December 2006

I tried to whittle this collection down, thinking that having fewer would make more of an impact…but each quote is such a wonderful lesson and each speaker such an amazing and motivational teacher, I just couldn’t take any out.

So, read through the quotes and let each really sink in.  There’s a great deal of wisdom coming your way - as soon as I get out of the way!
“Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.” Benjamin Franklin

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle

“A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.” Desiderius Erasmus

“First we form habits, then they form us. Conquer your bad habits or they will conquer you.”
Rob Gilbert

“I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.” Charles Dickens

“It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.” Kenich Ohmae

“Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny.” Tryon Edwards

“Any act often repeated soon forms a habit; and habit allowed, steadily gains in strength. At first it may be but as the spider’s web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel.”Tyron Edwards

“Powerful indeed is the empire of habit.”Publilius Syrus

“A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.”
Mark Twain

“What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.”  - Bruce Barton

The quote above makes me think back to a high school Grammar class.  One of my favorite teachers in the world (Mrs. Walters) spent a great deal of time teaching the importance of using strong words when writing.  She tried to beat into our heads the fact that our words should come off of the page and demand to be reckoned with.

Bondage is just such a word.  Look at the impact it has in the quote above.  Dilemna….situation…predicament - none of these weaker words would have been even half as powerful.

The speaker went with a hard-hitting word that reaches out and grabs you by the throat!  The only bad thing is that his words aren’t only powerful…..they’re dead on.

Procrastination, self-doubt, shyness, smoking, anger, bitterness - they’re all forms of bondage.  I don’t buy into the thought that we can’t do anything about them, that we can’t free ourselves from them.  We can….we just don’t.  And there, lying in the truth of that thought, is the reason we’re still chasing our dreams rather than living our dreams.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned my obsession with movies before.  I’ve seen so many that my brain has it’s own IMDB - but instead of it being an Internet Movie Data Base, it’s an Intermind Movie Data Base.  When an actress/actor looks familiar to me, I dig through my own collection to find out JUST where I’ve seen them before. Sometimes I find the reason they look so familiar…but most of the time it comes down to, “Well, I know I’ve seen them somewhere!”

Something else I’ve found is that we can learn a lot from movies.  You just have to know where to look.  Since I spend a great deal of my day writing self help articles and my evening watching movies, I thought I’d give it a swing.  Below are three lessons I think we can allow movies to teach us:

1.  Look ahead and move on!  I’m sure you’ve seen movies that leave you yelling at the character(s), “Get over it!,” “Get pass it!,”  or “Move on!”  Drives me straight crazy - you can see that the character has a full life ahead of him/her but they won’t turn around and face the right way.  They just stand there with their back to the future, facing the past - when it should be the complete other way around.   

Example:  “Batman Begins”  Bruce Wayne had a hideous, horrible, devastating thing happen to him when he was a child.  He lost his parents to a violent crime.  But he continued to carry the tragedy with him…not in his back pocket, not in his shirt pocket…he carried it with both hands up in front of him, and stared at it every second of the day.  Basically, he couldn’t live because he spent so much time with death.

Are we guilty or are we guilty?  If we were smack in the middle of a movie, would our viewers be yelling at us,  “Get pass it!  Move on!”  Are we carrying a tragedy or a mistake around with us, looking at it so much that we aren’t fully living?

It might not even be a bad past that’s robbing us of our present or future.  It might be what we think was a better/happier time.  We might be trying to force our present and future to live up to terribly high expectations, and instead of being grateful for what we have, we’re grateful for what we had.

Again, our viewers would be fed up with us and would freely tell us to, “Get over it!”

2.  Surround yourself with the right people.  A Movie’s Only as Good as it’s cast, right?  A lot of that holds true for life. Granted, we can’t cast our own family (and I’m not even going there) - but we can decide who we spend the rest of our lives with.  We can also decide what friends we allow into our life.  Each of these people should help us to live a better life in some way.  They most certainly shouldn’t hinder our life or cause otherwise good days to be bad or rob us of happiness.

