One Thing Can You Develop Within Yourself That Can Totally
Change Your Life

How did a cheesecake teach an important life lesson?

Excerpt from— Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: 52 Life-Changing Lessons for the Twenty-first Century, Inspired by Ben Franklin(Hazelden 2005):

My father and my mother divorced when I was a small child. I lived with my mother but occasionally visited my father.

On one such visit, when I was about twelve-years old, my father and I decided we wanted cheesecake, and we went to a bakery to get some. Once there, though, I looked around and didn’t see anything that looked the way I thought cheesecake should look. Dejected, I said to my father, “They don’t have any.”

He said, “Yes, they do,” and he pointed to a confection that didn’t look a thing like any cheesecake I’d ever seen.

“That’s not a cheesecake,” I said.

“Wanna bet?” he asked, grinning.

I lost the bet.

The cheesecake I was used to eating was what my mom always made. Her cheesecake, however, is actually more of a cheese pie. But it was what I knew then, and in my pre-teen mind, if it wasn’t what I knew, it didn’t exist. My father taught me otherwise … and that lesson went way beyond cheesecakes.

My father taught me to look at the world with an eager spirit and an eye for the unexpected. My father’s world was an open-minded world.

Open-minded is a quality that creates magic in your life. The magic is the delightful discoveries you make when you live with curiosity—willing to believe new things and see things in a new way.

Imagine for a moment that you live your life inside a single room. It’s a lovely room, and you’re quite content in it. However, it is limiting because it’s a small room. You’d like to go exploring and look at other rooms, but you have a problem. You think the door to your room is locked, and you can’t leave. So you sit in your room and wonder what it’s like in other rooms.

The truth, however, is that the door to your room is not locked. All that is required for you to leave your room is for you to get up, walk to the door, and turn the knob. This action comes from willingness, a willingness to believe that something beyond your current understanding is possible. Once you take this action, you can open the door to your room. Once the door is open, you’re free to explore as far and wide as your courage will allow.

If you refuse to look beyond your past and current experience, you will never unlock the door to future experiences that are different from what you expect. Unlocking that door by acknowledging that your perceptions are limited and your world knowledge is even more limited, is what will allow you to be open-minded. When you’re open-minded, you become a magnet for new experiences, experiences that will help you be a better person and live a happier life.

I, for instance, used to think I was capable of writing only ten or so pages a day when I was working on a novel. That was my limit. I accepted it as the truth. It was just the way it was. One day, though, without realizing what I was doing, I got in the zone during my work time, and I wrote over thirty pages in one day, in about four hours time. I was astounded. I had no idea I had that in me. After I did it, I realized I hadn’t been open to accomplishing amazing things. Now I regularly write over thirty pages a day when I’m working on a book, and now I allow for the possibility that I can outdo myself any time I want.

Being open-minded creates possibility in your life. It broadens horizons. It creates, entertains, amuses, educates, and heals. It takes you beyond what you think so you can find what exists outside of the confines of your worldview.

Your thoughts are limiting. Don’t let them keep you trapped in a life you don’t like. Be open to finding what is outside of the walls you put up with your habitual way of thinking.

If you aren’t open to things being different than what you expect, you may miss out on a lot of different cheesecakes. And you may miss out on a lot of life.

You’ll find seven action steps that will help you learn to be open-minded in Healthy, Wealthy, & Wise.