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Today is April 30 and the Navigate the Chaos question to understand is “how often do you create a stop-doing list?” Navigating the chaos involves knowing how good you want to be, allocating your limited resources for maximum impact, and making the best use of the 24 hours in each given day. As you put in the daily grind to translate one dream after another into reality you will make hundreds of decisions each day. Understanding, processing, and identifying what to do, as opposed to what not to do, is both art and science and takes years of practice and adjustment. Since everyone has the same amount of time each day, leveraging your mind, body, and spirit to determine how best to use your time is a strategy used by many who translate one dream after another into reality. In a September 2018 Psychology Today article "How Many Decisions Do We Make Each Day?" Dr. Eva M. Krockow noted “many of our daily decisions are made on autopilot. Sometimes we are unaware of having an option. Increased awareness and mindfulness can help us navigate our daily maze of decisions and support our concentration.” Today’s reflection might provide a momentary glimpse into your ability to decide between options. For some who navigate the chaos they rely on Pareto’s Principle. The Pareto Principle, named after esteemed Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. This principle serves as a general reminder that the relationship between inputs and outputs is not balanced. Pareto made his original observation while at the University of Lausanne in 1896 and published it in his first work, Cours d'économie politique. Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He made similar observations in other countries he studied. For the most part, the Pareto Principle is an observation that things in life are not always distributed evenly. The Pareto Principle is also known as the Pareto Rule or the 80/20 Rule. Another way to view this principle is to focus on the few things that get you the most benefit. For example, in sales, 80% of a company’s revenue usually stems from 20% of the customers. When applied to time management, the Pareto Principle offers a valuable tool for anyone looking to become more efficient in their time management in order to help themselves navigate the chaos of life as the translate one dream after another into reality. The Pareto Principle can help you determine which decisions not to make. It can clarify priorities, save time, and help you focus on what is most important. Everything cannot be a priority. In his February 2017 article "The Undisciplined Pursuit of More (The Art of Limiting Yourself to Only the Essential)" Thomas Oppong noted “When you force yourself to focus on essential tasks that have a large Return on Investment (ROI), you will be more productive, achieve more and simplify your life in the process.” To that end, and applying the Pareto Principle to his life, Robert Glazer wrote in a September 2018 Forbes article “The Pareto Principle holds that 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of effort. That means you are probably spending 80 percent of your time not accomplishing much.” Since “productivity is not about turning your schedule into a game of Tetris, cramming as much as humanly possible in your day and your life” Glazer recommends a ‘stop-doing’ list, as opposed to a ‘to-do’ list. As you work on translating one dream after another into reality, ask yourself what you can stop doing immediately, in the short-run, and in the long-run? Since 20 percent of your effort is producing 80 percent of the results in your life, how often are you reflecting on this? Can you identify the 20 percent of your effort that is generating 80 percent of results? Have you thought about life in this manner? For an illustration, let us use a scenario where you own a bakery as part of today’s reflection. After six months you calculate that 80 percent of your sales come from brewing coffee that only requires 20 percent of your time in the morning. Conversely, 80 percent of your time each morning involves making the baked goods, muffins, and sandwiches you sell alongside the coffee. For anyone looking to navigate the chaos of running a bakery, this analysis using Pareto’s Principle is critical since it helps you understand that spending any time creating new food items you are better off updating your coffee selection. If you remain unfocused as you go about running your business, career, or personal life, you risk wasting time on things that really do not matter all that much. You just need to make the difficult decision to add those tasks to your ‘stop-doing’ list. As Geoffrey James wrote in a May 29, 2012, Inc. article “Having a simple list of things to do almost forces you to waste time doing stuff that doesn't really count. That is true even if you prioritize according to importance. Plenty of important things take so much effort that, in the end, they're not worth actually doing.” In his 1999 book The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less Paperback, Richard Koch discussed that the 80/20 principle is “so valuable because it is counterintuitive. We tend to expect that all causes will have roughly the same significance. That all customers are equally valuable. That all problems have a large number of causes, so that it is not worth isolating a few key causes. That all opportunities are roughly equal value, so that we treat them all equally.” Kock went on to observe that the 80/20 Principle applies to almost any personal or professional aspect of life. The 80/20 Principle provides individuals with a strategy to become more effective and happier by recognizing what has value and avoiding what has negative value in order to become more efficient. How often do you use Pareto’s Principle to help you navigate the chaos and identify how best to spend your time? Do you have a stop doing list? How often do you reflect upon the belief that ’80 percent of results come from 20 percent of effort?’ How often do you reflect upon your process in order to increase your ability to make decisions effectively and efficiently? How often do you remind yourself that everyone has 24 hours a day so how you make the most of your limited time matters when it comes to translating dreams into reality? How often do you identify what has value compared to what has negative value in your life? What efforts have you made recently to become more efficient with your use of time? How often do you create a stop-doing list?

