Carpe diem: it seems as if that word has been uttered a lot. Maybe the cliche has lasted throughout the years because it brings the kind of wisdom people need to hear often. The saying simply tells you to seize the day, grab the opportunity to live in the now. Enjoying life doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to spend a lot just to appreciate the time. While you have days that you just go out, splurge, and get everything you want, these aren’t the memories that stick to your mind. What you remember in the long run are the times you’ve spent with your friends and loved ones. The moments that matter are those that satisfy your soul.

It’s time to stop thinking about merely material possessions. Instead, invest your money on what makes your life worthwhile. When you live in the present, you stop worrying too much about what you plan to have in the future. Appreciate the countless blessings you have and do things that enhance your life. Take a break, go on a vacation, and make time to bond with your buds. What you’ll take with you is the fun times you had and the new experiences you got into. Adventure plays a big part in making things sweeter.

Of course, this isn’t to say that you have to stop planning altogether. You still need to know what you want to do in the course of your life. But while you’re waiting for that dream to come true, you should keep your eyes open to the wonderful things right in front of you. You still have responsibilities to fulfill, but when it gets too much, you should know when to step back. If totally forgetting about work is impossible at the moment, you can always start small and move forward gradually. Remember, those little delays have never made much of an impact in your life.

Learn to step back, take a breather, and don’t get too caught up in the complex web of life. Try to be present whenever life presents you with the opportunity to be in the moment of pure joy. While you worry about making more money, you could’ve just missed one of the most beautiful sunsets. Or, instead of enjoying the chance to go on a wild new adventure, you opted to work overtime. Don’t just be observers because being there is a different experience all on its own. When you get into the thick of things, this is when experiences become more extraordinary.

When you do things that you don’t normally do and try to see whatever the world has in store, you stumble across experiences that might be life-changing. Use your eyes develop a certain reverence for what you find around. If you learn to do this often enough, you’ll find pleasure in just about anything. That’s how you were meant to live, and that’s what you must aspire for. You can be at your happiest when you allow yourself to get lost in your senses. While work will always be a big part of you, happiness is even more so.

If chapters are the meat of your manuscript, then the heart of it is the chapters that present the actual steps, techniques and elements that make yours a how-to/self-help book. If they are not easy for readers to understand and try out, all of your efforts will be for nothing. Keep them focused, organized, with the steps and exercises spelled out in detail, and your book will be well on its way toward the bestseller lists.

Inconsistent formatting: When it comes to introducing the individual programmatic chapters and subsections of your book (such as the seven steps to recovery or the six characteristics of a thriving organization), it is essential that you find a fully consistent way to present them. Inconsistency in a book distracts readers, and you Do not want readers distracted by the book’s formatting when they should be absorbing its content.

Do not present a bulleted list of the steps in some exercises, and omit such lists for other exercises. Do not use anecdotes to illustrate how people develop key problems associated with being adult children of alcoholics in some chapters, and not use any anecdotes in other chapters. Do not give exercises for developing some skills, and forget to provide exercises for other skills.

Do not number the steps of an exercise in one spot and use letters for the steps in other spots. or if you have a good reason for doing so, warn the reader in the Preface to your book. Instead, develop a consistent format for each element. and stick to it. If you use any of the above once, use them all the time.

Seeking future harvest over today’s gain may seem difficult. But if we choose current gratification over tomorrows gain we short circuit our ultimate success and can dramatically limit our life’s accomplishments and happiness.

Sometimes it is not easy to focus on your future harvest and long-term Life’s Purpose when immediate gratification is staring you in the face. Especially in the midst of society’s current dominant pattern of thought expressed in the phrase “I want mine now.”

This generation has been described as the “me generation” based on a self centered focus of getting what we want and getting it now. But Eddie Cantor had his long term Life’s Purpose to drive him to success even if others could not see it. It takes twenty years to make an overnight success.

Ask yourself which you most often choose: getting instant gratification or delayed gratification for the long term future harvest. In other words, are you willing to put off getting things now in order to plan, prepare and save for future goals and dreams? An example would be choosing to put a percentage of your income in a savings account in order to buy a new home in the future, instead of buying a new automobile today.

