Rich Experiences

It doesn't matter what is happening to the economy, government or your industry; it matters what is going on in your imagination. If you've got a rich imagination you're going to have a rich experience.

- Mark Victor Hansen

Liberty

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

- Louis Dembitz Brandeis, lawyer, judge, and writer (1856-1941)

Ideas...

Ideas are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.

- Carl Schurz

Ideas

Over the years I have discovered that ideas come through an intense desire for them; continually desiring, the mind becomes a watchtower on the lookout for incidents that may excite the imagination.

- Charlie Chaplin

Gratititude

Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.

- Albert Schweitzer

Former North Korean Prisoner Talks about Happiness

According to Amnesty International, North Korea has a vast network of gulags that imprison over 200,000 people. The most feared camp is known as "Total Control Camp 14." In Camp 14, hunger is so rampant that prisoners behave like "panicked animals" at mealtimes. Teachers at the camp school beat students to death for minor infractions. Medieval torture devices are employed in dungeon-like underground cells. And human relationships are so degraded that prisoners inform on family members.
The book Escape from Camp 14 tells the gripping story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the first known escapee from Camp 14. Shin was born in Camp 14, but at the age of 23 he escaped, finding his way to South Korea and eventually the United States. Today, Shin lives in Seoul, South Korea, a nation that in many ways resembles the United States and other developed countries.
In a 2012 documentary, Shin reflected on the nature of true freedom and happiness. Towards the end of an interview Shin said:
When I lived in the labour camp, I had to suffer a lot of pain …. But in South Korea you have to suffer when you don't have enough money. It's exhausting. It's all about money. That makes it tough for me here. When I think about it, I rarely saw someone committing suicide in the camp. Life was hard and you were an inmate your whole life. But in South Korea many people attempt suicide. They die. It may look like the people here don't want for anything. They have clothes and food. But there are more people committing suicide here than in the camp. There are news reports about that every day.
The interviewer asked, "What do you miss about the life in North Korea?" Shin got out his cell phone and started looking at it and tapping the screen before he said:
I miss the innocence and the lack of concerns I had. In the camp … I didn't have to think about the power of money like I do in South Korea. Though I don't miss everything from that camp …. I don't know how else to say it: I miss my innocent heart.

source

Six Behaviours That Increase Self-Esteem

Following are six behaviours that increase self-esteem, enhance your self-confidence, and spur your motivation. You may recognize some of them as things you naturally do in your interactions with other people. But if you don’t, I suggest you motivate yourself to take some of these important steps immediately.
First, greet others with a smile and look them directly in the eye. A smile and direct eye contact convey confidence born of self-respect. In the same way, answer the phone pleasantly whether at work or at home, and when placing a call, give your name before asking to speak to the party you want to reach. Leading with your name underscores that a person with self-respect is making the call.
Second, always show real appreciation for a gift or complement. Don’t downplay or sidestep expressions of affection or honour from others. The ability to accept or receive is a universal mark of an individual with solid self-esteem.
Third, don’t brag. It’s almost a paradox that genuine modesty is actually part of the capacity to gracefully receive compliments. People who brag about their own exploits or demand special attention are simply trying to build themselves up in the eyes of others — and that’s because they don’t perceive themselves as already worthy of respect.
Fourth, don’t make your problems the centrepiece of your conversation. Talk positively about your life and the progress you’re trying to make. Be aware of any negative thinking, and take notice of how often you complain. When you hear yourself criticize someone — and this includes self-criticism — find a way to be helpful instead of critical.
Fifth, respond to difficult times or depressing moments by increasing your level of productive activity. When your self-esteem is being challenged, don’t sit around and fall victim to “paralysis by analysis.” The late Malcolm Forbes said, “Vehicles in motion use their generators to charge their own batteries. Unless you happen to be a golf cart, you can’t recharge your battery when you’re parked in the garage!”
Sixth, choose to see mistakes and rejections as opportunities to learn. View a failure as the conclusion of one performance, not the end of your entire career. Own up to your shortcomings, but refuse to see yourself as a failure. A failure may be something you have done — and it may even be something you’ll have to do again on the way to success — but a failure is definitely not something you are.
Even if you’re at a point where you’re feeling very negatively about yourself, be aware that you’re now ideally positioned to make rapid and dramatic improvement. A negative self-evaluation, if it’s honest and insightful, takes much more courage and character than the self-delusions that underlie arrogance and conceit. I’ve seen the truth of this proven many times in my work with athletes. After an extremely poor performance, a team or an individual athlete often does much better the next time out, especially when the poor performance was so bad that there was simply no way to shirk responsibility for it. Disappointment, defeat, and even apparent failure are in no way permanent conditions unless we choose to make them so. On the contrary, these undeniably painful experiences can be the solid foundation on which to build future success.

