"Can You Imagine?"

On Saturday I took a drive up to Santa Barbara to attend the small workshop on “happiness” facilitated on by Dr. Robert Mueller and his lovely wife Barbara. It was wonderful to see and meet them in person and hear in their own words the stories that I’ve read on a number of occasions. It was a wonderfully inspiring couple of hours and well worth the crack-of-dawn drive up there on Saturday morning.

It was a beautiful and crisp morning, with bright blue skies and just whisper mist around the hilltops. I recall thinking that I wished I’d brought a camera along with me because there were several magnificent views on the hour or so drive up from Los Angeles.

I can certainly understand why the Muller’s have chosen to live in Santa Barbara. If there’s any place in the world that one can be happy certainly it is there. It’s a spot that feels almost magical, like anything in the world that you could imagine could happen here.

It’s no wonder why Dr. Robert Mueller is called “the happiest man on earth.” I was thoroughly inspired by his infectious optimism. This is a man who has had some incredible experiences in his lifetime and I feel so fortunate that he is so willing to share all of his amazing life stories.

Something interesting that I hadn’t particularly noticed before, that was strikingly apparent to me, is how often Dr. Mueller punctuates his stories with “Can you imagine?”

I love that phrase which makes me feel that anything I can possibly imagine, I can make reality.

Arianna Huffington's "On Becoming Fearless"

I had an opportunity to go to a book signing at Borders Books in Westwood last night. Arianna Huffington gave a talk and was signing her new book; “On Becoming Fearless.” I think that Arianna is a tremendous woman, though I don't necessarily agree with all of her policy opinions, I think she’s absolutely terrific; strong, confident, articulate, an exceedingly bright. She included some very personal stories from the book and discussed the fact that of all the previous ten books that she has written, this one makes her the most emotionally vulnerable.

I wanted to ask her last night, though I unfortunately didn’t have an opportunity, what is it that’s going on in her personal life right now that compelled her to write this book about fearlessness? Perhaps I’ll send her an e-mail and pose the question.

As I was waiting for Arianna to start last evening, I read the introduction to the book. Though it seems primarily geared toward a female audience, I could certainly relate to a number of the fears that she discusses in the opening. I initially was going to buy this book for my mother and send her this copy (that I had signed for her), but now I think I’m going to read myself as well. I get a sense that there will be some interesting lessons for me contained within some of her stories.

One of the topics that Arianna discussed last evening was the internal “critical voice” that we each have somewhere deep inside our mind. Her opinion is such that women have a much louder and harsher voice than men. I’m not sure on what she bases this opinion, but I found it a rather intriguing and provoking thought. She refers to her internal voice as “my obnoxious roommate,” which I thought was a rather hysterical way to think about this internal voice, to which I all too often find myself the subject of its criticism.

"Who is David?" Why Twelve Stories?

I’ve been asked by a number of people; “Why twelve stories in the book?” I don’t know the answer to that really; it just seemed like a somewhat spiritual and mystical and appropriate number to use. There are twelve signs of the zodiac, twelve months a year, twelve apostles, and there are twelve doughnuts in a dozen. I think these are probably as good a reasons as any.

Since this is the first book that I’ve written, I also was thinking about it in terms of manageable, small biographies to write about people. Most popular books it seems are about 300 or so pages, so I figured that if I use twelve stories of about 25 pages each, this would give me the ability to write the stories and end up with about the right size finished book.

I’m going to start a PowerPoint presentation today to develop the marketing plan for the book. I’ve been reading up a bit about how to market a book these days; it’s not really just about putting it on Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com, an author must really create a complete and comprehensive marketing plan in order to get the information about the book out there into the marketplace. It seems there are number of coaches that can help in this regard. The one I have found that I rather like is the Arielle Ford.

I think that once I have a sample story or two for the book, as well as some introductory pages, I think I would like to hire Arielle or a coach like her in order to help me get the book to an appropriate publisher.

Dr. Robert Muller: A Most Remarkable Man

I’ve been on the lookout for twelve people for whom I can write mini-bios to include in my book “David.” [The subtitle for the book is; “How to twelve ordinary people found extraordinary passion in their lives."]

I was watching the Wisdom Channel [now Lime] some time ago and I saw Chantal’s Westerman interviewing for a former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations. This man’s optimism was instantly infectious.

This was the first time that I’ve heard of Dr. Robert Mueller. He’s now in his 80’s and is the Chancellor of the University for Peace in Costa Rica. I’ve immediately went to go to the Internet to look up more about this fellow. The more I researched, the more I found out how amazing he really is. He is one of those people that I’m sure when you meet him in person you see his eyes sparkle; so full of passion, so full of optimism, and so full of life.

[for more information http://www.robertmuller.org/]

I immediately thought to myself, “This is somebody I need to include in my book.”

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