Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Your imagination is what you use to shape your future. And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source,tirelessly churning out mental pictures of what you'll be doing in the future.

Real confidence has no bluster or bombast. It's not rooted in a desire to seem better than everyone else and it's not driven by a fear of appearing weak. Real confidence settles in when you have a clear vision of exactly what you need to do. Real confidence blooms as you wield the skills and power you have built through your hard work and discipline.

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years. May you wake up... and start dancing while you're still half-asleep. May you spray-paint Rilke poems as graffiti on highway overpasses... My you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds, and one extrasolar planet... May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans.

But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.

Are you apathetic toward the saccharine goodness evangelized by sentimental, superstitious fanatics, but equally bored by the intellectuals who worship at the empty-headed shrine of scientific materialism?

You have to learn how to stay in a good mood as you overthrow the sour, puckered hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.

Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing is despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.