by Denis Waitley

(excerpted from The Psychology of Motivation)

The Quality Life

The secret life is the key to a quality life and that in turn is the key to a quality culture, products, and services. Once in New York City, I attended the Broadway play, The Secret Garden. The play was particularly poignant for me that evening because my mother had just died.
The Tony Award winning musical is the story of a young girl whose mother and father die of cholera in India as the play begins. She is sent to live with her uncle in a large British manor. The old house is filled with romantic spirits. As the restless girl explores the grounds of the estate, she discovers the entrance to the magical secret garden, a place where anything is possible.
When she first enters the garden, she finds that it appears to be dead, much like her cousin, a bedridden boy, and her uncle, still haunted by memories of his lovely wife who died giving birth to the boy. In harmony with natural laws and principles, the girl faithfully plants seeds and brings new life to the garden. As the roots are warmed and the garden cultivated, she brings about a dramatic transformation of her entire culture within one season.
In my many years of teaching and training, I have seen several such transformations brought about by proactive people who exercise principle-centered leadership and the Seven Habits in their secret, private, and public lives.
When I returned home to Salt Lake City the next day to speak at my mother's funeral, I referred to the Secret Garden, because for me and many others, my mother's home was a secret garden where we could escape and be nurtured by positive affirmation. In her eyes, all about us was good, and all that was good was possible.
Our Three Lives
We all live three lives: public, private, and secret. In our public lives, we are seen and heard by colleagues, associates, and others within our circle of influence. In our private lives, we interact more intimately with spouses, family members, and close friends. The secret life is where your heart is, where your real motives are the ultimate desires of your life.
Many executives never visit the secret life. Their public and private lives are essentially scripted by who and what precedes and surrounds them or by the pressures of the environment. And so they never exercise that unique endowment of self-awareness the key to the secret life where you can stand apart from yourself and observe your own involvement.
Courage is required to explore our secret life because we must first withdraw from the social mirror, where we are fed positive and negative feedback continuously. As we get used to this social feedback, it becomes a comfort zone. And we may opt to avoid self-examination and idle away our time in a vacuum of reverie and rationalization. In that frame of mind, we have little sense of identity, safety, or security.
Examine Your Motives
The most critical junctures in my life take place when I visit my secret life and ask, "What do I think? What do I believe is right? What should my motives be?" These are times when I choose my motives. One such time occurred when I first heard Dag Hammarskjold say, "It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual, than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses." That statement had such a profound effect on me that I started to say to myself in regard to my relationships with other people, "Wait a minute it's my life. I can choose whether I want to make reconciliation with this person or not. I can choose my own motives."
One of the exciting fruits of the "secret garden" is an ability to consciously choose your own motives. Until you choose your own motives, you really can't choose to live your own life. Everything flows out of motive and motivation that is the root of our deepest desires.
Now, when I get into a frustrating or perplexing situation, I enter into my secret life. That's where I find not only motives but also correct principles; that's where the inner wisdom is. As I learn to be proactive in exploring the secret life, I tap into self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and into the exercise of free will to choose another motive.
People who regularly explore their secret life and examine their motives are better able to see into the hearts of others, practice real empathy, bestow real empowerment and affirm worth and identity.
A healthy secret life will benefit your private and public lives in many ways. For example, when I'm preparing to give a speech, I read aloud a favorite discourse on faith, hope, and charity because it helps me to purify my motive. I lose all desire to impress. My only desire is to bless. And when I go to a public setting with that motive, I have great confidence and inner peace. I feel more love for the people and feel much more authentic myself.
Executives who attend our leadership training in the mountain setting of Sundance often tell me, "This is the first time in many years that I've done any soul searching. I've seen myself as if for the first time, and I've resolved that my life is going to be different. I'm going to be true to what I really believe." Recently, many people have written me to say, "Your habits and principles have made the difference. I'd never really thought about some of them before, but I resonate with them." That's because these principles are found in people's secret life.
And yet most of us spend our busy days privately doing our thing, never pausing long enough to enter the secret life, the secret garden, where we can create masterpieces, discover great truths and enhance very aspect of our public and private lives. Having a healthy secret life is the key to having a quality private and public life, as well as a quality culture, product or service.

