Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
Many people think that if they were only in some other place, or had some other job, they would be happy. Well, that is doubtful. So get as much happiness out of what you are doing as you can and don't put off being happy until some future date. -Dale Carnegie
You can read more on the story from ABC-7 here. #GOODNEWS
Many important things are done by folks who simply are too dumb to know they can’t be done.
The best advice I ever got came from one of my professors at the Harvard Business School.
He told a story about how George Bernard Shaw was working as a clerk in a dry-goods store in Dublin, and he decides to give himself three years to go and write plays in London. And if it didn’t work out he could always go back and be a clerk in a dry-goods store.
The way I interpreted his advice was to really do what you love.
Mort Zuckerman, US News & World Report
Quoted in Fortune Magazine
A man with no enemies is a man with no character. -Paul Newman
Ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. So it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation – the role of chance. -Leonard Mlodinow
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than yesterday. -Jonathan Swift
A man is known by the silence he keeps. - Oliver Herford
Many of us.. have great dreams and ambitions. Caught up in the emotions of our dreams and the vastness of our desires, we find it very difficult to focus on the small, tedious steps usually necessary to attain them. We tend to think in terms of giant leaps toward our goals. But in the social world as in nature, anything of size and stability grows slowly. The piecemeal strategy is the perfect antidote to our natural impatience: it forces us to think in terms of a process, a sequence of connected steps and actions, no matter how small, which has immeasurable psychological benefits as well. Too often the magnitude of our desires overwhelms us; taking that small firs step makes them seem realizable. There is nothing more therapeutic than action.
In plotting this strategy, be attentive to sudden opportunities and to your enemies momentary crises and weaknesses Do not be tempted however, to try to take anything large; bite off more than you can chew and you will be consumed with problems and disproportionately discouraged if you fail to cope with them.
Robert Greene
The 33 Strategies of War
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true. - Demosthenes
Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people CALL ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a bit envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
CS Lewis, Mere Christianity
Make good more attractive than evil.
You can't outwit death anyway by "progress" or accumulating wealth; so why not accept your fate, choose values which are authentic, and let yourself delight and believe in the being you are and the Being you are part of?
Rollo May, Love & Will
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When George Ahearn heard that farmers were destroying unsold produce, he arranged for trucks to deliver 3 million pounds of it to food banks across the state of Washington. Read more here.
Make simple things easy, and hard things possible.
Everyone takes it personally when it comes to birth order.
Children and parents alike are profoundly affected by the constellations of siblings.. But that doesn’t mean the effects of birth order are as clear or straightforward as we sometimes make them sound. Indeed, birth order can be used to explain every trait and its precise opposite. I’m competitive, driven — typical oldest child! My brother, two years younger, is even more competitive, more driven — typical second child, always trying to catch up!
“Too many parents are haunted by experiences both good and bad that they identify with their birth order,” said Dr. Peter A. Gorski, a professor of pediatrics, public health and psychiatry at the University of South Florida. And that might lead them to classify their own children according to birth order, he went on, which in turn can lead to a sense of identification or even rejection and to “self-fulfilling prophecies.”
“Birth order doesn’t cause anything,” (says) Frank J. Sulloway, a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley Dr. Sulloway said. “It’s simply a proxy for the actual mechanisms that go on in family dynamics that shape character and personality.”
Now, of course birth order played into my patients’ patterns, but so did gender and birth spacing and, above all, temperament.
"I wouldn’t discount the impact of birth order,” Dr. Gorski told me. “It sets up the structure of one’s place in relation to others from the beginning, as we learn how to react to people of different ages and different relationships.”
Perri Klass writing in the New York Times
Experience is the hardest teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward. -Vernon Law
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