Always Think Positively

Positive thinking is the key!

* "Face the fear and do it anyway." - Anon

* "If you can dream it, you can do it." - Walt Disney

* "You become what you think about." - Earl Nightingale

* "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but the seeds you sew." - Robert Louis Stevenson

* "Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning." - Winston Churchill

* "If you have the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed." - David Viscott

* "It doesn't matter if you're a slow walker, so long as you don't walk backwards." Abraham Lincoln

* "Experience is not what happens to a man,  but what a man does with what happens to him." - Aldous Huxley

* "Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." - Martin Luther King Jr.

* "Sometimes we stare so long at the door that is closing, that we see too late the one that is open." - Alexander Graham Bell

* "Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them." - John Updike

* "Visualize this thing you want. See it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint and begin." - Robert Collier

* "If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door." - Milton Berle

* "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve." - Napoleon Hill

* "Success is a consequence and must not be a goal." - Gustave Flaubert

* "The first step to becoming is to will it." - Mother Teresa

* "Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do." - John Wooden

* "Arrows are shot by dragging the bow back, similarly, if life is dragging you back with problems, be patient. It's getting ready to shoot you to new heights." - Anon

* "Cherish yesterday, dream about tomorrow, live for today." - Anon

* "Think about what you are going to achieve, not what you haven't achieved yet." - Anon

* "Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to face fear and win." - Anon

* "When you walk to the edge of all the light that you have, you must believe that one of two things will happen.That there will be floor to walk on, or you will be taught how to fly." - Patrick Overton

So what have you done today to make you feel proud?

A younger Steve Jobs on Life

In this never before seen interview, a younger Steve Jobs gave a rare glimpse of his vision of the world...

Steve Jobs:
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money...

That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader. Once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you called life was made up by people who were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use...

Once you learnt that, you'll never be the same again.

Jonathan Rosenberg On Rules To Foster Innovation

Jonathan Rosenberg was Google Inc. Senior Vice President. Prior to joining Google in 2002, he was a founding member of @Home's product group and served as Senior Vice President after the merger of @Home and Excite. Prior to that, he managed the eWorld product line for Apple Computer. And prior to that, he was the director of product marketing for Knight Ridder Information Services.

Jonathan Rosenberg:

Fostering innovation, 5 rules. So how do we foster this innovation? Most companies manage creativity in order to manage risk, that just doesn't work. Do we have an artist here today? Go do your art from 10 to 12 and be very creative, 12 to 4 is the management meeting. It doesn't work. Innovation comes from creativity, creativity cannot be managed, it can be allocated, it can be budgeted, it can be measured, it can be tracked and encouraged, but it can't be dictated.

Innovation rule 2. Create a culture of yes based on optimism and big thinking. Organizations developed anti-bodies to change, that's why big companies stop innovating. If you're the innovator you're like the virus, the anti-bodies wanna kill you. Many people think it's their function to do nothing but say "thou shalt not". Leaders protect people from anti-bodies, your focus should be thou shalt. Create a spirit of optimism, pessimist don't change the world.

Innovation rule 3. Never stop someone from moving forward with their good idea because you have a better one. There's a bull market for innovation, and a Darwinian process for reading out the bad ideas. You will do best by simply encouraging all of them. The best will win and the others will fail. Thomas Edison said: " Have a great idea, have a lot of them."

Innovation rule 4. A leader's job is not to prevent risks but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. There is no such thing as a good failure and a bad failure. Or there is such a thing as a good failure and a bad failure. A good one happens quickly, and it provides plenty lessons. Sometimes you have to look at these lessons in the data. A bad failure takes a long time and you don't learn anything. Leaders don't prevent failures, they prevent bad failures.

Innovation rule 5. A good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Whenever the public endorse a crisis, ordinary citizens start to wonder how and whether our institutions really work. We no longer take things for granted. It is only then change becomes possible. Many management challenges are in fact teaching moments. The crisis is the built-in narrative, so use it.

Richard Branson talks about Learning from Failure

 

Seth Godin:

I've been struggling with this business for two years, the economy seems to be falling apart, I'm ready to give up. What does Richard Branson tell me to do?

Richard Branson:

Do everything you can to survive and not to give up. As long as you tried everything you can, then if you fail, you'll sleep okay and you'll pick yourself up and when things are better you'll start again. If on the other hand, you give up too readily you will forever kick yourself. I wish you all the best in your quest, because I'm afraid there's a lot of people who will fail.

And I think the other important thing is not to take failure too seriously. It's something that happens to... something like 80% of all small business people fail. They either go into chapter 11 or actually go bankrupt and that's a lot of people and some people take that really badly and they should realize that the important thing is just to learn from it and come back and start again.

An awful lot of really big multimillionaires and billionaires who have been through 2 or 3 bankrupt companies in their lives have learnt from them and have come back stronger. It is what limited companies were designed for by governments. It was to say to people... try things, and if you fail, it shouldn't affect you personally, people know the risks in dealing with you.

Don't be embarrassed about your failures as long as you tried everything you can to avoid it, don't take it too personally.