Posts in the “personal” category

“Your parents name you, but they haven’t a clue who you are. Your friends nickname you because they know exactly who you are.”

~ Sting

In this image, the Chicago Cubs’ Kris Bryant talks about the power of thought. As I always try to tell people, all you are is attitude.

Here’s a YouTube discussion of the story behind the song, “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl.”

“Because I was afraid of worms, Roxanne! Worms!”

When Mrs. Albert Einstein was asked if she understood her husband’s Theory of Relativity, she replied, “No ... but I know my husband, and he can be trusted.”

“When you blame others, you give up your power to change.”

~ Possibly said by Robert Anthony first

“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”

~ Joan Didion (full quote here on Goodreads)

Bill Wyman, bass guitarist for the Rolling Stones, ranks all 165 Pink Floyd songs from worst to best.

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

~ Viktor Frankl (author of Man’s Search for Meaning)

“There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison.”

Jane Austen, Persuasion
(As I learned from the movie, The Lake House)

“Inspirational Dissatisfaction” is a term that I read a very long time ago, possibly in a book called Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude.

The term basically means, “I am so unhappy in my current situation that it is motivating the heck out of me to do something about it.” Rather than become sad or depressed about your current situation, you become motivated by it, so inspired by it that you become willing to do whatever it takes to change your situation.

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

~ Socrates, (470 – 399 BC)

(Courtesy of this Tony Fadell tweet.)

“It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.”

~ Seneca

I love this idea from Ryan Carson. From his tweet, “This is what I look at first, every day, when I wake up. It's my WHY.” Reading your life goals/mission first thing in the morning is a great implementation of the idea of a tombstone test.

July 22, 2017 will go down as the day I (finally) switched this website to using HTTPS instead of HTTP. (See the padlock icon in the URL field of your browser.) I’ve been using a self-signed certificate to log in to this site for a long time, but yesterday I finally switched to “HTTPS for everyone.”

This is a nice quote about attitude during competition from Garbine Muguruza, who just won the 2017 Women’s Wimbledon tournament:

“I knew she (Venus Williams) was going to make me suffer and fight for it. When I had those set points against me, I’m like, ‘Hey, it's normal. I’m playing Venus here.’ So I just kept fighting. I knew that if I was playing like I was playing during the two weeks, I was going to eventually have an opportunity. So I was calm. If I lose the first set, I still have two more. Let’s not make drama.”

SI.com has a good article on what the Colorado Rockies and their pitchers have done to try to pitch successfully at Coors Field in Denver, Colorado, where at nearly 5,200 altitude, the air is 20% thinner than at sea level.

“I was very happy to hear from you, and that you have such a position in the Research Laboratories. Unfortunately your letter made me unhappy for you seem to be truly sad. It seems that the influence of your teacher has been to give you a false idea of what are worthwhile problems.”

“The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.”

From a letter by Richard Feynman to a former student

“He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”

~ Seneca (as seen in this tweet)

“Ten things fab leaders do,” a nice graphic from Helen Bevan.