Category Archives: Emotional Well-Being

Just for Today

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Think and act cheerfully, and you will feel cheerful.

Create your happiness by follow daily program of cheerful and constructive thinking written by Sibyl F. Partridge.

  1. Just for today, I will be happy. This assumes that what Abraham Lincoln said is true, that “most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Happiness is from within; it is not a matter of externals.
  2. Just for today, I will try to adjust myself to what is, and not try to adjust everything to my own desires. I will take my family, my business, and my luck as they come and fit myself to them.
  3. Just for today, I will take care of my body. I will exercise it, care for it, nourish it, not abuse or neglect it, so that it will a perfect machine for my bidding.
  4. Just for today, I will try to strengthen my mind. I will learn something useful. I will not be a mental loafer. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration.
  5. Just for today, I will exercise my soul in three ways; I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don’t want to do, as William James suggest, just for exercise.
  6. Just for today, I will be agreeable. I will look as well as I can, dress as becomingly as possible, talk low, act courteously, be liberal with praise, criticize not at all, not find fault with anything and not try to regulate nor improve anyone.
  7. Just for today, I will try to live this day only, not to tackle my whole life problem at once. I can do things for twelve hours that would appall me if I had to keep them up for a lifetime.
  8. Just for today, I will have a program and plan. I will write down what I expect to do every hour. I may not follow it exactly, but I will have it. I will eliminate two pests, hurry and indecisive.
  9. Just for today, I will have a quiet half-hour all by myself and relax. In this half-hour sometimes I will think of God, so as to get a little more perspective on life.
  10. Just for today, I will be unafraid, especially I will not be afraid to be happy, to enjoy what is beautiful, to love, to believe that those I love, love me.

Written by Sybil F. Partridge and printed in How To Stop Worrying, And Start Living by Dale Carnegie, 1951

The Optimist

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“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” ~ Winston Churchill

While your health is very important to your quality of life and longevity, your emotional well-being is equally important. Your emotional well-being impacts the way you do nearly everything in your life.

Studies show that people who are optimistic are less likely to suffer from a chronic illness, states Brian Tracy, Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International. They live 11-15% longer and have a greater chance of living beyond age 85.

Optimistic people have better job security, are more likely to succeed in their careers, and have greater job satisfaction. They are able to turn disappointments into motivation, which leads to increased productivity and accomplishments. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

Optimistic people get sick less often and recover from illnesses faster. Optimists seem to have different ways of dealing with the world that set them apart from the average, says Tracy:

  1. “First, they keep their minds on what they want and keep looking for ways to get it. They are clear about their goals and they are confident that they will accomplish them, sooner or later.”
  2. “Second, optimists look for the good in every problem or difficulty. When things go wrong, as they often do, they say, “That’s good!” And then set about finding something positive about the situation.”

When you think and talk about what you want and how to get it, you feel happier and in greater control of your life. When you think about something that makes you happy, your brain actually releases endorphins, which give you a generalized feeling of well-being.

Moreover, if you are looking for something good or beneficial in a person or situation, you will always find it.  And while you are looking, you will be a more positive and cheerful person.

Optimists seek the valuable lesson in every setback or reversal.  Rather than getting upset and blaming someone else for what has happened, they take control over their emotions by saying, “What can I learn from this experience?” 

When you experience a setback or a negative event occurs, it’s your response that matters most and truly determines the outcome. Thus, it’s vitally important to always look for the positive response or optimistic lesson when such setbacks and events take place.

“While you cannot control everything that comes your way, you can control how you respond to them.” Brian Tracy

The true measure of emotional well-being is how positive and optimistic you are about yourself, about your talents and abilities, and about your life.

We all face challenges, but it is our reaction to those challenges that determine how quickly we can overcome them. Your ability to find an optimistic view of challenges will impact your overall success and emotional well-being, so to ensure you know how to be optimistic during hardships.

