Short news, product updates, research from last week, and/or heads-up about select things we’ll be talking about, releasing and/or endorsing over the coming week.

Hey, first off, high-fives to everyone who has commented on our our latest Hidden Heroes post (posted yesterday). It’s apparent that you dig people who persist, work hard, and fulfill a vision to its experienced level (yes, the HEROES we’ll be highlighting just don’t sit around wishing, affirming, envisioning, or waiting… they move, they engage, they improvise as they’re playing out their desires).

Keep your eyes on this space for more Heroes.

Okay, so, lets get into some of today’s items for discussion:

Why Does The World Love An Underdog?

One of the world’s biggest media sensations of late, in contrast to our highlighted Hidden Heroes, was a “waiter”, a “wisher”, for too much of her life. She put off “doing”, and put off giving value to the world, all the while wondering why value didn’t come back to her. She had a dream, but didn’t follow through on making it happen. She decided that her comfort zone, and victimitis excuses, were more appealing than facing fears.

Well, sure, comfort zones seem like a good idea at first glance. Heck, they’re comfortable, right? But on closer examination, it’s obvious that they also keep us stuck.

“Good things come to those who wait” is a very misleading phrase. The truth is: good things come to those who go out and get them. Opportunity’s not going to come knocking on your door while you sit on the couch and wish for it, and nobody’s going to give you a chance unless you ask for it.

Here’s Heather’s admittedly unpopular, but much needed, view on the Susan Boyle phenomenon.

The Recession Isn’t Hype — It’s As Real As Your Finger!

Hey, it’s the best real “thing” we could come up with to start off our point here (it was easy to come up with… we just looked down at the keyboard and saw some fingers typing these words).

Over the past few weeks, there’s been a mass herd-like stampede, from 50 or so well-meaning (read: in-crowd, let-me-jump-on-the-party-train) marketers whose email subject lines start with stuff like:

“Don’t Believe The Hype”

“The Recession Is Only In Your Head”

Well, while we’d love to be able to pass along some facts about how the REAL “outside” world (Forest Reality, as we’ve called it before) — the one engineered and lead by insiders, elites, and appointed (not elected) politicians — is just playing fun, hypnotic, grade-school games with you, the TRUTH is, it’s NOT !

And, we’ll venture to  tell you, with 100% conviction, that buying into some Bob Proctor prodigy who associates you with Chicken Little for trying to tackle the effect of a problem, in a collective way, isn’t going to get you any further.

Brian Wong, the guy who wants you to pretend all is well, writes:

Here is the simple truth. There is no “the economy”… there is only your economy. Let me say that again… in caps… just to make sure you don’t miss it.

THERE IS NO “THE ECONOMY” — THERE IS ONLY YOUR ECONOMY.

The media however wants you to believe that we’re all in this together. Hah! If that’s the case, how do you explain the fact that there were more millionaires created during the Great Depression than in any other era of American history?

Well, Brian, while the cutesy expression above may ATTRACT millions of spiritual neophytes who clamor to anybody or anything that’ll give them validation for withdrawing from the “world”, it’s just nothing more than, well, ah-hem, “cute” for anybody who can think for themselves and extrapolate “action plans” in the face of adversity and bad news.

You see, the FIRST principle any NEW Great Depression millionaire took grasp of is the truth that they WERE indeed in something not so grand (a smelly pile of “economic” horseshit) with OTHERS.

Nobody, regardless of how privileged, connected, intelligent, or aware, is an island on his/her own. Your quest to help people SEE sun in a pile of dust is commendable, but your approach is very similar to the New Agers who, metaphorically, are in a holding pattern above the airport refusing to land.

In other words, reality is reality — and regardless of what feel-good spin you douse it with, certain things always stay the same:

* Wealth only comes AFTER value is given, never before!

* Value only is expressed AFTER you contribute your time and/or resources to others.

* Self-sufficiency and a pioneering spirit is what sparks the contribution.

Yet, the rub is:

* Contribution becomes stifled when you employ the “I’m only in it for, and by, myself” mentality.

Speaking of the Economy — The President Ain’t No Cheerleader

Now, of course, his statement below is all part of a bigger game, but at least he ain’t a pretender

“2009 will continue to be a difficult year for America’s economy. And, obviously most difficult for those who’ve lost their jobs. The severity of this recession WILL cause more job loss, more foreclosure, and more pain BEFORE it ends.” — President Barack Obama

Well, okay, Dear Pres, we get it… the stage is set. No biggie!  We know the game plan for the year. We hear ya loud and clear.  Fear-mongering? Nah, that’s not you… you’ve got mind-numbed cronies for that stuff.

