October 30, 2010
“Let today be a day to spend time alone in nature, if possible. Take a walk as far from the hustle and bustle as you can. Take off your shoes and walk barefoot in the grass to reconnect with nature.”
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October 29, 2010
Did you ever add up the time you spend browsing the net, going on Facebook, Youtube and Linkedin?
According to recent surveys, more than 500 million people spend 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. 700 billion minutes…
The Internet can save us a lot of time when we search for something useful for our job or for school. We can also pay our bills, do our banking online and do a lot of other useful tasks. There are lots of benefits of using the web but we must discipline ourselves to use our time wisely. It is tempting to go on the Internet and spend an hour to look at random stuff. We must check our habits and set boundaries to avoid wasting precious time.
We all have 168 hours every week. How many of these hours do you invest or waste on the Web?
October 28, 2010
Donna Karan had planned to be a stay-at-home mom, but when her boss and mentor, Anne Klein, passed away, Donna stepped up and created a line just days after her daughter was born. And guess what? It has been a huge success…
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“You’ve gotta to live in the moment, be prepared for anything at any time in your life”
Founder DKNY
October 27, 2010
Life is similar to lying in bed; it’s easier to hit snooze and delay what you must do.
Whenever you get that hit-the-snooze feeling, try do go against your natural response, try to get out of your comfort zone. Sometimes it is as hard to do what we must do as it is to get out of bed in the morning.
No more delay. No more hesitation. Stand up and start your life.
Are you ready?
October 26, 2010
“Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, … you’re wasting your life.”
Jackie Robinson
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Do you prefer to watch “So You Think You Can Dance” or take dancing lessons with your partner?
Do you prefer to watch ” Property Virgins” or to invest your time taking care of your own property?
Do you prefer to watch a “NHL game” or to go play hockey with your friends?
Do you prefer to live your life or watch other people live their own?
Personally I prefer the acting part…because life is in the living.
What do you prefer?
October 25, 2010
“To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.”
Theodore H. White
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This is risky business! But when we are convinced that our ideas are the right ones, we must fight for them. Just think of Galileo, Martin Luther, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King…
October 24, 2010
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Mother Teresa
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When we jugde people, we waste our time and we hurt other people’s feelings. I have never seen any good coming out of it when I found myself guilty of judging others. I have never seen any good when I witness others judging others.
So my question to you is; why do we keep falling in this trap?
October 22, 2010
The first is that it doesn’t work. You can whine about the government or your friends or your job or your family, but nothing will happen except that you’ll waste time.
Worse… far worse… is that whining is a reverse placebo. When you get good at whining, you start noticing evidence that makes your whining more true. So you amplify that and immerse yourself in it, thus creating more evidence, more stuff worth complaining about.
If you spent the same time prattling on about how optimistic you are, you’d have to work hard to make that true…
October 21, 2010
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
Anais
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It’s always very challenging to get out of our comfort zone, to take a risk, a risk of failing, a risk of other people making fun of us. But it is the only way that I know to keep growing, to keep learning and to keep young in spirit.
To be young in spirit is to be alive, fully alive and more aware of everything that surrounds us. When we experience this state of mind, it seems that we have more energy, not only for our daily tasks, but for our leisure time as well.
I was listening to a show on newborn babies recently. They were saying that around 2 years of age, young kids are learning about 10 new words everyday. If this is true, that means that they are learning approximately 3650 words between ages 2 and 3. Wow!
We are constantly changing. We are either moving up or moving down; progressing or regressing.
How many new words or new things did you learn in the past year?
October 20, 2010
“To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.”
Kofi Annan
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It’s not always easy to choose because we must take responsibility for our choices. In my opinion, when we choose for ourselves, we increase our own personal freedom and we cannot blame others for what happens or what doesn’t happen to us.
Another difficulty with choosing is that when we say YES to one thing, we are saying NO to another thing because our time and space are limited.
October 19, 2010
“Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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This is exactly the way I always felt…but didn’t find a way to express it…in a polite way.
Well said Oliver!
October 18, 2010
“My Mama always said you’ve got to put the past behind you before you can move on.”
From the movie Forrest Gump
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October 16, 2010
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of the dream”
Eleanor Roosevelt
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The beauty of the dream is what keeps us going when the going gets tough. In the face of many obstacles, it is what gives us the strength and what tests our resolution to persevere all the way until the end.
October 15, 2010
“Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”
Lao Tzu
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It is often difficult for us to count our blessings, it is much easier to complain and focus on what we lack and what we need.
However, true happiness will be experienced when we are grateful with what we have and what happens to us.
Here is an inspiring life story that represents a real life experience in spite of …
October 14, 2010
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Confucius
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We are so good at making life complicated. Don’t you find it amazing that we can send people on the moon and bring them back and yet, so many of us have a hard dealing with their day to day lives?
October 13, 2010
The more we practice being thankful, the more we experience the feeling of gratitude and thankfulness.
The action precedes the feeling.
Stephen Lafond
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October 12, 2010
“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”
Helen Keller
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Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was 19 months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as “an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain”, which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind.
For the rest of her life, she has learned many lessons even with what most of us would consider severe handicaps.
