Land of 1,000 Dances and WWE

At the request of Keith...

The Grant Study

The Grant Study is a longitudinal study of Harvard graduates from the 1940s that tracked many of them their entire lives. Its purpose was to learn about the lives of these men, but it ended up revealing many complexities in the human condition - what makes us happy and how do we survive through suffering. It's a long article, but very interesting. A person's life and perspective can be completely different (and often is completely different) at age 20, 40, 50, even to the 80s.

Link.

Let's Get Happy

Time just published the 100 most influential people of our time. This was a link sent to me from a dear friend of mine, Ben, who said I helped him become happy through his friendship with me. I thought I'd pass this on. Let's get happy, people!

Nicholas Christakis

By Dan Ariely

Social scientists used to have a straightforward, if tongue-in-cheek, answer to the question of how to become happy: Surround yourself with people who are uglier, poorer and shorter than you are — and who are unhappily married and have annoying kids. You will compare yourself with these people, and the contrast will cheer you up.

Nicholas Christakis, 47, a physician and sociologist at Harvard University, challenges this idea. Using data from a study that tracked about 5,000 people over 20 years, he suggests that happiness, like the flu, can spread from person to person. When people who are close to us, both in terms of social ties (friends or relatives) and physical proximity, become happier, we do too. For example, when a person who lives within a mile of a good friend becomes happier, the probability that this person's good friend will also become happier increases 15%. More surprising is that the effect can transcend direct links and reach a third degree of separation: when a friend of a friend becomes happier, we become happier, even when we don't know that third person directly.

This means that surrounding ourselves with happier people will make us happier, make the people close to us happier — and make the people close to them happier. But social networks don't transmit only the good things in life.

Christakis found that smoking and obesity can be socially infectious too. If his thesis proves out, then the saying that you can judge a person by his or her friends might carry more weight than we thought.

Miracle II Soap

http://www.miraclesoap.com

Divine inspiration led Clayton Tedeton directly to the formula for his original Miracle II Soap and thousands of satisfied users have discovered a multitude of uses. They say it works wonders! Over the past two decades, a host of products emerged from that same inspiration; each miraculous in its own way. Here is Clayton Tedeton's story, in his own words... Testimony of Clayton Tedeton God's Faithful Servant It was God who gave me the formula for the Amazing Miracle II Soap. I awoke one night in July, 1980, to see names of minerals all miraculously flashed on my bedroom wall, along with the formulas on how to mix them. I had been talking to God and He was talking to me. My wife would hear me talking and would ask, "Clayton, what in the world is going on?" And I would tell her, "I don't know, I cannot explain to you what is happening in my life." I talked to God and He said, "I AM GOING TO GIVE YOU SOMETHING THAT EVERY PERSON THAT I HAVE CREATED ON THIS EARTH WILL NEED, AND AS LONG AS YOU GIVE ME THE GLORY, YOU WILL PROSPER AND SEE MY GLORY." One day later at 1:00 a.m., the formulation for Miracle II was miraculously flashed on my bedroom wall. The days following this I began to assemble and mix this product. The voice of God told me what to name it and how to package it. As time passed and all this time the voice of the Lord was saying, "IT'S TIME TO GO TO WORK." At this time, I did not know exactly what to do. In December 1980, I talked to the Lord and said, "I have got to have instructions so that this product can be used." A day later the Lord instructed me to take some of this product to a woman and tell her to use it for everything. I did not know the lady at this time. After three days, she called me and said, "Every time I use this product, the strangest things happen to me, I'm going to have to pray about this." On the 17th day of April 1982 at 9:00 a.m., the lady called me and said, "Mr. Tedeton, for the last two months the Lord has instructed me to write a set of instructions for that product that you brought me. When can you come and pick them up." That day I picked up the instructions and that same day the voice (which I know to have been God), said "YOU CAN RECEIVE WHAT YOU HAVE ALWAYS DESIRED - CONTENTMENT AND PEACE IN YOUR SOUL."

Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
    flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
    went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
    bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.