Truth Exists

1. Truth exists. 2. An idea is worth a dollar, a strategy is worth millions. 3. The universe is governed by Truth. We can discover as much as we have time to explore. 4. Biographies are written about those who have overcome their limitations, critics, and imposed restraints. 5. Wisdom is learned either through pain or by mentors. I suggest mentors. 6. Foolishness is repeating the action which caused pain. 7. The Earth's currency is Seed - Time - Harvest. This one principle defeats fatalism. 8. Your world is only as big as the trails that you run. 9. Never underestimate the destructive power of simple-minded men. 10. Man rarely lives up to the dignity of his potential."

The Station

Tucked away...

in our subconscious minds is an idyllic vision in which we see ourselves on a long journey that spans an entire continent. We're traveling by train and, from the  windows, we drink in the passing scenes of cars on nearby highways, of children waving at crossings, of cattle grazing in distant pastures, of smoke pouring from power plants, of row upon row upon row of cotton and corn and wheat, of flatlands and valleys, of city skylines and village halls.     But uppermost in our conscious minds is our final destination--for at a certain hour and on a given day, our train will finally pull into the station with bells ringing, flags waving, and bands playing. And once that day comes, so many wonderful dreams will come true. So restlessly, we pace the aisles and count the miles, peering ahead, waiting, waiting, waiting for the station.     "Yes, when we reach the station, that will be it!" we promise ourselves. "When we're  eighteen. . . win that promotion. . . put the last kid through college. . . buy that 450SL  Mercedes-Benz. . . have a nest egg for retirement!"     From that day on we will all live happily ever after.     Sooner or later, however, we must realize there is no station in this life, no one earthly place to arrive at once and for all. The journey is the joy. The station is an illusion--it constantly outdistances us. Yesterday's a memory, tomorrow's a dream. Yesterday belongs to a history, tomorrow belongs to God. Yesterday's a fading sunset, tomorrow's a faint sunrise. Only today is there light enough to love and live.     So, gently close the door on yesterday and throw the key away. It isn't the burdens of today  that drive men mad, but rather regret over yesterday and the fear of tomorrow. Regret and fear are twin thieves who would rob us of today.     "Relish the moment" is a good motto, especially when coupled with Psalm 118:24, "This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it."      So stop pacing the aisles and counting the miles. Instead, swim more rivers, climb more mountains, kiss more babies, count more stars. Laugh more and cry less. Go barefoot oftener. Eat more ice cream. Ride more merry-go-rounds. Watch more sunsets. Life must be lived as we go along. The station will come soon enough.

The World Needs More

The world needs more men who do not have a price at which they can be bought;

who do not borrow from integrity to pay for expediency;

who have their priorities straight and in proper order;

whose handshake is an ironclad contract;

who are not afraid of taking risks to advance what is right;

and who are honest in small matters as they are in large ones.

The world needs more men whose ambitions are big enough to include others;

who know how to win with grace and lose with dignity;

who do not believe that shrewdness and cunning and ruthlessness

 are the three keys to success;

who still have friends they made twenty years ago;

who put principle and consistency above politics, or personal advancement;

and who are not afraid to go against the grain of popular opinion.

The world needs more men who do not forsake what is right just to get

because it makes them look good;

who know how important it is to lead by example, not by barking orders;

who would not have you do something they would not do themselves;

who work to turn even the most adverse circumstances into opportunities to

learn and improve;

and who love even those who have done some injustice or unfairness to them.

The world, in other words, needs more true leaders.

Such an awesome idea

http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/#!home:page=1

How to Live a Positive Life

1. Stop doing things that make you unhappy. Too often we spend time and energy doing things that make us. Too often we don't make the connection between what we’re doing and our unhappiness. Look at your life carefully. Are you doing things that make you unhappy? When you find yourself at your lowest points, is there anything you can pinpoint that has caused negativity to occur? When you take a close look, you’ll probably spot patterns you might have missed before. Determine the things that make you unhappy—and stop doing them.

2. Surround yourself with people who lift you up. Just like you must choose not to do things that make you unhappy, you must also choose not to be around negative people. Sadly, too many people surround themselves with individuals who don't bring them up. If people in your life are bringing you down—yes, even family members or significant others—you have to find a way to separate yourself from these people. If you want to live a truly positive life, you must be surrounded by positive influences. 

3. Learn how to love yourself. If you want to live a positive life, you must love who you are. The only way to go about learning to love yourself is to invest time in it. It might sound silly to some, but finding true love for yourself and really knowing what matters to you is essential for living a positive life. Before you can love anyone or anything else fully, you must first love yourself. Don't ever think about self-love or soul searching as a waste of time; the time you spend learning to love yourself is incredibly valuable.

4. Spend time doing what you love to do. Once you've rid your life of activities that make you unhappy, you'll suddenly have more free. What to do with that all that free time? Spend it doing what you absolutely love to do. Take a moment to think about the times you were the happiest. What were you doing during those times? It doesn't matter if it's a silly thing or something other people don't quite get. What matters is this: if something makes you genuinely happy, you should spend time doing it. A lot of time. 

5. Revise the way you look at the world. The way you see the world around you is a choice. You can choose to look for the good or you can choose to focus on the bad. It's completely up to you. Once you realize how much control you have over your perspective, you’ll see that it doesn’t make much sense to focus on the negative. Focusing on what’s going wrong only brings you down. Change your point of view and your whole life will change too. 