Stephen Covey

Life

We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies?

- Edward Young, poet (1683-1765)

The Two Most Important Rules...

There are two rules for ultimate success in life.
1. Never tell everything you know.
2.

New Year

There are more overweight people in America than average weight people. So overweight people are now average. Which means you've met your New Year's resolution.

- Jay Leno

Good Response!

During the 1976 USA bicentenary celebrations, the Procrastinators Club of America sent a letter of complaint to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London. In 1752 this company had cast the original Liberty Bell, which was defective from the beginning and developed its famous crack almost ninety years later. Their tongue-in-cheek complaint included queries about a warranty and a possible replacement. It was great publicity for them, as it summarised their philosophy "never do today what you can put off for a long time yet."
What they didn't expect was the company's reply, which showed they were every bit as good at customer service as the club was at putting things off.
"We will be pleased to provide a replacement bell, if you would be so kind as to return the damaged bell to us in its original packaging."

Unexpected

It is easy for the devout to join up with the shepherds and fall into place at the crib and look out into the surrounding night and say, “Look at those silly intellectuals wandering about after a star, with no religious sense at all! Look at that clumsy camel, what an unspiritual animal it is! Look what odd gifts of self-consecration they are bringing; they’re certainly not the sort of people who’d make it in a church!” But we must remember that the child who began by receiving these very unexpected pilgrims had a woman of the streets for his faithful friend and two thieves for his comrades at the end: and looking at these two extremes let us try to learn a little of the height and breadth and depth of his love – and then apply it to our own lives.

- Evelyn Underhill

The Christmas Story

There’s nothing romantic about the Christmas story. If anything, it offers a slice of a brutal world in which a child is born on the street, so to speak, with next to nothing in the way of rights and security, and not even a home. He whose birthday we celebrate at Christmas said, even as a grown man, “I have nothing. I am nowhere at home. Even at night, I have no place to rest or lay my head”.…But now this man from Nazareth comes to us and invites us to mirror God’s image, and shows us how. He says: you too can become light, as God is light. Because what is all around you is not hell, but rather a world waiting to be filled with hope and faith.

- Jörg Zink

Representing Christ

The living Word once took on flesh in Mary’s son. The eternal, living Word – Christ – now takes on a new body in the church. Therefore the apostle Paul said that a mystery was entrusted to him, which he calls the body of Christ (Col. 1:24-26). The fact that the church is the body of Christ means that he becomes visible and real in the world today.
Just as Christ was in Mary, so Christ wants to live in us who believe and love. If Christ is real in us then we will live in accordance with and reflect the character of God’s future. The future kingdom receives form in the church.
For this reason the church must represent now God’s peace and justice in our world. This is why it cannot shed blood or tolerate private property. This is why the church cannot lie or take an oath. This is why it cannot tolerate the destruction of bridal purity and of faithfulness in the marriage of husband and wife. This is why the church expends all its life and energy to make room for God to bring everything under his rule.  

