“Have fun, be crazy, be weird.”–@tonyrobbins

“Most people are as happy as they make up their mind to be.”
–Abraham Lincoln

Last week, I was talking with Mastin Kipp. He’s the 31-year-old whiz kid behind the popular website, TheDailyLove (TDL). You might have seen him on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday as one of the spiritual leaders for the next generation. Although he now lives in L.A. and hobnobs with the likes of Tony Robbins and Kim Kardashian (she’s the one who helped get the ball rolling on his website, when she tweeted out to her 2 million followers, “You should follow this.”), he is originally from my hometown. His parents still live here, he came home for Thanksgiving right after the big Oprah wing-ding and so I decided to profile him for the local Lawrence Magazine.

My editor, who adores sidebars, said, “Ask him for some tips.” He gave me several, but the one I most resonated to was this: “The one thing we have control over is our thoughts, the meaning we give to events that happen in our lives. We can frame things in whatever light we choose and how we word the questions we ask ourselves is extremely important.”

For example:

“Is something the end….or is it a new beginning?”

“Is this a breakdown…or a breakthrough?”

As he says, “It’s a very powerful thing that we get to decide the meaning we give to things.”

So in honor of Mastin and my own evolving awareness, I’d like to share a couple reframed thoughts that have really blessed my life.

1. I am the Bill Gates of free time and flexibility. I’m a freelance writer so there’s no boss expecting me to clock in. I can travel whenever I want to. I can attend get-togethers in the middle of the day—like my spiritual entrepreneurs group—or lunch with a dear friend as I did yesterday for two and a half hours. Some people would panic without a regular job. I prefer to see it as having an abundance of time and a whole wagonload of opportunities to create new things.

2. I am OTT wealthy with an unlimited supply of creative capital. I have so many ideas I want to write about, so many books and TV series and articles I want to produce. And to my way of thinking, creative capital trumps the other kind of capital because mine is capable of producing the other kind of capital and is lots more fun.

3. I have fun no matter what. There’s no question that, as a travel writer, I get to do a lot of cool things—meet medicine men from the Cook Islands, hang with wealthy people at five-star resorts, eat every meal beside the ocean—but it doesn’t take that for me to have fun. My favorite recent example of this happened in December.

I was scheduled to go to Belize to bring in the “end of the Mayan calendar” at Caracol, a jungle Mayan city still being excavated. The night I was supposed to pack for my 6 a.m. flight, my back went out. I wasn’t able to go….at that time. So I lay in bed that first day in what some might describe as excruciating physical pain. I could barely get up to pee. But I, because of my commitment to fun and joy, actually had a stellar day. I was so happy–really!!! I decided to have fun anyway. I look back at that day as very important to my spiritual growth because I realized this:

Our thoughts are the only thing that separate us from having every single thing we could ever want.

Thank you, Mastin, for the reminder.

Pam Grout is the author of E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality.

“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” – Thornton Wilder

“Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”

– Oprah Winfrey


My friends, relatives and anyone who follows my blog knows about A.A. 2.0. It’s a simple, two-step program for revolutionizing your life.

The name comes from my daily practice of getting up each morning and proclaiming, “Something amazingly awesome is going to happen to me today.”

The next step, just as easy, involves texting three miracles and/or blessings (A.K.A. awesomeness) to four friends who I refer to as my “power posse.” The only stipulation is the list has to be different every day. I like to say that my number one mission in life is scouting miracles. I’ve found that the more I look for them, the more plentiful they become.

Since I’m writing about travel today and looking over my itinerary for next week’s oh-so-exciting trip to the Cook Islands, I thought I’d demonstrate how this simple program works by sharing the awesomeness from last month’s adventure to Belize:

Thursday: Easy, on-time flights, staying on a 7200-acre rainforest preserve and drinking Argentinean wine with the resort’s South African manager.

Friday: Exploring a 3000-year-old Mayan site, howler monkeys who sound like Jurassic Park and rescuing my favorite hat before it plunged down an 800-foot waterfall.

Saturday: Swimming three-feet away from a three-foot loggerhead turtle, seeing lemon sharks, barracuda and a giant school of blue tang and being invited to watch the Caribbean cup soccer finals on an outdoor TV while eating just-caught barbecued lobster.

Sunday: Egrets and pelicans on my morning beach walk, mimosas and gelato before my 10 a.m. flight and getting home 30 minutes early.

If you want to join A.A. 2.0, tweet your daily blessings to #A.A. 2.0.

Pam Grout is the author of E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality.