*A snail in my garden (searching for his purpose?) -- September 2012.*

It's July, which is my birth month -- and this year is a big one, I'm turning 50! Because I swim in a gene pool shared by long livers (three of my grandparents lived past 95, and one lived until 102!), I figure I'm only halfway done. So to celebrate my birthday, I've decided that for every day for the first two weeks of this month, I'm going to share images and words representing what I hope the next 50 years will have more of. Time to say it and claim it, by gum. And maybe, if what I say resonates with you, you'll be inspired to get more of these things for your next 50 years, too.

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

A friend of mine yesterday was on her way to meet a Very Important Person, a person who is a celebrity and a business leader. My friend runs a nonprofit organization, and she was meeting with this VIP in conjunction with the work she does serving people who need help. While she was on the train, we were speaking online (aside: I will never get over the fact that you can get online while on various modes of public transportation. We live in marvelous times), and she mentioned how humbled she was to be meeting this VIP, not just for the first time, but the second. "I'm not sure how I got here, how I got to be this lucky," she said.

"I can tell you how you got there," I responded immediately. "You have heart."

"Lots of people have heart," she replied.

I persisted. "Yes -- but you lead with heart. Your motivation is first and foremost to help people, and you let that guide your decisions about your business. If you have heart and are motivated by being in service, good things come. That's just natural. That's just physics."

As I said this, I realized that I'd never actually thought about it this way myself; nonetheless, I believe it to be true. And it dawned on me that while certainly, I've always wanted to help people with my work, I'm not sure I've been as intentional about leading with service as I could be.

So for the next 50 years, I'd like to see what happens when I lead with serving first, and put everything else second. To be very clear, this is not to say that I don't want to make money -- I am all about being paid a fair wage for your work, and always will be -- but I'd like to see what happens if I am constantly mindful to subordinate that urge for money to a primary urge to serve. I suspect that the change that could happen around me might be even be bigger than I imagine.

Also for my birthday, I thought I'd give a nice, deep discount to one of my most popular online courses, GLOW: a 21-day ecourse for claiming your light! So if you'd like to get more light in your life, enter coupon code WATCHMEGLOW for 30% off the course. It really is a great course: one participant said she was so happy to rediscover "how blessed I am in my life"; another said, "GLOW came into my life at the perfect time. It is slowly changing my mental state and I have been focusing on the positives for the first time in ages." So join me. It's a wonderful way to brainstorm how to use your talents and gifts to serve.

click here to register for glow