Either you run the day or the day runs you.
Jim Rohn
/phil
It’s up to you
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Tag Archives: attitude
Different positions
The optimist already sees the scar over the wound; the pessimist still sees the wound under the scar.
Ernst Schroder
/phil
A tall stand
Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.
William Safire
/phil
Well groomed
You are never fully dressed until you wear a smile.
/phil
A fresh start
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
Ivy Baker Priest
/phil
What’s with that attitude?
As many of you know, I think of attitude as one of the most important factors in improvement. Here are some pretty well spoken words from Charles Swindoll concerning attitude:
The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.
Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day.
We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way.
We cannot change the inevitable.
The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our attitudes.”
Charles R. Swindoll
/phil
It’s a question of naming things
Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
/phil
It’s all about judgement
Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.
Charles Addams
Right, wrong, normal, strange, those concepts are not percieved universally. They are subjective and it is important to keep that in mind!
/phil
Bruce Lee Week #2: Simplify, focus on the important things in life!
It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away the unessential.
Bruce Lee
Our society has taught us that more equals better. More money, more material goods, more of basically anything will increase your happiness.
That may work on a superficial level, but it won’t fulfil you, it won’t make you genuinely happy. Collecting material goods or money may occupy your mind and give you a sense of accomplishment, but it has two flaws. It will make you depend on those goods and it will always have you craving for more.
Satisfaction and happiness are mental states that have no requirements. By nature you can be happy and satisfied at any given moment. The assumption that more stuff or money will make you happy eventually will make you run a race you can not win.
It will make you chase the carrot on a stick and before you know it, you are exhausted and still as far away from your carrot than you were at the beginning.
Lee was also talking about martial arts when he talked about hacking away the unessential, but it can definitely be used as a metaphor for your life. Like Fight Club taught us: The things you own end up owning you.
Happiness comes from the inside, not from the outside. It is not dependant on circumstances, it acknowledges them. It forms them, creating chances and possibilities.
Use your time for the essentials. You have one life and a limited amount of given time. Make good use of it. And by good use I do not mean accumulate as much money or collect as many houses/cars, whatever. You can do that. Just don’t do it as a pathway to happiness, because you will find out that it is a dead end.
/phil
Bruce Lee Week #1: Get your thoughts straight!
All right, this week will feature Bruce Lee quotes only and focus on some of his views on life. Why? Because he is awesome and one of my greatest inspirations.
Hopefully you will find him as inspirational as I do, enjoy.
As you think, so shall you become.
Bruce Lee
As I wrote some time ago in the article You decide who you are, your mind is extremely powerful. It can build you up and it can break you down. In any case: Your mind leads you.
What you think of yourself and of your life determines the direction in which you are headed. Wether you think of yourself as a person with low worth and no impulse to improvement or wether you think of yourself as a rising star amongst all humans, as a motivated and high-spirited person, it will eventually become true.
The fact about self-fulfilling prophecies is that you don’t want to believe in them when it comes to negative prophecies. But it works in both ways. As long as you tell yourself that you are a weak person, you will never grow strong.
Bruce Lee is a perfect person to make this quote, although it would fit many more, of course. He had the strong belief that he was able to break records, that he was able to do better than anyone ever had done before. It was like hard-wired in his mind that he was able to reach unbelievable heights and that his potential was insane. In all his texts, speeches and even in his movies it becomes obvious:
Lee was a person that did not doubt himself in an universal way. Why he may have doubted certain ways of training or diets, he never questioned his potential and his destiny to become the greatest man in his particular branch. He knew that people could do so much more to improve themselves than they normaly did, and that was probably one of the reasons that gave him the strength not to copy that mistake.
This is especially interesting as Bruce Lee did not limit himself to movies and acting. He was a very philosophical person and his way to approach physical training was way more than just a sports thing. For Lee, training was his life. He spent countless of hours of his short life to find out the best ways of training, the best ways of fighting, the best possible ways of living in a healthy body.
All of his work would have been impossible if it were not for his urgent desire to suceed and to achieve his great goals. He may not have reached all of them, but he sure succeeded in being an incredible person in many ways.
You have to believe in yourself and you have to know what you want out of yourself. Do not think too low of yourself. After all, if you don’t respect yourself, how do you expect others to do so?
Stay positive,
/phil
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