Today is April 29 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you have courage to start over?" In a small but impactful publication entitled The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours, Marian Wright Edelman, American activist, and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, summarized “Twenty-Five Lessons for Life.” In an interview she noted that “Growing up in Bennettsville, South Carolina there was one thing that my father continually stressed—education, education, education. My parents taught us that education and knowledge were an individual’s source of strength.” In The Measure of Our Success, Edelman noted: “Don’t ever stop learning and improving your mind or you’re going to get left behind. The world is changing like a kaleidoscope right before our eyes.” For those who leverage their mind, body, and spirit to navigate the chaos they did so on their second, third, or even fourth strategy. They continued to learn and improve their mind. These people demonstrated by example that there is no limit to the number of times you can try something to figure out how to translate your dream into reality. Begin again and have the courage to start over and join the chorus of others who serve as examples. Three such examples are: John Glenn started over. Glenn is best known for becoming the first American astronaut to orbit Earth in 1962. But 12 years later, at 53 years old, he became a US senator in Ohio, a role he held for 24 years. Julia Child started over. Child worked in advertising, media, and secret intelligence before writing her first cookbook when she was 50, launching her career as a celebrity chef in 1961. Vera Wang started over. Wang was a figure skater and journalist before entering the fashion industry at age 40. Today she is one of the world's premier women's designers. As Eric Roth wrote for the screenplay of the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: “For what it is worth: it is never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There is no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you are proud of. If you find that you are not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.” How often have you placed a time limit on yourself? Why do you think you have given yourself a limited amount of time to translate a dream into reality? How often do you make the best of a life situation? Do you allow yourself to see things that startle you? Do you live a life you are proud of? If not, how often do you exhibit the courage required to start over? Actor Terry Crews knows all too well the value of starting over to navigate the chaos and practice the art of living well. He did, however, need to learn such a lesson the hard way. Crews struggled after retiring from the National Football League (NFL) in 1997. His initial dream was to have a long successful career playing professional football. That did not happen. He had to realize that playing in the NFL was not what he expected. The transition from athlete to civilian caused him to fall into a depression. To cope, Crews turned to food. He would rent a movie from Blockbuster and stay up until early in the morning eating burgers, fries, and entire bags of cookies. He gained 30 pounds and had to accept the harsh reality he was broke, overweight, and needed a new career. As Crews said “I was hungry. Your stomach is growling, and you realize these kids got to eat. And you are like, man, I’m going to act. I’m going to cry on screen.” Eventually he gained control of his weight and started working out on a regular basis. Crews also moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career and it would take several years of little or no work for him to break through into the industry. As Crews recalled in an interview “I feel like I am a guy who is floating downstream, and I am going to go where I need to go. It is one of those things where I just say yes. You must be open to everything. I never thought I was going to be an actor. I did not have it figured out. But you must go. You have to be willing, and suddenly, you’re in somewhere you’ve never been.” As 13th century Persian poet Rumi noted “Do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know the side you are used to is better than the one to come?” How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the new one to come? How often do you have the courage to start anew? Do you worry so much that your life is turning upside down that it is preventing you from exploring the new side of life to come? Who or what is stopping you from starting over? What skills, traits, or habits do you need to practice in order to start over? Who in your life can you turn to help you start over? Have you ever helped anyone start over?

