Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Archives for March 2020

Inspirational Quotations #831

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There is no help for you outside of yourself; you are the creator of the universe. Like the silkworm you have built a cocoon around yourself… . Burst your own cocoon and come out as the beautiful butterfly, as the free soul. Then alone you will see Truth.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

In studying the way, realizing it is hard; once you have realized it, preserving it is hard. When you can preserve it, putting it into practice is hard.
—Zen Proverb (Japanese School of Mahayana Buddhism)

People are more inclined to be drawn in if their leader has a compelling vision. Great leaders help people get in touch with their own aspirations and then will help them forge those aspirations into a personal vision.
—John Kotter (American Management Consultant)

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war.
—Neville Chamberlain (British Head of State)

The people have a right to the truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
—Epictetus (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (American Psychiatrist)

Don’t be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.
—Lily Tomlin (American Comedy Actress)

Make revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke (British Philosopher, Statesman)

All of us have bad luck and good luck. The man who persists through the bad luck—who keeps right on going—is the man who is there when the good luck comes—and is ready to receive it.
—Robert Collier (American Self-Help Author)

There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.
—Akira Kurosawa (Japanese Film Director)

The war is lost for too much advice.
—Sicilian Proverb

People with honorary awards are looked upon with disfavor. Would you let an honorary mechanic fix your brand-new Mercedes?
—Neil Simon (American Playwright)

Question Success More Than Failure

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Katrina “Kat” Cole, formerly CEO of the American baked goods-chain Cinnabon, in an interview for Adam Bryant’s “Corner Office” column in the New York Times:

I’ve learned to question success a lot more than failure. I’ll ask more questions when sales are up than I do when they’re down. I ask more questions when things seem to be moving smoothly, because I’m thinking: “There’s got to be something I don’t know. There’s always something.” This approach means that people don’t feel beat up for failing, but they should feel very concerned if they don’t understand why they’re successful. I made mistakes over the years that taught me to ask those questions.

People tend to attribute failure to external factors and success to their own abilities and performance (see self-serving bias and Dunning-Kruger effect.) The human brain is indeed riddled with cognitive and memory biases that are conducive to making people feel like they’re good and capable, regardless of reality.

Idea for Impact: Luck is so much more important than we acknowledge. Most successes and failures in life combine both skill and luck. Understanding the relative contributions of skill and luck in failure—and success, as Cole suggests above—can help you judge past and present results and, more significantly, prepare for future results.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Avoid Magical Thinking
  2. Admit When You Don’t Have All the Answers
  3. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect
  4. In Praise of Inner Voices: A Powerful Tool for Smarter Decisions
  5. Gambler’s Fallacy is the Failure to Realize How Randomness Rules Our World

Understand What’s Stressing You Out

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Mindfulness comes from paying attention to what you’re feeling right now and then taking the first steps to let go of your regrets, worries, and fears.

To gain an insight into why you’re feeling stressed out, first get into a relaxed frame of mind. Take a deep breath. Hold it for a moment, and then exhale.

Mentally ask yourself, “Why am I so tense right now?” Then, listen to whatever feelings pop into your mind or notice any images of distress or anxiety that emerge.

If you can’t get an evocative response to your question, imagine that you’re confiding in a best friend or chatting to a counselor.

Your spontaneous reflections can give you valuable insights into your inner feelings and concerns. Become acquainted with your inner experience and embrace what you see with a kind heart.

Try a relaxation technique—play with a pet, soak in a warm bath, listen to soothing music, practice yoga or meditation, do physical activity, write a journal entry (try expressive writing,) or get a massage. When you perform a relaxation technique, you’re stimulating activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, which can offset the effects of your body’s overly activated stress response.

While relaxation techniques may calm you down and relieve the immediate symptoms of stress, they’ll not help alleviate the underlying triggers of stress.

If you resort to relaxation merely to suppress or bury your emotions, the tension will find its way to pop up somewhere else.

For a more in-depth, enduring solution to your stress, you must learn how to unshackle yourself from this source of stress through alternative actions. Ask your inner self, “What do I need to do to stay calm?” Be receptive to what your mind tells you.

Don’t overanalyze the past, get upset, and increase your stress. Stay in the moment.

Look forward. Ask yourself, “What is the first baby step I can take toward mitigating my stress?” Or, “What is a stumbling block that I can overcome now?”

Idea for Impact: By practicing positive modes of reflection and taking small corrective actions now, you can bring balance to your inner life and deny those negative emotional patterns their power to affect your sense of self-control.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Is Your Harried Mind Causing You to Underachieve?
  2. Learn to Cope When You’re Stressed
  3. A Quick Way to De-stress: The “Four Corners Breathing” Exercise
  4. How to Encourage Yourself During Tough Times
  5. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue

Inspirational Quotations #830

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Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you’ll spend your life yearning for a man you can’t have.
—Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Indian-born American Novelist)

To each individual the world will take on a different connotation of meaning-the important lies in the desire to search for an answer.
—T. S. Eliot (American-born British Poet)

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.
—Jean de La Fontaine (French Poet)

My God, give me neither poverty nor riches, but whatsoever it may be thy will to give, give me, with it, a heart that knows humbly to acquiesce in what is thy will.
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (German Writer)

Fortune may find a pot, but your own industry must make it boil.
—John Gay (English Poet, Dramatist)

War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and not–I am not dreaming–it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through.
—H. G. Wells (English Novelist, Historian)

I’m a perfectionist, so I can drive myself mad – and other people, too. At the same time, I think that’s one of the reasons I’m successful. Because I really care about what I do.
—Michelle Pfeiffer (American Film Actress)

The one happiness is to shut one’s door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.
—Eleonora Duse (Italian Actress)

One-half of the people of this nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one.
—Susan B. Anthony (American Civil Rights Leader)

True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
—William Butler Yeats (Irish Poet)

Nonviolence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one’s life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.
—Erich Fromm (German Social Philosopher)