You’re playing it real, baaaaaaby! We dig dat! With over 13 million unemployed folks, though, we’ll still pretend that it’s ONLY a “me economy” — er, NOT!

And, Peter Schiff, we think you make about as much sense as anybody lately. Kudos to you for staying the course. (If you don’t know who he is, watch as many of his videos as you can to get a feel for the practical common sense ideas his mind comes up with for fixing the economic challenges that the world faces.)

A Most Brilliant Statement About TRUST!

By now, you’ve probably heard the buzz about Twitter, the social networking site that uses micro-blogging to keep people connected. In this 3-minute video interview, Joel Comm, the creator of The Next Internet Millionaire (a reality online T.V. show that was co-hosted by Heather) and author of the book Twitter Power, tells how a simple “tweet” can help you market your business.

Pay careful attention to what he says towards the end of the video. It’s priceless!

Here’s the VIDEO (Wait to get past the 22-second American Express — not MasterCard — commercial)

Your Partners in the Quest For
Living a Life Without Limits,

(( Life Design Consultants,
Agents of Higher Learning &
Catalysts For Change ))

At the end of the movie, when Dorothy is lamenting over how her friends all got given “tokens” of their knowledge, or courage, or heart, she says, “I don’t suppose there’s anything in that black bag for me”.

No, there wasn’t. But there was something else…

As the “wizard” prepares to fly her home in a balloon, and Dorothy runs off to save one more living creature (her dog, Toto), the balloon leaves without her, and Dorothy figures she’s stuck.

But alas! Glinda the Good Witch of the North comes swooping in to save the day, and says:

“You’ve always had the power within you! Just click your heels together three times and say, ‘There’s no place like home!’”

Riiiiiiiight! Always had the power within her! Been there all along!

What’s the truth?

= = = = Continued = = = =

The truth is, while she had a seed of truth within her (as we all have seeds of truth about the true nature of our spirits), Dorothy needed to go through a tough journey of trials and tribulations before she had learned and experienced enough to use that power, just like we must go through the journey of life before uncovering our spiritual power.

It doesn’t matter whether we think we “know” about our spiritual side or not; we come here to experience life on the physical realm, and to uncover the puzzle as we go, not to just become “enlightened” or “evolved” into our spiritual selves as some teachers would have you believe.

Heck, if you want to be a spiritual being living a spiritual experience, you’ll get there soon enough… here, on earth, the idea is to partake in, well, earthly sorta things.

As our good friend — the soon to be editor of our upcoming Renegade Money Guide — said:

“… c’mon, as much as I acknowledge the spiritual side of our true nature, we incarnated for a good freakin’ reason — to experience what we can’t in the non-physical and to live in a world of contrast (that may or may not exist in the other dimensions)...”

Glinda, you see, tends to look at a life in a rose-colored “love and light” kinda way… everything is perfect, there’s nothing to be improved, there’s nothing to strive for… you have it all.

On one level, that’s great. Maybe even inspirational in small doses. On another, it keeps you stuck in a rut. If taken to the extreme, it just doesn’t work in our day-to-day realities on this planet.

Just imagine if Dorothy had decided NOT to go on her journey, but to stay in Munchkinland, because she had all the power she needed within her and figured she had nothing to learn, nothing to improve.

Well, she never would have been able to help the Scarecrow uncover his brainy tendencies, or the Tin Man uncover his heart, or the Lion uncover his courage. She wouldn’t have been able to save the land from not one, but TWO wicked witches (the dark thoughts that hold so many of us back), or helped the “wizard” find his way home.

A few weeks ago, a woman named Angel (seriously) wrote to us to ask us to help her raise the consciousness of the planet by getting together enough people to send out good thoughts.

Angel (our Glinda) assumes that, because our community is called “Life Without Limits”, we’re woo-woo thinkers like her, floating around in a magic positive bubble of good thoughts, just like Glinda assumed Dorothy had the power to tap her heels and fly home all along.

But in fact, groundedness in the real world is always required to achieve the exceptional.  Walking the Yellow Brick Road, and fighting off the poppy fields and the witches and the flying monkeys, are what prepare you to make a real difference, in your life and others’.

While it’s true that you’ve always had all the brains, the heart, and the courage you ever needed — buried somewhere beneath the surface — not everybody has accessed that in their own selves.

You see, the way we look at enlightenment is it’s something that comes and goes, like the ebb and flow of the tide, the rising and setting of the sun, the opening and closing of the flowers — the way all of nature operates.

You might experience an enlightened moment while walking on the beach, sitting in your garden, meditating, or even doing repetitive tasks like the dishes. But then it’s back to hustle and bustle, and the “unenlightened” moments that make up most of our days.

And while you’re experiencing momentary enlightenment, somebody else is not. When they’re connected with their source, you’re not. We all move through life with different patterns, at different paces, and experience different amplitudes and frequencies of existence.

Being tuned into the “All Good, All The Time” radio station doesn’t mean everyone else is listening to the same show; so it’s fine when you’re by yourself, but does you very little good when trying to connect with other people (something we feel is very important for physical beings on a physical planet).

In other words, pretending “it’s all good” all the time won’t make the “other people” who are brainless smarter, the heartless more compassionate, or the cowards braver, any more than you’ll appear brainier, braver or more loving in their eyes.

That’s because tapping your heels together doesn’t solve all the problems… it’s the journey down the Yellow Brick Road, through adversity and challenges, that enable you to be able to discover what you’re truly made of.

A couple of synchronistic things happened last week. First, a former partner posted a blog post about how you should only do things that feel good if you want to manifest what you want.

This is what he wrote:

“1. If it feels good, do it.

2. If it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it.

That’s it. Yes it is true there is nothing more to this process of creation than that.

Since most of you don’t buy into this, let’s look at some examples:

You are on the phone or in a meeting and you don’t feel good about it.  Leave it.”

Ummm… yeah, try that tactic, just as it stands in black and white without any adaptation around common-sense usage out in the real world, and let us know how it goes.

Then our associate Tom Murasso posted an article on Facebook, asking “What is Truth?” It was a well-researched and well-written piece talking about how people search for evidence to support what they’ve decided to believe, and call that “truth”… but how do we know if it really is truth?

Of course, we commented on how in metaphysical terms it may be hard to define a hard-and-fast “truth” while we’re in the physical realm, but in physical terms it’s much easier to apply research and say, “This is truth; this is fact; this is what’s really happening at this point in time.”

But a lot of Glindas came out of the woodwork to post their feel-good comments, which mainly revolved around the opposite school of thought.

See, Glinda says, “Your reality is what you believe to be true, and your truth is what feels right for you, and that’s all that matters.”

One of the commenters even went so far as to say, “Truth should not be confused with fact.” As in, who cares if “your truth”, your beliefs, or your perception of “the way it is” are founded or unfounded, logical or ridiculous, sane or insane?

Intelligent people, of course, know that’s just a way of justifying excuses for stupid behavior, and that truth IS the same as fact or reality, regardless of perception.

Vic Johnson, a well-known motivational speaker and online entrepreneur, said this to Heather in an interview:

“See, belief is simply defined as this; a belief is something that you accept as true or real. It doesn’t mean it’s true, it doesn’t mean it’s real, it just means you accept it as true or real. And when you accept it as true or real, you act on it as if it’s true or real.”

So the person hanging onto the belief that “my truth, and my perception of reality, is the only truth that matters, whether it’s fact or not” is afraid of the true reality that might be out there… and afraid to find out that their perception might be wrong.

Intention always trumps perception… so if someone did something, or intended something, it doesn’t matter what you THINK they did or didn’t do — it only matters what really happened.

And yes, Virginia, there IS a real reality (at least how we humans define reality, which is how the physical plane is set up to operate).

Yes, we understand that the whole physical reality we live in is an illusion of sorts to our spiritual selves — but we’re only concerned with HOW our physical selves have agreed to define reality, which is:

re-al-i-ty [ree-AL-i-tee]
–noun, plural -ties for 3, 5–7.
1.     the state or quality of being real.
2.     resemblance to what is real.
3.     a real thing or fact.
4.     real things, facts, or events taken as a whole; state of affairs: the reality of the business world; vacationing to escape reality.
5.     Philosophy.
a.     something that exists independently of ideas concerning it.
b.     something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive.
6.     something that is real.
7.     something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent.

See, Glinda’s view of reality is skewed. There’s no such thing as “All Good All The Time” because The Law of Polarity says that our physical plane is made up of opposites. Those dualities are actually non-dual in nature, because they need each other to exist, but they’re opposites nonetheless.

Glinda only wants to exist in the spiritual world where all is one — again, noble to a degree, but not practical in the physical world.

Angel, of course, isn’t the only “Glinda” in our lives. We know several life coaches who take this same kind of “cheerleading”, “all is good”, “you’re perfect as you are” approach.

Well, what good is that?

