Every Friday I plan to post a new “Famous Quotivation”. A “quotivation” is the word I invented to describe how a good “quote” motivates and inspires action or further investigative thought for the core idea behind the quote. These are quotes you can live by.
Please leave me your own quotes in the comment area below and, if they’re a good fit, I might include them in a future post.
Thanks
Click on the quotes to read the entire post.
“Failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success” – Napoleon Hill
I found this quote in an email I got last week. It’s a quote from one of my most favorite authors of the success/failure dynamic – Napoleon Hill. I like him a lot. Not because he wrote one of the best selling motivational self-development books of all time but because he himself – like a ton of modern-day self-helper/coaches after him – failed to deliver the raw goods and instead skillfully side-stepped the most important “how to” information everyone was needing but no one was aware of yet.
Of course that’s one of the reasons he got away with it. The other is the fact that his was still an age of innocence. He became a masterful user of the language of his time and that was enough to placate his hungry audience. Enough that they bought his stuff in droves.
Unfortunately, Hill was a great salesman so no one ever noticed that he never got around to actually explaining the mechanics of persistence and determination that lay at the root of what he was trying to say in his books.
Is it because the English language had not evolved enough by his time so that he could use it to explain this mystery cogently? That might be part of it. We do have a better understanding of how human immune systems work these days than we had back then. But, of course, he would have had to have realized the esoteric connection as to what role mindset immunity plays in success attainment.
No one that I’ve ever come across has ever done it yet. A quick search in Google for “mindset immunity” just brings up results tied to this blog right here.
So, what exactly is the “seed of an equivalent success”?
I can sum that up in this one little three-word statement of fact: Failure causes immunity.
More power to you.
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
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“When the world says, Give up, Hope whispers, Try it one more time.” – Unknown
You know the drill.
A thing gets tougher and tougher till you begin to believe that the only option open to you is to quit and give up.
But if you’re lucky enough, and lots aren’t, you get this little niggley feeling from deep down inside of you that says “Try it one more time”.
It looks like a useless idea because it’s damn hard work to follow a suggestion like that. You already have the facts. You have the evidence stacked up from previous failures that work to convince you that what you’re trying to do is impossible to accomplish… at least by you.
There’s just one thing that you have left. Hope. As faint as it looks it can spur you on to try again. It’s a lot more than just another four letter word if you look at it closely.
For me HOPE is an acronym for “History Opens Perception Expands”. It’s part and parcel of how I explain mindset immunity.
Your past (H) history has within it the entire record that is your success footprint. It’s complete and quite detailed. It includes within it every feeling you’ve ever had for those times when you’ve gained even the slightest victory. If you can get it to (O) open it will reveal a trove of all those great very positive memories of the times, thought by you to be rare, when you did win. It is very empowering.
Imagine what it would be like if every moment of space and time where you won out over adversity could be piled one atop the other, like so many slices of bread, and visit with you in your current space and time.
I’ve been quietly doing just that for clients in seminars for over 25 years now and I can tell you it’s over-the-top powerful.
Why?
When this is done your (P) perception of the base energy behind the accomplishment (E) expands to become your now reality. You will feel it in your gut brain. It will present itself as real, solid, and irrefutable hard evidence that you can build an enduring self-belief on. A vital component of success attainment.
Ask anyone who’s seen to be accomplished.
With HOPE working for you you’ll come to the conclusion that you’ve done it before and, dogonit, you can do it again.
So why give up now? You still have hope don’t you?
More power to you my friends.
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
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“When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.” -Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Today’s quotivation is from Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945 also known by his initials, FDR) was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war
His message re-iterates the long standing dictum that all motivators promote: Don’t you quit!
The one thing that get’s people to a place where they make the decision to give up is, not really so much about how tough it is, but the length of time that must be endured between the starting point and the successful finish point.
The sad truth is none of us like unending pain. We’ll do anything to avoid it. In fact, one thing that researchers know about humans is that we are not all that rational
Of course the entire personal development industry is dedicated to correcting this problem. But they are just about out of rope themselves. That’s because over the last 100 years the message “don’t you give up” has been so over-repeated that it’s lost most of its ardor.
