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Popular ArticlesCreators May Fail, But Never Give Up
Do you have fear of failure?
Enough already with all your fears. You’ve got them, I know you do. So did I. I was afraid of failure. I didn’t ever dare start anything because I would most certainly fail at it.
If I never started then I’d never fail was the way my insane brain would think about it. Little did I know that not moving forward was actually making me move in reverse. Instead of getting closer to the things I wanted in my life I was getting further away with each passing minute.
You want to know what helped me to make a change? I thought about all the many successful people, creators, who had succeeded at creating great lives in spite of their failures.
Here’s a list:
- Einstein was 4 years old before he could speak.
- Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school and was considered “unpromising.”
- When Thomas Edison was a youngster, his teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything. He was counseled to go into a field where he might succeed by virtue of his pleasant personality.
- F.W. Woolworth got a job in a dry goods store when he was 21, but his boss would not permit him to wait on customers because he “didn’t have enough sense to close a sale.”
- Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
- Bob Cousy suffered the same fate, but he too is a Hall of Famer.
- A newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because he “lacked imagination and had no original ideas.”
- Winston Churchill failed the 6th grade and had to repeat it because he did not complete the tests that were required for promotion.
- Babe Ruth struck out 1,300 times, a major league record.
A person may make mistakes, but is not a failure until he starts letting his failures define him as a failure. We must believe in ourselves, and never give up.
Somewhere along the road of life we will meet someone who sees greatness in us and lets us know it. But even if we don’t meet that some one till many years later we still cannot afford to let ourselves be afraid of trying.
Don’t give up. Stick in there until you know for sure you are a success. Let your failures make you stronger. Learn from them so that they don’t define you – you define them.
Creators Set Goals
Ever wonder why some people cacn’t even achieve an inch of what they dream of becoming? Blame it on pure dreaming. I know, that’s what I’ve done for the greater part of twenty years. I have had a lack of setting goals; making plans for achieving my dreams.
Setting goals is a very significant part of success and creating creations. It’s deciding before you set out to create exactly what you want to create in the first place.
People who set goals literally create a map of their target achievements in life, marking where they should begin, where to pause, where to delve a bit deeper, and where and when to stop. Once this map is created, it allows the map drawer to check where he is in the scheme of things and whether or not he is making some achievements that will take him closer to his goals, or whether or not he is heading in the correct direction.
By setting goals, creators know how they are doing and what they should be doing to achieve their targets or dreams in life. They know if they can relax or if they have to double their efforts when they are falling short of what is expected of them.
Goal setting means a person is proactive in dealing with challenges that may affect his creation. Being proactive means one is able to outline possible difficulties that may occur as well as the solutions to those difficulties. By doing this, a person is not easily scared or defeated when challenges occur because he has already prepared for them. He knows they can happen and he has prepared a solution or strategy when that time comes.
Setting goals will enable creators to track their progress in whatever creation they have set out to create. Goals help them become more confident in themselves and more motivated to achieve their plans. Creators don’t procrastinate – they are too passionate about, and desire too much to see their creation exist. Procrastination is a thing of the past.
However, goal setting is not enough, as this should be accompanied by love, faith, and self-discipline. A creator may have a blueprint of what he desires to create, but if he does not have these necessary tools to carry out the plan, then most likely nothing will come out of it.
When a creator loves the idea of what will be created, the creator works voraciously to bring it into existence. Coupled with faith that the thing to be created can and will be created and self-discipline to make it happen. The creation has every chance of coming into existence – living.
To be successful in goal setting, the goals that creators set should be realistic and based on true principles. Being too ambitious in setting up goals can make the goals unrealistic and difficult to achieve. However, creators do not also set goals that are too low because this might discourage their vision instead of achieving it.
It is also necessary that the creator setting the blueprint for his creation should also include a time frame within which the goal will be achieved. This way, he is able to determine if he has to fast track his strategies or to slow down a bit. Goal setting will also help a creator check if he is performing within his plans or if he is doing things towards the achievement of his plans.