Eberhard Arnold

Christmas is the Promise

That God became a mother’s son; that there could be a woman walking the earth whose womb was consecrated to be the holy temple and tabernacle of God – that is actually earth’s perfection and the fulfillment of its expectations.
So many kinds of Advent consolation stream from the mysterious figure of the blessed, expectant Mary. The grey horizons must grow light. It is only the immediate scene that shouts so loudly and insistently. Beyond the present tumult there exists a different realm, one that is now in our midst. The woman has conceived the Child, sheltered him beneath her heart, and given birth to the Son. The world has come under a different law. Christmas is not only a historic event that happened once, on which our salvation rests. Christmas is the promise of a new order of things, of life, of our existence. 

Alfred Delp

The Magi

The mysterious men from the Orient followed the star and discovered the place where the secret of love lay in the helplessness of a human baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes in the feeding trough of an animal. They discovered the place where God’s love came down. That is the most important thing for every person, to discover in his own time and at his own hour the place where God’s love has broken through, and then to follow the star that has risen for him and to remain true to the light that has fallen into his heart.
The birth of God’s Son is God’s challenge for each of us to manifest his love. There is no manifestation of love quite so complete as that of a life lived in unity and community, a love where houses and doors and hearts are kept open to all.

Eberhard Arnold

Beyond Imagining

The god we have chosen as the highest ideal recognisable by our understanding is certainly not the true God, because God cannot be grasped by our intellect – or if so, we would be capable of forming only a very human, even if perhaps well intended, picture of a godly being. This picture would be very fragmentary and contradictory, and would make God accessible only to intellectuals, to those with highly trained minds, whereas God often lives most purely in those who are simple and childlike.
Now that is not to say that there should only be simple people or, to put it bluntly, that stupidity is godly and desirable. But it does mean that we should understand where the limits of human reason lie and that there is much above and beyond these limits that can only be grasped by faith. And that becomes possible for the person who lets all that is human become silent in order to stand before the divine in adoration, reverence, and awe.

Annemarie Wächter

Expert Calculates Santa's Christmas Eve Workload

Some people will have a stressful load this Christmas season. Take Santa, for instance. Phillip Bump, a technology writer for The Atlantic, has attempted to provide a tongue-in-cheek answer to an important question: what exactly is Santa's yearly workload? Bump calculated the number of Christian children in the world and the geographic distribution of those children around the globe. After factoring in all the nuances of time zones, distance between houses, and how many children live in each house, Bump shared his conclusions about Santa's yearly task:
[Based on CIA estimates] there are just over 526,000,000 Christian kids under the age of 14 in the world who celebrate Christmas on December 25th. In other words, Santa has to deliver presents to almost 22 million kids an hour, every hour, on the night before Christmas. That's about 365,000 kids a minute; about 6,100 a second.
Bump mentions a few caveats: not all Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25th, the CIA's data isn't always up-to-date, and some non-Christians celebrate Christmas too. But all in all, Santa has an enormous job to do! He has to serve over a billion kids in one night as he pulls a huge sleigh with nine reindeer, while he tries to avoid being detected and shot down by the North America Aerospace Defense Command—and don't forget that one of his reindeer has a very shiny nose.

Philip Bump, "Santa's Christmas Eve Workload, Calculated," The Atlantic (14 December 2011)

Success

It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done

- Samuel Smiles

Standards

Let us be about setting high standards for life, love, creativity, and wisdom. If our expectations in these areas are low, we are not likely to experience wellness. Setting high standards makes every day and every decade worth looking forward to

