There’s this virus going around which causes quite a few of us to live a life of scarcity.

A virus that has to be eradicated if we are to get anywhere in life.

It really isn’t much of a virus, to be honest, but more of a mental way of thinking.

I call it a virus because when I meet certain people and they give me the same excuse of ‘Oh, I didn’t have enough time’ or ‘It’s not going to work’ it tends to infect us without really realising it. That infectious feeling of an attitude which spells in big bold letters ‘WHY BOTHER!’

So to put things straight I would like to write out a selection of the actor James Franco’s autobiography from Weekipedia.

The autobiography is quite long for such a young chap so I’ll pinpoint the major points he’s managed to achieve thus far in his 38 years of existence on this planet:

– He was born in 1978

– His occupation is an actor, writer, producer, director and teacher

– His first role was in ‘Freaks & Geeks’ and he later played James Dean and won a Golden Globe for his performance.

– Then he performed as Harry Osborne in the ‘Spiderman’ trilogy.

– After that he acted in ‘Flyboys’, ‘Pineapple Express’, ‘Milk’, ‘127 hours’, ‘Rise of the planet of the apes’, ‘Spring breakers’, ‘Oz the great and powerful’, ‘This is the end’, and ‘The interview.’

– He had a recurring role in General Hospital. And he was also nominated for an academy award.

– He volunteers at the charity Art of Elysium and teaches at NYU in filmmaking and production.

– He has a short course that he teaches at UCLA and also has a course that he teaches at USC.

– And, he’s also got a PHD… From Yale!

The guy is in abundance – he did three movies in one year and still found time to pursue other careers.

– He was dissatisfied with his career’s direction and therefore re enrolled at UCLA in Autumn 2006 in an English major. He received permission to take sixty two course credits per quarter compared to the normal limit of 19 while he was shooting movies and continuing to act.

– He was actually studying while he was on the set of Spiderman three.

– Then he graduated with a GPA of 4.0 (whatever that means but it sure means something).

– Then he studied French, The Holocaust, the Philosophy of Science, American Literature while on film sets.

– He moved to New York to simultaneously attend graduate school at Columbia’s MFA’s writing program and NYU Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking and Brooklyn College for fiction writing while also attending a low residency MFA program for writers at North Carolina for poetry.

– And he is now a PHD student in English at Yale and also attended the Rhode Island school of design.

The man is LIVING LIFE.

Henry James Theroux said once ‘Suck on the marrow of life’ and this is definitely what Franco’s doing.

But the question is are we doing the same?

Most of us tend to live a life of scarcity – thinking up excuses of why it won’t work instead of why it should.

So next time you feel a sense of excusitis creeping up on you, stop for a second and think ‘hey, what would Franco do in this situation?’ and then go ahead and do it!

Think abundantly.