Once you have created something, even a little of what you hoped to create, then you should always give yourself a pat in the back to keep you motivated. But do not be too complacent with any little achievement, as this may cause you to backslide.
Setting goals can be used in any aspect of one’s life – from one’s personal or family life, to his career and finances. Goal setting can be as simple as setting a target weight when you wish to lose pounds or something big, like earning your first million.
When setting goals, it is always important to set standards that would suit your present situation, your capabilities, and other factors that may influence the achievement of your goal.
Get out a piece of paper. Write out what you want to create. Get Creating! |
To your creations,
Michael Claridge
Between Stimulus and Response
In his book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen R. Covey has this phrase, “Between stimulus and response is our greatest power – the freedom to choose.” Today I would like to write my thoughts about what this means.
Every day each of us has a myriad of different stimuli that occurs. The shower is too hot, too cold, our hair is not combing well, or is, our breakfast is too this or that or the other, our car won’t start, or does. Good or bad, everything we do or everything that happens is some sort of stimulus or another. Fact is, what you are reading right this very minute is stimulus.
Like it or not we cannot ignore, overt or delete it from our lives. We may, however, respond. In fact that is the only thing that we can do. Every response is evidence of the choice we took as a result of the stimulus.
The water was too cold, we flinched and pulled back our hand, or maybe we chose to leave that hand in the cold water and reached for the hot water knob with the other hand to turn it up. All were choices to respond to the simple stimulus of the water being too cold.
Each minute of every day is filled with the same opportunities to choose how we will respond to the stimuli that occur. Right now you can choose to read on, stop reading, you can choose to believe what you are reading, or disbelieve what you are reading. You can smile you can frown; you can laugh or even cry. But the simple truth still exists – you have a choice how you will respond; followed by another and another choice, and so goes life.
Some people choose to respond to certain stimuli in very disproportionate ways; meaning that the response is either way too big or way too small in proportion to the stimulus. Good examples of this would be a person not showing any emotion when their dearest loved one passes away, or a person laughing uncontrollably at something that was extremely insignificant.
Some people choose inappropriate ways to respond. Others try avoiding responding all together; failing to realize that avoiding is a choice and therefore a response. In fact there are many different ways in which people choose to respond. Some are positive, some are negative, some productive, some destructive, some valuable, some unnecessary, some kind, some mean, some fun, some boring, some . . . you get the picture.
We each have the same ability too. There is not a single person that I can think of who is exempt. Take a moment and think about it. Can you think of anyone who is exempt?
There may be some who are limited in the amount of options they have in their responses but nevertheless they have the freedom to make choices and therefore responses. Take a baby for instance; a baby can’t use the get-up-and-walk-away response because of physical inability but we have each heard the cry-at-the-top-of-your-lungs response plenty of times.
Tomorrow I will explore 7 different kinds of responses that are used.
| Your assignment today is to get a piece of paper and write a list of the different stimuli that have happened in your last hour. This is how I would like you to do it. Divide the paper into three columns. At the top of column one write, “Stimulus”, here you will write what the stimulus was. In column two write, “Choice”, here you will write what choice you made for that given stimulus. Then in column three write, “Alternatives” here you will write down at least two different choices you could have made instead of the one you made. Notice in column three how many different alternatives you can come up with. We will talk about that later. Go do you assignment. |
To your creations,
Michael Claridge
MUST DO
I have a bunch of quotes printed up on my wall where I work. One of my favorites is a quote I have attributed to Walt Disney that says, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” I love that quote. Another favorite one is by Charles Spurgeon which says, “By perseverance the snail reached the ark.” That one makes me chuckle, but it’s oh so true – that’s how anything worthwhile has ever come about; by perseverance.
There is one quote that I particularly like that I would like to spend the remainder of this article discussing. I don’t know who said it. I’ve done a search on the Internet to see who might have originally said it and I have not found a source. Here’s the quote:
“If you want what you’ve never had you must do what you’ve never done.”
Nearly every time I read this my head begins to reel with woulda-coulda-shoulda’s. I have had tons of great ideas throughout the years, and I know that many of them would have made me very wealthy. So why am I not very wealthy? Because I didn’t do what was required in order to succeed at whatever the great idea was.