Resolve to see your glass of life as half full rather than half empty. Happy people give thanks for the many blessings in life rather than worrying or complaining about the things they do not have.

Assume the best of intentions on the part of everyone around you.  Most people are pretty decent, honest and are trying to do the very best they know how to, says Tracy. When you look for something good in their words and actions, you will almost always find something.

Finally, resolve to be cheerful, no matter what happens.

Looking on the bright side is most important when things go wrong. According to Tracy, “While you cannot control everything that comes your way, you can control how you respond to them.”

“Success is not an action that you take, it’s a way of life. If you want to accomplish great things, greatness must be reflected in everything that you do.” Brian Tracy

References:

  1. https://www.briantracy.com/blog/personal-success/be-an-optimist-at-all-times/
  2. https://www.briantracy.com/blog/personal-success/positive-attitude-happy-people-positive-thinking/

Brian Tracy, Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company specializing in the training and development of individuals and organizations.

Working on Your Goals and Expressing Gratitude Everyday

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“With whatever you are struggling to master in your life, create a small habit or routine that gets you one step closer to it each and every day. ” Brendon Burchard

Now more than ever is the time to really appreciate the small, meaningful moments in life. It’s time you stop waiting for ” the anvil of purpose” to fall onto your head and suddenly everything, like life’s vision, purpose and meaning, become clear!

Instead, sit down with yourself and really think about what that purpose, that meaning, that vision for your life can really be.

There is no better time than the present to start this journey of self-exploration and find the ways in which you can truly feel alive, fulfilled, and happy in this life.

Thus, it’s important to make getting better everyday and self-improvement a way of life. It’s important to:

  • Begin the journey to think about and clarify your life’s vision, purpose and meaning.
  • Focus more on expressing gratitude and incorporating everyday wins back into your week and taking the time to appreciate them and let them sink in.
  • Focus more on your habits and long-term goals, and connecting back to your vision and purpose.

In the past, how many times did you achieve something or have special moments with your kids, spouse or friends, only to quickly move on to the next thing?

Life is so short to breeze by these special moments and not appreciate them. Really take the time to feel the day and fill your heart with gratitude. You’ll be happier too!

There’s still time to reclaim your day and schedule activities that add real value and meaning back into your routine. By pursuing your dream for 2 minutes or even 30 minutes every single day.

Don’t wait until next weekend when you might have the time for your goals and vision. Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed and that big dream of yours isn’t going to materialize if you keep pushing it off.

Break down your big audacious goals into quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals. Work on your goals every single day and you will move the needle in your progress and success.

Additionally, if you want to achieve your goals, you should develop a growth mindset. A growth mindset allows you to explore more, take more risks, try new things, and grow more into what you’re capable.

The Power of Reflection

Clarity only happens when you reflect on your long term goals, habits and relationships — daily. It might be time to take a hard, unflinching look at your own performance in these important areas of your life.

When you live a life with intention each day, that brings about true purpose and meaning to your life. And when your days are filled with more purpose and meaning — more happiness and fulfillment tends to follow. And isn’t that the ultimate goal? To live a happy, purposeful and meaningful life.

Personal growth, goals and purpose are things that must be worked on everyday, otherwise you will lose touch with them.

Your Wealth Building and Financial Freedom Coach,

References:

  1. https://growthday.com
  2. https://www.growthday.com/hps-v4

Small, daily actions can gather momentum to become an unstoppable force of change.

  • Outcome – goals and vision
  • Process – habits and systems
  • Identity – mindset, beliefs and thoughts

It’s not too late to prioritize your health and wellness, explains Brendon Burchard,

! If you haven’t already, put your health at the forefront and do everything you can to get your healthy eating, sleep, and exercise routine in place. Because small, daily actions can gather momentum to become an unstoppable force of change.

The Great Benefits and Joy of Movement

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“Anytime you engage in regular activity, you’re becoming this version of yourself that is more hopeful, more motivated, more energized, and better able to connect with others.” ~Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D.

