If nice people don’t change the world, who does? What is the opposite of nice? Are the only people who can change the world jerks? (h/t to Joel Runyon at Blog of Impossible Things for bringing the topic of Nice to my mind this week!)

You are shaking the dice in your hand. You are playing the game. You’re in it now.

That’s pretty much how life goes when we are pushing the boundaries. We have options.

What stops us from exercising these options is their consequences.

The funny thing about holiday traditions is that in the end they are rarely about things. Also, Wild Turkey may be good enough for Hunter S. Thompson, but it is a bourbon that I recently characterized as an “esophageal shanking”.

I posted my 2011 Goals in January and lots of you were like “Elisa, that’s a pretty lofty list, are you sure you wanna go all crazy sauce on life like that?”

And I was all “You don’t know me, I do what I want. Whateva whateva, I’ll crush this list!”

Well…I lied.

Ish.

This spring, my life felt like it was falling apart. By mid-summer I was overwhelmed with a feeling that I just couldn’t explain. I wasn’t depressed or exceedingly sad.

I had just lost my sparkle.

Then Dan posted his 9th Tropical MBA Internship.

(Pssst…I got accepted!! I’m moving to Bali in January 2012!!)

When you are a person who is loved, there is never any lack of advice and guidance being thrown at you.
The things that you SHOULD do.
Often, your advisers and guidance counselors are not trying to break your spirit or cause you pain. They want to help, they want to see you succeed, they want to see you happy.
They love you.
They just don’t know what to say or how to say it. Or they don’t know any other way to live life than the path they’ve chosen.
Or they are scared and/or …