Unleashing Change

Allow a sense of pragmatism to hang over every project. This will help to make room for other possibilities besides our originally chosen path. If you fall in love with your creation and marry your effort, you may join the most frustrated of groups--people who fight the process rather than allowing their efforts to become living documents of creativity, which are always in process. You have to make room in your head for change to be a part of that process rather than seeing it as something extra, a burden beyond what is necessary. Make room for change before you start your task and then you'll be ready to adopt to shifting circumstances, new revelations, and emerging goals.

Stephen Goforth

Opportunity often comes disguised

Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune - or temporary defeat.

majoring in the majors

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand-Thomas Carlyle

Opportunity is missed

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. Thomas Edison

Open your mouth

Open your mouth only when you can improve on the silence

The only cure for suffering

The only cure for suffering is to face it head on, grasp it around the neck and use it. 

– Mary Craig

taking the shot

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.. - Wayne Gretzky

clever or pleasant

"My mother used to say to me, 'Elwood' -- she always called me Elwood -- 'Elwood, in this world you must be oh-so clever, or oh-so pleasant.' For years I was clever. I'd recommend pleasant -- and you may quote me."

–Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd in HARVEY

What sets apart highly successful students

One of the major differences we found between highly successful students and mediocre ones: average students think they can tell right away if they are going to be good at something. If they don't get it immediately, they throw up their hands and say, "I can't do it." Their more accomplished classmates have a completely different attitude-and it is largely a matter of attitude rather than ability. They stick with assignments much longer and are always reluctant to give it up. "I haven't learned it yet," they might say, while others would cry, "I'm not good at history, music, math, writing, or whatever." Traditional schooling rewards quick answers-the person with the hand up first. But an innovative work of the mind, something that lasts and changes the world, demands slow and steady progress. It requires time and devotion. You can't tell what you can do until you struggle with something over and over again.

Ken Bain, What the Best College Students Do

our hearts are restless

O God, Thou hast made us for thyself, and ours hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee. –Augustine

Focusing on the Bright Spots

Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, “Well, something must have happened – the problem is gone!”

The miracle question doesn't ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened. Once (someone has identified) specific and vivid signs of progress... a second question is perhaps even more important. It's the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even for just a short time?"

There are exceptions to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event. Let's replay that scene, where things were working for you. What was happening? How did you behave? That analysis can point directly toward a solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked before.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

justice

Nothing is to be preferred before justice – Socrates

feeling understood

Nothing is more validating and affirming than feeling understood. And the moment a person beings feeling understood, that person becomes far more open to influence and change. -Stephen Convey  

wearing a smile

The nice part about wearing a smile is that one size fits all. 

spiritual joy

No one can live without delight and that is why a man deprived of spiritual joy goes over to carnal pleasures-Thomas Aquinas

never

Never miss a good chance to shut up

a silly idea

No man knows how bad he is until he has tried to be good. There is a silly idea about that good people don't know what temptation means.  - C.S. Lewis

People think they know something.. because others know it

People are individually rather limited thinkers and store little information in their own heads. Much knowledge is instead spread through the community—whose members do not often realise that this is the case.

(Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach) call this the illusion of understanding, and they demonstrate it with a simple experiment. Subjects are asked to rate their understanding of something, then to write a detailed account of it, and finally to rate their understanding again. The self-assessments almost invariably drop. The authors see this effect everywhere, from toilets and bicycles to complex policy issues. The illusion exists, they argue, because humans evolved as part of a hive mind, and are so intuitively adept at co-operation that the lines between minds become blurred. Economists and psychologists talk about the “curse of knowledge”: people who know something have a hard time imagining someone else who does not. The illusion of knowledge works the other way round: people think they know something because others know it.

From a review in the Economist of “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach

rushed steps

No man walks with dignity who’s steps are rushed.  

a sense of failure

Never let the sense of failure corrupt your new action. - Oswald Chambers