of imagination are wonderful things. All it took was a few simple toys.

And then the laughter started. There is nothing like the sound of children laughing.
They were so giggling and joyous, at nothing really, as only children can be. And soon us old fogeys were laughing and genuinely having fun too.

Then some other information came out, something that I had no idea about.

The children had been adopted. Once they had been living on the street, homeless, begging for food in order to stay alive. One of the children was found, aged only 5, collecting bottles off the street to get money to buy food for herself and her parents. Her older sisters had been sold into prostitution. This was soon to happen to her.

It made me look at my own life, my own family circumstances, the people around me.
We were blessed. In ways I had never thought about.

There was enough food, there were clothes, there was shelter, children were born healthy and grew up into happy contributing members of society. We lived in a world that was stable, not war torn, gunned, poisoned with chemicals and burned by the scorched earth policy of an enemy.

There weren’t third generation children born deformed by their grandparent’s exposure to Agent Orange. Religious persecution wasn’t an everyday life or death matter. Living to a ripe old age is normal.

Yes I counted my blessings. And wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year too

A View on Brexit

As we move forward in time, having wavered from the group of countries known as the European Union, there may be some circumstances we will need to suffer through in order to move onwards and upwards. The British people feel strongly about control, in particular being controlled by others. And the urge to Freedom is universal. So with that in mind, the majority of Brits decided that we should leave the European Union.

At the end of the day, it is trade that makes the world go round. The Romans founded an empire on trade around the Mediterranean. The Vikings travelled and traded all around the Baltic, the Middle East, the Atlantic sea board and the North Sea, even into the Middle East.

Marco Polo made his way to the East and back, bringing tales of fabulous wealth, of new materials and spices and exotically different cultures all the way to China through Persia and the other lands of the Silk Road. And with this trade in silks and china, spices and precious jewels, came back ideas from the philosophers of Greece recorded by the Arabic thinkers and knowledge developed by mathematicians of the Middle East creating what became known as the Renaissance in Italy and the rest of Europe.

Great Britain in past centuries traded by sea all over the known world from 1600′s onward and explored and discovered other unknown worlds, along with Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese explorers who found sea routes to the Americas, both north and south, to the West Indies, to Africa, India, to Australia and New Zealand and the many different lands and islands of the Far East.

Whatever happens, people will still need and want to do business and trade whatever services and products they can produce and deliver, and want to exchange them with other nations and cultures in other parts of the world. Sane people will come to agreements that permit this. Sane governments and politicians will work it out so this can still occur as we still depend on each other buying and selling our goods and services — for our future survival is mutual and interdependent.

WHAT THE LABELS DON’T TELL YOU

A great many of us enjoy the Great British Bake Off.

Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood are well known public figures with celebrity status, and the program has done much to popularize baking with people up and down the country. In fact not just inside the British Isles. The BBC exports the program around the world. Mary with her wonderful cakes and pies and pastries and Paul who is a master bread baker. Who could
resist?

And not just Mary and Paul.

There are lots of other programs, with James Martin doing Saturday in my Kitchen, the stratospheric Masterchef, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay showing their different takes on life in the restaurant kitchen and the family home, not to mention the Hairy Bikers travelling around the world sampling world cuisine.

Most cakes, breads and pastries start with flour, white flour to be precise. Easily available, cheap, light and fluffy powder, versatile, adaptable and multi-purposed. There are different strengths and types, each more suited to a specific purpose depending on the type of wheat it’s produced from. But all white, refined and standardized to be consistent from packet to packet, brand to brand so our cakes and pancakes are mouthwatering, our pies and pastries delicious and filling, our sauces smooth and creamy.

And look good.

That beautiful white flour so appreciated in our modern, western way of modern life as one of the best comforts and most pleasantly useful, versatile kitchen ingredients has a deadly secret.

Those of us who count calories and watch our weight might be shocked to know there is more.
In the USA, 140 million tons of white flour is produced DAILY according to the North American Millers Association. That’s a lot of flour.

To speed up the process of preparing the flour for sale, it is treated with chlorine gas which whitens it. It also produces a chemical called alloxan when the chlorine reacts with proteins in the flour. Alloxan doesn’t have to be declared on the food labels as an ingredient because it’s not been added to the flour.

What’s the big deal?

Alloxan is toxic to humans and destroys the cells in the pancreas which produce insulin. Diabetes is the result.

This is so well known and reliable that research scientists feed alloxan to rats and laboratory animals to produce diabetic animals to use for experimental research.

Something to think about next time you order a Danish pastry with your cappuccino for breakfast. Or pop out to buy a bag of bleached white flour for a spot of healthy home baking.

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