Success is a Journey
by, Corey Wells

The great Earl Nightingale said, “Success is the progressive realization of a worthwhile goal.” What he means is being successful is not just reaching your goal, but the continuous activity towards that goal. After all, there’s no point in a person’s life where they actually stop, look at what they have, and suddenly decide that’s it, I have enough and I’ve made it to where I want to be. Do you think Bill Gates and Donald Trump did that, or did they just set higher goals and aspirations and continue onward?

Success is a journey, not a final destination. You become successful as soon as you begin the journey. So if you’re striving to reach a goal you are successful. If a new salesperson’s initial goal is to sell 15 widgets a week, is his success concluded when he reaches that goal, of course not. They may have been successful, but the journey continues by setting new higher goals and objectives.

Being successful is about striving to overcoming personal barriers and recognizing your own unique dreams. Success is the result of a combination of commitment, passion, and patience on a never ending voyage. Make your entire life a part of one long successful journey.

Let’s get started.

1. Beauty without intelligence is an illusion that is close to disenchantment. It is like a fairy that fascinates us, as long as we look at her through the enchanting prism of her beauty. However, it disappears as soon as the light of reason penetrates beyond the place where the eyes can see.”
   -Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera,
2. “Common folk, not statesmen, nor generals nor great men of affairs, but just simple plain men and women, can do something to build a better, peaceful world. The future hope of peace lies with such personal …. service.”
   -Henry Cadbury,
3. ” Furthermore, we have not even to risk the journey alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”
   -Joseph Campbell,
4. “Try to love someone who you want to hate, because they are
   just like you, somewhere inside, in a way you may never expect, in a way that resounds so deeply within you that you cannot believe it.”
   Margaret Cho,
5. “It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the
   mechanisms of friendship.”
   Colette,
6. “He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.”
   Confucius,
7. “To err is human, but it feels divine.”
   MAE WEST,
8. “Who can give law to lovers? Love is a greater law to itself.”
   -Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus),

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Dealing With Adversity
by, Corey Wells

No matter who you are, at one time or another you’ve had to deal with adversity. We’ve all experienced times when nothing seems to go right. Whether it’s surviving a crisis, dealing with an unexpected setback or any number of possible occurrences. If you can name a problem, it’s happen to us or someone we know.

Today, we live in a society where blaming is pretty much the norm. We blame our parents, we blame the politicians, we blame our employers, we blame our customers, we blame the weather, and so on. But if we want to overcome our adversities, we need to change our attitudes and outlook. Instead of looking at adversity as something that was “done to us” by something or someone else, we need to identify it as a blameless event that we can learn a positive lesson from. Instead of saying; “Why am I the victim of such adversity?” ask yourself “What can I learn from this?

By changing our outlook, we’ll find we have better responses and a much better outcome. It’s not the problem but rather your response to the problem that’s important. By coming up with new responses, we’ll be free from the previous response patterns that have always limited our progress. If we can look at adversity as just an impersonal experience, we’ll soon discover that overcoming it is nothing more than choosing a different way to experience the situation.

One of the greatest thoughts on adversity I’ve ever heard comes from the late professor Randy Pausch who was dying of pancreatic cancer and said, “We can’t change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” I think this sums up dealing with adversity perfectly.

Let’s get started.

1. “All virtues come down to courage, at the sharp end of the sword. But courage must be tempered by prudence. Courage wasted by misdirection is the most heart-breaking of all tragedies. If there is an eighth deadly sin, it ought to be stupidity, by which all virtues run out into dry sands. Yet…where does prudence end and cowardice begin? That’s a very good damn question!”
   -Lois McMaster Bujold,
2. “Every man hath a good and a bad angel attending on him in particular all his life long.”
   -Robert Burton,
3. Never underestimate the importance of having fun. I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day, because there’s no other way to play it.
   -Randy Pausch
4. “Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance and love have no end.”
   -George W. Bush,
5. “Justice while she winks at crimes,
   Stumbles on innocence sometimes.”
   -Samuel Butler
6. “A real thinker is one of the rarest things in nature. He comes only at long intervals in human history, and when he does come, he is often astonishingly unwelcome. Indeed, he is sometimes speedily sent the way of the unfit and unprotesting earthworm.”
   -Nicholas Murray Butler,
7. “Until you walk a mile in another man’s moccasins you can’t imagine the smell.”
   -Robert Byrne,
8. ” “Adversity is the first path to truth.”
   -Lord (George Gordon) Byron,

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The Importance of Focus
by, Corey Wells

Focus is the act of channeling all our activities into achieving a desired objective. Focused behavior doesn’t just happen by chance. It happens when we take the time necessary to regularly look at our own behavior and then choose what needs to be done each day in order to obtain our goal. This requires a lot of personal discipline and the ability to shield yourself from the distractions of everyday events or other opportunities. Someone who is truly focused does not allow occasional problems or the resistance of others to keep them from pursuing their ultimate goal.

Although setting a desired goal and focusing your efforts to obtain that goal my sound simple, it’s not. As time passes the concentration necessary to keep focused is continually under assault by such things as boredom, new objectives and other possibilities. Many start out with clear objectives, but find themselves inevitably distracted by other emerging and exciting opportunities. It’s easy to get excited about something new and many times people have fallen pray to shifting focus half way through their original goal.

What happens when we lose focus? We start going in multiple directions toward multiple goals and end up doing nothing well. We have essentially invited failure by focusing our efforts on too many things. Success comes from focusing on doing one thing right, rather than doing many things poorly. Stay focused and be successful at whatever you do.

Let’s get started.

1. ” Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.”
   -Heywood Broun,
2. ” If your life is free of failures, you’re not taking enough risks.”
   -H. Jackson Brown, Jr.,
3. “You must be willing to do the things today others don’t do in order to have the things tomorrow others won’t have. “
   -Les Brown,
4. “He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself.”
   -Sir Thomas Browne,
5. “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
   Or what’s a heaven for?”
   -Robert Browning,
6. ” “Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”
   -William Jennings Bryan
7. “The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.”
   -Pearl Buck,
8. “Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.”
   -Buddha

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