It’s the “MUST DO” part that I fail at. Now don’t get me wrong, I do stuff, even stuff that gets me closer to my desired objective. The problem is that I don’t do what “must” be done.
You see there is a law that works 100% of the time. It is the law of cause and effect, otherwise known as the law of the harvest, which states that what you sow you will reap. If you plant corn seeds you get corn plants not coconut trees.
That is what I was doing, I was planting the wrong seeds. XYZ idea required XYZ actions. I was ABC actions and expecting XYZ objective. You know the definition of insanity don’t you? Doing what you’ve always done and expecting different results.
I was insane.
Sound familiar? Or maybe you are as diluted as I am and convinced yourself that you indeed were planting XYZ seeds. Be honest, did you really? Or did you do what I did? I planted an X seed or an XY seed and tried to pass it off as a XYZ seed.
The law of the harvest is precise. Plant corn get corn. It really doesn’t get any more complicated than that. But like I said, we try to pass off what must be done with other stuff and expect our results to be our objective.
Buckminster Fuller said,”You never change the existing reality by fighting it. Instead, create a new model that makes the old one obsolete.”
If your existing reality isn’t what you were expecting stop fooling yourself. Realize that you are doing the wrong things. Start doing the thing that “must” be done to bring about your desired creation. And then stick to it until it becomes the reality you desire.
Easier said than done, I know, but that is the way these universal laws work. Remember they work 100% of the time too. There is no fooling them, or side stepping them.
| Today I want you to pick out one objective (creation) that you can focus you attention on.FOCUS – Follow One Course Until SuccessfulNow, focus on it and do what you “MUST DO” to create it. Nothing wavering. Onward! |
To your creations,
Michael Claridge
The Eternal Now!
NOW!
You can’t change the past, and you can’t get to the future any faster than the rest of us, so really the only thing you have to work with is NOW.
So I’ve got a challenge for you. Think of everything as though it is present: Think of yourself in the “I am” state. Not in the “I was” or the “I will be” state. The fact is: the “I was” will never be again and the “I will be” you will never get to (kind of like a dangling carrot). So the only one you really can be is the “I am”.
Act in the NOW! What can you do NOW to make NOW more productive, more peaceful, more pleasant, improved? What can you think now that will make better NOW? How can you think, act, and be NOW that will be your true authentic self?
We have all had “many wrong doings” in our lives. Those were the past. You can’t go back a relive them so why try. And why waste another minute in the NOW worrying about it? Think in the NOW and act in the NOW and you will see that is it less easy to do wrong.
Live NOW – not in the past nor in the future – but NOW!
“Do not dwell in the past. Do not dream of the future. Concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
Buddha (B.C. 568-488)
“Nothing is there to come, and nothing past. But an eternal Now does always last.”
Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)
“Time has only a relative existence.”
Carlyle
“Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.”
Chesterfield (1694-1773)
“Time is breath. Try to understand this.”
Gurdjieff (1873-1949)
“There is a bridge between time and eternity; and this bridge is the Spirit of man. Neither day nor night cross that bridge, nor old age, nor death nor sorrow.”
Upanishada
“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”
Albert Einstein
“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place and this too will be swept away.”
Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A.D.)
“You wake up in the morning, and lo! Your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the magic tissue of the universe of your life. No one can take it from you. No one receives either more or less than you receive. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt. You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow. It is kept for you.”
Arnold Bennet
“The present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of eternal duration which we call the future, from that which we call the past.”
H. P. Blavatsky
| The purpose of today’s assignment is to prove to yourself that you indeed do have great power to create, and that power resides in NOW.Right NOW, go do that thing that you have been putting off. Go do it NOW! Get it done NOW! Don’t wait another second. Go!See, you do have control. And that control resides in the eternal moment of NOW! |
So you see dear friend, if you try with all your might to make your NOW the best that NOW can be you will be assured that your future will be bright and beautiful, and your past will only be filled with memories of successes and brilliant living to be proud of without regrets. Ask yourself what is the best that you can do NOW and then DO IT NOW!!