An effective business philosophy

This long-term thought process is also a vital part of an effective corporate strategy. Lee Iacocca efforts to turn around the troubled Chrysler Corporation close to bankruptcy, offers a good case in point. As head of Chrysler, Iacocca engineered one of the greatest turnarounds in industrial history. Soon after a reporter asked him why, in the midst of astronomical cash shortages, asset liquidation, massive layoffs, and possible bankruptcy, he set aside $750 million to launch a new product the Caravan. He replied, “I had to. If you eat the seed corn, you have no future.”

Don’t eat your seeds of success today and sacrifice your future harvest tomorrow.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates believes that his wiliness to invest in a future harvest was one of the major reasons for his mega success. He states: “The key trade-off is how much money to put into future improvement verses how much to put into present consumption. Keeping my money in productive investments suits me.”

Some of the fastest growing Internet companies have invested nearly all of their net profits back into projects that will bring future growth.

Yet most people are shortsighted and focus on the present fruit rather than on future harvests. We need to have a mind-set on a continuum of harvests rather than on one-time events. By planting and nourishing seed today we can reach bounty tomorrow. If you desire to live a lifestyle of increase, you must determine to set aside a certain amount of your present time, money, resources and energy as seed for future harvests and benefits.

Those who fail to adopt delayed gratification thinking and a future harvest focus, normally find themselves fighting reoccurring battles with debt, material problems, health difficulties and relationship breakups. Instead of spending all their income, wise personal planners choose to set aside a certain amount for investment, savings or future purchases and accomplishment.

Business consultants James Kouzes and Barry Posner put it this way. “The most important role of visions in organizational life (or personal life) is to give focus to human energy. Visions are like lenses that focus unrefracted rays of light. To enable everyone concerned with an enterprise to see more clearly what’s ahead of them, leaders must have and convey a focus.”

Have you found your future harvest focus by uncovering your Life’s Purpose?

Imagine that your child had appendicitis. Could you imagine a family conversation about whether or not you’d do the operation on the kitchen table? I hope not.

Yet, families often get caught in a kind of equivalent around a parent with dementia. What shall we do? How can we get our parent fixed? What should we do to make them better?

Of course, any family is probably going to be watching medical developments closely and hopefully around this disease. So they should.

A family’s real role is having enough good care around the parent. Learning what makes good care for their parent. A certain level of agreement so that the family can move onto getting to know this parent in the present state of having dementia.

Often, that’s approximately the last thing many families do. I can guess why. I’m betting they mainly think, “Is this our inheritance? Is this who I’m going to be one day?”

I wish more frightened families would go into therapy, because their fear issue is not the reality of care. But they share our society-wide terror of Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s, if we’re even talking Alzheimer’s accurately in most cases, is demonized. The reality is that life with dementia is not necessarily a torment. Dementia does not physically hurt. It can emotionally be a whole range of experiences, from okayish to horror.

I’m not saying there’s no reason to fear dementia, just questioning what use that has? Wouldn’t we do better to learn how to cope with dementia in a family member. Regular dementia, which is variable with a certain consistency in each individual, has good or bad days. That often depends upon the care that surrounds and supports the person with dementia.

I’ve always been astonished in this 12-step, personal growth, therapy-minded world of ours that we don’t all those skills to dementia. But we don’t.

On the whole, people would almost rather avoid to learn, grow and aim at finding good times in care. Now I’m not criticizing, just seriously wishing people could more easily come into the present moment with the person with dementia.

Holding back and fighting makes everyone so lonely, so frightened and so abandoned. Getting together, drawing in and learning some relationship skills applicable to dementia changes all that.

I have seen that over and over again. The help and hope and healing in dementia is for the family to come close and do what’s needed. That is the healing for everyone, even the person with dementia.

The biggest problem is the terror that keeps people away. Sometimes literally, but most often figuratively. I think maybe that’s why people don’t learn good dementia relationship. Maybe it’s too much like giving in instead of fighting.

Yet dementia is only like any other big family problem. It’s not different. Not special. Not really. When a family member can come and stand on the same side as the person with dementia, they both feel better.

And that is what all crisis and all care is about. About standing together. Sharing the burden. About being family, together with the person with dementia.