As usual the old 80/20 rule applies. Only 20 percent can ever get to the point where they overcome enough to actually call it a real success the other 80 percent are left hanging.
But I like working with the end-of-the-ropers. For one thing they have usually come to the point where they have rejected a lot of the extraneous BS that is so common in the personal development industry.
All I have to do then is deliver real truth for a change. Not some wordy truth but a gut-based strength type truth that they can both feel and see as well. A truth that’s tied firmly to the one single enduring attribute that guarantees that we finish what we start every time: PERSISTENCE.
So… if you’re nearing the end of your rope here’s how you can tie a big knot in it and find the key to surviving over time.
More power to you my friend.
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
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“The times they are a’changing”-Bob Dylan
Today a tattered and worn old piece of paper was sold at Sotheby’s auction house in New York. The buyer was a wealthy hedge fund manager who ponied up $422,500 for the artifact.
In this series I usually quote famous leaders who had written great unforgettable one-liners. But this time I came across something different. That old piece of paper that changed hands today was the original hand-written draft of Bob Dylan’s protest anthem “The Times They Are A-changing”. It rattled in my brain all day.
I was just beginning high school back in October 1963 when Dylan picked up a pencil and scratched out this song on a three-hole punched piece of paper. He couldn’t have known of course the changes that were afoot just a short time later when President John F. Kennedy was shot dead by an assassin’s bullet during a motorcade through Dallas. Many things changed that day.
Here’s the quote:
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
For Dylan this was a song to protest the war in Vietnam and the issue of civil rights. But for me now, some 47 years later, I see it as a reflection of the perils of not being adaptable to change.
Adaptability is an important human attribute and is a big part of what I cover in my discussion about my work and research as I continue to develop my theory of mindset immunity. Change is something that’s all around us and we’d better be good at handling it because one thing we can rely on is more of it in the future. Whether we’re ready or not.
Many are not.
That’s why I developed this.
Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, for your enjoyment, here’s my favourite cover of that great Bob Dylan song performed by the iconic trio of the 1960’s era Peter, Paul, & Mary.
http://youtu.be/1oU7M4OeSRM
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
More Power to you
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“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily”-Zig Ziglar
Welcome to this edition of “Quotivations” for December 17, 2010.
Usually every Friday I choose quotes that I think are motivating or inspiring. But today I’m doing something a little different.
Rather than being motivating I found this quote, from one of the original key figures of modern day Self-help, to be a less then a subtle complaint about one of the biggest faults of his positive motivational product.
It doesn’t last.
Never has and never will.
Poor old Zig. He’s been at this self-help game since before the earth was done cooling. A defensive quote like this one appears to bring out the curmudgeon in him.
It’s total spin though.
But there is something I’ve got to give him credit for. He’s always been good at adding a touch of poetry to make his message more memorable. Remember the famous line “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude”? Clever stuff like that sells well and it sure did for multi-millionaire Zig Ziglar.
But I still don’t buy it.
Want poetry? How about this: “Disable the fable about motivational spinners making you able”.
Ok, maybe it’s not as good as Zig can do it but, hey, I’m still working on it.
I believe that the real reason why motivation appears not to last very long is because of the type of motivation that’s being delivered.
What doesn’t last is the typical self-motivation aimed toward your head-brain by clever artful dodgers like Zig.
Now, don’t get me wrong here, anyone who’s been at it for over forty years, like Zig has, deserves some respect. I’m sure he’s helped some people along the path.
But we need some hard truth here.
The problem is that Zig, like all of his compadres today, did not and has not been able to recognize that there is another overriding motivational force that comes from the gut and powers through all the head-brain muddle causing a desired goal to be achieved despite all the great motivational sayings.
That energy, we refer to it sometimes as persistence and determination, cannot and does not originate in the head brain. It’s strictly a property of the gut brain (scientifically known as the enteric nervous system).
The problem with trying to change thoughts from negative to positive is that as humans we have a slight negativity bias to start with and the head-brain, which is always open to messages from the eyes and ears, can’t avoid reverting to and taking on the polarity of whatever has the greater amount.
In other words, there is a lot of negatively charged media fighting for attention with the positive stuff (poetry notwithstanding). It usually swings back to the negative side because that is often the default setting. Negative is also the polarity a lot of our perceptions happen to have about how our existence is treating us.
For example, you could be studying one of Zig’s great books and feeling very positive about your day. That’s until some jerk cuts you off in traffic or you get a flat tire on your way to work and suddenly bamm! just like that you’re back to where you started. You need to bathe your brain again in more positive juice.
The fundamental Problem…
It’s taken me a lot of years but I can now describe the fundamental problem with just three words: lack of immunity.
See the mindset is constantly under attack by our negative perceptions of our situation. But the body’s physical immune system is primarily a buffer against the attacks of pathogens and most of the time it works quite well.
But mindset immunity is another animal all together. It’s not physical it’s ethereal because thoughts are ethereal. The problem with it is that it’s too weak and too slow acting in most people to act like much of a buffer. But, here’s the good news:
I’ve found a way to fix that with this.
Not one of the best head-based motivators working today has ever thought of this approach before. If they did they’d have to change their whole business model to include one where they only deliver the result just once and it sticks.
Like I do.
They wouldn’t want to ever do that though. If they did their business could end up taking a bath… daily.
That’s it for today, consider yourself “quotivated”.
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
More power to you.
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“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”-Albert Einstein
I recently found this quote on Leo’s blog .
I thought it, and the blog post that accompanied it, to be so in line with the way I feel about the subject of success attainment that I couldn’t resist making it the focus of today’s quotivation.
Leo claims that he was a success even from the day he started his blog. He says he had no readers then but he was happy because he loved doing what he was doing.
Too bad not more of us think like that.
The reason we don’t I believe is because there is a problem with the term “success”. We can’t seem to agree on how to define it. That’s because it means different things to different people and personal opinions can be touchy things when it comes to defining our station in life.
In my work, which I’m very passionate about, I’m often trying to move out value to my clients. It’s sometimes a struggle. Because what I’m offering is an intrinsic experience and it’s tough to make clear what it’s like before they actually get into the actual experience.
I’m attempting to find a way to explain that I’m out to bring them a state of mindset maintenance that is not too up and not too down but in the middle. Like a teeter-totter that stays level. It acts sort of like an immune system. It mirrors the body’s immune system except it looks after the thinking flesh rather than the physical flesh.
That’s my value.
In thinking about success the common thing most people do is to look at the bright shinny objects (hype) that successful people often possess. But there is a reason why they call them “trappings” (stress).
In the early part of this century, when the super-rich John D. Rockefeller was passing on the family mantle to his only son, the treasure trove was referred to as a “heavy burden” and indeed it was to the young John Jr. He grew up terrified of making a mistake.
Value, on the other hand, is about giving something to others. The magic of giving intrinsic value is that it’s bottomless. It never runs out because the more you give the more you’ve got. Giving intrinsic value is the road to happiness because it changes lives with invisible enrichment.
Am I against making money?
Of course not. But let me ask you: Where does monetary success end? As Leo points out, for the wealthy it doesn’t ever seem to. The feeling of needing to make more is never sated.
Personally, I’d rather stay on the side of more happiness.
Like Leo the simple joy that I get from every experience I witness is greater a value than the money people might pay me for any service that I might offer them. That’s just gravy.
I firmly believe that we need not join in the chase for success but become so resilient to our own failures that a special immunity kicks in and happiness remains intact.
Something that I think, given the season, might be an importantly relevant observation for a lot of us as we ponder our future prospects going into 2011.
More power to you and yours during this season.
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
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“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely”-Henry Ford
Well well… here we are the last day of 2010.
The quote above from Henry Ford speaks about renewal. That’s why I choose it for today.
The failure quotient this year for me was high and that’s a good sign.
That simply means that in 2011 I will be that much closer to being worthy to drink from the golden cup of success.
