In our wildest dreams we could not possibly have predicted the immensity of the response to a previous blog in which you, dear readers, were asked for assistance in helping expand our subscriber base.

To manage the avalanche of new subscription we have had to, yet again, add a new department to the rapidly growing company.

I am proud to inform you that our Dept. of BS (Blog Subscriptions) is now fully staffed and completely functional.

So overwhelming has been the response that the FART team (Forecasting Analytical Response Team) has informed me that at the present rate at which new subscriptions are pouring in, our total numbers of new subscribers will reach double digits at 11:47am on August 19, 2011 – truly an amazing accomplishment for our team and a humbling experience for me.

In the previous posting we discussed the greatest of all the gifts we are provided with at birth – the indescribably powerful gift of choice.

So I’d like to tell you of two people I met over the past week, both of whom had recently been laid off from the same company after more than fifteen years of employment and how the meanings they chose to place on their experiences profoundly influenced their actions and, ultimately, the results in their lives.

The first person told me that for the first few days he was in shock and disbelief, struggling to accept that they would do this to him. He spent the next few days enraged, with thoughts of revenge flooding his mind.

He “accepted” that finding a new job would be next to impossible as we are in a recession and this has been validated for him by numerous media accounts of how poor the economy is right now.

Ten days ago his family physician prescribed anti-depression medication and he is starting to feel a little better but still has not “wasted his time” trying to find a new job.

The second person told me that on her way home from having been laid off she made a pact with herself that she would allow herself to use the weekend (they were laid off on a Friday) to mourn, get angry, feel sorry for herself and, in her words, “get over it’.

She spent several days the following week thinking about her life, her interests, her passions and what she would like to do. She told me that she chose to feel a strong sense of gratitude to her previous employer for providing her the opportunity to really examine her life and choose a new direction.

She made a few decisions about what she wanted to do and then went to work. She prepared a resume, forwarded it to everyone on her contact list with a cover letter asking for their assistance, hit the internet and created a list of 37 companies she would be interested in talking to, re-contacted the people on her contact list, forwarded the names of these 37 companies and asked if anyone had any contacts within those companies and, while waiting to hear back from her contacts, sent her resume to each of those companies with a cover letter saying that she would like to interview them to determine whether she would be a good fit for them.

She told me that within 10 days three of these companies had called her, she had several interviews and will be starting a new job next Monday, November 2.

Wow!

Two identical events. Two very different choices. Two very different actions taken. Two very different results.

How powerful our gift of choice?

So I asked myself why so many people are wisely and brilliantly using their power of choice to subscribe to my blog?

I choose to believe they do so in order to soak up the inspirational genius of its content, to align their brains with brilliance in action, to pull themselves up from lives of despair, to flood their thoughts with hope and conviction, to transcend from pitiful to powerful, to learn, to grow, to aspire, to believe – in essence, to reach Nirvana.

Or, perhaps they believe these are simply the rantings of a lunatic and, as our judgement of people tends to be based on comparison, by reading this, and then comparing themselves to me helps them to feel sane and ok.

If this is so then I am nobly performing a selfless act of public service.

I await my call from the Nobel Committee.

Till we read again.