What is "Success?"

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notmartha
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What is "Success?"

Post by notmartha »

Ben Williams has posted his latest newsletter, “Straight Talk,” about Success and Prosperity.
WHAT IS “SUCCESS”

To a primitive native in a South American jungle, success may be bringing home a monkey to eat, or a few yams, or-a basket of sago palm grubs (maggots) to feed his family for the day. To some families in the Middle East, success may be staying alive in their meager dwelling and escaping the US and Saudi financed terrorists one more day. To some on the other end of the spectrum in another part of the world, success may be a million dollars in savings, and a fixed retirement fund.

What one man considers “success” in one culture can be very different from what another man considers “success” in another culture. It depends on how people think in their particular culture or society. Success in any man's mind is determined by the value system he goes by.

If a man's sense of success is based on the Beast System it will be very different from one based upon God's system. It is absolutely imperative that you understand this if you want to be happy and truly prosperous.
Read the rest of the newsletter here:
http://benwilliamslibrary.com/pdfs/st17-11&12.pdf
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editor
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Reality is Perspective -- Server Notes

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A couple days ago my wife, daughter, and I were sitting at the kitchen table discussing cake.

We know of a woman who, for about a year, ran a bakery in the small town nearest us. She mostly made cakes and cupcakes. This woman used decent quality ingredients, knew how to bake, and charged reasonable prices. By all rights she should still be in business, but for one flaw-- she smoked cigarettes inside the kitchen while she was baking.

Naturally, all her cakes smelled and tasted like stale tobacco. Being a heavy smoker herself, she could not detect the odor or flavor in her cakes-- her senses were blind to it. Because of this, most non-smokers found her cakes disgusting. I'm pretty sure at least a few people said something to her, but she didn't change her habits. She probably didn't believe what she couldn't detect with her own senses.

I remarked to my family how creepy it is to realize there might be something in any of our own lives that we can't see, feel, taste or smell; something about which we might have no clue, but which can work behind the scenes to destroy our best efforts.

Maybe I'm just sleep deprived.

I've been working on a new server which will soon be hosting The Lawful Path (TLP). The server upon which TLP currently runs has been operational for about three years, and it desperately needs some upgrades. Some of those upgrades might cause considerable downtime if done on the same server.

The best solution is what I've done: Start up a new server, and gradually move all the services over from the old to the new. Nevertheless, you may notice some occasional disruptions over the next week or two. If all goes well, it will be nothing to cause any worry.

In the process of getting email running on the new server, I noticed an odd behavior in the old server. This led me to look at some logs, which led me to discover a minor mis-configuration in the email server. Just four characters missing. Due to this mistake, email generated by the server itself were often rejected by recipient email servers.

Why is this important?

One example of server-generated email is when someone subscribes to our forum. The server sends the new subscriber an email containing a link which must be clicked to activate the new account. If the subscriber doesn't get the email, the account can never be activated.

Not every email was rejected, it depends upon how strict the recipient's email provider is configured. But many emails would not go through. This has been going on for three years!

I've known that some people didn't get emails, but I couldn't put my finger on the cause. I also think I greatly underestimated the number of undelivered emails.

Does this sound familiar? It fits the cake example to a TEE. Who knows how many potential members we might have had, if they had not walked away in frustration when they couldn't activate their accounts?

As notmartha recently pointed out, we all have a different measure of success in life. Is there something in YOUR life holding you back? Something you can't see, hear, touch, taste, or smell?

This old server has been a good thing for me, and a lot of others who have benefited from its use. Even though it wasn't perfect. Naturally I've already fixed this glitch on the new server. There may be others, of which I must try to be vigilant.

Please wish me well in getting TLP moved over to the new server. I worry most about the forum, which is not trivial to transplant. I got to practice first with a smaller forum from a non-related website I run for a different domain on the same server, and I managed to do it successfully. Whew.
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Lawfulpath.com
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notmartha
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Re: What is "Success?"

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Prayers for you during this transition. Let me know how I can help.
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Firestarter
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Re: What is "Success?"

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In short my main problems with judging people by their “success” are:
1) The whole “game” is rigged. Take for example Targeted Individuals whose life is effectively destroyed and, even worse, Yemen that’s starved to death. How can these people measure success? By how long they’re able to stay alive?!?
2) “Success” is mostly observed superficially. There are self-help gurus, who advise to simply ignore failure, show others that you’re a success (for example by bling bling). When the façade crumbles, comes the inevitable depression. Maybe the strive for success can make people manic-depressed…


I’ve read some of the posts in the education section that I find interesting. While I agree that public education is awful, I don’t think that home schooling is the perfect answer. The rest of this post could fit in that part of the Lawfulpath forum.
In my opinion, the most interesting part from the Ben Williams newsletter, is the information that shows that children are effectively made stupid (by education).

In 1968, George Land researched the creativity of 1,600 children starting in age from three-to-five years. He re-tested the same children at 10 years and again at 15 years of age. The results were astounding.
Test results 5 year olds - 98%
Test results 10 year olds - 30%
Test results 15 year olds - 12%

The same test was given to 280,000 adults, who were only 2% “creative”.
A good explanation could be, that our educational system was designed to train us to be good workers that follow instructions: https://www.creativityatwork.com/2012/0 ... be-taught/
For some reason internet “search” engines block my posts: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread ... orld/page2

The Order of the Garter rules the world: viewtopic.php?p=5549#p5549
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notmartha
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Re: What is "Success?"

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Firestarter wrote:In short my main problems with judging people by their “success” are:1) The whole “game” is rigged. Take for example Targeted Individuals whose life is effectively destroyed and, even worse, Yemen that’s starved to death. How can these people measure success? By how long they’re able to stay alive?!?2) “Success” is mostly observed superficially. There are self-help gurus, who advise to simply ignore failure, show others that you’re a success (for example by bling bling). When the façade crumbles, comes the inevitable depression. Maybe the strive for success can make people manic-depressed…
I don't concern myself so much with others' perceived success. As for me, I guess I'd best define success as the freedom to live to my divinely inspired full potential.

JFK said - "Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth."

Linking this to the studies of creativity, I think this is why young children are so successful. The younger they are, the less they feel the need to conform, to live by standards set for them. As soon as the art of conformity is drilled into their heads ("you can't do this, you should do that" Why? "Because I said so..."), the creativity wanes. This is true in any school setting.

Romans 12:2 says, "And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."

If conforming success to a worldly standard, success will be stifled by those who hate the Creator, hate what's creative, hate what's good, and hate what's perfect. It will absolutely perpetuate mental instability. What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result? Those who strive for "success" through conformity to the world are insane, or soon will be.
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Re: What is "Success?"

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Reminds me of Harry Chapin's song, Flowers are Red.
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