I have endured therefore I am.
The evil of the enduring and continual learning curve has not claimed this here guy.
Won’t either.
I must keep going towards my goal of creating the best way of telling the story of how anyone can become “immune to failure” and beat the odds of becoming a worthless statistic on the road to success. I predict that I will do it in 2011. (Watch for my new DVD: Immune To Failure Essentials in the new year.) In fact just yesterday I made this point clear to copywriter and fellow blogger John Breese.
Is your time-line too long?
In reality it isn’t the curve of learning that does us in. The death of our ambitions is dashed on the rocky shoals of time. I’m not trying to be poetic here so let me explain a bit more.
We are all a bit impatient these days. This, after all, is the age of the microwaved five minute dinner, instant-on TV sets, video games that so easily let us start again even though we’ve been fatally cut down in a hail of laser bullets, and communications that…oh, don’t get me started.
Because of that need to feel impatient we are not at all accustomed to waiting it out by working it through. As a result we fail to see the vision of the future already completed as we would have it completed in our dreams. [I have always maintained that there is a difference between a dream and a vision but that is another issue.]
In other words… time itself will finish a lot of us off long before we are eligible to find ourselves waking up on the wrong side of the grass. Ambitions die with a silent whimper. After that we just go out and get our old job back (yuk!).
Not me though. Not now and not ever. Once this project is done I have a few others in my bucket to complete before the sky is darkened.
For now though I’ll continue on. Tomorrow is New Years day. You’ll find me here – same place same station – pounding this damn keyboard just as I have on any other day during the last 30-odd months straight.
Like Henry I want to start over tomorrow more intelligently than I did the day before when my head hit the pillow. I can only do that by going through a certain set of failures.
So tonight I will raise my glass and bless all the mistakes that have gone by the boards. Tomorrow is a new year and another day to start again.
I hope all of you who have ambitions will join me in turning them into a profitable future starting tomorrow.
Much success to you and to yours in the coming year.
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
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“If your head tells you one thing, and your heart tells you another, before you do anything, you should first decide whether you have a better head or a better heart”-Marilyn vos Savant
For over two thousand years it has been observed that there is a serious division that exists in humans.
It’s the issue of duality.
Underscored in this duality is the fact that each one of us consists of two realities, our physical and our ethereal natures.
Now I don’t want to geek anyone out here but in the big picture we see a reflection of this dual nature in all matter found in the universe. It appears to either have the behavior of a wave or as a particle.
Personally I have a lot of respect for this duality. I support it in my work everyday where we help people acquire the perspective to deal with the dilemma described in today’s quote.
We do this by providing a way for anyone to observe a part of their ethereal nature by using a part of their physical nature.
Like all of us you may have been faced with indecision. Which way to turn? Left or right?
Your head is a talker and not always a very soft quiet one either. It’s boisterous and likes to loudly promote it’s own agenda. The heart on the other hand is often soft spoken and subtle. It just quietly suggests a course of action that you might like to take.
If the head holds sway you might be seen as selfish. If the heart get’s its way you might look like a pushover.
But as adults, when the day is done, all we’re left with is the realization that we must muster the courage to live with whatever choices we make be it head or heart.
Personally, I try to choose to go with the heart most of the time. It’s more considerate of others and eventually it comes back in spades.
Until next time … consider your self quotivated.
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
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“I couldn’t wait for success so I went ahead without it”-Jonathan Winters
Know what I’ve noticed over the years?
A lot of us have wait problems.
No, I’m not talking about the heavy kind of weight. To be sure, obesity is certainly reaching critical mass here in Canada and in the US, but what I’m talking about is a problem that has gripped almost all of us no matter what the size label says.
The wait problem I’m talking about is metered by the pendulum not the tape measure and it’s probably more virulent than you would think. In fact the number one reason for highway deaths each year is speeding in an attempt to beat the clock.
So, why are we going so fast? We can’t wait to get to where we’re going.
See the wait problem?
We can’t stand to wait for anything so we surround ourselves with things that deliver quickly. Microwave ovens, email, rapid transit, TV and internet with high-speed cable, and, of course, pizza.
