Giving Our Best

Every day that we are alive,
We should be asking ourselves whether we,
Are we giving our best to each day,
This is something we may not all see.

See each day we are given is a gift,
And to waste it would be very wrong.
But our lives are just that,
Ours to do with and hope our life's long.

But that's just it, our lives may not be long,
And come to an end before we are ready.
Don't be that person, who regrets,
Live your life full and steady.

Close your eyes and go to sleep,
Knowing you've conquer your day.
You'll life will be very successful,
And you'll be happy to look back when you're gray.

by  Julie Hebert, © 2012 

How failures resulted in great success

1. Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he finally succeeded.
2. Beethoven handled the violin awkwardly and preferred playing his own compositions instead of improving his technique. His teacher called him hopeless as a composer.
3. Colonel Sanders had the construction of a new road put him out of business in 1967. He went to over 1,000 places trying to sell his chicken recipe before he found a buyer interested in his 11 herbs and spices. Seven years later, at the age of 75, Colonel Sanders sold his fried chicken company for a finger-lickin' $15 million!
4. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor for lack of ideas. Disney also went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland.
5. Charles Darwin, father of the theory of evolution, gave up a medical career and was told by his father, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching." In his autobiography, Darwin wrote, "I was considered by my father, a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.
6. Albert Einstein did not speak until he was four years old and didn't read until he was seven. His teacher described him as "mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish dreams." He was expelled and refused admittance to Zurich Polytechnic School. The University of Bern turned down his Ph.D. dissertation as being irrelevant and fanciful.
7. The movie Star Wars was rejected by every movie studio in Hollywood before 20th-Century Fox finally produced it. It went on to be one of the largest grossing movies in film history.
8. Louis Pasteur was only a mediocre pupil in undergraduate studies and ranked 15 out of 22 in chemistry.
9. When NFL running back Herschel Walker was in junior high school, he wanted to play football, but the coach told him he was too small. He advised young Herschel to go out for track instead. Never one to give up, he ignored the coach's advice and began an intensive training program to build himself up. Only a few years later, Herschel Walker won the Heisman trophy.
10. When General Douglas MacArthur applied for admission to West Point, he was turned down, not once but twice. But he tried a third time, was accepted and marched into the history books.
11. After Fred Astaire's first screen test, the memo from the testing director of MGM, dated 1933, said, "Can't act! Slightly bald! Can dance a little!" Astaire kept that memo over the fireplace in his Beverly Hills home.
12. The father of the sculptor Rodin [The Thinker Statue] said, "I have an idiot for a son." Described as the worst pupil in the school, Rodin failed three times to secure admittance to the school of art. His uncle called him uneducable.
13. Babe Ruth, considered by sports historians to be the greatest athlete of all time and famous for setting the home run record, also holds the record for strikeouts.
14. Eighteen publishers turned down Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, before Macmillan finally published it in 1970. By 1975 it had sold more than seven million copies in the U.S. alone.
15. Margaret Mitchell's classic Gone with the Wind was turned down by more than twenty-five publishers.
16. Richard Hooker worked for seven years on his humorous war novel, M*A*S*H, only to have it rejected by 21 publishers before Morrow decided to publish it. It became a runaway bestseller, spawning a blockbusting movie and highly successful television series.
17. When the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book was completed, it was turned down by thirty-three publishers in New York and another ninety at the American Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim, California, before Health Communications, Inc., finally agreed to publish it. The major New York publishers said, "It is too nicey-nice" and "Nobody wants to read a book of short little stories." Since that time more than 8 million copies of the original Chicken Soup for the Soul book have been sold. The series, which has grown to thirty-two titles, in thirty-one languages, has sold more than 53 million copies.
18. In 1954, Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis Presley after one performance. He told Presley, "You ain't goin' nowhere… son. You ought to go back to drivin' a truck." Elvis Presley went on to become the most popular singer in America.
19. Dr. Seuss' first children's book, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street, was rejected by twenty-seven publishers. The twenty-eighth publisher, Vanguard press, sold six million copies of the book.

Never give up believing in yourself!!!

Goal setting rules

There are several important rules that accompany effective goal setting.

First

Your goals must be in harmony with one another, not contradictory. You cannot have a goal to be financially successful, or to build your own successful business, and simultaneously have a goal to spend half your day at the golf course or at the beach. Your goals have to be mutually supportive and mutually reinforcing.

Second

Your goals must be challenging. They must make you stretch out without being overwhelmed. When you initially set goals, they should have about a 50 percent or better probability of success. This level of probability is ideal for motivation, yet not so difficult that you can become easily discouraged.

Third

You should have both tangible and intangible goals, both quantitative and qualitative. You should have concrete goals that you can measure and evaluate objectively. At the same time, you should have qualitative goals, for your inner life and your relationships.

Fourth

You need both short-term goals and long-term goals. You need goals for today and goals for five, ten, and twenty years from today. The ideal short-term time frame for business, career and personal planning is about ninety days. The ideal long-term period for these same goals is two to three years. These time horizons seem to be the ideal for continuous motivation.

Fifth

The ideal life is focused, purposeful, positive and organised so that you are moving toward goals that are important to you every hour of every day. You always know what you're doing and why. You have a continuous sense of forward motion. You feel like a 'winner' most of the time.

Sixth

The decision to become a goal-setting, goal achieving, future focused person gives you a tremendous sense of control. Your self-esteem increases as you progress toward your goals. You like and respect yourself more and more. Your personality improves and you become a more positive, confident person. You feel happy and exited about life. You open the floodgates of your potential and begin moving faster and faster toward becoming all that you were meant to be.

Action Exercise

Map out your short-term, long-term, qualitative, and quantitative goals for your future in both your personal and professional life.

Written by Brian Tracy

Don't Quit

When things go wrong as they sometimes will, 
When the road you're trudging seems all uphill, 
When funds are low and the debts are high, 
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh. 
When care is pressing you down a bit. 
Rest, if you must, but don't you quit. 
Life is queer with its twists and turns
As every one of us sometimes learns. 
And many a failure turns about
When he might have won had he stuck it out: 
Don't give up though the pace seems slow -
You may succeed with another blow. 
Success is failure turned inside out -
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt. 
And you never can tell how close you are. 
It may be near when it seems so far: 
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit
It's when things seem worst that you must not quit.

By

Michael J. Bird