Author Archives: Garry Rodgers

About Garry Rodgers

After three decades as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police homicide detective and British Columbia coroner, International Best Selling author and blogger Garry Rodgers has an expertise in death and the craft of writing on it. Now retired, he wants to provoke your thoughts about death and help authors give life to their words.

THINK AND GROW RICH

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

Think And Grow Rich was written in 1937 and sold 70 million books before its author, Napoleon Hill, died in 1970. Who knows how many copies since. Talk about a best seller. It’s still in print.

It’s about the science of personal achievement; the philosophy of success. There’s a lot in it for you.

Andrew Carnegie, the philanthropist of U.S. Steel and Carnegie Hall fame (the BillGates/Warren Buffet of the day), wanted to leave the masses a timeless formula for prosperity. He challenged a young buck, a West Virginia reporter by the name of Napoleon Hill, to research and write it. He didn’t pay Hill – Carnegie just introduced Hill to the players of the time – writers, inventors, business people, presidents, royalty, socialites, clergy, sports & entertainers.

Hill spent 20 years studying the secret of what makes people successful. He identified 17 common principles and wrote a heady book titled The Philosophy of Success. It didn’t sell well, so he modified it as The Science of Personal Achievement. That didn’t do so good, neither.

**Napoleon Hill didn’t quit. He condensed it with a catchy cover and a slick title: Think and Grow Rich.**

People wanted to get rich, so they bought up his book and, when everybody started talking about it, they told their friends, who wrote their pen-pals, who dialed-up others, who lettered-the-editor, …

Napoleon Hill spew pure truth. He got it bang-on and his secret has stood the test of time. Read it. Modern updates are available if you can’t handle the male vernacular of the time.

Here’s Napoleon Hill’s 17 principles of success. Think about how they can work into your writing… or whatever you need.

1. Definiteness of Purpose

2. Positive Mental Attitude

3. Self Discipline

4. Personal Initiative

5. Enthusiasm

6. Creative Vision

7. Accurate Thinking

8. Controlled Attention

9. Learning From Adversity and Defeat

10. Maintenance of Sound Health

11. Budgeting Time and Money

12. Pleasing Personality

13. Applied Faith

14. Teamwork

15. Going The Extra Mile

16. Master-Mind

17. Cosmic Habit-Force

These principles are of no particular order, but follow a pattern. To achieve something, you must first conceive what you want – your definite purpose – knowing where you want to go. Then, you must have a positive mental attitude to go with it. In other words – you must believe that you are going to achieve your definite purpose – and then you must build your world around it – using all these principles – especially the mastermind.

Go read, or re-read, Think And Grow Rich. And I’ve already given you a spoiler… the Napoleon Hill secret is –

Whatever The Mind Can Conceive And Believe, It Can Achieve

YOUR BRAIN IS WIRED FOR STORY

You have to read ‘Wired For Story‘ by Lisa Cron.

It’s the writer’s guide to using brain science to hook readers from the very first sentence. Download it, or go right out and buy it at a brick & mortar place. It’s just that good. Even if you aren’t a writer – as a reader it’ll make you appreciate what a story is.

And, as Lisa tells us, we’re all wired for story.

We’re humans. Story is crucial to our evolution – more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs lets us hang on; story tells us what to hang on to. Story is what enables us to imagine what might happen and prepare for it. Story is what makes us human.

Brain science and story. Right brain. Left brain. Common sense.

No matter how you cut it, we’re hardwired for story. We need story to make sense of things. We need story to tell us things. We need story so we don’t have to find out things by ourselves.

TV. Facebook. Twitter. Emails.

They’re all story.

Just like letters, and print books, and smoke signals used to be.

Technology changes, but the human attraction to story doesn’t. That’s because we’re hardwired by our creator to tell and listen to stories.

We get a dopamine rush from wanting to know what happens next… and that dopamine rush lets us learn. It keeps us up late at night… turning the page. It’s the rush of intoxication. Being captivated by a good read. Meeting our hardwired expectations that the story will tell us something about life that we don’t have to risk learning on our own.

Hey Lisa, I’m gonna quote you without permission…

‘Evolution dictates that the first job of any good story is to completely anesthetize the part of our brain that questions how it is creating such a compelling illusion of reality. After all, a good story doesn’t feel like an illusion. What it feels like is life. Literally. A recent brain-imaging study reported in Psychology Science reveals that the regions of the brain that process the sights, sounds, tastes, and movement of real life are activated when we’re engrossed in a compelling narrative. That’s what accounts for the vivid mental images and the visceral reactions we feel when we can’t stop reading, even though it’s past midnight and we have to be up at dawn. When a story enthralls us, we are inside of it, feeling what the protagonist feels, experiencing it as it were indeed happening to us, and the last thing we’re focussing on is the mechanics of the thing.”

A good story engrosses us so much that we forget it’s a story at all.

Check out wiredforstory.com

It’s what we’re hardwired to hear.

5 LEADING CAUSES OF DEATH

You’re going to die one day.

You just don’t know when.

But there’s a lot you can do to delay it.

**The vast majority of deaths are preventable; or should I say – delayable.**

What’s interesting is how the causes and contributors in death are intertwined, which puts delaying your death pretty much in your own hands.

Here’s how they rank:

5. Accidents

This includes motor vehicle, occupational, and residential mishaps. Dying in a plane crash is so, so, far down there – so don’t sweat your next flight. Motor vehicle incident (MVI) deaths are much more likely to claim younger people, as they’re much more likely to push the limits. And alcohol is the leading contributor to all fatal MVI’s.

4. COPD – Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

COPD is an all-encompassing term for your lungs being plugged. The usual suspect lifestyle contributors come into play – alcohol, diet, lack of exercise, obesity, and smoking.

3. Cancer

What can you say about the C-word? Nasty. You don’t want to go there. Funny how all-of-the-above contribute to cancer.

2. Cardiovascular Disease

Heart Attack. The Big One. A Jammer. There’s two main types. A Myocardial Infarction (MI), where the heart muscle dies. Or an Arrhythmia, where the electrical system shuts down. You don’t want to try these out, either. Ah, guess what causes heart attacks?

1. Senescence

Biological aging. Really? Yep. Old age is the leading cause of death. Eventually that’ll do you in and that’s the one you should strive for. Provided you still have quality of life till it claims you. And, if you manage the 5 leading contributors…