October 9, 2010
“Nothing purchased can come close to the renewed sense of gratitude for having family and friends”
Courtland Milloy
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October 8, 2010
Talk is cheap!
It’s not that we want to yap all the time, it’s just that it’s so much easier to yap than to work.
When I find myself yapping and not doing, I try to remember that with just a little more focus and concentration, I can move forward instead of thinkin’ about progress or talkin’ about why others are not moving forward.
Yes the choice is to do or talk about doing. Create or critique.
Recently , the movie The Social Network (apparently this movie is more a fiction than reality) shows an example of some people yapping and other people doing.
Let me give you an example…
Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss , identical twins and members of Harvard’s rowing team, and their business partner Divya Narendra have an idea of creating the Harvard Connection, this is the idea, it is not the execution of the idea. This is the thinking and the yapping. Mark Zuckerberg is definitely the doer in this project and while his best friend, Eduardo Saverin takes the risk of lending some money for the Facebook project, Mark is the one doing the coding and strategic planning side of the business. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are yapping and becoming very frustrated, but since they cannot execute themselves, and even if they had the good idea, they have no legitimate right on the new venture, note that I didn’t say legal right; I said legitimate right.
Sean Parker eventually becomes involved in the project and he acts as a doer as long as he bring some value, in his case, it is to get the venture capitalists to invest their cash in the dream. As long as he does that, he is “in the doing” because he brings a value that nobody else in the team can supply. But when he over-indulges in partying, drugs and sex scandals, he doesn’t bring value to the team project anymore.
The only one who keeps bringing value is Mark; the reason is not because he’s doing most of the coding, it’s because his heart and soul are linked to the dream.
So Mark is doing while the others are yapping…and guess who is getting the biggest reward?
October 7, 2010
October 6, 2010
“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”
Jean Paul.
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October 6, 2010
According to internet guru Clay Shirky, Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours (200 000 000 000) of TV every year. That represents about 2000 Wikipedias’ projects worth of free time annually assuming that it took one hundred million hours (100 000 000) of human thought to build it.
( Source, Cognitive Surplus, by Clay Shirky, 2010, The Penguin Press).
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If we could recuperate only half of these hours doing something more useful for our society, we would recuperate 28,6 billion days.
What do you think?
October 6, 2010
The problem with waiting until tomorrow is that when it finally arrives, it is called today. Today is yesterday’s tomorrow. The question is what did we do with its opportunity? All too often we will waste tomorrow as we wasted yesterday, and as we are wasting today. All that could have been accomplished can easily elude us, despite our intentions, until we inevitably discover that the things that might have been have slipped from our embrace a single, unused day at a time.
Each of us must pause frequently to remind ourselves that the clock is ticking. The same clock that began to tick from the moment we drew our first breath will also someday cease.
Time is the great equalizer of all mankind. It has taken away the best and the worst of us without regard for either. Time offers opportunity but demands a sense of urgency.
When the game of life is finally over, there is no second chance to correct our errors. The clock that is ticking away the moments of our lives does not care about winners and losers. It does not care about who succeeds or who fails. It does not care about excuses, fairness or equality. The only essential issue is how we played the game.
Regardless of a person’s current age, there is a sense of urgency that should drive them into action now—this very moment. We should be constantly aware of the value of each and every moment of our lives—moments that seem so insignificant that their loss often goes unnoticed.
We still have all the time we need. We still have lots of chances, lots of opportunities, lots of years to show what we can do. For most of us, there will be a tomorrow, a next week, a next month, and a next year. But unless we develop a sense of urgency, those brief windows of time will be sadly wasted, as were the weeks and months and years before them. There isn’t an endless supply!
So, as you think of your dreams and goals of your future tomorrow, begin today to take those very important first steps to making them all come to life.
Jim Rohn
October 5, 2010
October 5, 2010
“Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.”
Stephen Butler Leacock
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But it’s never too late to wake up.
October 5, 2010
“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”
Elbert Hubbard
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Try to remember that we never made any statue to honor Critics.
October 4, 2010
“Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions.”
John Randolph
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If this is true, why do we still waste so much of it in so many ways?
October 4, 2010
This is a message that I picked up from my Facebook wall recently. An old friend from high school, Daniel Laporte gave me the authorization to post it on my blog. After living many years in Paris and New York city, Daniel is leaving this time to Moscow for another great life adventure. The reason why I post this message is because, Daniel, in my opinion, is a living example of someone who lives each day to the fullest and this is the spirit of the message of my daily posts.
Here is Daniel’s message that was on Facebook this morning;
“As I’m waiting for my plane to bring me to a new life… I feel very excited and at the same time scared from the unknown that lies ahead! This is a state I am truly grateful to be in… Getting out of your comfort zone is an amazing way to discover yourself… Love to all!”
Daniel Laporte , Architect
Thank you Daniel for being who you are.
Good luck to my old friend and his wonderful spirit of adventure.
October 4, 2010
“ All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone. “
Blaise Pascal
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While others are filling their time with entertainment and escapism, people who are aware of the value of their time are studying and improving their craft. Having more knowledge, data, background and intelligence will always give you the upper hand in any situation.
October 4, 2010
“When you find yourself stressed out, ask yourself this question: Will this matter five years from now?
If yes, then do something about the situation. If no, then let it go.”
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