Knowing only great benefits and happiness will result from movement, why are Americans so resistant to making movement a priority in their day?

While our brains and bodies reward us for moving and exertion, we also are built with an instinct to avoid overexertion, conserve energy, to rest, to avoid discomfort, and avoid failure and embarrassment, says Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., a research psychologist, a lecturer at Stanford University, and an award-winning science writer and author of The Joy of Movement.

To retrain our bodies to encourage movement, we must first start with self-compassion and the practice of gratitude. We must remove the negative connotations from movement and recognize how the practice of movement can be really rewarding on its own.

“Exercise is health-enhancing and life-extending, yet many of us feel it’s a chore.” Kelly McGonigal

Research shows, according to Dr. McGonigal, there are three motivations that keep people moving:

  • Enjoyment – doing something you actually enjoy
  • The activity provides social community or sense of identity (i.e. “I’m a runner”), … positive social connection, and
  • It’s a personal challenge and meaningful to you as you’re making progress toward a goal.

If you can find an activity that gives you all three – you’re hooked for life! Exercise is health-enhancing and life-extending, yet many of us feel it’s a chore and burden.

Movement can be a source of joy and is intertwined with some of the most basic human joys, including self-expression, social connection, and mastery–and why it is a powerful antidote to the modern epidemics of depression, anxiety, and loneliness.

Basically, bliss can be found in any sustained physical activity, whether that’s hiking, swimming, cycling, dancing, or yoga. However, the runner’s high emerges only after a significant effort. It seems to be the brain’s way of rewarding you for working hard.

McGonigal tells the stories of people who have found fulfillment and belonging through running, walking, dancing, swimming, weightlifting, and more, with examples that span the globe.

Along the way, Dr. McGonigal paints a portrait of human nature that highlights our capacity for hope, cooperation, and self-transcendence.

Movement is integral to both our happiness and our humanity. By harnessing the power of movement, you can create happiness, meaning, and connection in your life.

The latest theory about the runner’s high claims that: Our ability to experience exercise-induced euphoria is linked to our earliest ancestors’ lives as hunters, scavengers, and foragers.

As biologist Dennis Bramble and paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman write, “Today, endurance running is primarily a form of exercise and recreation, but its roots may be as ancient as the origin of the human genus.”

The neurochemical state that makes running gratifying may have originally served as a reward to keep early humans hunting and gathering. What we call the runner’s high may even have encouraged our ancestors to cooperate and share the spoils of a hunt.

In our evolutionary past, humans may have survived in part because physical activity was pleasurable. It takes about six weeks of consistent moderate movement to see structural and neurochemical changes in your brain. And, increase intensity amplifies the benefits. The harder stuff seems to payoff. Exercise gets easier and more pleasurable sooner.

The key to unlocking the runner’s high is not the physical action of running itself, but can be achieved on continuous moderate intensity exercise. And in fact scientists have documented a similar increase in endocannabinoids from cycling, walking on a treadmill at an incline, and outdoor hiking.

If you want the high, you just have to put in the time and effort. 

References:

  1. https://getmadefor.com/blogs/perspective/the-joy-of-movement-how-looking-backwards-moves-us-forward
  2. https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Movement-exercise-happiness-connection/dp/0525534105/ref=nodl

Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., is a research psychologist, a lecturer at Stanford University, and an award-winning science writer and author of The Joy of Movement.

An Attitude of Gratitude

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“Be in a state of gratitude for everything that shows up in your life. Be thankful for the storms as well as the smooth sailing. What is the lesson or gift in what you are experiencing right now? Find your joy not in what’s missing in your life but in how you can serve.” Wayne Dyer

Gratitude is the quality of being thankful. It’s a readiness to show appreciation

Gratitude is a foundational element to building wealth. Gratitude allows you to find joy in and focus on what you already have because envy is the stealer of wealth and comparison is the thief of joy.  If you are constantly comparing yourself to others you will never have enough. You will feel empty and inadequate. You will not find happiness.