- Greg Anderson

The Nature of God

The unity of love involves a descent of the lowest kind. God became the equal of the lowliest and took on the form of a servant. But this servant’s form is not merely something he puts on, like the beggar’s cloak, which, because it is only a cloak, flutters loosely and betrays the king. No, it is his true form. For this is the unfathomable nature of boundless love, that it desires to be equal with the beloved.
Look, then, there he is – God! Where? There! Don’t you see him? The Child is the God, and yet he has no place to lay his head. It is sheer love and sheer sorrow to want to express the unity of love and then to not be understood.
But God suffers all things, endures all things, is tried in all things, hungers in the desert, thirsts in his agonies, is forsaken in death, and becomes absolutely the equal of the lowliest of human beings – look, behold the man!
God is not zealous for himself but out of love wants to be equal with the most lowly of the lowly. What power! When an oak seed is planted in a clay pot, the pot breaks; when the new wine is poured into old wineskins, they burst. What happens, then, when God the king plants himself in the frailty of a human being? Does he not become a new person, a new vessel?

Soren Kierkegaard

Obtaining Wisdom

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.

- Confucius

Encouragement

Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools.

- Richard Steele

Empathy

How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

- George Washington Carver

Rounded Education

Our emotions need to be as educated as our intellect. It is important to know how to feel, how to respond, and how to let life in so that it can touch you.

- Jim Rohn

Four words

Much wisdom can be crowded into but four words: In God we trust. This too shall pass. Live and let live. Still waters run deep. Bad news travels fast. Love laughs at locksmiths. Nothing succeeds like success. Charity begins at home. Politics make strange bedfellows. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Man proposes, God disposes. Let sleeping dogs lie.

Perseverance

When the morning's freshness has been replaced by the weariness of midday, when the leg muscles give under the strain, the climb seems endless, and suddenly nothing will go quite as you wish - it is then that you must not hesitate

- Dag Hammarskjold

Success

The one human quality that must be developed is self discipline for success. The will power to force yourself to do what you know you should do when you should do it, whether you like it or not, whether you feel like it or not. Success is tons of discipline

- Brian Tracy

Failure to Count the Cost in Building Projects

Apparently many people don't know how to count the cost for their building projects. That's why cost overruns, which stem from "an underestimation of the actual cost during budgeting," are notoriously common. Here are some famous cost overruns:
· The Suez Canal cost 20 times as much as the earliest estimates.
· The Sydney Opera House cost 15 times more than was originally projected.
· The Concorde supersonic airplane cost 12 times more than predicted.
· When Boston's "Big Dig" tunnel construction project was completed, the project was 275 percent ($11 billion) over budget.
· The Channel Tunnel between the UK and France had a construction cost overrun of 80 percent, and a 140-percent financing cost overrun.
A study of cost overruns published in the Journal of the American Planning Association found that 9 out of ten construction projects had underestimated costs. Overruns of 50 to one hundred percent were also common. Another group studied IT projects and also found that the average cost overrun was 43 percent. This study also found that 70 percent of the projects were over budget, exceeded time estimates, and had estimated too narrow a scope.

adapted from Wikipedia, "Cost Overrun," last accessed on 1-7-13

A Mirror

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Freedom

Freedom consists not in doing what we like but in having the right to do what we ought.

- Pope John Paul II

Rest

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.

- Sir John Lubbock

Perspective

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.

- Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

Rainbows

Entertainer Dolly Parton once said that if you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.
Rainbows are beautiful, but Dolly is right - it takes both rain and sunshine to create one. It's the same with life. In most lives there are dark and bright spots; there's joy and sorrow. The few people who have never known adversity invariably don't have lives that are as rich and satisfying as those who have. If you can handle it, adversity makes you stronger. It also makes you a kinder and more empathetic person. At the end of a life without adversity, it's hard to find a rainbow.

Contrast

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.

- Anne Bradstreet (1612 - 1672)

Adversity

Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.

- Edmund Burke

Choice

Every life form seems to strive to its maximum except human beings. How tall will a tree grow? Answer...as tall as it possibly can. Human beings, on the other hand, have been given the dignity of choice. You can choose to be all or you can choose to be less. Why not stretch up to the full measure of the challenge and see what all you can do?