Today is April 28 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you help people understand?” Instead of assuming people know what you want, comprehend what it is you are doing, or believe in the direction in which you are traveling, try helping people understand. If you feel as though helping people understand what you believe to be obvious then navigating the chaos of life might be a bit more arduous for you. Helping people grasp what it is you are trying to do and why you are doing it is a necessary and important strategy to use. If you choose not to do so then you risk being misunderstood. While some people will never understand you or your efforts, helping them do so will at least allow you to know you did everything you could. As you navigate the chaos remember that being misunderstood is a common occurrence. You will have to decide if being misunderstood will slow you down or stop you from translating your dreams into reality. Fred Smith did not. Federal Express founder Fred Smith knows all too well the time he was misunderstood. While he was a student at Yale University, Smith wrote a paper on the concept of reliable overnight delivery. Such a concept was foreign at the time and hard to comprehend for many people. A Yale management professor gave Smith a C on the paper and wrote “The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible." After graduating Yale Smith joined the Marines in 1966 and completed two tours in Vietnam. He narrowly survived a Vietcong ambush after losing his helmet, grenade, and gun. Upon returning home from the Vietnam war, he returned to the idea he developed at Yale. In 1970, Smith purchased a controlling interest in an aircraft maintenance company, Ark Aviation Sales and by 1971 turned its focus to trading used jets. On June 18, 1971, Smith founded Federal Express with his $4 million inheritance and raised $91 million in venture capital. In 1973, the company began offering service to 25 cities, and it began with small packages and documents and a fleet of 14 Falcon 20 (DA-20) jets. His focus was on developing an integrated air-ground system, which had never been done before. Smith developed FedEx on the business idea of a shipment version of a bank clearing house where one bank clearing house was located in the middle of the representative banks and all their representatives would be sent to the central location to exchange materials. In the first two years, however, and primarily due to rising fuel costs, the company found itself millions of dollars in debt and on the brink of bankruptcy. The company had already gone to many extremes, from pilots using their personal credit cards to truck drivers leaving their watches at gas stations as collateral. When FedEx's funds dwindled to just $5,000, Smith realized he did not have enough to fuel the planes, so he bet on himself and gambled. After a crucial business loan was denied, Smith took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill. It kept FedEx alive for one more week. In the book Changing How the World Does Business: FedEx's Incredible Journey to Success - The Inside Story, Roger Frock, a former senior vice president of operations at FedEx, describes the scene when he found out what Smith did. "I said, 'You mean you took our last $5,000 — how could you do that? [Smith] shrugged his shoulders and said, 'What difference does it make? Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldn't have flown anyway.'" The $27,000 proved only a temporary solution, however, but Smith did consider his winnings as a hopeful sign business would go up from there. He used the money as motivation to obtain more funding, and eventually raised another $11 million. After stabilizing financially, Smith helped launch a direct mail advertising campaign to boost the company's visibility and help people understand the value of such a novel idea of overnight delivery. By 1976, FedEx produced its first profit of $3.6 million. A few years later, it went public and has been thriving ever since. Today, FedEx, the world's first overnight delivery company, delivers more than 1.2 billion packages every year to over 220 countries. In 2021 Smith had a net worth of over $4 billion: not bad for someone with a misunderstood college essay, a misunderstood new service, and a misunderstood vision. In March 2022, Smith announced that he will step down as CEO and become executive chairman. Just as Smith helped people understand the utility, value, and convenience of overnight delivery, Kieran Culkin had to help people understand he was right for the role of Roman Roy. During the 2018-2023 period the television series Succession aired on HBO. Created by Jesse Armstrong, Succession is an American satirical black comedy-drama series that centers on the Roy family, the owners of Waystar RoyCo, a global media and entertainment conglomerate, who are fighting for control of the company amid uncertainty about the health of the family's patriarch, Logan Roy (Brian Cox). As Charlie Ridgely noted in an April 24, 2023, article “Succession will likely go down as one of the most perfectly cast shows in years. Every single character seems to be flawlessly paired with their actor, leading to multiple acting awards over the course of the series and some of the most memorable turns in HBO's storied history.” Cast members include Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy, Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy, and Sarah Snook as Siobhan ("Shiv") Roy, Logan's children employed by the company. Additionally, Matthew Macfadyen stars as Tom Wambsgans, Shiv's husband and Waystar executive; and Nicholas Braun stars as Greg Hirsch, Logan's grandnephew. But ‘one of the most perfectly cast shows’ owes its success to Kieran Culkin who helped Armstrong and his team understand he was right for the part of Roman, not Greg. In an April 2023 Variety interview, Culkin said “They sent me to read for Greg, and I knew I wasn’t Greg. I read the first element and knew that’s just not me. What’s fun about that is I thought the writing was good enough 10 pages in and just kept reading, which I don’t normally do. Then the character Roman walks in and says, ‘Hey, hey motherfuckers,’ and then I was like, he’s fun, and kept reading. And then I asked: ‘I’m wrong for Greg, so that’s a pass, but I don’t want to pass. Can I read for Roman?’ The response I got back was they’re not reading for Roman yet. And I said, ‘Can I do it anyway?’ My agent at the time was like, yeah, go ahead, play the game. So, I picked three scenes, put myself on tape, and sent it in.” The rest is history. After reviewing Culkin’s unsolicited audition tape of Roman the production team added him to the star-studded cast of one of the most successful television shows in recent history. Smith helped people understand why they needed overnight delivery and Culkin helped people understand the role he was suited for. How often do you help people understand? Do you feel as though helping people understand is beneath you for some reason? What is holding you back from helping people understand? Neither Smith nor Culkin waited for permission to help people understand; are you waiting for someone to give you permission? What role do you think courage plays when trying to help people understand? Has anyone ever tried to help you understand their point of view or perspective for a specific life situation?

