Greetings. It is my pleasure to introduce you to Challenges Accepted. During my life, I have been blessed in many ways, but I have also had to overcome an exceptional amount of adversity. These many trials and tribulations happened at different ages and for different reasons. Just a few examples would include losing my parents at a young age, having to work two jobs to survive, and graduating from college at the age of sixty-eight. Also, since 2003, I have suffered from debilitating illnesses, including five heart attacks and being paralyzed from the waist down. One doctor described me as being immortal, and another one told my family that I would be dead within twenty-four hours if an infection in my blood system could not be located. My medical history from one hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia, is over six hundred pages long. However, Challenges Accepted is not just about my misfortunes. What is more important is how I grew stronger with each hardship and was able to recover from tragedies. Please join me as I travel back along my journey of life. It is my hope that you will be inspired by my book and it will help you overcome the hardships that you may encounter in your life. PS: Did I mention that my story is interwoven with humor?

A Library Journal Best Wellness Book of 2018! 2018 Self-Help Silver Medal Winner--Independent Book Publishers Association! 2018 Non-Fiction Audio Book Silver Medal Winner--Independent Book Publishers Association! 2018 Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award Finalist--Family & Relationships! WHAT WOULD YOUR LIFE BE LIKE IF YOU ACCEPTED PEOPLE AND THINGS AS THEY ARE? Do you wish your parents had been more nurturing and supportive? Are you wondering if you’ll ever find your perfect soul mate and dream boss? Do you wish you had “perfect” children, relatives who never fight, and friends who always agree with you? No one gets to sail through life free of turbulence. What separates people who shake it off, bounce back, and stay positive from the bitter, never satisfied, and defeated? Best-selling author and former compulsive controller Daniel A. Miller convincingly attests that the answer is choosing acceptance. In THE GIFTS OF ACCEPTANCE: EMBRACING PEOPLE AND THINGS AS THEY ARE, Danny shares what he’s learned—through extensive research, inspiring true stories, and his own experience with hardships—about the integral relationship between accepting the facts of life and others, with their quirks, flaws, and differences, and enjoying greater satisfaction in life. Recognizing the benefits of acceptance isn’t difficult. Yet the reality of accepting an unexpected job loss or financial setbacks, a friend’s betrayal, a child’s struggle with addiction, a serious illness, or even the annoying traits of a loved one can be extremely challenging. To make it easier, THE GIFTS OF ACCEPTANCE offers insights, intentions, and strategies for practicing acceptance of parents, a significant other, children, siblings and extended family, coworkers, friends, and foes; of life’s adversities and the limitations of getting older; and, perhaps toughest of all, of yourself. You will learn how practicing acceptance helps you * Navigate life’s ups and downs more easily * Enjoy greater trust, openness, and intimacy with your loved ones and those closest to you * Survive control freaks, foes, and other crazy makers *Lift self-imposed burdens and obligations and experience less stress, frustration, and worry * Reduce the struggle with your children * Strengthen bonds with coworkers and business associates * Discover new choices and opportunities in the most discouraging situations * Turn setbacks and failures to future successes * Find the path to assured self-acceptance THE GIFTS OF ACCEPTANCE is a book with the potential to repair relationships, revitalize careers, and make the world a better place.

This book explores the question of whether and how meme theory or “memetics” can be fruitfully utilized in evolutionary economics and proposes an approach known as “economemetics” which is a combination of meme theory and complexity theory that has the potential to combat the fragmentation of evolutionary economics while re-connecting the field with cultural evolutionary theory. By studying the intersection of cultural and economic evolution, complexity economics, computational economics, and network science, the authors establish a connection between memetics and evolutionary economics at different levels of investigation. The book first demonstrates how a memetic approach to economic evolution can help to reveal links and build bridges between different but complementary concepts in evolutionary economics. Secondly, it shows how organizational memetics can help to capture the complexity of organizational culture using meme mapping. Thirdly, it presents an agent-based simulation model of knowledge diffusion and assimilation in innovation networks from a memetic perspective. The authors then use agent-based modeling and social network analysis to evaluate the diffusion pattern of the Ice Bucket Challenge as an example of a “viral meme.” Lastly, the book discusses the central issues of agency, creativity, and normativity in the context of economemetics and suggests promising avenues for further research.