Where Do I Sign? From Tragedy to Resilient Triumph is a moving, motivational memoir by David A. Dodd—A global leader in economic resilience, dynamic speaker, and survivor of extraordinary adversity. Through deeply personal storytelling, David reveals how a life shaped by trauma and setbacks became one defined by purpose, innovation, and unshakable resilience.

After a near-fatal auto crash left him with life-threatening injuries and a long road to recovery, he had every reason to give up. Instead, he leaned into five core principles that had guided him from childhood, resulting in personal resilience, faith, and a commitment to service. Along the way, he founded the International Sustainable Resilience Center and helped reshape how communities worldwide recover from disaster and build lasting strength.

This book is a compelling blend of life story and practical principles that will inspire readers from every walk of life. Whether you’re seeking encouragement during hard times or a framework for long-term growth, Where Do I Sign? offers hope, clarity, and an empowering message: you are stronger than you think.

Sign your name to your future. Conquer tragedy with resilience.

Here are the five principles of personal resilience.
1. Learn something, something that interests you
2. In learning about that something, find your passion
3. Pursue that passion, continue to learn about it and experience it
4. Develop a strategy, with specific actions to realize results from that passion
5. Measure your progress and celebrate success, focusing on the future not the past

The post David Dodd – Where Do I Sign? (From Tragedy to Resilient Triumph) appeared first on Good News!.

Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor of Rome, wrote his private reflections in Meditations, offering timeless wisdom on living a meaningful life. Despite ruling one of history’s greatest empires, he grappled with anxiety, frustration, and the search for purpose. His insights reveal profound lessons most men understand only after years of struggle.

1. You Control Only Your Thoughts and Actions

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” – Marcus Aurelius.

Most men waste years attempting to control circumstances beyond their influence—worrying about others’ opinions, market crashes, or political developments. Marcus understood that your only absolute authority is your own mind. Your response to events, not the events themselves, determines your experience. This distinction between what you can and can’t control is perhaps the most liberating realization a man can have.

2. Your Time is Limited — Stop Living for Tomorrow

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” – Marcus Aurelius.

The tragedy isn’t that men die, but that they never truly live. They postpone joy and authentic connection until after the next promotion or retirement. Marcus, who faced death daily, recognized that deferring life is ultimate self-betrayal. Each moment is the only moment you possess. Those who learn this late find themselves surrounded by regrets for experiences never had.

3. Your Perception Creates Your Reality

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” – Marcus Aurelius.

External events are neutral. A job loss or betrayal becomes painful only through your interpretation. This doesn’t mean denying genuine hardship, but understanding that between stimulus and response lies your power to choose meaning. Two men experience the same setback, yet one finds devastation, while the other discovers opportunity. Most men realize too late that they’ve been torturing themselves with their stories about reality, not reality itself.

4. Character Matters More Than Reputation

“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.” – Marcus Aurelius.

Men sacrifice integrity daily for others’ approval—taking soul-draining jobs, suppressing authentic beliefs, abandoning values to maintain a favorable image. Character is who you are when no one watches. Reputation is merely what others think they know. One provides genuine self-respect and is within your control. The other is a shadow you’ll never catch.

5. Anger and Resentment Poison Only You

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.” – Marcus Aurelius

Holding anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. The damage you inflict through sustained rage far exceeds whatever harm initially provoked you. When you harbor resentment, you grant your offender permanent residence in your mind. Forgiveness isn’t excusing bad behavior; it’s freeing yourself from carrying hatred. This lesson, learned too late, leaves men looking back on years wasted in anger that accomplished nothing.

6. Your Obstacles Are Your Opportunities

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius.

Every obstacle contains seeds of equivalent or greater benefit. The challenge blocking your path forces you to develop new capabilities or discover alternative routes. Marcus understood that obstacles aren’t the interruption to your path; they are the path. Men who grasp this early transform setbacks into stepping stones. Those who learn it late realize they spent years avoiding the very difficulties that could have forged their most significant growth.

7. Simplicity Brings Freedom

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” – Marcus Aurelius.