- Jim Rohn

Justification

People always have two reasons for the things they do:
1) The logical reason, and
2) The real reason.

The Greatest Power

The greatest power we have is the power of choice. It's an actual fact that if you've been moping in unhappiness, you can choose to be joyous instead and, by effort, lift yourself into joy. If you tend to be fearful, you can overcome that misery by choosing to have courage. Even in darkest grief you have a choice. The whole trend and quality of anyone's life is determined in the long run by the choices that are made.

- Norman Vincent Peale

An Enduring Truth

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

- Abraham Lincoln

The Greatest Need

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Opinions

We must love them both - those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have laboured in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.

- St. Thomas Aquinas

Success and Failure

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.

- Jim Rohn

True Love

What is TRUE LOVE? The late Father James Keller, founder of The Christophers, put it this way:
Love delights in giving attention rather than attracting it.
Love finds the element of good and builds on it.
Love does not magnify defects.
Love is a flame that warms but never burns.
Love knows how to disagree without becoming disagreeable.
Love rejoices at the success of others instead of being envious.

Decisions

You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage - pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically - to say 'no' to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger 'yes' burning inside. The enemy of the 'best' is often the 'good.'

- Stephen Covey

African Proverb

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.

- African proverb -

Wisdom

All truly wise thoughts have already been thought thousands of times, but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Reason

I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

- Galileo Galilei

Lesson from History

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

- B. C. Forbes

Achievements

I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith. What is faith if it is not translated into action

- Mahatma Gandhi

The Best Days

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments

- Gustave Flaubert

The Harder Task

It is much harder to ask the right question than it is to find the right answer to the wrong question.

- E. E. Morison (1909 - 1995)

Researchers Develop Faster Ketchup Flow

An article in Time.com noted that ketchup flows out of a glass bottle at a rate of .028 miles per hour. That's slower than a Galapagos tortoise, which, according to the San Diego Zoo, zips along at a blazing 0.16 miles per hour, or almost six times faster than ketchup.
But impatiently tapping your ketchup bottle soon might be a thing of the past. Dave Smith, a PhD candidate at MIT, and a team of MIT mechanical engineers and nano-technologists have offered a possible solution to this ketchup flow problem. After months of research, Smith and his team developed LiquiGlide, which they define as a "kind of structured liquid [that's] rigid like a solid, but lubricated like a liquid." The researchers say that coating the inside of a bottle with LiquiGlide will cause ketchup and other sauces to slide out faster than a Galapagos tortoise. Smith claims that the sauce industry, which rakes in $17 billion a year, would love to get their hands on the invention.
The Time.com article concluded: "Let's hope some big [ketchup] companies bite. I'm tired of waiting five minutes for ketchup to land on my cheeseburger."
Possible Preaching Angles: This illustration shows the ridiculous level of impatience that sometimes exist in our culture--the desire to have everything we want (even spiritual transformation) right now.

Keith Wagstaff, "MIT Scientists Figure Out How to Get Ketchup Out of the Bottle," Time.com (22 May 2012)

Marriage Is Like a Formal Dinner in Reverse

Germans sometimes use a culinary metaphor for marriage, comparing the lifelong journey of marriage to a formal French or German dinner menu—except the courses are served in reverse order.
According to this analogy, marriage actually begins with the last course—dessert. There's a season of sweetness. But, sadly, the sweetness doesn't always last. Temptations and distractions often follow this dessert-like honeymoon phase. In a formal French dinner, the second course includes a seductive selection of cheeses. At times there are so many cheese selections that diners get focused on flirting from one plate to the next. The third course consists of a beautifully prepared salad that adds freshness and vitamins to the meal. The fourth and main dish is the red meat course, the long, substantial, satisfying and nutritious body of any good dinner or marriage. The fifth course consists of a light fish or seafood dish that can be fraught with dangerous bones. Finally, the menu of a marriage ends with an enjoyable tray of hors d'oeuvres. After decades of commitment, mastering all the earlier courses of marriage, a husband and wife are rewarded with the delight of remaining committed throughout the entire journey of life.
In the end, they've truly become one. The French might compare their union to the blend of two famous kinds of grapes—Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. When these grapes are blended together they become the mellow Bordeaux wine that is loved around the world.

