The Place of Passion

Dear loving people,

For several reasons, Debra was sure she really loved Japheth. Her whole body was electrified the first time they met and after knowing him for three years, she was certain that she had seen the guy who could likely be the man of her dreams. She waited for two long for him to make the first move and nothing was forth coming from his end and so she decided it was time she told him her mind.

 

Dressed in the best of her clothes that afternoon, Debra was feeling in control of and happy about herself. On the way to meet Japheth, she decided to stop by Angeline’s house at least to tell her best friend her feelings and plans.

 

The voices coming from Angeline’s house were loud and clear as she approached the door. She could overhear the on-going conversation. Angeline was in a deep conversation with Julian and what was being discussed brought her to a standstill in front of the door.

 

Angeline: How could you of all tell me such nonsense Julian? How is it possible that you think you are in love with Japheth? I would expect Debra to tell me such a thing not you. Besides, Debra is too clever and certainly not that stupid to fall in love with such a useless retch of a boy. They are close to each other yes but she certainly knows her limits and I am happy for her. Look at you, toying with eminent disgrace. Come to think of it, Japheth is such an obsolete, stupid and heartless boy. Anything that he touches changes to failure and clumsiness is his second name. I have been planning to tell Debra to stay clear of him and who do I have here? The gorgeous Julian, falling headlong in love with such a nincompoop, Christ!

Julian: Well Angeline, all I can say is that you don’t have an idea about what you are talking about. Japheth will make a perfect man for me and trust me; I know what I am talking about. I will be so disappointed if Debra feels same for him that is why I want to discuss this with her.

Overhearing this from outside the door, Debra felt like she’d been hit many times over with a sledge hammer. A billion thoughts were running through her mind to different directions. She had so much respect for her two friends to the extent that she believed all they said and will do anything to protect their friendship. As she quietly left unnoticed on her way home, she was painfully convinced that she will not carry on with her plans. Wiping the tears rolling down her cheeks, she thought-on that whatever feelings she had for Japheth would have to be laid to an eternal rest.

The Point!! Success has a lot to do with PASSION. How high you go in life depends a great deal on how passionate you have been about the things you have to do and have been doing. Passion equally has some links with obsession and until you are obsessed with what you want to do, your chances of success are slim.

 

I have to be very clear that when I speak of passion, I don't mean it in the romantic sense. What I mean by passion is the powerful feeling of enthusiasm we all have inside of us. We are all enthusiastic and passionate about something, whether its finance, food or movie. That enthusiasm is very powerful. When we can combine it with our work, we are setting ourselves up well for achieving true success.

 

Whether we're thinking about starting a small business, or just thinking about what career path to choose, it's important that we follow our passions. When we think about what is needed to be successful in life and in our work, we usually think about characteristics like value, talent, ambition, intellect, discipline, persistence and luck. What many of us often fail to include in this recipe for success is passion. The passion we have, or don't have, for our work should not be underestimated. Sometimes this ingredient could make the biggest difference of all.

 

Debra erroneously put what she was so passionate about, in fact something that really made her happy to a premature end just because her best friends thought otherwise. She was quick to allow her life to be watered-down by the likes and thinking of others. Certainly, she will remain in the pains of failure.

 

Listen to others for advice, but equally know the place of passion in your life especially with regards to the things you must do to get where you want to go.

"No One Drifts to Success" - Napoleon Hill

Dear loving people,

One of the toughest persons I have read about in the success industry is Napoleon Hill. He particularized a practical method of incorporating Definiteness of Purpose and Plan into your daily life.  Without it, as he states in the following essay he wrote, you are merely "drifting" - as is 98% of the population - and no one drifts to Success.  Today, you have the opportunity to read Hill's essay in its entirety.

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You don’t have to be a futurist or a fortune-teller to be able to predict someone’s future.  You can do so by asking him or her one simple question: “What is your one definite purpose in life – and what plans have you made to attain it?”

If you ask a hundred people that question, ninety‑eight of them will answer with something like, “I’d like to make a good living and become as successful as I can.”  While the answer sounds good on the surface, if you dig a little deeper, you will find a drifter who will never get anything out of life except the leftovers of truly successful people – those who have a definite purpose and a plan for attaining it. To be successful, you must at this moment decide exactly what your goal is and lay out the steps by which you intend to reach it.

Years ago I worked with a fellow named Stuart Austin Wier of Dallas.  He was a contributor to a magazine I edited and was just getting by financially.  He would probably have remained a starving writer if a story he was writing about an inventor hadn’t suddenly inspired him to change his life.

Much to the surprise of those who knew him, he announced that he was giving up journalism and going back to school to become a patent attorney.  He wasn’t going to be just any patent attorney, he was going to become “the top patent attorney in the United States.”   He put his plan into action with such fervor that he completed law school in record time.

When he began his practice, he deliberately sought out the toughest cases.  Soon his reputation spread throughout the country and his services were in such high demand that even though his fees reached astronomical levels, he was turning away more clients than he accepted.

The person who acts with purpose and a plan attracts opportunities.  How can life give you anything if you don’t know what you want yourself?  How can others help you to succeed if you haven’t decided how to get there yourself?   Only with definiteness of purpose will you be able to overcome the defeats and adversities that will stand in your way.

One of America’s earliest and most successful franchisers was Lee Maranz, a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it.  A mechanical engineer, Maranz invented an automatic ice cream freezer that made soft ice cream.   He envisioned a chain of ice cream stores from coast to coast and worked out a plan to make his dream become a reality.