3.  There are going to be conflicts, so expect them….face them….and be the last one standing.  I’d never, ever, ever want to sit through a movie where nothing exciting happened, would you?  Can you imagine?  The character gets up, has his coffee, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, goes to bed.  I’d feel like I’d stepped into The Dick Van Dyke Show. Nice enough place to visit, but after a while Laura’s crying would make me homicidal. She’d go, “Rooooooob…” and I’d snap somewhere between the 4th and 5th o.

Sometimes our day will be a comedy, other times a drama. Sometimes we might even get a little action and adventure.  Some nights will be  romantic, and some might even rank an R rating. Sadly, of course, there will be the heartbreaking tragedies - there’s absolutely no way around them.  But whatever life throws our way, we have to keep moving on - if it’s bad, hope that it gets better…..if it’s good, hope it gets even better.

The amazing posters are from at All Posters.com.  Movie posters are pretty awesome, anyway, but this Fear the Bat one is one of my all-time faves.

“Yesterday ended last night.  Every day is a new beginning.  Learn the skill of forgetting. And move on.” - Norman Vincent Peale

“Remember:  The only way to get the best from life is to get the best from yourself.  If you settle in one, you’ve settled in the other.”

…Hard rain rough roads… so my life goes……

Montgomery Gentry accompanied me and my youngest daughter to the store today.  They were on the radio, of course, as opposed to the back seat.  The song on their mind was “If You Ever Stop Loving Me.”

Like in all their songs, the lyrics and the message are good stuff - really good stuff.  A few parts of the song reminded me of the messed up year I’ve had….no, the messed up year that had me….and of the valleys we all go through.  There’s no escaping life’s punches or pinches.  Life knows where we live, when we’re home, and it certainly knows our hiding places.  Heck, it’s often in the hiding places before we are - waiting on us.  It’s incredibly fond of the sneak attack, isn’t it?

Anyway, a few of the lines meant something to me, and I thought I’d pass them along.  Since you, too, are human - except for my cat readers - I figure that you’ve had your share of times when you were on the mat and these words may be just what you need to jump back on your feet.  You know, wake up your inner fighter.

………with the world sittin on my chest
it just showed me how much I can take…..

You never truly know how much strength you have until you’re called upon to prove it.

….the bank man… the bossman… the lawman
all tryin’ to get their hands on me
and I ain’t even done a damn thing wrong

I been waylaid… freight trained… short changed
by bigger and badder men
and all I got to say is bring it on…….

Bring it on. Now those are fighting words.  They’re not “Let’s pitch a pity party” words or “I think I’ll just quit!” words.  They’re “Is that the best you’ve got?” words.

And those are words to live by.

Joi

Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him, not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.  ~Walter Kaufmann

Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don’t unravel. ~Author Unknown

In addition to shopping and baking, I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude lately.  More appropriately, about the lack of gratitude. As a whole, I just don’t think we’re a very gracious generation. Can you imagine what the ones behind us will be like? Lord help us!

Why do people just expect everyone else to bend over backwards for them - and to feel privileged for getting to do so.

I started thinking about all of this a few days ago after a tirp to the store. As we were leaving, I saw an older man hold the door open for a woman.  He looked at her, smiling, but she never acknowledged him, and she certainly didn’t bother to say, ”Thank you.”  She kept her phone to her ear and blew right by him with a stern look on her face while he had a puzzled expression on his.

When he was walking away he muttered under his breath, “You’re welcome.”

He came from a generation when courtesy was the norm, not the exception. When people said “Thank you” when someone went out of their way on their behalf. When ladies would have not only said, “Thank You!,” but would have told him to have a very nice day.

Again, the problem is that our generation expects the world to lay down at its feet. If it doesn’t, you’ll hear grumbling, sarcasm, yelling (that’s something else people are doing more than ever, too), etc. That shouldn’t be the only time we speak up, should it?

A gracious person is a beautiful, beautiful thing…and an ingrate?  Straight up ugly.

Joi

The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you.  ~John E. Southard

I’m going to start doing something really novel with the Quotes of the Day… (drum roll) I’m going to start posting one each day. I know, radical - Daily Quotes of the Day.

This particular quote is worth spending a little time with.  But not too much - after all, we’ll all be too busy trying to settle some scores.

Joi