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Posts Tagged ‘Temple University’

Coincidence

Posted in Music, Personal Mythology, Television, Video, tagged , , , , , , , on September 24, 2013| 7 Comments »

Triple SpiralThe rational part of my brain always wants to shrug off coincidence as mere matters of probability but I still am excited in a way when I experience it, even when the coincidences are seemingly  mundane, not appearing as some sort of cosmic omen or example of the universe’s synchronicity.

Take this past weekend.  I had one of those weird moments when I was singing a song to myself and just a short time later it pops up on the car radio.  Now, that doesn’t seem like too much of a coincidence.  I mean, I’m sure most of us have had this experience, especially when a song is popular and regularly played on our favorite station.  I know this used to happen to me all the time as a kid, when I would be humming a song and would flip on the radio and there it was, almost synchronized in its timing.  But this recent time was with a song from 1967 that was not a classic song but a novelty hit, Judy in Disguise (With Glasses),   from what was considered a bubblegum band of the time, John Fred and the Playboys.

I shrugged it off with a smile.  It is an infectious song, after all.  Besides, who wants to think that their destiny is somehow entwined with this song?

Then on Sunday evening, we were watching the Martin Scorsese produced Boardwalk Empire on HBO.    A few days before this, I had written a post for this blog that was titled Acres of Diamonds, about the famed inspirational speech from Temple University founder Russell Conwell.  The episode this night was also titled Acres of Diamonds and briefly played  a recording of the speech performed by Conwell.

This coincidence gave me more of a pause than Judy in Disguise.  It just struck me as odd that I had chosen to write about this story on just the weekend that it was also referenced on the TV show.  It was a somewhat famous speech in its time but is pretty obscure today.

Coincidence or omen , a symbol of deeper meaning?  Some view coincidence as evidence of a universal consciousness or of God’s directing hand at work.  I don’t know that we can ever know with any certainty of such things.   I know that I would like to believe that these pop culture coincidences somehow demonstrate that I am closer to the center of the labyrinth that is life, but, as I said, the rational part of me tells me to take it easy– if it’s a symbol, it will reveal itself in due time.  If not, it’s just a fun coincidence.

What do you think this is trying to tell me?  Maybe the message was a warning about buying those pants. Message received…

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Acres of Diamonds

Posted in Influences, Motivation, Quote, tagged , , , on September 20, 2013| 5 Comments »

Grass-Is-Greener“The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment.”

—Earl Nightingale

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It’s funny sometimes what you take from an experience in your life.  At one point in my life I was in the retail car business, working at a Honda dealership both as a salesman and a finance manager.  In order to keep their sales staff engaged and excited about pushing their product, the management there would periodically send us to seminars with industry-specific motivational speakers and would also have sets of motivational tapes from other speakers that they would encourage us to listen to in our free time.  One of the sets of tapes was from a man named Earl Nightingale who had a deep and engaging voice that added a serious dimension to whatever he said.  As I listened to his tapes, my interest grew as he told his little tales and his lessons registered deeply within me.

One of his stories was a short retelling of a classic lecture  called Acres of Diamonds from Russell H Conwell (1843-1925), an interesting fellow who was a baptist minister, a lawyer, a philanthropist and the founder and first president of Temple University.  The lecture, one that Conwell delivered over 5000 times during his lifetime, made the point that the riches we seek are often right in our own backyards.  His tale is of an African farmer who sells his farm in order to go in search of diamonds and finds nothing but failure that ends with his suicide.  Meanwhile, the man who took over the farm found an abundance of diamonds and ended up with one of the largest diamond mines in Africa.

There were a lot of lessons to be learned from this tale but primarily  what I took away  was that I must leave the car business–it was not my backyard.   It was the place to which I had come in search of my own diamonds.  I had not yet, at that point, began to search my own backyard. I am not sure if that was the message that management had been hoping would sink in.  Or maybe it was.

The other part of Nightingale’s message was that you had to set a course, aim for a destination.  Everything was possible if you knew where you wanted to go and truly set your mind to it.  He gave a laundry list of great human accomplishments that were achieved once we put our minds and wills in motion towards their fulfillment.  That resonated with me.  I had seen many people over the years who seemed deeply unhappy in their lives and most had no direction going forward, no destination for which they were working.  They drifted like a rudderless boat on the sea, going wherever the strongest current took them without having any influence over this motion.

If you can name it, you can do it in some form.

As I said, it’s funny how things influence you.  It’s been about twenty five years since I heard those words but they still resonate strongly with me, even now.  I try to be always conscious of the goals I set, knowing that the mind and the universe will always try to make a way for the possibility of achievement.

 

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