He, like many others since, built his own success by helping others achieve theirs.  He helped people set up ice cream shops by furnishing construction and design plans, a revolutionary idea at the time.  He sold the ice cream machines at cost and made his profit from the sale of the ice cream mix.  The result?  That chain of stores Maranz was determined to create across the country.

“If you have a strong belief in yourself, in what you are doing, and what you want to do, no adversity is too difficult to overcome,” he said.

If you want to achieve success, make today the day you stop drifting.  Decide upon a definite goal.  Write it down.  Commit it to memory.  Decide exactly how you plan to achieve it.  Then begin by putting the plan into action immediately.

Your future is what you make it.  Decide NOW what it shall be.

The Power of Willpower

Dear loving people,

The possession of willpower or its lack plays an important role in everyone's life. For example, you wish to be the best football player, knowing how good it is for your fame and how great you feel afterwards to be named best player, but you feel too lazy, and prefer to watch movies instead. You might be aware of the fact that you need to change your sporting habits or stop drinking too much alcohol, but you don't have the inner power and persistence to change these habits.

I can bet this sound familiar? How many times have you said, "I wish I had will power "? How many times have you started to do something, only to quit after a short while? We all have had experiences like these. Everyone has a few habits they wish they could get rid of, such as smoking, excessive drinking, laziness, procrastination or lack of assertiveness. To overcome these habits or addictions, one needs a certain degree of willpower. Their possession makes a great difference in everyone's life, bringing to the fore inner strength, self-mastery and decisiveness.

Will power is the ability to overcome laziness and procrastination. It is the ability to control or reject unnecessary or harmful impulses. It is the ability to arrive at a decision and follow it with perseverance until its successful accomplishment. It is the inner power that overcomes the desire to indulge in unnecessary and useless habits, and the inner strength that overcomes inner emotional and mental resistance for taking action. It is one of the corner stones of success, both spiritual and material.

Theodore Roosevelt, one of America’s celebrated Presidents said “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

I find everything I know about willpower in this Presidential quote. It displays what we as people are capable of when we are pushed to extremes. Every day, we are tested. Whether it’s a nice invitation to party with a date tempting us from our days plan or a warm bed coaxing us to sleep in when it’s time to work, we are forced to decide between what we want to do and what we ought to do.

The ability to resist our impulses is frequently described as willpower. The forces behind a person’s willpower have been the subject of increasing scrutiny by the scientific community trying to understand why some people overeat or abuse drugs and alcohol and others don’t. What researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.

During my secondary school days, I decided I will never fall prey to the beauty of young women but will go for a woman only when I have CONCIOUSLY taken an informed decision to do so. Over seventeen years later, sticking to that principle has paid off. I must tell you that it has never been that easy but I have succeeded in resisting what some people will commonly call ‘temptation’ from some of the most charming women you can ever imagine. Not only do I not have that word ‘temptation’ in my dictionary but I have resisted pressures from numerous women that some men will plunge into head-long. I have extended this quality to many other areas in my life. I can stand up tall today and anywhere to tell whoever that will power is sheer magic.

You cannot take a conscious decision about something and later blame it on the simplistic ‘temptation’. If Jesus Christ defeated the devil after some tiresome forty days and nights in the wilderness, it was because he hadn’t that word ‘temptation’ in his vocabulary. If you are Christ-like and made in God’s image, you shouldn’t either.

Friedrich Nietzsche reordered the appellation calling it the will to power and saying that it is a prominent philosophical concept. He believed that the will to power is the main driving force in humans: achievement, ambition and the striving to reach the highest possible position in life.

If you are just starting and plan to “willpower” your way through success in life, chances are you are setting yourself up for failure because if you had enough willpower to do this before you wouldn’t be reading this in the first place, right?

It is your quest to succeed that is pushing you into learning the magic that is willpower and how to use it to your ought most advantage. Living Lectures can be part of the solution. Stick with us.

Be The Winning Speaker Part4: Ice the cake

Dear loving people,

 

Let us get back to our strategies of becoming a winning speaker and ice the cake with two more strategies:

 

Always interact with your audience: An easy technique to calm your nerves during a presentation is to engage the audience. Encourage them to participate. A simple way to do this is to ask your audience an interesting and topical question. You will be amazed at the responses you will receive.

If your audience has been sitting for a long time, you can interact with them by asking them to stand up, give their neighbor a friendly hand gesture, or by patting themselves on the back. This unexpected physical movement helps your audience stay more engaged with you for the rest of your presentation.

Should your nerves begin to raise, this gives you a quick break to compose yourself again before you continue on with your presentation. The key is to keep breathing…you will overcome your fears.

Always remember to breathe and enjoy: It’s common for anxiety to set in as you approach the platform to give your speech or even during your presentation. If this happens, then remember to take a deep breath and relax. You will get through it.

You can also relax yourself by simply focusing on a friendly face in the audience. For example, make eye contact with a listener who is smiling or nodding his head with what you are saying or has just laughed at one of your opening sentences or jokes. Once you find that friendly face in the audience immediately focus on that person and speak to him as if that person is your friend. This will calm you.

Public speaking can definitely be challenging at times but in the business world, it is really an inescapable part of the every day. As a business owner, you are by default the spokesperson for your company. So, embrace it and put your fears aside. Enjoy the experience!

 

Recapitulating and as a friendly reminder, when it comes to public speaking, remember to do the following:

1. Throw perfection out the door…don’t beat yourself up if you make a mistake or two during your presentation.
2. Be prepared and use an outline to present your ideas.
3. Add humor and humility to your presentation to connect with your audience.
4. Interact with your audience by asking questions.
5. Breathe and enjoy the experience.