Make Me YoungerIdeas you can use for natural wellness

A friend asked me the other day, “…given the sorry state of so much in the world, what’s possible to look forward to?”

The state isn’t sorry. It’s wide open.

Interest rates are super low, violence is close to an all time low, industries are being remade and there’s more leverage for the insurgent outsider than ever before in history.

The status quo is taking a beating, there’s no question about it. That’s what makes it a revolution.

I said this nine years ago and I stand by it. In the years since I wrote this essay, people have started social movements, built billion dollar companies, toppled dictators, found new jobs, learned new skills and generally made a ruckus.

Go!

Hindsight is 20/20. People are already looking back on the 1990s and wishing that they had had more courage. When you look back on the 2000s, what will you have to say for yourself? [The following is reprinted from 9 years ago].

Here’s a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?

Many people will have to answer that question by saying, “I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing.” Because that’s what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice.

While your company has been waiting for the economy to rebound, Reebok has launched Travel Trainers, a very cool-looking lightweight sneaker for travelers. They are selling out in Japan — from vending machines in airports!

While Detroit’s car companies have been whining about gas prices and bad publicity for SUVs (SUVs are among their most profitable products), Honda has been busy building cars that look like SUVs but get twice the gas mileage. The Honda Pilot was so popular, it had a waiting list.

While Africa’s economic plight gets a fair amount of worry, a little startup called ApproTEC is actually doing something about it. The new income that its products generate accounts for 0.5% of the entire GDP of Kenya. How? It manufactures a $75 device that looks a lot like a StairMaster. But it’s not for exercise. Instead, ApproTEC sells the machine to subsistence farmers, who use its stair-stepping feature to irrigate their land. People who buy it can move from subsistence farming to selling the additional produce that their land yields — and triple their annual income in the first year of using the product.

While you’ve been wishing for the inspiration to start something great, thousands of entrepreneurs have used the prevailing sense of uncertainty to start truly remarkable companies. Lucrative Web businesses, successful tool catalogs, fast-growing PR firms — all have started on a shoestring, and all have been profitable ahead of schedule. The Web is dead, right? Well, try telling that to Meetup.com, a new Web site that helps organize meetings anywhere and on any topic. It has 200,000 registered users — and counting.

Maybe you already have a clipping on your mirror that asks you what you did during the 1990s. What’s your biggest regret about that decade? Do you wish that you had started, joined, invested in, or built something? Are you left wishing that you’d at least had the courage to try? In hindsight, the 1990s were the good old days. Yet so many people missed out. Why? Because it’s always possible to find a reason to stay put, to skip an opportunity, or to decline an offer. And yet, in retrospect, it’s hard to remember why we said no and easy to wish that we had said yes.

The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.

Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.

Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?

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From the Fluoride Action Network:

The broad based coalition of people opposed to fluoridation has just gotten bigger! In an interview with FAN’s campaign director Stuart Cooper, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, said that if elected he would oppose any funding to enable the CDC to continue to promote fluoridation. He said that fluoridation was a local issue and the federal bureaucracy should not be spending tax dollars promoting the practice. Here is Stuart’s report of the conversation:

Last week, at a campaign event in Laconia, New Hampshire I spoke for several minutes about fluoridation with Dr. Paul, telling him about the EPA Union’s call for a moratorium, the 2006 NRC report, the numerous I.Q. studies, the dental fluorosis epidemic, and the CDC’s promotion of fluoridation, and asked him, “if elected President, would you allow the CDC, DHHS, or any federal agency to use tax dollars to promote water fluoridation?”

Dr. Paul responded: “The federal government should have zero…nothing to do with the promotion of fluoridation unless its on a military base...and hopefully there they would do the right thing. So no, federal fluoride promotion shouldn’t exist, they shouldn’t be telling you or anyone else what should happen because even though it was well intended at the time–I remember that I thought it was a bad principle because in a way it was massive treatment–and at the time everybody accepted the idea that fluoride was great and that you would never get a cavity and there was no downside, now there is a big question, that’s why you don’t want government doing these kinds of things. You or I should decide, someone should give us bottled water with fluoride, or we should have the ability to buy water with fluoride, but we should not have the federal government promoting fluoridation…sometimes their right, most of the time their wrong. They shouldn’t have the authority to do this. Especially with the information out there now about fluoride, I would do my best to stop federal involvement with state and local fluoride decisions.”

Ron Paul is a physician trained in obstetrics and gynecology and has been a U.S. Congressman representing the Houston area of  Texas for over 20 years. He has run for President twice before, has multiple best selling books, and has a very large and loyal following across the United States.

Dr. Paul is the latest influential leader to join the choir of opposition to fluoridation in 2011. This winter, prominent Democratic New York City Council Member Peter Vallone, Jr. introduced a bill to prohibit fluoridation of the city’s drinking water. In April, former U.N. Ambassador and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, along with fellow civil rights leaders Reverend Dr. Gerald Durley and Bernice King, called for a repeal of mandatory fluoridation laws.  And just last month, Consumer Activist and former Green party and Independent party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader, came out publicly in opposition to mandatory water fluoridation.

The wide range of personalities opposing fluoridation, along with the nearly 4,000 medical and scientific professionals who have signed FANs professional statement, clearly proves that opposition to fluoridation is not only growing rapidly, but is also blind to ideology or political party affiliation. The anti-fluoridation tent just keeps getting bigger and bigger!