The emperor of Rome, surrounded by unimaginable wealth, understood that happiness requires very little. Modern men chase bigger houses, more impressive titles, fuller schedules. They mistake accumulation for achievement and busyness for importance. Marcus recognized that contentment springs from internal alignment, not external acquisition. Simplicity isn’t deprivation; it’s liberation from the tyranny of endless wanting.

8. Everyone is Fighting Their Own Battle

Marcus began many days acknowledging that he would encounter difficult people. Rather than being surprised, he prepared with compassion. Every person is fighting battles you know nothing about. This understanding doesn’t excuse poor behavior, but transforms your relationship with it. Judgment becomes curiosity. Frustration becomes empathy. Men who learn this late realize they wasted enormous energy taking things personally that were never about them.

9. Your Thoughts Become Your Life

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.” – Marcus Aurelius.

Life quality is determined by habitual thought quality. Marcus practiced rigorous mental discipline, knowing that unchecked thinking patterns create your experienced reality. A man who thinks in terms of scarcity perceives lack everywhere. One who trains their mind toward gratitude discovers abundance in even the simplest moments. Your thoughts are patterns you’ve reinforced through repetition. Most men don’t realize until late that they’ve been their own worst enemy through decades of toxic self-talk.

10. You Must Die to Ego to Truly Live

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” – Marcus Aurelius.

The ego builds elaborate defenses, creating a false self that demands validation and fears criticism. Marcus, despite holding absolute power, practiced humility and gratitude. Surrendering your ego isn’t about losing yourself; it’s about finding yourself. When you stop defending your self-image, you become free, actually to live. This is perhaps the hardest lesson and the one most men learn last, if at all.

Conclusion

Marcus Aurelius left us a manual for practical living. His lessons aren’t difficult to understand intellectually, but require humility to accept and discipline to practice daily. These insights can’t be learned from books alone; they must be lived through experience. Yet awareness can save years of unnecessary suffering. The question isn’t whether you’ll encounter these lessons, but whether you’ll recognize them when they appear.

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To ALSO Listen to the AUDIO PODCAST, Click Here:
Listen to “What a great man Aaron Zabar, one of the World’s Greatest Food Markets in the World, at 80th Street and Broadway, NY” on Spreaker.

The Zabar’s Story
90 years, and 4 generations later, Zabar’s family business is still going strong.

Our father and mother, Louis and Lillian Zabar, started the business back in 1934, opening a 22-foot-wide shop along NYC’a Broadway at West 80th Street. Louis was a real stickler for quality, roasting his own coffee, and personally visiting smokehouses to sample and inspect the fish – rejecting far more than he accepted.

The principles and practices of our founder and father continue to guide us: Respect the customer. Never, ever stint on quality. Offer fair value. And last but not least, keep searching for the new and wonderful.

Without question, this last point has accounted for some memorable moments. Back in the 1960’s, we introduced New York to Brie, in the ‘70’s we brought them sun-dried tomatoes and gnocchi, and in the ‘80’s, we got so excited about caviar – and wanted everyone to taste it – that our prices set off a so-called “Caviar War”. (Incidentally, we won.)

Over the years, the business kept growing, and today we span practically the entire block front. With our sons, daughters and their cousins, we’re still at it – hand-slicing meltingly delicious smoked fish behind our deli counter…offering tastes of the latest artisanal cheeses…setting out fresh-baked batches of rugelach (it’s our Bubbe’s recipe)…overseeing the roasting of our special coffee blends (we sell 400,000 pounds a year!) Retire? Not on your life – we’re having too much fun!

As Louis taught us, to succeed as a family business, you have to love each other, and love the business – in our case, great food, great service, great prices, great folks. We ask you, what’s not to love?!

Here’s to another 80 years, and then some! Heartfelt thanks for your patronage.

– Saul & Stanley Zabar

#aaronzabar #worldsgreatestfoodmarket #80thbroadcway #ny #manhattan

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#aaronzabar #worldsgreatestfoodmarket #80thbroadcway #ny #manhattan

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Little hugs

can dry big tears.

Little candles

can light the darkness.

Little memories

can last for years.

It’s the little things

in Life that bring the

greatest happiness.

#little #hugs #dry #tears #candles #light #darkness #memories #years #bring #greatest #happiness #thought #day #life

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THE BIG QUESTION:

CAN WE MAKE THESE

LAKES GREAT AGAIN?

