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DAY 85

UPDATE: 2:AM Eastern Standard Time, over Iran (near Qom @ 36,000 feet), headed back to Amsterdam, the Netherlands after spending nearly a week in Sri Lanka. Tuesday, 24th of May 2005.

Last time I did this coming back from the USA I had made about a hundred typographical errors and grammatical errors, so I'll read this after a good eight hours sleep and publish. The next few weeks of discussion will be filled with things I learned from the six days on my Sri Lankan trip.

The past 6 days were exhausting. Not only did I manage to meet several times with our programmers about the tasks that are ahead, but I also took the time to take notes on why things in Sri Lanka "DO NOT WORK!".

Sri Lanka is a classic example of what a mix of poor leadership, religious meddling in politics and a general social mentality of people waiting to get something from the government or someone else and not initiating things by themselves can do to a population. Such a mind set helps make one of the most literate populations in the world stuck at the lowest GDP.

If you ask the locals what is wrong, they will blame the government. If you ask the government what is wrong, they will blame the population that they have to work with.

The blame goes around while no one does anything about everything (apart from some isolated cases of success, which I will discuss later) and in the bottom line everyone is sitting on a sinking boat going seemingly nowhere.

Are there solutions to success? You bet.

Will they get implemented? Most likely not.

I spent the six days traveling by car, train and bus taking notes of why people were not succeeding. These are nice people. IF you are in trouble somewhere, they'd run to your aide on the road. When you smile at them, they smile back. When you talk to them, they are very friendly and helpful.

Then the problem is that the people themselves DO NOT UNDERSTAND the FAILURE PROCESSES that they are stuck following, day in day out.

So, where should changes begin? At the top. The leadership has been poor for decades.

The results are all around. Corruption is everywhere. Suffering is unlimited.

IF you are reading this in the Mid Western part of the USA, then count your lucky stars. Your kids are asking for that latest XBOX game or iPOD with 25,000 song storage? Save up some money and take a trip to Sri Lanka, and you can show your kids how most of the world lives on less than $2.00 per day. Better yet, make the trip part of the south Indian expedition.

Think things are bad in Sri Lanka. Just make the tour wind through parts of India. Sri Lanka has a population of only 20 Million. However, India is just 30KM away from the island and there are 1.1 billion people in another boat I cannot describe here.

Just take a trip and trust me --what you have materially will be just fine for your life. The problems you have will seem rather insignificant to what an average person goes through in a day.

These also another bonus: Need to shed some weight? India or Sri Lanka is guaranteed to lose you about a pound a day as long as you stay out of a buffet style hotel. Just a thought...

Anyway, I had quite an 'educational experience' at the expense of the Sri Lankans over the six day period and I will talk about that over the coming weeks. It will conclude my discussion about personal success. I feel that I now have an idea about the things I need to improve and the business building part that I initiated is progressing very well.

I didn't take the time to keep writing over the six days because I had a lot to do. Instead, I used the pocket note pad to jot notes. Then I used my back pack note book to take additional notes. In the end I have a list of 35 reasons why Sri Lankans fail a lot and why in general the whole island looks like a tsunami hit it -not just many parts of the shore line.

I'll examine these 35 reasons and discuss them from my view and analyze them to see IF I am also unknowingly allowing the behavior of failure to enter my life.

There are a lot of questions to ask myself. The errored ways of the Sri Lankans are deadly. Their general ways to doing things, which by the way, I have no idea how they evolved into the lifestyle, will keep the Sri Lankans living like they are now for the next thousand years.

It was not an easy six days, but I have traveled the world and been to all kinds of conditions. So, I kept wondering how good 'ol FiremanPete from Tennessee was doing on his two week homebuilding expedition.

I wish he was sitting next to me on the comfortable Sri Lankan airlines flight back to London. I wish...

FiremanPete had never been out of the good 'ol USA in his life as I recall. I think he'd been to Mexico. But folks going to Canada and Mexico does not count as "foreign travel" as far as 'experience' is concerned. It didn't help President Bush much either.

Anyway, IF FiremanPete had been sitting next to me I venture to guess that the discussion would NOT have been about GOD as we had talked about on the way to Sri Lanka. It would have been interesting nevertheless. Maybe I'll call him someday to find out what life was life for two weeks.

I'll bet he'll be a lot closure to his family, and 'even more deeply' spiritual once he's back at home.

I'll check on it some time.

Anyway, this conversation got a bit long. But, trust me the coming days and weeks I'll go into a deep analysis of "why people fail" and "Why I Have Failed in the Past" and "Why I now can do more than 200 sit-ups and 100 push-ups" without much difficulty.

It's all Interesting stuff, and trust me, you will want to follow along. The stuff is about things we all do. Sometime, unknowingly. However, when done by a collective mass, it leads to a disaster, like Sri Lanka.

There's not much that can be done to help Sri Lanka. The island will need to "hit bottom", the people will need to realize that they are going to then sink into the Indian Ocean. Then the leadership has to change. Perhaps, this should happen first. It's been a virtual family dictatorship since the islands independence from the British after world war two.

However, from all this there is a treasure trove of knowledge that you and I can learn from to help succeed in our world. I'll discuss all these aspects in the coming days and weeks. And that will conclude my discussion about personal success building.

Hope you and your family are well. I miss mine very much. It was only six days, but on the third day, IF I could have changed flights, I would have returned. But, in the end all the meetings and dinners with associates was good and it was nice to see where they were doing our programming from.

Well, out for now. Still over Iran near the City of Qazvin. I'll get some rest. Sam out.

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