As media mogul Oprah Winfrey explains, “Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”

“Gratitude turns what you have into enough.” Unknown

“Mother Theresa talked about how grateful she was to the people she was helping, the sick and dying in the slums of Calcutta, because they enabled her to grow and deepen her spirituality,” explains Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., is the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude and professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.

Like Mother Theresa’s spiritual growth, there are several important reasons that gratitude can have transformative effects on your own life, according to Dr. Emmons. Additionally, there are four effects he sites:

1. Gratitude allows you to appreciate and celebrate the present. It magnifies positive emotions.

Research on emotion shows that positive emotions wear off quickly. Our emotional system likes newness and novelty. It likes change. You adapt to positive life circumstances so that before too long, the new car, the new spouse, the new house—they don’t feel so new and exciting anymore.

But gratitude makes you focus on and appreciate the value of something, and when you appreciate the value of something, you extract more benefits from it; you’re less likely to take it for granted, states Dr. Emmons.

In effect, gratitude allows you to participate more in life. You notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, you celebrate goodness. You spend more time watching and doing things with gratitude. Effectively, you become a greater participant in your life as opposed to being a spectator.

2. Gratitude blocks toxic, negative emotions, such as envy, resentment, regret—emotions that can destroy our happiness. A 2008 study by psychologist Alex Wood in the Journal of Research in Personality, showed that gratitude can reduce the frequency and duration of episodes of depression.

You cannot feel envious and grateful at the same time. They’re incompatible feelings. If you’re grateful, you can’t resent someone for having something that you don’t.

3. Grateful people are more stress resistant. There’s a number of studies showing that in the face of serious trauma, adversity, and suffering, if people have a grateful disposition, they’ll recover more quickly. In short, gratitude gives people a perspective from which they can interpret negative life events and help them guard against post-traumatic stress and lasting anxiety.

4. Grateful people have a higher sense of self-worth. When you’re grateful, you have the sense that someone else is looking out for you—someone else has provided for your well-being, or you notice a network of relationships, past and present, of people who are responsible for helping you get to where you are right now.

Once you start to recognize the contributions that other people have made to your life—once you realize that other people have seen the value in you—you can transform the way you see yourself.

Thus, it’s imperative for you to cultivate gratitude and to overcome the challenges to gratitude. You must put conscious and deliberate effort into practicing gratitude.

“Gratitude is the healthiest of all human emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more likely you will have even more to express gratitude for.” Zig Ziglar

First is to keep a gratitude journal as a way to cultivate gratitude, says Dr. Emmons. This can mean listing just five things for which you’re grateful every week. This practice works because it consciously, intentionally focuses your attention on developing more grateful thinking and on eliminating ungrateful thoughts. It helps guard against taking things for granted; instead, you will see gifts in life as new and exciting. People who live a life of pervasive thankfulness really do experience life differently than people who cheat themselves out of life by not feeling grateful.

Another gratitude exercise is to practice counting your blessings on a regular basis, maybe first thing in the morning, maybe in the evening. What are you grateful for today? You don’t have to write them down on paper.

Additionally, you can use concrete reminders to practice gratitude, says Dr. Emmons. For example, a Vancouver family developed a practice of putting money in “gratitude jars.” At the end of the day, they put spare change into those gratitude jars. They had a regular reminder, a habit, to get them to focus on gratitude. When the jar became full, they gave away the money to a good cause within their community.

Gratitude journals and other gratitude practices seem simple and basic, but studies have shown that people who keep gratitude journals for just three weeks realize results that have been overwhelmingly beneficial in their lives, according to Dr. Emmons.

The bottomline is that having an ‘attitude of gratitude’ is the key ingredient to living your best and most rewarding life. It’s a practice and habit that we must all embrace.

