Here is an inspiring video that displays the type of friendship and loyalty that all of us should have with our friends.  Fair weather friends are a dime a dozen, but true friendship is built and maintained by a common set of principles and honor.  I have been blessed with long lasting friendships in my life that are my true wealth.  True friends are there when you are up and there when you are down.  Stephen Covey calls his leadership style principle centered leadership.  I believe that more people need to learn principle centered friendship.  I know life will at times deal you some bad cards, but if you are true to your principles then your true friends will stay true you.  I have seen many of my friends soar to incredible heights and have seen others struggle financially.  My friendship with them is not based upon their external results, but by their internal principles.  I love my friends because they live a life based upon the ideals espoused in their principles and a short term financial hardship would never change my love or respect.  Is that true of how you feel about your friends?  Friendships are glued together by the principles that you hold in common.  Friendships can be lost when the previous principles honored begin to change.  This happens when one person continues to grow and apply better principles in their life and another chooses to stagnate.  All of us have high school friends that were really close that might not be as close anymore.  Why?  You are no longer honoring the same principles in your lives.

This is why I love the MV Team community – our friendship is not based upon the points being generated, but, instead, on the consistency of the principles being applied into their lives.  The Team is a group of men and women who espouse and live (to the best of their ability) principles that we hold dear.  The community has, is, and always will be the key to building a strong and successful business.  All networks will produce new products, but the staying power of any network is in the links of friendships, loyalty and common principles, not products and money.  I am surprised at how many people miss this key point!  Like the old saying goes, “Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.”  Living according to the right principles makes a person lovely.  Here is how I would describe my friends – principle centered, encouragers, believers in others, character first, honor, selfless, team oriented, faithful, loyal.  I have never lived up to my ideals, not through lack of effort, but because my ideals are very high.  I pray that you set ideals for your life and become a friend to others worthy of emulation.  How would you rate yourself on the list of principles for true friendship?  Are you loyal to the men and women in your life who are loyal to the principles that you share in common?  

This video started me on this train of thought – would we be as loyal as Tara was to Bella?  Tara and Bella were best friends, but Tara displayed honor and loyalty by her vigil for Bella.  Tara didn't run out and get a new friend at the first sign that Bella was hurting.  In fact, she displayed her friendship more when Bella was in need.  Honor and loyalty are in short supply in the world and all of us suffer as a consequence.  We must choose to be the change that you wish to see in the world!  A person is truly blessed if they have friends like Bella has in Tara.  Be that blessing into someone else’s life!  I want to personally thank my friends for being friends like Tara.  God Bless, Orrin Woodward

"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."—2 Corinthians 3:17

I want to thank the best readers in the country for constantly sending me incredible content to share with all.  Like I said from the beginning, this is our blog and I am just the administrator.  Americans must remember the roots of our liberties.  The Rule of law - Cicero, Magna Carta, the English Civil War (Locke), and the American Revolution (to name just a few) are all required readings to understand the roots of our American liberties.  Here is a fascinating video that captures some of the basics of our philosophy of liberty.  How many of these principles are being violated right before our eyes today.  I have experienced attempted force to deprive me of liberties to pursue my chosen path and know these principles to be true first hand.  We must all learn the philosophy of liberty and recognize that a man or woman convinced against their will is of the same opinion still.  A team is only a team when everyone volutarily buys into the philosophy.  A country is only a country when everyone buys into the philosophy of that country.  America was born on a philosophy of liberty, but how can we defend this philosophy when most American's do not even know nor understand it?  Here is a simple video teaching the underlying principles of liberty.  Enjoy.  God Bless, Orrin Woodward

David C. McCullough:

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

Edward Gibbon:

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.

Etienne Gilson:

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

George Santayana:

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Harry Truman:

The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.

Pearl S. Buck:

One faces the future with one's past.

Thucydides:

History is Philosophy teaching by examples.