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEITH LADZINSKI

By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT executive editor

In the 60s and 70s, when I was growing up, phosphate in detergents was one of our biggest environmental concerns, because it contaminated the Great Lakes. Rivers in Cleveland or Detroit still caught fire then. It was a simpler time.

Environmental problems seemed relatively contained, manageable. It seemed that by taking phosphate out of detergent and other pollutants out of a few rivers, we could make the Great Lakes great again. I should say “whole” again, because of course the lakes had never stopped being great. They hold almost 85 percent of North America’s fresh surface water and a fifth of the world’s. Their coastline is longer than the East and West coasts combined.

They’re as huge and as seemingly immutable a part of our geography and collective imagination as the Rocky Mountains—but while the Rockies are tens of millions of years old, the lakes were gouged out of bedrock by retreating glaciers only some 10,000 years ago. In their present form, they’re younger than the Egyptian pyramids, Tim Folger writes in this month’s cover story. From the shore, they may look big as oceans, but “they’re immature, more susceptible to threats.”

These days the threats are more global and daunting than in the good old days of burning rivers. They come from climate change, which is warming the lakes, diminishing their winter ice cover, and decimating the tiny plankton at the base of the food web. More than 180 invasive species, like zebra mussels and sea lampreys, have disrupted the food web from top to bottom. (Pictured above, floodwater from Lake Michigan pours over a walkway in Chicago in 2019; extreme weather caused the lake to rise two feet.)

For a while in the 90s, the lakes were blessedly free of the algae blooms that clog them when too many nutrients wash into the water. After the Clean Water Act of 1972, we built sewage treatment plants and removed phosphate from laundry detergent. But in the past two decades the blooms have returned, more toxic than ever, especially in Lake Erie (pictured above, in 2019). Now the phosphorus is washing off over-fertilized corn fields. Sadly, the problem seems to be aggravated by no-till agriculture—an eco-friendly practice designed to prevent soil erosion—as well as by the extreme rains that climate change is bringing.

These days, old industrial cities like Duluth or Buffalo are mentioned as places that might be reborn as havens for climate change refugees from places like Alabama, where I live now. The water in the Great Lakes, Folger tells us, may come to seem a far more valuable asset to this country—as droughts increase—than all our coal, oil, and natural gas. The Great Lakes will never stop being great. But once again it’s time to stop taking them for granted.

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

Why Moderna may have an edge: The second COVID-19 vaccine candidate with stunning early success rates does not have to be refrigerated at an ultra-cold temperature, as does the Pfizer candidate. Moderna says its vaccine can be stored at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit) for 30 days. That’s the temperature found in a normal refrigerator or in a cooler filled with ice. This more common temperature range would allow for easier vaccine storage in rural areas and low-income countries, Sarah Elizabeth Richards reports for Nat Geo. This morning, Pfizer said it would apply for emergency FDA approval after tests showed its vaccine was 95 percent effective and had no serious side effects. Here’s a snapshot of vaccines in development.

Did these dinos die in combat? A fossil of a tyrannosaur alongside the bones of a plant-eating Triceratops may provide new clues to paleontologists. The exquisitely preserved fossil, found in Montana in 2006, has been acquired by a North Carolina museum after more than a decade of human scuffles related to private ownership and legal disputes. “Each specimen is among the best of its kind ever found,” Nat Geo’s Michael Greshko reports.

Ending a cancer: The lives of five million women could be saved by 2050 if the world joins forces to wipe out cervical cancer. In a first, 194 countries pledged to introduce measures that would see the number of new cases of the disease fall by 40 percent through vaccination, screening, and treatment. “We now have the cost-effective, evidence-based tools to make that dream a reality,” says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general. Without additional measures against HPV, responsible for 99 percent of cases, deaths could rise to 400,000 a year by 2030, The Telegraph reports.

Fighting a public health threat: The American Medical Association has declared racism a public health threat and has pledged to take action to confront systemic racism, racial injustice, and police brutality. “A proactive approach to prevent, or identify and eliminate, racism is crucial,” the AMA declared, “particularly considering that studies show historically marginalized populations in the U.S. have shorter lifespans, greater physical and mental illness burden, earlier onset and aggressive progression of disease, higher maternal and infant mortality, and less access to health care.” The action comes as the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately stricken African Americans and Latinos in the U.S.