Clearly, we hate waiting. We want stuff and we want it now.
Instant gratification has become the new normal. Too bad our immune system, the one that looks after our thinking not the one that takes care of our body, hasn’t kept up to this speed increase. It’s been a mindset immunity massacre.
As a result all the old methods of personal development, the ones that were authored way back in the 30’s and 40’s, don’t work near as well as they once did.
One of the most devastating effects of this bias for all things instant is when it comes to success. When a new entrepreneur doesn’t see their dream unfolding quick enough it tends to kill their motivation to carry on. They loose the ability to muster enough passion and persistence to keep running the business efficiently and learn from their mistakes over the long haul.
Studies show that, on average, fifty percent of all start-ups fail during the all-important first five years of being in business. Same for relationships (What’s that? You refuse to make me happy every single day? I’m outta here!)
Sure, you shouldn’t wait for success to happen but don’t quit trying new things to make it happen. Consistently working every day toward the end goal is key to getting through the dreaded timeline of the learning curve.
It could well be that success in anything is always going to be further than you think. But what if the reward of knowing that you could do it on your own is worth the wait?
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
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“When this energy is at an optimum all our organs function better, we ‘feel good’, wounds heal faster, we are more resistant to disease, we recover from any sort of stress faster, we feel and act ‘younger’, and in fact biologically we are younger.” -Maxwell Maltz
Today’s quotivation is from Dr. Maxwell Maltz MD, the author of Psycho-cybernetics one of the most popular books in self-improvement ever written.
It is true that energy plays a huge part in the lives of humans. It is also true that the duality principal applies here also.
Dr. Maltz was an astute observer and recognized that there was not one but two types of energies at play within us. He made references to one that he termed “caloric”, that is, it comes from the food we eat. As a medical doctor he knew that one well since it was a “produced” energy, but the other was a much more an elusive and immeasurable one.
This energy was much more mysterious yet he was a great believer that it alone held the most promise for the overall wellness of us all. You can almost sense his effusiveness about it in this quote.
I don’t know if he knew it or not but this energy, the existence of which he could not actually prove but could only speculate on, was very different. It’s not a produced energy – it’s a naturally occurring “emitted” energy. Sort of like how an atomic reaction emits energy.
Now, please don’t be weirded out here, but this one unseen energy interacts with us humans every day. Let me explain:
When you look out at that world something happens to what you see, it becomes a memory. To accomplish this the information must go through a type of transformation. The information about that physical experience must be converted to an ethereal state so it can be available as a memory to the mind which is itself in an ethereal energy-based state.
This is what happened to that newspaper article you read this morning, that music you heard on the radio in your car on the way to work, and it’s why you remember where you were when you first heard that Barack Obama had won the election as US president. But here’s where things start to get strange.
Let’s suppose that you had a flat tire when you came out to your car this morning. You realize that you have to now change that tire or you’re not going anywhere. So you haul out the spare and then struggle to jack up the car.
Now, with much huffing and puffing you get the tire on only to find that your headlights were on all that time and now your battery is drained. You go to get the jumper cables that are “supposed” to be hanging up in your garage but are not and … well, you get the picture.
You are just about at your wit’s end about ready to quit right there and give up but, for some reason, you don’t. Instead you decide to power through. You walk over to your neighbor’s house to ask for his assistance and if he would help you with a boost. He agrees and soon, after a quick clean up, you’re again on your way.
A story like this may not be all that unusual but when you recall it, like you would do inside a H.E.R.O. eMachine session, you would realize that it was your persistence that kicked in and caused you to get the job done despite all the difficulty. After all you could have chosen to quit. The energy that is persistence is mysterious. It’s sometimes referred to as a “gut drive” that powers accomplishment. But no one has ever detailed how it works.
Not until now that is. Here’s what I think is going on.
That hidden drive that Dr. Maltz was so fascinated with is felt in the gut area of the body but do you know why?