Ludwig Von Mises lived through WWI and WWII.  He saw the socialistic ideas and what it did to Germany and Austria.  This video is an intriguing look into the man who stood by himself against the onslaught of statist power.  The courage of Von Mises to speak truth in an age of lies should be celebrated and honored.  The Bible states to give honor to whom honor is due.  Ludwig Von Mises should be honored for his ground breaking work in economics and liberty.  Do we understand the price that civilization has paid to have the freedoms we enjoy today?  We have a responsibility to educate ourselves on the principles of freedom.  We must understand the roots of freedom in order to protect those freedoms.  Enjoy the video and watch for the parallels in the history of Von Mises's time with the current events in our time.  God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Here is a super 5 minute video by Dr. Terry Paulson.  There are enough nuggets in this video to help anyone move on in their life and businesses.  Success is success is success regardless of the field of your endeavor.  Please get a piece of paper and take some notes on this video!  Are you applying these principles in your life?  If you are not, chances are you are playing a victim role not the victor role.  A positive can do attitude will make the difference between trying and doing!  Are you trying or doing?  On the MonaVie Team we have chosen not to participate in the recession.  The Team knows that there are difficulties and opportunites.  We choose to focus more on our opportunities in our difficulties and less on the difficulties in our opportunities!  God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Don't make it easy on people, make it tougher.  Make them earn their maturity and strength of character.

Here is a powerful story of the power of words and deeds to create or destroy.  What is your specific intent that you have for your words and deeds?  I encourage you to take a deep breath before you say or do something harmful to others and ask, "Is it worth it?"  Just this simple pause and question has helped me immensely value people more than I value making a point or having to be right.  Enjoy the story and decide today to validate, encourage, and love people.  Who have you helped today by lightening their load and lifting their spirits?  God Bless, Orrin Woodward

One day, when I was a freshman in high school,

I saw a kid from my class was walking home from school.

His name was Kyle.

It looked like he was carrying all of his books.

I thought to myself, 'Why would anyone bring home all his books on a Friday?

He must really be a nerd.’

I had quite a weekend planned (parties and a football game with my friends tomorrow afternoon), so I shrugged my shoulders and went on.

As I was walking, I saw a bunch of kids running toward him.

They ran at him, knocking all his books out of his arms and tripping him so he landed in the dirt.

His glasses went flying, and I saw them land in the grass about ten feet from him..

He looked up and I saw this terrible sadness in his eyes

My heart went out to him. So, I jogged over to him as he crawled around looking for his glasses, and I saw a tear in his eye.

As I handed him his glasses, I said, 'Those guys are jerks.'   

They really should get lives.

He looked at me and said, 'Hey thanks!'

There was a big smile on his face.

It was one of those smiles that showed real gratitude.

I helped him pick up his books, and asked him where he lived.

As it turned out, he lived near me, so I asked him why I had never seen him before.

He said he had gone to private school before now.

I would have never hung out with a private school kid before.

We talked all the way home, and I carried some of his books.

He turned out to be a pretty cool kid.

I asked him if he wanted to play a little football

with my friends

He said yes.

We hung out all weekend and the more I got to know Kyle, the more I liked him, and my    friends thought the same of him.

Monday morning came, and there was Kyle with the huge stack of books again.

I stopped him and said, 'Boy, you are gonna really build some serious muscles with this pile of books everyday!

He just laughed and handed me half the books.

Over the next four years, Kyle and I became best friends..

When we were seniors we began to think about college.

Kyle decided on Georgetown and I was going to Duke.

I knew that we would always be friends, that the miles would never

be a problem.

He was going to be a doctor and I was going for business on a football scholarship..

Kyle was valedictorian of our class.

I teased him all the time about being a nerd.

He had to prepare a speech for graduation.

I was so glad it wasn't me having to get up there and speak

Graduation day, I saw Kyle.

He looked great.

He was one of those guys that really found himself during high school.

He filled out and actually looked good in glasses.

He had more dates than I had and all the girls loved him.  

Boy, sometimes I was jealous!

Today was one of those days.

