I was on Facebook this morning and I noticed a YouTube video about a 13 year old boy named Andrew Johnston who sang on Britain’s Got Talent. I have included the video here and I wanted to point out something that is said in the video. It is when Simon Cowell asks young Andrew if his friends support his singing (paraphrased):

Simon: Do you friends support your singing?

Andrew: Well, I get bullied a lot at school.

Simon: Why do they bully you?

Andrew: My mates say they don’t like that kind of music.

Simon: And how do you deal with it?

Andrew: I just carry on singing.

Sometimes, it takes a child for us to see how our fears stop us. What is it that you enjoy doing? What do your friends think of it? Are you going to carry on or are you going to let them tell you what they think and leave your dreams behind?

It’s your choice, not theirs.

As an example, my wife and I have a dream of living in Costa Rica. Part of the process has been designing our future Costa Rican home for about 18 months. The first time I did this, we didn’t even have property to build on. I had everything on a flat, square plot. It was great and it incorporated all of the details I always thought I wanted. Then we went to look at lots and found out that the lots were more interesting than we had ever considered. That is, anything BUT flat and square.

I didn’t just drop the idea of living in Costa Rica. In fact, this new information made the prospect even more exciting. With respect to the house, there were so many new ideas that I could incorporate. In fact, every bit of new information changes what I can or want to do with the house. In fact, I have over 20 different designs that I have played with, dealing with about 5 different concepts.

You can see the latest design on my Flickr page. The house design has changed, but the main idea of living in Costa Rica has always stayed strong. With every new design, I get more and more excited. In fact, this is a great way to visualize the end result of achieving my dream.

So don’t let changes allow you to abandon your dreams. Just look at them closer and see how you can improve them.

What is it exactly?

The top level is the main house with the kitchen, semi-circular dining balcony, living room and hallway to office and master bedroom. The master bedroom has a glass shower that faces out to the private courtyard.

The second level is where the bedrooms are for our three children, plus their common bathroom. This is accessed from a circular staircase that matches the curve of the semicircular dining balcony.

The third level is where the guest rooms are located, along with the outdoor kitchen that they could use. Behind this is where the car would be parked. The two lines in back represent the driveway that would wrap around below the pool and to the bottom of the property. Notice that the pool has an infinity edge that would allow those coming up the driveway to see the water coming over the edge.

The green areas that you see are, as much as possible, the natural slope of the property. There will be a lot of trees on the property, I just haven’t bothered to put them into the model.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

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Costa Rica sets a standard for sustainable growth

Sailing down Costa Rica’s Tempisque River on an eco-tour, I watched a crocodile devour a brown bass with one gulp. It took only a few seconds. The croc’s head emerged from the muddy waters near the bank with the foot-long fish writhing in its jaws. He crunched it a couple of times with razor-sharp teeth and then, with just the slightest flip of his snout, swallowed the fish whole. Never saw that before.

These days, visitors can still see amazing biodiversity all over Costa Rica — more than 25 percent of the country is protected area — thanks to a unique system it set up to preserve its cornucopia of plants and animals. Many countries could learn a lot from this system.

Costa Rica is insisting that economic growth and environmentalism work together. It has created a holistic strategy to think about growth, one that demands that everything gets counted. So if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river — or a farm sells bananas but destroys a forest — this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature — nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.

Combining Key Jobs

The process began in the 1990s when Costa Rica, which sits at the intersection of two continents and two oceans, came to fully appreciate its incredible bounty of biodiversity — and that its economic future lay in protecting it. So it did something no country has ever done:

“In Costa Rica, the minister of environment sets the policy for energy, mines, water and natural resources,” explained Carlos M. Rodriguez, who served in that post from 2002 to 2006. In most countries, he noted, “ministers of environment are marginalized.” They are viewed as people who try to lock things away, not as people who create value. Their job is to fight energy ministers who just want to drill for cheap oil.

But when Costa Rica put one minister in charge of energy and environment, “it created a very different way of thinking about how to solve problems,” said Rodriguez, now a regional vice president for Conservation International. “The environment sector was able to influence the energy choices by saying: ‘Look, if you want cheap energy, the cheapest energy in the long run is renewable energy. So let’s not think just about the next six months; let’s think out 25 years.’ ”

As a result, Costa Rica hugely invested in hydroelectric, wind and geothermal power, and today it gets more than 95 percent of its energy from these renewables. In 1985, it was 50 percent hydro, 50 percent oil. More interesting, Costa Rica discovered its own oil five years ago but decided to ban drilling — so as not to pollute its politics or environment.