It took a cell biologist studying the digestive system to stumble upon what I believe is the definitive answer. Turns out that now the “good old gut feeling” has a sound scientific base to it.
Fantastic as it sounds woven into the sheaths of tissue that line the digestive track from your throat to your colon is another brain! This brain, called the “enteric nervous system” by Dr. Michael Gershon who announced his finding to a New York Times reporter in 1996, is rich in natural ‘feel good’ chemicals and is made up of neurons identical to those found in the head brain.
But here’s the connection to that strange invisible energy I talked about in the beginning.
The next time you have a gut feeling about something remember this: You feel it in the area, just below the rib cage, because your gut-brain is incredibly sensitive. (It’s designed to feel but not to think.) What you are feeling is an energy this actually has enough weight to it that it can brush up against the neurons there and cause that feeling – but, that’s not all. If you’ve had a gut feeling and it’s turned out to be right it’s because this mysterious energy has an intelligence attached to it and, lucky for you, it has your best interests at heart.
So, next time you think it would be a good career move to seek out a mentor and following their advice without question it might be a good idea to do a quick gut check first.
You would make Max proud.
It’s Friday, consider your self “quotivated”.
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
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“It is through science that we prove but through intuition that we discover”-Henre Pointcare
You may have, at one time or another, had a gut feeling about a choice you were about to make.
It this right or is this wrong? The feeling you get in your gut tells you the truth every time. Have you noticed that?
This type of quasi-philosophical experience did not escape the notice of Henre Pointcare, one of the most brilliant minds of mathematical scientific inquiry. To me that seems odd at first. What’s a guy who has been credited with important
Mathematical discoveries like the kind that led to the first description of relativity, to come to terms with something like a gut feeling?
It just goes to show that this quote is truly an interesting and provocative observation that Pointcare, a man who’s whole career was deeply involved in the exacting black and white scientific study of mathematics, simultaneously gave credence to the unknown quantity that lay at the foundation of such things as gut hunches.
After all we’re only talking about feelings.
Guess that means that in some tight confines of the human mind worlds can and do collide in strange and wonderful partnerships.
Pointcare saw his. Are you observing yours?
This is Friday. Consider yourself Quotivated.
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
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“When I was roaming the street with nothing to eat, even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world”-Charlie Chaplin
The most important thing you can have is an unbridled belief in yourself. This one thing will fuel your personal vision of the future like nothing else can. It will be a vision that is so real that it is not a question of weather or not it is going to come to fruition but only when.
But, given this truth, there is one fly in the ointment. Belief, any belief, is established in one of two ways: through argument or through hard evidence. If you go out and attempt to build self-belief by investing in the argument method only it might not be sticky enough to pull you up through life’s steepest inclines.
Better you should seek an authentic burning eternally-fired energy-backed belief based on the hard evidence that you’ve been successful before.The key can be found in your success history.
Locate that and you at least stand a fair chance no matter what the current circumstances look like.
Charlie was a child performer and had lots of ups and downs.
But he must have been keenly aware that those times when he persevered would create memories of real victories that he could draw on later.
Must have worked because he did go on to gain many honors. Playwright George Bernard Shaw called Chaplin “the only genius to come out of the movie industry.”
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
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I’m not a genius. I’m just a tremendous bundle of experience”-R. Buckminster Fuller
There is no doubt that the man who popularized the geodesic dome about the same time as I was being busy being born, had genius pouring out of him every day.
Obviously he wouldn’t agree with this assertion. He just wanted to do all that good stuff so he could make this statement in complete and utter confidence that one day you and I would get this size 12 take away: Experience, both good, bad, and ugly can become something of value.
Our experiences may not directly define us but that’s ok. Their true value is that they provide us the raw material we can then use in the fabricating department we call our life where we forge what becomes our legacy to the greater world.
This is the way experience can work for us and benefit others long after we are here no more.
It sure worked like that for Bucky.
Could it work for you?
Find the original Quotivation on this page.
PS: If you have a question about how you can use your past experience to uncover the workings of the New Immunity that open more creativity and genius in your life then leave me a comment and I’ll answer you back. Cool eh?