6. Open your mind to ideas of living a positive life. There are a lot of awesome people out there in the world living positive lives and, really, why shouldn't you consider their ideas of what it means to live a positive life? If someone has been successfully living a positive life, it's at least worth considering how he or she got to a place of positive. Every idea might not work for you, but having an open mind really helps lead to a positive life. 

7. Stop stressing about your past. Many of us spend way too much time thinking about, revisiting, and going backward to the past. Doing these things is pointless and painful and will only cause you (and others) a great deal of unhappiness. Hard as it is to admit sometimes, the past is over. Going back to it or fretting about it or beating yourself up over it does absolutely nothing. What's done is done. The sooner you learn from it and move on, the better. 

8. Don't seek happiness in things or people. Don’t look for positive outlets outside of yourself. Often when we’re feeling unhappy, we look outside ourselves for a solution, for a quick burst of happiness. It might be tempting to rely on other people for your happiness or turn to habits like shopping, eating, or drinking to quell your negative state of mind, but those outside things never do the trick. You must seek happiness and positivity within yourself. It really is the only way to truly live a positive life. 

9. Know you have the power to change your own life. Over and over again many of us think the worst two words: "I can't..." The second you let yourself think that way about changing your life, you're set up for failure. If you don't believe you can change your life, then it's going to be pretty hard to actually change it. Believing in yourself sounds so cliché, but there's a reason that concept has stuck around for so long. Without believing in your power, you'll paralyze yourself and living a positive life will be impossible.

10. Refuse to give up on what matters most. A lot of people look down on those trying to better their lives. Perhaps it is jealousy or fear or just plain ignorance, but for whatever reason, people may judge you for striving to be positive. People may criticize you or attempt to stand in your way. Don't let them. Don't let anyone or anything come between you and living the life you want to be living. Remember that, no matter what, this is your life. If you want to live it positively, don't let anyone or anything stand in your way. 

Living a positive life takes a lot of hard to work, especially if you're struggling with negativity. But know this: even if you do one thing on this list, your life will improve. And you owe it to yourself to at least try. If you want to live a positive life, do it. All of the work will be worth every ounce of effort you put in because nothing is better than loving the life you're living. 

90 Reasons, 90 Days

http://90days90reasons.com/index.php

A single footstep will not make a path on the earth

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives." 

-Henry David Thoreau

Filming one second every day

Filming one second every day: Cesar Kuriyama at TED2012

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

On his 30th birthday, Cesar Kuriyama quit his job in advertising. At the same time, he started a project: “One Second Every Day” for which he cuts together one second of footage from every day of his life into an ever-expanding project. We’ve seen these daily-picture kind of projects before, but this is certainly ambitious. As Kuriyama explains, it’s a project he plans on conducting for the rest of his life. ”If I live to 80, I will have a five-hour video that summarizes 50 years of my life,” he says to applause. “At 40, I’ll have a one-hour video of my 30s.”

He shows the film to the audience, and it’s interesting to see how much richness the footage includes. Sometimes, he says, it can be difficult to narrow down his choice to just one second, but as the project has gone on, he has become ever more convinced that this is a way he will remember his life forever.

Obviously, life is filled with moments, both happy and sad. The most affecting part of his talk and film comes with footage of his sister-in-law, who was taken ill in the last year and who spent much time, desperately sick, in hospital. This quiet footage of a family, hoping and waiting, is truly moving. “Recording these one seconds on a bad day is extremely difficult,” Kuriyama admits. “We take our cameras out when we’re doing awesome things; we rarely do that when something horrible is happening.” Yet filming the bad times has helped him to process, to recognize, to deal–and he concludes by wondering if it might not do the same for us all.

Share this:

Do You Act, Or React?

–Condensed from an article by Sidney J. Harris in the Chicago Daily News


I walked with a friend, a Quaker, to the newsstand the other night,
and he bought a paper, thanking the newsboy politely. The newsboy
didn’t even acknowledge it.

“A sullen fellow, isn’t he?” I commented. “Oh, he’s that way every
night,” shrugged my friend. “Then why do you continue to be so polite
to him?” “Why not?” inquired my friend. “Why should I let him decide
how I’m going to act?” As I thought about this incident later, it
occurred to me that the important word was “act.”

My friend acts toward people; most of us react toward them. He has a
sense of inner balance which is lacking in most of us; he knows who he
is, what he stands for, how he should behave. He refuses to return
incivility for incivility, because then he would no longer be in
command of his own conduct.

Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor. His center of
emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but
in the world outside him. His temperature is always being raised or
lowered by the social climate around him, and he is a mere creature at
the mercy of these elements.

Praise gives him a feeling of euphoria, which is false, because it
does not last and it does not come from self–approval. Criticism
depresses him more than it should, because it confirms his own
secretly shaken opinion of himself. Snubs hurt him, and the merest
suspicion of unpopularity in any quarter rouses him to bitterness.

Serenity cannot be achieved until we become the masters of our own
actions and attitudes. To let another determine whether we shall be
rude or gracious, elated or depressed, is to relinquish control over
our own personalities, which is ultimately all we possess. The only
true possession is self-possession.

It is more important to know where we are going than to get there quickly

“It is more important to know where we are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement.”

"Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity."

First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen?

"First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst." 

"If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done." 

- Dale Carnegie

Live

It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live.-Albus Dumbledore