INSTAGRAM PHOTO OF THE DAY

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL SEELEY, @MSEELEY20

Not a Star Wars light saber: This stunning image captures the trail of light left by a SpaceX rocket when it launched Sunday evening from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The launch to the International Space Station, following a test mission in May, represents the first operational spaceflight in nine years from American soil. This image had a remarkable 163,000 likes from our @natgeointhefield Instagram page, which has a tiny fraction of the 146 million followers of our main @natgeo Instagram page.

THE NIGHT SKIES

ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW FAZEKAS

Jupiter’s moons play peek-a-boo: After darkness tomorrow evening, look for the crescent moon in a triangular formation with the two largest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn. As an observing challenge, small telescopes pointed at Jupiter after sunset can reveal one of its moons, Callisto, gliding in front of the planet’s disk, while the neighboring moon Ganymede will peek out from behind Jupiter’s shadow on its eastern side at 7:13 p.m. ET. With binoculars, you can also spy two other Jovian moons—icy Europa to the planet’s west and volcanic Io to its east. Meanwhile, early bird sky-watchers will get a chance to see Mercury, which is usually hidden behind the glow of the sunrise or sunset. This week, it has pulled enough away from the sun that it’s more easily visible low in the southeast sky.
— Andrew Fazekas

THE BIG TAKEAWAY

PHOTOGRAPH BY REBECCA HALE

Bluer than blue? How can you make vivid pigments that could be even more striking than those found in nature? That’s what scientists are doing by “controlling light”—altering the arrangement of molecules to reflect only a specific wavelength of light. By layering together polymers, as pictured above, scientists were able to produce the kinds of iridescent rainbow effects that occur naturally in opal gemstones, Sarah Gibbens and Rebecca Hale show in the latest National Geographic magazine.

SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE

An all new scripted Original Series on Disney+, The Right Stuff brings the stories of early American astronauts to life, celebrating the limitless possibility that space exploration inspires. Allow yourself to be Starstruck by the mysteries of the unknown, learn about the astronauts of today, and wonder where in the universe we are going next.

                               STREAM NOW

OVERHEARD AT NAT GEO

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS SEARLES

Diving with a purpose: “When you dive,” Tara Roberts says, “it’s a completely different world.” Between 500 and 1,000 of the estimated 35,000 voyages that carried 12.5 millions Africans to the Americas wrecked—and only a handful of those shipwrecks have been discovered, the Nat Geo Explorer says on the latest episode of our podcast, Overheard. Roberts has been diving not only to find submerged history, but also to better explain the forced movement of enslaved people that led to modern economies and nation-building. “I am going to go out and find my own history”—and to shape the story she finds, Roberts tells Nat Geo’s Amy Briggs. “Slavery is not the start of our story, but according to the history books, it is.” (Pictured above, Roberts examining part of a wreck in the Florida Keys).

HEAR IT

IN A FEW WORDS

I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

DID A FRIEND FORWARD THIS NEWSLETTER?

On Thursday, Rachael Bale covers the latest in animal news. If you’re not a subscriber, sign up here to also get Whitney Johnson on photography, Debra Adams Simmons on history, and George Stone on travel.

THE LAST GLIMPSE

PHOTOGRAPH BY EIJIRO MIYAKO

Pollen special delivery: How do you to pollinate plants if there aren’t enough insects to do the job? In the image above, this plant is being pollinated by a soap bubble that carries pollen. How exactly? Through a drone with sprayers that release the bubbles onto plants, Jordan Salama reports for National Geographic magazine. That’s just one of several scientific breakthroughs we highlight this month.

SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE

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Enjoy this original piece by our chorus director, Tucker Biddlecombe, performed by the all volunteer Nashville Symphony Chorus. Each singer recorded a video of themselves singing their part, singing to an accompaniment track with Tucker conducting. Each solo voice was combined into one video so that the chorus could sing together again – just virtually!

https://www.nashvillesymphony.org

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The post On 12/9 4:30PM Benefit. Good News Planet in association with My Generation Media Presents ‘A Special Benefit Tribute to John Lennon in Words & Music.’ appeared first on Good News!.