“The ultimate path to enlightment is the cultivation of gratitude. When you’re grateful, fear disappears. When you’re grateful lack disapears. You feel a sense that life is uniquely blessed, but at the same time, you feel like you’re a part of everything that exists and you know that you are not the source of it.” Tony Robbins

References:

  1. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_gratitude_is_good
  2. https://thestrive.co/gratitude-quotes/
  3. https://blog.gratefulness.me/gratitude-quotes/

Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., is the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude. He is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and the founding editor-in-chief of The Journal of Positive Psychology. He is the author of the books Gratitude Works!: A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity and Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier.

Duke’s Coach Mike Krzyzewski Career Ends

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“It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” Teddy Roosevelt

One of the most impressive coaching careers in NCAA basketball history ended Saturday, April 2, 2022, when Duke Blue Devils men’s basketball team lost to North Carolina Tar Heels in Coach Krzyzewski’s 13th and last Final Four appearance in New Orleans. The loss shut down his bid for a sixth national title.

The loss marked the end of Mike Krzyzewski’s illustrious head coaching career – one that started at the U.S. Military Academy in 1975 before he took the Duke job in 1980. Krzyzewski, a West Point grad, played point guard at West Point from 1966-1969 under Coach Bob Knight and then spent 1969-1974 serving in the U.S. Army, coaching three different service teams.

In a 2018 Military Times article, Krzyzewski, the 75-year-old grandfather of 10, called West Point “the best leadership school in the world.” 

Regarding his tenure as head coach, “I’ve been blessed to be in the arena,” Krzyzewski said. “And when you’re in the arena, you’re either going to come out feeling great or you’re going to feel agony. But you always will feel great about being in the arena. And I’m sure that’s the thing when I’ll look back that I’ll miss. … But damn, I was in the arena for a long time. And these kids made my last time in the arena an amazing one.”

Krzyzewski’s coaching career ends with a victory total of 1,202 — including 101 in the NCAA Tournament.

References:

  1. https://nypost.com/2022/04/03/an-epic-ending-for-mike-krzyzewski-the-man-in-the-arena/

The Optimist

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“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Winston Churchill

Research shows that optimists enjoy many health and lifestyle benefits, including greater achievement, greater health, a sense of persistence toward goals, greater emotional health, increased longevity, and lower reactivity to stress.

Promise Yourself

To be SO STRONG that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.

To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.

To make all your friends feel that there is something in them.

To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.

To think only of the best, to work only for the best and to expect only the best.

To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.

To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the GREATER ACHIEVEMENTS of the future.

To wear a cheerful countenance AT ALL TIMES and give every living creature you meet a smile.

To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have NO TIME to criticize others.

To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now wrote, “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the now the primary focus of your life. Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the now, have your dwelling place in the now and pay brief visits to the past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.”

Optimism is about seeing potential and working creatively with—but not being limited by— the challenges. Optimism combines having a positive outlook of what’s happening now and having a positive vision of the future.

The key to optimism is understanding how you are narrating the story of the events and experiences of your life. A story has many angles. But all the angles of the story don’t matter. What only matters is how you perceive the story, how you accept it and how you react to it. While we don’t have control over what’s occurring on Wall Street or Main Street, we do have control over how we interpret the events playing out in our own lives.

Optimism is about being positive and confident regarding our work and effort, something each of us is capable of doing in our own way. Research in Positive Psychology tells us that those who adopt an optimistic mindset are healthier, less prone to depression, live longer, and lead happier more satisfying lives.

Optimists look for opportunities for growth and positive change, but more importantly, they stay tethered to the present reality. It’s not about pretending that all is well or about avoiding challenging situations. It’s about thinking accurately, acting with confidence, making calculated risks, and when things go wrong, perceiving those setbacks as temporary, and using innovation, flexibility and resilience to learn from the fall and move forward.

“Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing a solution paves the way to solution.” – David J. Schwartz

References:

  1. https://www.verywellmind.com/become-more-of-an-optimist-3144818
  2. https://tamarchansky.com/tools/safe-optimism/
  3. https://www.optimist.org/Documents/creed_poster.pdf

 

Health, Wealth, Emotional Well-Being, Purpose and Success

Visualization: Your Life In Focus

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“The key to effective visualization is to create the most detailed, clear, and vivid a picture to focus on.”

Research shows that the more you focus on the things you desire, the better chance you have at getting them. Thus, knowing what you want and focusing on what you want are essential for success and achieving your best life.

As you might ascertain, having a clear direction of where you’re headed or where you want to go is essential. Without a clear purpose and goals, it can be very easy to get caught up in things that aren’t actually moving you forward in your life’s journey.

For example, struggling comedian and actor, Jim Carrey used to picture himself being the greatest actor in the world. When Carey was still a “wannabe” during one of his appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”, he spoke about his early days trying to make it in the entertainment business. He was broke and had no future. But he took a blank check and wrote out $10 million dollars to himself for acting services rendered and dated it five year in the future.

Subsequently, he carried that check in his wallet at all times and looked at it every morning, visualizing receiving $10 million. Five years after he wrote the check to himself, he found out that he was going to earn $10 million from the movie “Dumb and Dumber.”

“Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life, because you become what you believe.” Oprah Winfrey

Vision boarding is an excellent way to get clear on your goals. Creating a vision board is a powerful way of getting to know yourself and what it is you truly want in your life.

A vision board is essentially a physical (or digital) manifestation of your goals. Vision boarding involves collecting images or objects that speak to the future you want to create and arranging them on a board for a tangible and aesthetically pleasing reminder of where you’re heading.

References:

  1. https://seatgeek.com/tba/articles/oprah-winfrey-2020-vision-tour-dates-tickets/
  2. https://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-20630/8-successful-people-who-use-the-power-of-visualization.html
  3. https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/how-to-make-a-vision-board

 

“Success = Knowing, Growing, Acting and Serving.”

Seven Steps to Success: John C. Maxwell

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“Attitude is the first quality that marks the successful man. If he has a positive attitude and is a positive thinker, who likes challenges and difficult situations, then he has half his success achieved.” John C. Maxwell

Although there is not a perfect formula to be successful, everyone has the capability to become successful. Success is a journey that you create for yourself if you strongly desire it and act on it. And, success can be learned and attained by you and everyone else. One ‘tried and true’ way to learn about becoming successful is to study the success of other people.

And that is what John C. Maxwell* has done. After over nearly fifty years of knowing successful people and studying the subject, John C. Maxwell has taught millions the principles of success and has embraced the following definition of success:

Success is…

  • Knowing your purpose in life,
  • Growing to reach your maximum potential, and
  • Sowing seeds that benefit others.

By this definition, success is a journey rather than a destination. No matter how long you live or what you decide to do in life, you will never exhaust your capacity to grow toward your potential, nor will you run out of opportunities to help others.

Additionally, Maxwell has developed a process of seven steps for success that are available to you and anyone else who desires to study and pursues the journey of success:

1. Make a commitment to grow daily.

“Success is… knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.” John C. Maxwell

Success comes from growing, not from achieving, acquiring or advancing. If you commit to growing each day, you will soon start noticing positive results in your life. Every action that you take towards growing will bring you closer to success, it doesn’t matter how small your action is or how slow you go as long as you keep going. As the poet Robert Browning said, “Why stay on earth except to grow?”

2. Value the process more than events.

“You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” John C. Maxwell

If your goal is to go to the next level in life, then strive for continuous improvement. Events in life are temporary, they teach you how to make better decisions. However, it is the process of change and growth that have lasting value. Choose to embrace the process and learn from both, the process and the event.

3. Don’t wait for inspiration.

“If you start today to do the right thing, you are already a success even if it doesn’t show yet.” John C. Maxwell

People who advance far in life find ways to motivate themselves and live the best they can regardless of how they feel. At times, they even have to push themselves to do something. Successful people persevere. Basketball great Jerry West said, “You can’t get much done in life if you only work on the days when you feel good.”