Matthias Pankau, Leipzig, Germany, "50th Wedding Anniversary Mediation for Gillian and Uwe Siemon-Netto" (May 12, 2012)

Winners

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

- B. C. Forbes

Success

The great difference between those who succeed and those who fail does not consist in the amount of work done by each but in the amount of intelligent work. Many of those who fail most ignominiously do enough to achieve grand success but they labour haphazardly at whatever they are assigned, building up with one hand to tear down with the other. They do not grasp circumstances and change them into opportunities. They have no faculty for turning honest defeats into telling victories. With ability enough and ample time, the major ingredients of success, they are forever throwing back and forth an empty shuttle and the real web of their life is never woven.

- Og Mandino

A Test

I am a big believer in the 'mirror test.' All that matters is if you can look in the mirror and honestly tell the person you see there, that you've done your best.

- John McKay

Patience

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.

- Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)

Gifts

We have been miseducated about gift giving. We believe gifts must always bear a price tag or be given for a particular reason...The real joy in giving comes when we give what we have spontaneously...

- Iyanla Vanzant

Value

To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them as if they were household pets.

- Mencius, philosopher (c. 380-289 BCE)

Remembrance Day Thought

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children

- Jimmy Carter

Searching

In truth everything and everyone
Is a shadow of the Beloved,
And our seeking is His seeking
And our words are His words...
We search for Him here and there,
while looking right at Him.
Sitting by His side, we ask:
"O Beloved, where is the Beloved?"

- Rumi, poet and mystic (1207-1273)

The Important Moments

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these

- Susan B. Anthony

Two Steps

All things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation of all things. You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You begin with the end in mind.

- Stephen Covey

What Brings Life

Life energy flows when we create, or when we help another person's creativity flower by encouraging them in some way.
Think of the sense of joy and satisfaction that one can derive from the simple act of planting flowers, cooking a meal, writing a poem, solving a problem, painting a picture, dressing with flair, or doing your job to the best of your abilities.
Creativity brings us life, and by using our creativity we help bring the world into being

- Joan Borysenko

What is produced

The soul attracts that which it secretly harbours; that which it loves, and also that which it fears; it reaches the height of its cherished aspirations; it falls to the level of its unchastened desires. Every thought-seed sown or allowed to fall into the mind, and to take root there, produces its own, blossoming sooner or later into act, and bearing its own furtive of opportunity and circumstance. Good thoughts bear good fruit; bad thought, bad fruit.

- James Allen

Great Things

It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not only not poorer, but it is even richer

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Have You Been Praying for Armadillos?

Christian comedian Ken Davis tells the following story about waiting for a "sign from God." A Christian gets on an empty city bus, walks to rear, and sits down. Lord, he prays, if you want me to speak to someone about you, please give me a sign. At the next stop another passenger boards the bus, goes all the way to the back, and sits down right next to the Christian. The passenger asks, "Do you know anything about Jesus?"
The Christian excuses himself for a moment and slowly bows his head and once again prays,
Lord, if you really want me to talk to this stranger, I need just one more sign. Please turn the bus driver into an armadillo.
Have you been praying for armadillos?
Have you been waiting for a sign from God you really hope never comes before you get serious about following him?

Clare De Graaf, The 10-Second Rule (Howard Books, 2013), page 51

The Better Option

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though chequered by failure...than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Dreams

Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born

- Dr. Dale Turner

Aiming high

To dream anything that you want to dream, that is the beauty of the human mind. To do anything that you want to do, that is the strength of the human will. To trust yourself, to test your limits, that is the courage to succeed

- Bernard Edmonds