What kind of coaching can you get — what kind of growth can you experience — if you believe you’re already perfect, physically as well as spiritually?

Steve Keough, our Coaching Director at LWL Coaching, is anything but a Glinda. He knows how to help people get real-world results, not do airy-fairy feel-good exercises.

He knows that we’re on the physical plane to achieve as much as we can in the physical world, and if we didn’t want to do that, we wouldn’t even be here — we’d still be hanging out in Spiritland (just like Dorothy would have still been hanging out in Munchkinland).

To meet Steve and find out what a real-world, grounded life coach can do for you, visit LWL Coaching.

Your Partners in the Quest For
Living a Life Without Limits,

(( Life Design Consultants,
Agents of Higher Learning &
Catalysts For Change ))

The sun is shining, birds are chirping, lilies are blooming, bunnies are multiplying, and ohhhh yeaaah, eggs.

Gots ta have eggs. So, in this Sunday edition, about the only thing we’re rounding up (or maybe should have, regardless of the fact that our little guy is only 6 months old, many tell us) is EGGS.

Not this year for the baby, boys and girls… next year, when he can actually walk and have some fun searching for them

But for you it’s a different story!

Soooooo, instead, we’ll just ask a few questions:

What do you call a sleeping egg?
Egg-zosted!

What did the eggs do when the light turned green?
They egg-celerated.

Why was the father egg so strict?
He was hard-boiled.

Why did the egg go to school?
To get “Egg-u-cated”

What day does an egg hate the most?
Fry-days.

How did the egg roll across the road?
It just rolled, silly!

Why shouldn’t you tell an Easter egg a joke?
It might crack up!

Then, again, telling cheesy egg  jokes to our list, we know, may make some of  you think we cracked up

Okay, fun over… back to business. The business of sincere egg FACTS (it’s important, you know, to EXAMINE things related to “Food” and “Diet” (more on that AFTER clicking the  “Continue Reading” link)…

DID YOU KNOW…

The incredible edible egg™ has a high nutrient density because it provides a wide range of nutrients in proportion to its calorie count (about 75 calories per large egg). Nutrient-dense foods help you get the nutrients you need without excess calories.

A large-sized egg supplies 12.6% of the Daily Reference Value (DRV) for protein. A little over half of the egg’s protein is in the white and the rest is in the yolk. The egg’s protein is the highest quality protein of any food. One egg of any size equals one ounce of lean meat, poultry, fish or seafood in the food groups.

Dates on egg cartons, and all other food packaging, reflect food quality, not food safety. An ‘expiration’ or ‘sell-by’ date on an egg carton tells the grocer to pull the eggs if they haven’t sold by that time. A ‘best-by’ or ‘use-by’ date tells you that your eggs will still be of high quality if you use them by that date.

About 60% of the eggs produced in the U.S. each year are used by consumers and about 9% are used by the food service industry. The rest are turned into egg products which are used mostly by food service operators to make restaurant meals and by food manufacturers to make foods such as mayonnaise and cake mixes.

Hey, Egg Trivia is great and all… but, let’s take this even deeper and broader:

How much do you really know about the food you buy at our local supermarkets and serve to your families?

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.

Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment.

We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of e. coli — the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farm’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising — and often shocking — truths about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation, and where we are going from here.

For the 3-minute trailer, check this out:

Your Partners in the Quest For
Living a Life Without Limits,

(( Life Design Consultants,
Agents of Higher Learning &
Catalysts For Change ))

What’s this new Sunday blog edition all about ? Just what the heck are we rounding up? Well, simply put: short news, product updates, and heads-up about select things we’ll be talking about, releasing and/or endorsing over the coming week.

We may reference / link to previous posts on this long-running blog; we may embed a video (the viewing time of any video doesn’t count, by the way. Them’s the rules… we only promise your reading will be less than 7 minutes ; we may list a quote; we may give a down-and-dirty answer to a subscriber’s question. Okay, that should get ya prepped on what this is about… onward we go….

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Renegade Money… And… Overcoming The Odds:
————————————————————————–

If you spent the time to read our last post in its entirety, you would have stumbled upon a subtle link about Toto — a slight Wizard of Oz tribute to  the line that Dorothy used to let her little scruffy dog know that they were in some OBVIOUSLY “odd” place.

Well, while we won’t give you a hard push to read the last post (if you haven’t already) so you KNOW why we feel the
“bailout” comes from a place of hallucinatory madness, we’ll at least give you a more front line notice of
this:

We’re about to open up a beta-version of our NEW “Renegade Money Guide” membership site (the sister site to RenegadeGrowthPak.com).

