A Handful of Quotes

Hatred is but love frustrated.

Small habits compounded over a lifetime lead to dramatic results.

One moment can destroy a lifetime of work.

In every victory, find a defeat.  It will keep you hopeful.  In every defeat find a victory. It will keep you hopeful.  Orrin Woodward

Trials cause pereverence which builds character which leads to hope.  Romans

Courage is taking action despite the presence of fear.

Pain is the pathway to growth.

The source of our greatest pain will also be the source of our greatest contribution.  Rick Warren

A horse doesnt acheive its fastest speed until it has been broken.

Only time can reveal the heart of a true champion.

All you can do, is all you can do.  But all you can do is just enough.  Art Williams

You want someone to not believe you, give them 100% truth.  You want someone to believe you, give them just an ounce of truth.

The hardest thing about relationships is that they are like a giant spotlight on our own weaknesses.

3 Ways For You to be Innovative Even if You Don’t Think of Yourself as Creative

Reposted from http://finlit.biz

This blog post was inspired by a friend of mine who asked, "Can you give me three ways I can improve in the area of innovation?"

1. We now live in the information age, where it seems everyone, everywhere is creating something new. More people on the planet have access to more information than ever before. With organizations like Khan Academy and Standford, promoting online education, people are capable of learning at much faster rates. Even this blog post is a sign that anyone anywhere can now create for the world to see. "You no longer have to create something new, there is already enough creation as it is. You can now add a new perspective to relate existing creations."

For instance, Aristotle came up with the four temperaments thousands of years ago: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholy. We see these same redundant temperaments in a myriad of other personality tests: BANK (Action, Nurturing, Blueprint, Knowledge), DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance), STAR (Action, Relationships, Stability/Structure, Theory/Technical), Workology (General, Cheerleader, Mediator, Number Cruncher).

Rather than re-creating that wheel, why not tie it into other theories. For example, to resolve conflict you might Compete (Fight), Collaborate, Accomodate or Avoid (Flight). In the middle of these is compromise. Do you see how conflict resolution is related to personality type?



Likewise, Gary Chapman has a book called the "Five Love Languages" in which he introduces ways of expressing and receiving love: Quality Time, Words of Affirmation, Physical Touch, Acts of Service and Gifts. Another great book, by Gary Smalley, is "The DNA of Relationships", in which he introduces core fears people have. We could tie these two books together and make hypothesis. For instance, if someone was abandoned as a child, perhaps their greatest fear would be abandonment. This would probably lead to a need to spend quality time with people to confirm they are loved. You could begin to tie in fears with love languages and even possibly relate those to personality types. Do you see how fun this could get? And that is just relating three books! How much more information is out there?





2. "You don't have to be good at everything, you can recruit people who are good at everything." According to Jim Collins, who wrote, "From Good, to Great", the best leaders in the world, find a cause or mission and recruit people towards that cause.

If you are great at detail and follow through, why not partner with someone who can't get their bearings but is constantly coming up with new ideas. If you can help them see one of their dreams to fruition, your collaboration will be innovative.



3. "There is something that you can do that no one else in the world can do." Many people spend to much time focusing on their weaknesses. Take this as a rule of thumb: Spend 80 percent of the time developing your strengths. That will keep you accelerating. Spend 20 percent of your time developing your weaknesses. That will keep you from being slowed down.

I had a good friend of mine tell me about his son who in middle school competed nationally as a runner. Apparently, at the national level, there is much more interest in tri-atheletes. So my friends son learned how to swim. He was an amazing runner, a pretty good biker and a terrible swimmer. He would place in the twenties because his swim time was so slow. What he ended up doing was spending a little bit of time to get his swim time up to average. This minor change caused him to jump from placing in the twenties to within the top five!

Do what you love. Do what you were meant to do. Just spend some time once in a while checking your blind spots to make sure they aren't preventing you from achieving your full potential.

When you focus on your strengths, and focus on becoming the best in the world, you will naturally seem innovative and creative, simply because you stand in a class of your own.

Finding the Four Leaf Clover

Do you remember looking for four leaf clovers as a kid?

Isn't it strange how some people don't even notice patches of clovers that they pass by daily? Isn't it strange how some people can notice a patch of clovers but even after years of passing by, or sitting in or spending time near, the patch, they never even see the four leaf clovers within that patch?

In life, everyone is searching for happiness. Everyone has self-interest.

Greed is the extent to which your desire to obtain objects, extends beyond your self-interest. For instance, if I were to steal a car, I may end up going to jail. If I were to get a loan for a car that I couldn't afford, I might face financial struggles in the future.

The amount of happiness we will obtain in life is based on how closely our world view or blueprint matches reality. None of us will ever have a fully perfect blueprint of the world. One major distinction between people is their understanding of delayed gratification. In other words, according to their blueprint, do they make short term decisions that negatively affect their long term gains?

Sin is an action that is harmful to oneself. Sacrifice is a word that refers to losing something in the short term to gain something longer in the long term. Sin is an action that is inward and selfish, causing discord in a community. Love is an action that is outward and selfless, causing unity in a community. While most people believe love to be a feeling, it is actually an action, the opposite of which is sin. While on the surface, it may appear that people who have self-interest, would sin, it is quite the opposite, that people who have self-interest should actually choose love over sin.

I once met an old man in a coffee shop and he taught me about life's thermostat. He said that people have high and low points, above which and below which, we are too hot or too cold. In a sense, happiness comes from living within the set points. Your happiness over time might be the amount of time you spent living within the set points.

While we have many choices, we can take on a day to day basis, finding the right path among the multitude of paths can be difficult. It is like finding the four leaf clover, in the patch of clovers.

As we live our life, we experience trials and tribulations, which are a true blessing because they allow us to move our set points up and down appropriately to live a more happy life. In eastern culture, fasting is common as people actually try to limit their dependency on food, in an attempt to adjust their set points. In western culture, people tend to do the opposite, providing an abundance of food, in an attempt to take the actions which will allow them to stay comfortable within their set points.

Comfort may be associated with living within your set points, while character may be associated with the distance between the high and low points.

To some extent, we can make a mental decision about where we are with respect to our set points. However, just as putting your body into freezing weather can cause death, being in denial about your set points, can also cause harm. This harm can come in one of two ways. Even when beyond our set points, our mental power is strong enough to live as if we were within our set points. Likewise, even when without our set points, our mental power is strong enough to live as if we were beyond our set points.

I once heard a story about a man in a refrigerator freight of a train. He spent the night there and believed he was freezing to death. The next morning, he had died and the autopsy, showed the cause of death was freezing. However, the refrigerator component had never been turned on!

Is it possible to be comfortable, yet still expand your set points? Is it possible to both produce and simultaneously increase production capacity? Is it possible to be completely content with today, yet still want to improve towards a better tomorrow? This is a matter of position versus velocity.

Suppose you want to take a trip from Northern California to Southern California. After three hours, if you were in Fresno, would you be happy? What if you knew that you would get held up in Fresno for another 2 days, due to car trouble?

Contentment is being happy with where you are today in life. It is about being happy with all the cards you've been dealt with up to this point and being at peace with all the things that got you to where you are today. Hope is about being happy with where you are heading in life.

Surprisingly, the formula for hope is actually emotional pain. Trials in life, which cause pain can be a blessing. If you are aware that a four leaf clover exists, and you look hard enough, you can find the four leaf clover in the midst of the patch. If you do, you essentially use the trial as a blessing to adjust your world view closer to reality. This will lead to perseverance, which leads to character which leads to hope.

When you work out, if you do not exercise your muscles to the point of exhaustion, beyond what they are capable of performing, you will not feel pain, but you also will not experience growth? Likewise, people who live life without feeling physical pain find it a curse, because they cannot avoid situations like burning themselves, which cause damage to their body.

So, I encourage you. Be open enough to see the patches of clovers lying right in front of you, day in, day out. Do what is takes to learn that the four leaf clovers exist. That take the time and courage necessary to find them.