I make guacamole pretty regularly. (It’s important for me to mention that because I need to establish that I do know how to make it!) That’s why what I recently did when making a bowl of “guak” was so irregular: I put in waaaay too much lemon! I squeezed an entire lemon into a bowl that had only three mashed avocados. What was I thinking?

Well, who cares what I was thinking. It was a mistake. What was done was done and now I had extremely lemony guacamole.

So, what to do? How do you fix a dip with too much of one ingredient?

You know how. The most perfunctory version of this problem – gentlemen, you’ve been faced with this happy dilemma since you were eight years old – is when you have lots of milk remaining in the cereal bowl after you’ve gobbled up all the Lucky Charms. What to do? Duh. Add more Lucky Charms.

Then add milk when that gets low. Then more Lucky Charms when that gets low.

Obviously, when your guacamole is too lemony, you add more avocados. I did that, adding a little of all the other ingredients as well (except lemon juice). Problem solved. Great guacamole. And more of it!

If you’ve ever been confronted with a similar culinary conundrum and solved it by simply adding more of the right ingredient – whether avocados or Lucky Charms or milk or sugar or salt – then you’ve also put into practice a simple solution to solving other, much more seemingly complex problems in life.

You’re sick and tired of habitually making misjudgments, mistakes, and miscalculations? You’re sick and tired of getting lousy results? Frustrated that things don’t seem to be working?

Here’s what to do (remember now, you know you can do this because you did it countless times with Lucky Charms): focus on what you want more of. Go get it. Add to your life more of what you want.

Do you constantly whine and complain? Do you ruminate about what you lack? Do you beat yourself up over things you can’t seem to get right?

Yes?

Do you want to stop doing all that?

Yes?

You stop doing all those things by adding more of what you do want. Too much lemon in your guacamole? Add an avocado. Waaaay too much lemon? Add more avocados! You keep adding more of what’s needed until the desired objective is achieved, whether with life or just a simple dip.

I don’t get what I want by thinking – whining, complaining, ruminating, and beating myself up – about the fact that I can’t seem to get rid of what I don’t want. That’s actually the secret formula for getting more of the same! If I were to get up every day and think about all the things I could be worried about, it would be like squeezing even more lemon into the mix.

I will get sicker by worrying about being sick.

I will get poorer by focusing on what I lack.

I will make all problems worse, not better, by dwelling on them.

Instead of sickness, I choose to promote my good health. I adopt an attitude of thankfulness and gratitude for the fact that my body is a cure factory for all disease. I choose to support the factory in every way possible: spiritually, mentally, and in my food and supplement choices and the choices I make for physical activities. If I am not well (too much lemon), I add more of what the cure factory (the human body) needs… always with an attitude of gratitude that I’ve been given such an amazing factory to manage.

Instead of choosing constant angst over what I lack, I nurture and kindle my creativity. The wealth is out there. It’s time to be open to the countless ways the wealth can be brought forth, into fruition, rather than whining and worrying.

And so on and so forth. If you’re focused on what you don’t want, you will most certainly get more of it because you’re not giving enough (if any) attention to what you do want.

Too much lemon? Add an avocado.