It’ll be a one-time fee VIP inner-circle membership site exclusively set aside for listing and archiving unique,
little-known, viable investment and passive business opportunities.

From high-yield verified passive-income systems, to offshore programs and asset protection, to tax planning and business structuring, we’ll bring you what the mainstream (the masses) considers to be on the fringe… which is precisely why informed, sovereign-minded people act on what we’ll be passing along.

To be notified when we release this, you MUST be on a separate list set aside exclusively for this opening.

Just follow the last post to the bottom and click on the link titled: “Toto, I get the feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore!”

Oops, we said Monday… buuuuuuut, somebody around here actually somehow forgot the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship tomorrow night (Monday, April 6th)… so, being that, ahem, Barry NEEDS to watch it (if he couldn’t, or let’s just say he had to work all day to get RMG ready for Monday, he might turn into a flying monkey or some other yellow-brick road villain)… well, we’re now anticipating Thursday (but, again, the link to join won’t be on this blog, and we won’t be announcing this to our main subscriber list. The link to find it is mentioned above).

Speaking of basketball, which is a game around here that is always infused with motivation and life lessons too, do you know Jason McElwain, Josh Titus and Patrick Thibodeau ?

If not, check out this inspiring video on YouTube called OVERCOMING THE ODDS

AFTER you watch it (or you can bookmark it and check it out later), click the link below for MORE goodies and surprises:

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Giving Our Commenters Some Link Luv:
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We appreciate you expressing your thoughts about what we research, write about, and pass on via this blog.

We work hard to bring you posts with depth and emotional / mental “juice” — if we were  doing this to just be part of some feel-good movement or to fulfill some misguided higher-calling to jump on the “enlightenment” bandwagon, we’d just FOCUS our efforts on passing along ho-hum, watered-down, regurgitated, G-Rated news and “you’re perfect already” rhetoric.

Yet, if you’ve been following us for any length of time, you know we’re all about passionate introspection, critical examination, and accountability-based personal (inner) AND business (outer) growth.

We’ll ALWAYS walk that extra mile with the readers and customers who give an honest effort to actually LIVE what they know. Yup, theorizing and continual pedigreed study can only get you so far.

If you’re with us on this notion — that if we’re to improve on anything, we must analyze it, debate it, and toss it around some — then we wanna REWARD you for showing your full colors.

We added a NEW features to the COMMENTS section of this blog. For contributing  to any of our posts with rational, inquisitive, creative, and on-target, topic-at-hand comments, we’ll give a LINK back to your own blog.

Here’s how it works:

Under each blog post, you’ll see this:

Leave your comment… but, in the website field, enter the URL to your blog.

Then when you click on the SUBMIT button, there will be a link underneath your comment. Here’s an example comment, and underneath it is a link back to the commenter’s blog (showing the latest post on her blog):

We hope this NEW feature encourages all you bloggers out there to join in whenever we post something that certainly can GROW even BIGGER when there’s group energy around it.

Our aim here is to continue bringing about information that’ll help expand your perceptions, debate your own beliefs, question the way you look at the the world, and take ownership of your results (or lack thereof).

If you want to be more active on that journey with us, instead of just reading, let us know what’s on your mind as we’re exploring together.

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Interview With a Pioneer In Mind Technology:
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We found somebody who is often considered the “undisputed leader in mind technology.” He has devoted his professional career to developing successful motivational and coaching methods to empower people and create lasting positive change in their lives.

He is the author of an award-winning bestselling book, and several other books, and his work has been featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and The Discovery Channel as well as in The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, People, Entrepreneur, and INC. Magazines!

His electrifying keynote speeches and seminars deliver the real life, nuts ‘n bolts concepts he used to take his own business ventures to astounding heights, and he has personally instructed more than 35,000 people in self-help, Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Psycho-Linguistics.

On Monday night, we’ll be releasing the exclusive one-on-one interview Heather did with him about mind technology and awakening your inner GENIUS (which is also an acronym he’ll explain to you) right here on this blog.

No, we don’t usually release recordings of our interviews this way — you usually have to either be a member of one of our sites, or buy it a la carte on CD or in a product package; but in this case we’re making an exception.

You’ll love finding out how the brain works, and what you can do to increase its effectiveness. So don’t miss that one-hour interview, coming your way at no charge tomorrow.

Your Partners in the Quest For
Living a Life Without Limits,

(( Life Design Consultants,
Agents of Higher Learning &
Catalysts For Change ))