Tag: failure
Growing in the Right Direction
“Are you green and growing, or ripe and rotting?”
– Ray Kroc (Founder of McDonald’s)
What is a problem? There’s a saying, which says that obstacles are what happens when you take your eyes off your goals. I don’t agree because problems can occur even when you are focusing on your goals. However, I would certainly agree that obstacles are what happens when you take your eyes off your priorities. In fact, to the congruent person, problems are not problems but considered as growing pains.
Calculating Your Risks
“Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.”
– Maxwell Maltz
Realize that whatever you choose to focus on affects your quality of life, or what Zig Ziglar calls your “standard of life,” and not just your standard of living. For instance, if you focus on the future by setting goals, you may be forcing yourself to remain in your comfort-zone and probably without ever knowing how far you can really go.
Goal Achievement
“We are at our very best, and we are happiest, when we are fully engaged in work we enjoy on the journey toward the goal we’ve established for ourselves. It gives meaning to our time off and comfort to our sleep. It makes everything else in life so wonderful, so worthwhile.”
–Earl Nightingale
“Success is a journey… Not a destination.”
–Ben Sweetland
Your Successfulness
“When we think of failure, failure will be ours. If we remain undecided, nothing will ever change. All we need to do is to want to achieve something great, and then simply to do it. Never think of failure, for what we think will come about.”
–Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
What’s true success? What’s real, authentic, fulfilling success? Is it achievement? Is it made of goals, efficiency, and deadlines? Is it the kind that says, “The level of one’s success is measured by the depth of one’s wallet”? I’ve asked myself that deeply intriguing question for many years.
Foreword
In the autumn of 1996, I still remember that faithful week and a half when it all happened. My business went belly-up. They came to repossess my car. The landlord, eviction notice in hand, came knocking on my door. And my ex-wife packed up her things, saying, "I’m leaving."
But throughout this time, I had a flash of insight. One that changed the way I was thinking but didn’t realize it until later.
Efficient Action
You must use your thought as directed in previous chapters and begin to do what you can do where you are, and you must do all that you can do where you are.
You can advance only by being larger than your present place, and no one is larger than his present place who leaves undone any of the work pertaining to that place.
Acting in The Certain Way
Thought is the creative power or the impelling force which causes the creative power to act. Thinking in a certain way will bring riches to you, but you must not rely upon thought alone, paying no attention to personal action. That is the rock upon which many otherwise scientific thinkers meet shipwreck — the failure to connect thought with personal action.
We have not yet reached the stage of development, even supposing such a stage to be possible, in which a person can create directly from formless substance without nature’s processes or the work of human hands. A person must not only think, but his personal action must supplement his thought.