Today is April 27 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how many traits of lucky people do you practice?” Throughout the course of navigating the chaos you may have used the phrase, or perhaps have heard others use the phrase, “she was so lucky.” Variations of such a theme include “he was lucky and found himself at the right place at the right time,” or “they were so lucky to have that happen to them.” Turns out luck is not what we often think it is. Instead of a series of unpredictable events, luck is far more sophisticated a strategy to navigate the chaos than most people know. Luck has been studied by researchers and a more thoughtful reflection of luck might just help nudge you further along your path of navigating the chaos. One such researcher was Max Gunther. Gunther was an Anglo-American journalist and author of 26 books, including his investment best-seller, The Zurich Axioms. Born in England, Gunther moved to the United States at age of 11 after his father, Frank Henry became the manager of the New York branch of a leading Swiss Bank Corporation. Gunther graduated from Princeton University in 1949 and served in the United States Army from 1950 to 1951. He worked at Business Week magazine from 1951 to 1955 and during the following two years he was the contributing editor for Time Magazine. In one of his many publications Gunther explored the question “why are some people luckier than others?” The answers can be found in his now classic 1977 publication The Luck Factor: Why Some People Are Luckier Than Others and How You Can Become One of Them. Gunter identified five traits of lucky people: The spider web structure: network with others The hunching skill: believe that it is possible to perceive more than you see The ‘audentes fortuna juvat’ (fortune favors the brave) phenomenon: the lucky life is a zigzag not a straight line The ratchet effect: prevent bad luck from becoming worse luck The pessimism paradox: lucky people often cultivate hard, dark pessimism as an essential item of survival equipment. Two examples of people who were diligent in creating their luck were producer Brian Grazer and photojournalist Clemens Kalischer. After graduating from college in 1974, Grazer overheard a conversation between two men outside his apartment window one afternoon. One man was telling another how he had just quit a law clerk position for Peter Knecht at Warner Bros. Grazer needed a job that summer before he started USC Law School, so he found the phone number and called Knecht who invited him in for an interview the following day. Knecht hired him and a year later Grazer quit law school to pursue a life in Hollywood. As a law clerk for Warner Bros. Grazer delivered contracts to Hollywood’s top executives and actors and started to have conversations about how television shows and movies were made. As he explained in his 2015 publication A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life, his curiosity allowed him to be prepared for the opportunity that presented itself. Grazer used his entry level position to meet experts in the movie and television business. He also took the advice of American talent agent and studio executive Lew Wasserman who told him “Start manufacturing ideas. You don’t have enough money to buy anything, so take this pencil, put it on this paper, and get going.” During this early part of his career Grazer first met Ron Howard and soon they became friends and eventually business partners when they founded Imagine Entertainment. Grazer made his own luck by practicing Gunther’s first trait of lucky people-he created a ‘spider web structure to network with others.’ Was Grazer lucky? Most certainly. He created his own luck. Noted photojournalist Clemens Kalischer launched his career in a similar fashion to that of Grazer and also created his own luck. Kalischer fled Germany in 1933 as the Nazis clinched power, surviving imprisonment in France, and escaping to the United States. His career as an accomplished photographer happened by pure accident. Upon arriving in the United States, and still acclimating himself to New York, having arrived speaking only French and German, Kalischer took a job as a copy boy at the New York bureau of Agence France-Presse. His daily agenda consisted of getting coffee and figuring out the word counts of articles. Then one day in 1946 the news agency’s chief photographer was unavailable for an assignment, and an editor recruited Kalischer as a replacement. With a borrowed Rolleiflex, he set out to record the arrival, at 4:00 am of the former French luxury liner Normandie, which was being towed to a scrap yard. His editors in Paris were impressed with his photographs. As Kalischer recalled “That’s when it first dawned on me, perhaps you’re now a photographer.” His series of photographs of displaced persons arriving in New York City from displaced persons camps in post-World War II Europe, taken in 1947 and 1948, was his most recognized work. He would go on to be one of the influential photographers of the 20th century by taking advantage of an opportunity merely by accident. Kalischer practiced Gunther’s second trait of lucky people - the hunching skill of believing it is possible to perceive more than you see.’ How often do you network with others? How often do you perceive more than you see? How often do you remind yourself fortune favors the brave? How often do you prevent bad luck from becoming worse? How often do you cultivate hard, dark pessimism as a means of survival?

Today is April 26 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you make a crazy idea work?” This use of a ‘crazy’ strategy to navigate the chaos is uncommon, strange, and misunderstood. The etymology of the word crazy stems from the late 16th century (in sense ‘full of cracks’): from craze; perhaps of Scandinavian origin and related to Swedish krasa meaning ‘crunch.’ Can you tolerate people viewing your idea as one ‘full of cracks?’ Are you able to see how people might view your idea as crazy? If navigating the chaos required you to make a crazy idea work, could you, do it? Jimmy Wales, Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin did. Wales left graduate school before completing a PhD to take a job in finance and later worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm. In 1996, he founded the web portal Bomis, a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment and adult content, with two partners. Although Bomis struggled to make money, it did provide him with the funding he needed to pursue his idea for an online encyclopedia. In March 2000, along with Larry Sanger, Wales launched a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia called Nupedia. Nupedia was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics and attract enough viewers that would allow advertising to be placed alongside the entries. Due to an arduous peer-review process, however, Nupedia failed to achieve any level of growth and published just 24 articles. To help facilitate its growth and simplify the submission process, Wales and Sanger implemented a new tool called a wiki that programmer Ben Kovitz introduced to them in January 2001. Wiki stems from Hawaiian wiki wiki ‘very quick.’ This new tool would revolutionize the level of collaboration possible for anyone with Internet access around the globe. When Nupedia’s experts rejected the wiki for fear that mixing amateur content with professionally researched material would compromise the integrity of Nupedia’s information and damage the credibility, Wales and Sanger labeled the new project “Wikipedia” and went live on its own domain five days after its creation. In a 2006 TED talk Wales said that Wikipedia began with a very radical idea and that was for “all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” As a radical and innovative global collaboration platform Wikipedia now has over 290 editions with the English Wikipedia having the largest collection of articles reaching over six million. A pair of Swedish inventors, Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin, know all too well how to make a crazy idea work since they designed the invisible bicycle helmet known as the Hövding. Developed over the course of eight years, the Hövding is also known as the world's first airbag bicycle helmet as it is stored in a decorative pouch worn around a rider’s neck. When a rider crashes, a helium canister inflates the nylon hood within milliseconds. Hövding started out in 2005 as a master’s thesis by the two founders who were studying Industrial Design at the University of Lund. Haupt and Alstin had the idea of developing a new type of cycle helmet in response to the introduction of a law on mandatory helmet use for children up to the age of 15 in Sweden. To design their invisible helmet, Haupt and Alstin collaborated with a variety of experts in various fields to create an innovative set of sensors that trigger the helmet to inflate out of its pouch upon a bicycle’s impact. They added sensors to the Hövding that analyzed movement patterns 200 times a second to know when the rider is in a real crash. Normal movements made by riders won’t trigger the Hövding. In 2006, Hövding won the Venture Cup, after which Hövding Sweden AB was founded. Haupt said, “We don’t like, as designers, to have this attitude that it’s people who need to change, instead of the product that needs to change. And that’s why we decided to see if we could improve them.” By creating a whole new mind, they succeeded in creating a solution to the vanity aspect of wearing bicycle helmets. People want a product that leaves their hair intact. Their understanding of this vanity aspect helped the two innovators realize they “needed to really think new if we wanted to solve the problem.” Over 150 000 airbags for cyclists have been sold in over 15 countries and 5,017 people have Hövding to thank for protecting their head in bicycle accidents. As stated on the Hövding web site “Continuing to believe in our vision and proving time and time again that the impossible is possible has given us the unique expertise that ultimately landed us several global patents. But our journey has only just begun, as we’ll never stop moving forward. All our employees share a motto that is at the heart of everything we do — At Hövding, we thrive on the impossible.” English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead noted “every really new idea looks crazy at first.” People thought Wales was crazy to launch Wikipedia. People thought it was impossible to create an invisible bicycle helmet until Haupt and Alstin did it. How often do you make a crazy idea work? How often do you support others as they are trying to make a crazy idea work? Who or what is holding you back from trying to make your crazy idea? Do you even allow yourself to have crazy ideas? Can you move forward when people think your idea looks crazy?

Today is May 3 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “how often do you endure caterpillars to befriend butterflies?” Another way of considering the phrase ‘enduring caterpillars to befriend butterflies’ is radical transformation. How does this wondrous process occur by which a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly? According to The Scientific American in an August 10, 2012, article “The story usually begins with a very hungry caterpillar hatching from an egg. The caterpillar, or what is more scientifically termed a larva, stuffs itself with leaves, growing plumper and longer through a series of molts in which it sheds its skin. One day, the caterpillar stops eating, hangs upside down from a twig or leaf and spins itself a silky cocoon or molts into a shiny chrysalis. Within its protective casing, the caterpillar radically transforms its body, eventually emerging as a butterfly or moth.” To unpack this strategy of radical transformation available to anyone willing to leverage their mind, body, and spirit, let us reflect upon each step of the process to engage in a self-reflection exercise with questions throughout each of the four steps. Step 1: a very hungry caterpillar. How hungry are you? How often do you have the self-awareness to realize just how hungry you are? How long have you gone without food? How long have you delayed pursuing your dreams? Why are you waiting to feed yourself? Are you engaging in some form of self-sabotage by delaying the nourishment your self is longing for? Step 2: the caterpillar turned larva stuffs itself with leaves. What do you need to stuff yourself with to transform from the person you are to the person you want to be? What will nourish your soul? Have you even thought about what you need to eat? Does your mind need education? Does your body need movement? Does your soul need love? Step 3: the caterpillar stops eating, hangs upside down and spins itself into a shiny chrysalis. During this phase of the radical transformation, it may appear that you are merely standing still, or in this case, hanging around. But no! You are allowing that you which you digested to transform you. During this incubation period you allow the nourishment to do itsjob. Are you patient enough to wait for your transformation to crystallize? Do you understand the value of time here as it relates to the incubation period involved with the transformation? Step 4: the caterpillar completes its radical transformation and emerges into a butterfly. This last time requires an inordinate amount of courage. Do you have the courage to come out of your shell and emerge onto the world stage different than you were? You will now have wings and can fly – are you ready? You will be more beautiful, and people will notice – are you ready? You will be light and able to fly – are you ready? French writer Antoine de Saint- Exupéry published his novella The Little Prince in 1943. The novella is one of the most-translated books in the world and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Saint-Exupéry was exiled to North America. During personal upheavals and failing health, he produced almost half of the writings for which he would be remembered, including a tender tale of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss, in the form of a young prince fallen to Earth. An earlier memoir by the author had recounted his aviation experiences in the Sahara Desert, and he is thought to have drawn on those same experiences in The Little Prince. Recognizing the transformational potential within each of us Saint-Exupéry wrote “well I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.” In other words, if you want to have some of one, you need to put up with the other. Is this not true of most of our relationships? Is it not true of being kind towards ourselves? No one is born a butterfly. Even the people we consider butterflies today had a caterpillar stage at some point. The important point is to realize that if we keep growing, the butterfly stage is available to each of us. We can get there if we keep working at it. Eventually, we will get better and better, and then one day, we will realize we have become the butterfly we wanted to be. How often do you work on your radical transformation of becoming a butterfly? Is someone helping you transform into a butterfly? Have you helped anyone transform into a butterfly? Is someone holding you back from transforming into a butterfly? Are you holding anyone back from transforming into a butterfly?