I could see that he was nervous about his speech.

So, I smacked him on the back and said, 'Hey, big guy, you'll be great!'

He looked at me with one of those looks (the really grateful one) and smiled.

' Thanks,' he said.

As he started his speech, he cleared his throat, and began

'Graduation is a time to thank those who helped you make it through those tough years.

Your parents, your teachers, your siblings, maybe a coach...but mostly your friends...

I am here to tell all of you that being a friend to someone is the best gift you can give them.

I am going to tell you a story.'

I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the

first day we met.

He had planned to kill himself over the weekend.

He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his Mom wouldn't have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home.

He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile.

'Thankfully, I was saved.

My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable..'

I heard the gasp go through the crowd as this handsome, popular boy told us all about his weakest moment.

I saw his Mom and dad looking at me and smiling that same grateful smile.

Not until that moment did I realize it's depth.

Never underestimate the power of your actions..

With one small gesture you can change a person's life.

For better or for worse.

God puts us all in each others lives to impact one another in some way.  

Look for God in others.

'Friends are angels who lift us to our feet when our wings have trouble remembering how to fly.'

There is no beginning or end. Yesterday is history.

Tomorrow is a mystery.

Here are snippets from a fabulous article by Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post.  This article will stop and make you think.  Thank you Mr. Weingarten for sharing your gifts of writing with the world! In our never ending quest for goals and dreams, let us not forget to take time to smell the roses and search for the beauty that surrounds us.   What makes this article so powerful to me is that it captures how easy it is to overlook the incredible gifts of others right before our eyes.  I did an earlier article on the video validation that captures some of these points.  If a person is not validated, they may lose hope and their genius is lost to the world.  Here is my message for the day:

Do not let life choke the beautiful out of you.  Do not let life wear the passion out of you.  Do not stand by idly as the beauty in others is being marred by the incisions of life.  Let your beauty shine for the world to see!  While you’re at it, lift other’s beauty so the world can enjoy the beautiful in all around you.  We spend too much time consumed in our own issues and life to take notice of the gifts and talents of others.  We must share our gifts with others while breathing oxygen onto the flame of beauty in their souls!  Encouragement and discouragement are a choice and that choice has ramifications that reverberate into eternity.  True success involves bring out the beauty in body, mind and soul.  I love building teams because it gives me the opportunity to validate other people’s genius and gifts in body, mind and soul.  If someone as validated as Joshua Bell can begin to feel un-validated, then imagine what can happen in the population at large?

Make a promise today to bring out you inner beauty and be the example to draw other’s beauty to the surface!  What is beautiful in your life that you are ignoring? This video is a powerful example of ignored genius and a great example of why we must build our communities.  God Bless, Orrin Woodward

Snippets from Pearls Before Breakfast by Gene Weingarten

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

So, what do you think happened?

HANG ON, WE'LL GET YOU SOME EXPERT HELP.

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening."

So, a crowd would gather?

"Oh, yes."

And how much will he make?

"About $150."

Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened.

"How'd I do?"

We'll tell you in a minute.

"Well, who was the musician?"

Joshua Bell.

"NO!!!"

A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using another for this gig.  Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master's "golden period," toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest sprcue, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection.

"Our knowledge of acoustics is still incomplete," Bell said, "but he, he just . . . knew."

Bell doesn't mention Stradvari by name.  Just "he."  When the violinist shows his Strad to people, he holds the instrument gingerly by its neck, resting it on a knee. "He made this to perfect thickness at all parts," Bell says, pivoting it.  "If you shaved off a millimeter of wood at any point, it would totally imbalance the sound."  No violins sound as wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still.

The front of Bell's violin is in nearly perfect condition, with a deep, rich grain and luster. The back is a mess, its dark reddish finish bleeding away into a flatter, lighter shade and finally, in one section, to bare wood.

"This has never been refinished," Bell said. "That's his original varnish. People attribute aspects of the sound to the varnish. Each maker had his own secret formula." Stradivari is thought to have made his from an ingeniously balanced cocktail of honey, egg whites and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees.