4. Be willing to sacrifice pleasure for opportunity.

“Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” John C. Maxwell

There are two paths to follow: “You can play now and pay later, or pay now and play later. You choose whether you will first want to pay or play. Regardless of the path you choose to take, life will always demand a payment. If you choose “to pay first,” you will be more pleased with your results and enjoy greater and sweeter rewards

5. Dream big.

“Where success is concerned, people are not measured in inches, or pounds, or college degrees, or family background; they are measured by the size of their thinking.” John C. Maxwell

If you’re going to dream, dare to dream big. Dreaming small may keep you from discovering what you’re truly made of. Robert J. Kriegel and Louis Patler, authors of If Ain’t Broke, Brake It, assert, “We don’t have a clue as to what people’s limits are. All the tests, stopwatches, and finish lines in the world can’t measure human potential. When someone is pursuing their dream, they’ll go far beyond what seems to be their limitations. The potential that exists within us is limitless and largely untapped. When you think of limits, you create them.”

6. Plan your priorities.

“To Stay Focused in Life: You can’t know everyone. You can’t do everything. You can’t go everywhere. We have to pick and choose between good and a little bit better.” John C. Maxwell

Successful people have many things common and one of of them is that they have mastered the art of how to effectively manage their time. More than anything, they have organized themselves. Henry Kaiser, founder of Kaiser Aluminum and Kaiser Permanente Health Care, says, “Every minute spent in planning will save you two in execution. Time cannot be retrieved, so live every moment the best you can.

7. Give up to go up.

“One of the major keys to success is to keep moving forward on the journey, making the best of the detours and interruptions, turning adversity into advantage.” John C. Maxwell

Everything that has value comes as a result of making sacrifices. Life will present you with countless opportunities to trade something you value for something else. Keep your eyes open to identify those opportunities and once you do, make sure that what you decide to trade will be a trade up, not down.

In conclusion, “success is a journey” isn’t just a matter of words and ideas, it’s a matter of actions. It’s in you to act on what makes you achieve your success every day. Know that what may mean success to you may not mean success to others, and vice versa–and this is completely fine. Success implies diversity of thoughts, habits, behaviors, values, and attitudes.

“If you make it your discipline to do a little bit of growing every day, in just a few years you will be amazed by your transformation.” John C. Maxwell

References:

  1. https://www.johnmaxwell.com/blog/what-i-believe-about-success/
  2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/seven-steps-success-john-c-maxwell-ivette-k-caballero

* John C. Maxwell is an International Leadership Expert, Speaker, #1 New York Times bestselling author, coach, and speaker who has sold more than 26 million books in fifty languages. As the founder of The John Maxwell Company, The John Maxwell Team, EQUIP, and the John Maxwell Leadership Foundation, he has trained more than 6 million leaders. Dr. Maxwell speaks each year to Fortune 500 companies, presidents of nations, and many of the world’s top business leaders. For more information about him visit JohnMaxwell.com.

Albert Einstein Best Quotes

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“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein, a German-born physicist, has been widely regarded as one of the greatest minds and physicists of all time. In December 1932, he emigrated to the United States, renouncing his German citizenship after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany.

In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to theoretical physics and discovery of the photoelectric effect.

Einstein was best known for developing the theory of relativity and the mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc2, often dubbed “the world’s most famous equation”.

During his life, he made many sayings about science, education, religion and life that continue to resonate today:

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

“Logic will get you from A to Z, imagination will get you everywhere.”

“Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.”

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

Einstein’s words have inspired generations around the world to live life fully, and in a more positive, self aware and rewarding manner.

References:

  1. https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/remembering-albert-einstein-inspirational-quotes-of-the-nobel-laureate-on-143rd-birth-anniversary/ar-AAV19qr
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein