CHAPTER 14:

GRATITUDE: THE GATEWAY DRUG TO

AWESOMENESS

When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.

—Anthony Robbins; author, speaker, motivator, life-changer

When I was a little kid, my parents made my brothers and sister and I answer the

phone in this very formal way, “Jennifer Sincero speaking,” as if, between

fighting over who got to play with the Big Wheel and stuffing balloons down our

pants, we were all running our own private concierge businesses.

CHAPTER 13:

GIVE AND LET GIVE

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely

try to help another without helping himself.

—RalphWaldo Emerson; American poet, essayist, visionary, giver

One day while driving somewhere with my family, we stopped off at a store

along the way and told my niece, then five years old, that she could get herself a

little sumthin’. She came up to the register with a six-pack of orange Tic Tacs

and charmed her way into getting the whole thing, instead of being told to put it

back and just buy one

CHAPTER 12:

LEAD WITH YOUR CROTCH

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there

are few.

—Shunryu Suzuki; Japanese Zen monk, author, teacher also

lovingly known as the “Crooked Cucumber”

I know the big saying is “youth is wasted on the young,” but I think, in certain

respects anyway, we’ve really got it going on in our late teens and early twenties.

Aside from all the angst and drama and escorts home from the police, we’ve still

got our little kid-like ability to create “just because” still firmly intact, but we’ve

also got this newly-hatched adult ability to make big things happen in our lives.

Add to this the fact that we’re not yet jaded by a long list of failures, and are still

under the vague impression that death is something that happens to other people,

we, if you’re anything like me, leap into our lives when we’re young with an

idiotic, yet awesome, disregard for “what-if’s.”