Bell bought it a few years ago.  He had to sell his own Strad and borrow much of the rest.  The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million.

On Friday, January 12, the people waiting in the lottery line looking for a long shot would get a lucky break -- a free, close-up ticket to a concert by one of the world's most famous musicians -- but only if they were of a mind to take note.

Bell decided to begin with "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version."

Bell didn't say it, but Bach's "Chaconne" is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.

If Bell's encomium to "Chaconne" seems overly effusive, consider this from the 19th-century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann: "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."

So, that's the piece Bell started with.

He'd clearly meant it when he promised not to cheap out this performance: He played with acrobatic enthusiasm, his body leaning into the music and arching on tiptoes at the high notes. The sound was nearly symphonic, carrying to all parts of the homely arcade as the pedestrian traffic filed past.

Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept walking, but it was something.

A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened.

Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

We'll go with Kant, because he's obviously right, and because he brings us pretty directly to Joshua Bell, sitting there in a hotel restaurant, picking at his breakfast, wryly trying to figure out what the hell had just happened back there at the Metro.

"At the beginning," Bell says, "I was just concentrating on playing the music. I wasn't really watching what was happening around me . . ."

Playing the violin looks all-consuming, mentally and physically, but Bell says that for him the mechanics of it are partly second nature, cemented by practice and muscle memory: It's like a juggler, he says, who can keep those balls in play while interacting with a crowd. What he's mostly thinking about as he plays, Bell says, is capturing emotion as a narrative: "When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story."

With "Chaconne," the opening is filled with a building sense of awe. That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a sidelong glance.

"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."

The word doesn't come easily.

". . . ignoring me."

Bell is laughing.  It's at himself.

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous.

"It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies," he says. "I was stressing a little."

Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro?

"When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence . . ."

He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened -- or, more precisely, what didn't happen -- on January 12.

THERE ARE SIX MOMENTS IN THE VIDEO THAT BELL FINDS PARTICULARLY PAINFUL TO RELIVE: "The awkward times," he calls them. It's what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn't noticed him playing don't notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord -- the embarrassed musician's equivalent of, "Er, okay, moving right along . . ." -- and begins the next piece.

After "Chaconne," it is Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria," which surprised some music critics when it debuted in 1825: Schubert seldom showed religious feeling in his compositions, yet "Ave Maria" is a breathtaking work of adoration of the Virgin Mary. What was with the sudden piety? Schubert dryly answered: "I think this is due to the fact that I never forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right and true devotion." This musical prayer became among the most familiar and enduring religious pieces in history.

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

BELL ENDS "AVE MARIA" TO ANOTHER THUNDEROUS SILENCE, plays Manuel Ponce's sentimental "Estrellita," then a piece by Jules Massenet, and then begins a Bach gavotte, a joyful, frolicsome, lyrical dance. It's got an Old World delicacy to it; you can imagine it entertaining bewigged dancers at a Versailles ball, or -- in a lute, fiddle and fife version -- the boot-kicking peasants of a Pieter Bruegel painting.

Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one thing only. He understands why he's not drawing a crowd, in the rush of a morning workday. But: "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!"

He is. You don't need to know music at all to appreciate the simple fact that there's a guy there, playing a violin that's throwing out a whole bucket of sound; at times, Bell's bowing is so intricate that you seem to be hearing two instruments playing in harmony. So those head-forward, quick-stepping passersby are a remarkable phenomenon.

Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don't take visible note of the musician, you don't have to feel guilty about not forking over money; you're not complicit in a rip-off.

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

-- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies

Let's say Kant is right. Let's accept that we can't look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people's sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life?

We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

"This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?

That's what the Welsh poet W.H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite that way before.

Of course, Davies had an advantage -- an advantage of perception. He wasn't a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo.

Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he is back in the States this week. He has to be. On Tuesday, he will be accepting the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America.