I’m sure you all know of the idea about “pay it forward,” right? Well I decided for my blog topic this week (which is a little late, by the way :~) that I’m going to tell you about a man who has taken the concept of “pay it forward” to a new level.

His name is James Barnett. He quit his job at age 24, sold everything he owned, and bought a van to travel around the country and help our homeless. He turned his passion for helping others into a non-profit organization called Clothe Your Neighbor As Yourself. For every t-shirt someone buys, he donates one to the homeless.

So, if you are looking for a cool present for someone this year that truly gives back, check it out at http://cyny.org/. I plan on it.

And you know, I have to say, this kind of stirred up something else for me as well. I have been so bombarded with information overload lately that I really felt like I was starting to lose my mind a little. There are all these training programs out there to learn really great “stuff” about manifesting and marketing and business strategies and anything else you can think of really.

But here is my question for you…

Does it really serve us to always rely on someone else to teach us how to fix our own problems? I mean yeah, we all need help along the way – that’s for sure – but I think we all get so hyped up on achieving our goals quickly that we forget that other people’s solutions to problems may not always work for us.

Our journey here is a learning experience, and yes, we can always benefit from the knowledge that others’ have to offer us, but we should never rely solely on what anyone else has to tell us. We all need to learn to rely more on ourselves and our inner wisdom. By not doing that we are all doing ourselves a great disservice.

We are all unique and amazing Divine Beings, each with our own unique experience here. If we forget that and constantly try to fulfill our needs from someone else’s well, we will be perpetually chasing something that was never meant to be attainable to us in the first place. The truth is, there is something WAY better out there for each of us, but only unique to you.

We all have so many different gifts and characteristics that when you combine them all, there is literally no way that any two individuals can EVER be alike, therefore each of our experiences will be vastly different than the next. And if we are trying to fit into the mold that someone else has created for us, will it ever truly work?

No, it won’t.

I mean is it any wonder that we have collectively created this reality for ourselves where there seems to be an exclusive group of “wealthy” individuals that we are all scrambling to emulate, yet it never quite seems to be attainable for many of us. Why is that?

I think part of it is that we are all not meant to have the same exact thing in the same exact way. The terms “wealth” and “abundance” have very different meanings for everyone and ultimately you have to find your own definition of it and your own “happy medium” with it. Someone else’s path is not necessarily going to work for you. Again, you can learn from others and find another piece to the puzzle that is your life, and maybe they even give you all the pieces, but ultimately they can’t put the pieces together for you. That’s your job.

So I say to you, PLEASE be different and do it to the best of your ability! Because we owe it to one another to inspire each other with as many new ideas as we can possibly conceive of. How else are we going to break the pattern that we are currently stuck in as a society if we all continue to take the same actions and make the same choices over and over again?

What has inspired you lately?