A few weeks ago I was inspired. This inspiration led me to write the following. I'm sharing it now as an inspiration for you:
How to Take Over the World
Time: Saturday morning. May 14 2011 10:32am.
Location: Hamilton, New Zealand (Planet Earth)
Right now is when I decided to take over the world.
This seems like a laughable goal when the writer has already had to go back and correct three typos before reaching even 23 words of his master plan. The truth is that I’m not sure at all of the details of my plan. What I am sure of is my desire to cause a positive change, and my ability to use my creative potential to this end. The only major unknown that I have no direct experience with is in scaling this up to include the entire world.
Right now, I am buoyed up by a fresh confidence and mental focus that comes from a decade or more of wanting to see peoples’ lives improve. This has created a foundation of behaviour and fertile soil for the seeds of a recent read, which has sparked these new heights of optimism that I feel at this moment.
Josh Waitzkin’s ‘The Art of Learning’ has blasted my mind and restored my confidence in making a difference in the world. Set-backs are no longer negative, but instead provide cherished fuel for positive growth. Far from the emptiness of blind optimism this, almost surreal feeling of reality in my decision for world domination, is a chance to combine rational processes to achieve concrete goals.
Recently, getting married and focusing on building a home life with wife, kids, and a dog, I had almost decided that the best way I could hope to cause positive change was by living this “classic” of lives perfectly. This was in order to be the best example to the world that I could be. A passive form of world domination, on a small scale, affecting those immediately around me.
While this is a good and admirable goal, I am far from perfect, and will never be so golden in this life. Others are better suited to having the “perfect” life. I am better suited to being off balance and adapting myself. I am good at applying principles, values, and foundational ideas to make decisions (sometimes instant) about how to deal with that off-balance-ness. For years I have been building up a self-sufficiency, adaptability, and resilience to change that can cope with anything.
Now it is time to put my experience into practice by seeking to improve the entire planet in a tangible and measurable way.
One thing I know, which will form the foundation of my strategies and actions, is that God is in complete control of everything which means that I have to first petition Him for success. He not only wills everything to happen, both good and evil, but he maintains the energy that holds the physical universe together and which actively makes everything happen that will happen. Knowing this, I have already accepted that I may fail and that this is a part of God’s plan (which is greater than my plan!). On the other hand, if God has decided that I should succeed, then there is no stopping me. Not even my by own foolishness, through regular typos, or because of the nastiest plans of even greater forces for evil within the universe.
So I pray like this:
Lord, for your glory, I ask that you would allow me to be a positive influence of change in the world. The whole world. Help me to improve peoples’ lives so that they can see what you have made possible for them in this life. Give me all I need to accomplish this. Amen.