Category: Diversity

I got my life back.
Whereas before I was a mess, with moods all over the place and energy levels in the gutter, for the past four years since I initiated that challenge, I have felt energized, and in control of my life. After I completed the personal challenge, I now eat some refined sugar, and drink some coffee and alcohol again—but with much more moderation than before.
I’m thirty-four now, happy, and completely off all medications. Once my mental issues and moodswings were taken care of, I was able to turn my attention to getting my worklife, career, and finances in order. Over four years, I went from earning just over $8,000 in the worst year of my bipolar, to breaking the six-figure barrier in revenue for the first time last year, in a combination of freelance projects and my own book projects.
(I tell this story of my own journey of financial self-transformation, between the ages of 30-34, in my upcoming book The Education of Millionaires – though I’m not a millionaire—yet!)

Three and a half weeks after the challenge ended, in late May 2008, I went out on my first date with Jena. That first date was epic; we stayed up all night, telling each other our life stories. During the course of that night, I told her my story of struggling with and eventually overcoming bipolar.
Jena shared with me that she had a close friend during her teenage years, a brilliant musician and composer with a bright career ahead of her, who was bipolar. Jena played for me a hauntingly beautiful recording of the friend’s music. Jena told me, with tears, that the friend had not been able to share her full artistic gift to the world; the friend had cut her life off early at 22, through suicide.
When I finished my own story, Jena’s speech slowed down from our excited all-night story telling. She looked me in the eyes. Time around us seemed to slow down. She reached over, held my hand. She looked at me, and said: “I’m glad you made it, Michael.”
A year after that, we were engaged. This past July 2nd, we celebrated our one year wedding anniversary. Neither of us has ever been happier in our entire lives.
I often shed a tear when I contemplate that I came very close to taking my life, only a year before I met the love of my life, who is now my wife.
If you are in the dumps about a mental illness, please do not give up. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I know it may seem hopeless at times—it may seem like a darkness that never ends. But you can get through it. In fact, you might just be at the beginning of the final corner before the road turns to health, freedom and happiness.
Please, do not give up. You can do this.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2011/07/18/how-i-overcame-bipolar-ii/7/

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.

~steve jobs

One of the great forgotten facts about the United States is that not very long ago the wealthy weren’t all that wealthy. Up until the 1960s, the gap between rich and poor in the United States was relatively narrow. In fact, in that era marginal tax rates in the highest income bracket were in excess of 90 percent. For every dollar you made above $250,000, you gave the government 90 cents. Today — with good reason — we regard tax rates that high as punitive and economically self-defeating. It is worth noting, though, that in the social and political commentary of the 1950s and 1960s there is scant evidence of wealthy people complaining about their situation. They paid their taxes and went about their business. Perhaps they saw the logic of the government’s policy: There was a huge debt from World War II to be paid off, and interstates, public universities, and other public infrastructure projects to be built for the children of the baby boom. Or perhaps they were simply bashful. Wealth, after all, is as often the gift of good fortune as it is of design. For whatever reason, the wealthy of that era could have pushed for a world that more closely conformed to their self-interest and they chose not to. Today the wealthy have no such qualms. We have moved from a country of relative economic equality to a place where the gap between rich and poor is exceeded by only Singapore and Hong Kong. The rich have gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything they can get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regard to logic or shame. In the end, this is the lesson of the NBA lockout. A man buys a basketball team as insurance on a real estate project, flips the franchise to a Russian billionaire when he wins the deal, and then — as both parties happily count their winnings — what lesson are we asked to draw?

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7021031/the-nets-nba-economics