Rodriguez also helped to pioneer the idea that in a country like Costa Rica, dependent on tourism and agriculture, the services provided by ecosystems were important drivers of growth and had to be paid for. Most countries fail to account for the “externalities” of various economic activities. So when a factory, farmer or power plant pollutes the air or the river, destroys a wetland, depletes a fish stock or silts a river, the cost is never added to your electric bill or to the price of your shoes.

Costa Rica took the view that landowners who keep forests intact and rivers clean should be paid, because doing so benefits dam owners, fishermen, farmers and eco-tour companies downstream. The forests also absorbed carbon.

To pay for these environmental services, in 1997 Costa Rica imposed a tax on carbon emissions — 3.5 percent of the market value of fossil fuels — which goes into a national forest fund to pay indigenous communities for protecting the forests around them. And the country imposed a water tax whereby major water users — hydroelectric dams, farmers and drinking water providers — pay villagers upstream to keep their rivers pristine. “We now have 7,000 beneficiaries of water and carbon taxes,” said Rodriguez. “It has become a major source of income for poor people. It has also enabled Costa Rica to actually reverse deforestation. We now have twice the amount of forest as 20 years ago.”

Nature’s value

As we debate a new energy future, we need to remember that nature provides this incredible range of economic services — from carbon fixation to water filtration to natural beauty for tourism. If government policies don’t recognize those services and pay the people who sustain nature’s ability to provide them, things go haywire. We end up impoverishing both nature and people. Worse, we start racking up a bill in the form of climate-changing greenhouse gases, petro-dictatorships and biodiversity loss that gets charged on our kids’ Visa cards to be paid by them later. Well, later is over. Later is when it will be too late.

The concept of Deepest Commitment comes from Brian Klemmer of Klemmer & Associates and means that your intention is the deepest commitment you have to achieving your stated goal. For instance, you are reading this blog post right now because it is your deepest commitment to do so. You have other things you could be doing right now and the one you are most deeply commited to at this moment is reading this post (thank you by the way).

One of the problems that people have with their goals is that there really is no deep commitment to achieving it. Oh yes, they may want it really bad, but are they willinig to do the things necessary to actually achieve it. An armchair quarterback may say he would love to play in a professional game, but is he willing to put in the hours and years of hard training necessary to achieve it?

So if your intention is to achieve a particular goal – that is, that goal has  your deepest commitment to seeing it achieved – then you need to ensure you work on your intention. You must Raise Your Intention!

To raise your intention, you have to think about what you want, why you want it, or what it will be like when you go achieve your goal. You can do this by taking some time to focus on those goals. Find images or videos or websites about your goal. Visit a store and touch and feel the item of your affection. There are many different ways to increase your intention and they are as plentiful as the number of goals there are in the world.

For me, one of my biggest goals to is move to Costa Rica and live in my own personally designed home. To raise my intention for this, I spend time putting the details of the house together using a home design software package. I have added below my latest iteration (sorry about the cheezy background).

So find a way to raise your intention and make your goals and dreams become reality.

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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

Call it the miracle miles. Or the sight that residents of the central Pacific coast never thought they would see,

But despite a delay of 30 years, more or less, a contractor is paving the Costanera Sur just north of Dominical.

The highway section from Savegre to Dominical is 22.6 kilometers (about 14 miles) and the responsibility of Constructora Solís-Sánchez Carvajal. The contract is for $15.5 million. A similar project is under way between Quepos and Savegre. Consorcio Meco-Santa Fe has that job.

The stretch is about 19 kilometers (about 13 miles) and will cost $16.4 million.  Deadlines are by the end of the year if bad weather does not intervene.

As residents point out, even when the highway is finally paved there will not be much difference because heavy trucks have been using the route for years, except during frequent washouts when traffic could be stalled for a day or more.

The Costanera Sur is one of the great scenic drives of Costa Rica. The road parallels the Pacific the whole distance from Dominical to Quepos. But it has been a gravel washboard.  With some new and rebuilt bridges and paving, residents hope they have an all-weather road.