If you are depressed, you are living in the past
If you are anxious, you are living in the future
If you are at peace, your are living in the present
by Lao Tzu
ATTITUDE
“The longer I live, the more i realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearances, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change the past…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude…i am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our ATTITUDES”
-Charles Swindoll
$5 Lamp Could Shed Light to Those in areas still Without Electricity!
This $5 lamp is powered by gravity (and just destroyed
its funding target on Indiegogo)
A lamp for $5 that does not require any electrical power source?
It may sound like an impossible dream, but two designers in London have built functioning prototypes of GravityLight, a cheap way for people in developing countries t0 light homes, recharge batteries, or power a radio. And they just exceeded their Indiegogo fundraising goal by more than 500 percent with 21 days left in their campaign, so they’ll have the resources to mass-produce the light for less than $5 a unit.
The GravityLIght comes in the bag that will be filled with dirt or stones to power it
Martin Riddiford and Jim Reeves have spent four years developing GravityLight, which uses the Earth’s gravity to generate enough power to light an LED bulb for half an hour — no electrical grid, batteries, or any external generator required.
Using the GravityLight simply requires removing the small white lamp from its bag, hanging it up, filling the bag with about 20 pounds of dirt or rocks, and attaching the bag to bottom of the device.
Gravity powers a generator, light fills your room, and every 30 minutes, you hoist the bag back up.
The goal is to provide clean, efficient light for the 1.5 billion human beings on this planet who still do not have reliable access to electricity and use kerosene-powered lamps. According to Riddiford and Reeves, the use of kerosene results in vastly higher cancer rates due to smoke inhalation, and 2.5 million burn victims due to dropped or jostled lamps every year in India alone. Not to mention the cost: 10 percent to 20 percent of a household’s income in the developing world can go to fuel for lighting.
The initial run of 1,000 GravityLights will be distributed for free to villagers in Africa and India, the designers say. Based on the results, they will tweak the product and then seek NGO and non-profit organizations’ help in distributing it even more widely.
Here’s their explanatory video:
Thousands of backers have contributed anywhere from $10, which gets a thank-you, to $100, which pays for three GravityLights to be sent to needy villages in developing nations, a GravityLight of your own, and several other perks. And four sponsors have signed up at the $5,000 level to help the project succeed — and get their names and logos on the initial run of devices.
Image credits: GravityLight Project
This World Needs Leaders
an excerpt from John Maxwell’s book, “Developing the Leader Within”
This world needs leaders…
who use their influence at the right times for the right reasons,
who take a little greater share of the blame and a little smaller share of the credit;
who lead themselves successfully before attempting to lead others,
who continue to search for the best answer, not the familiar one;
who add value to the people and organizations they lead;
who work for the benefit of others and not for personal gain;
who handle themselves with their heads and handle others with their hearts;
who know the way, go the way and show the way;
who inspire and motivate rather than intimidate and manipulate;
who live with people to know their problems and live with God in order to solve them;
who realize that their dispositions are more important than their positions;
who mold opinions instead of following opinion polls;
who understand that an institution is the reflection of their character;
who never place themselves above others except in carrying responsibilities;
who will be as honest in small things as in great things;
who discipline themselves so they will not be disciplined by others;
who encounter setbacks and turn them into comebacks;
who follow a moral compass that points in the right direction regardless of the trends
Zig Ziglar: 10 Quotes That Can Change Your Life
Zig Ziglar died today at age 86. A World War II veteran, Zig Ziglar became the top sales person in several organizations before striking out on his own as a motivational speaker and trainer. With a Southern charm and lessons grounded in Christianity, Ziglar wrote over two dozen books and amassed a following of millions who were encouraged by his lessons for success.
Below are 10 quotes from Zig Ziglar that have the power to completely change the direction of one’s life.
10) “Remember that failure is an event, not a person.”
9) “You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.”
8 ) “People often say motivation doesn’t last. Neither does bathing—that’s why we recommend it daily.”
7) “There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.”
6) “People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.”
5) “Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.”
4) “If you go looking for a friend, you’re going to find they’re scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.”
3) “A goal properly set is halfway reached.”
2) “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”
1) “If you can dream it, you can achieve it.”
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7 Reasons Good Teams Become Dysfunctional
Have you ever been part of a team that just can’t seem to get things done? Don’t despair; it happens more than you think.
Here are the most common habits of a dysfunctional team and how to change them so you can get your group back on track.
1. Leadership
Dysfunctional teams lack a strong leader. A team needs a strong leader to identify the team’s objective, maintain the group’s focus on that end, and drive the team toward its established goal.
2. Team Members
Dysfunctional teams often have members more interested in individual glory and less interested in the team’s objective. The goal of the team must always remain the team’s focus. The quest for individual glory is contrary to the very concept of a team. As such, a true team needs members that are concerned only with how they can help the team achieve its goal and not what achieving the goal will be able to do for them individually.
3. Defined Goal
A dysfunctional team often fails to define its goal. A well-organized team defines its goal or goals from the outset and then sets out a road map as to how to get there.
4. Equitable Distribution
Dysfunctional teams disproportionately place too much of the team’s work on a few of its members’ shoulders. This is contrary to the entire concept of the team. If one person is going to do everything, why have a team to begin with? It is wasteful. A successful team combines individuals who come together to accomplish the defined goal and spread the work load evenly across team members. Each person is necessary to achieve the goal.
5. Focus
Dysfunctional teams lack focus. They may convene to discuss an issue but get caught up in seemingly endless debate surrounding a general topic while never moving toward an ultimate goal. A team needs to maintain its focus on achieving its defined goal.
6. Accountability
Dysfunctional teams lack accountability. They push back deadlines, or worse, they ponder theoretical questions without defined goals in mind. Moving back deadlines or simply gathering to endlessly pontificate without defined goals leads to a lack of accountability. Without accountability, it is easy to lose focus on the team’s goal. A successful team maintains its accountability to achieving its ultimate end.
7. Decisiveness
Dysfunctional teams lack decisiveness. Often flowing from a strong team leader, a team needs to be decisive. Consider facts, draw conclusions on the basis of the best available information, and make a decision. A team’s goal must always be to make a decision and then to act to accomplish its goal or make recommendations as required to do so.
What Successful People Do!
WORK SMART
What Successful People Do With The First Hour Of Their Work Day
How much does the first hour of every day matter? As it turns out, a lot. It can be the hour you see everything clearly, get one real thing done, and focus on the human side of work rather than your task list.
Remember when you used to have a period at the beginning of every day to think about your schedule, catch up with friends, maybe knock out a few tasks? It was called home room, and it went away after high school. But many successful people schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room every day. You should too.
The first hour of the workday goes a bit differently for Craig Newmark of Craigslist, David Karp of Tumblr, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, career writer (and Fast Company blogger) Brian Tracy, and others, and they’ll tell you it makes a big difference. Here are the first items on their daily to-do list.
Don’t Check Your Email for the First Hour. Seriously. Stop That.
Tumblr founder David Karp will “try hard” not to check his email until 9:30 or 10 a.m., according to an Inc. profile of him. “Reading e-mails at home never feels good or productive,” Karp said. “If something urgently needs my attention, someone will call or text me.”
Not all of us can roll into the office whenever our Vespa happens to get us there, but most of us with jobs that don’t require constant on-call awareness can trade e-mail for organization and single-focus work. It’s an idea that serves as the title of Julie Morgenstern’s work management book Never Check Email In The Morning, and it’s a fine strategy for leaving the office with the feeling that, even on the most over-booked days, you got at least one real thing done.
If you need to make sure the most important messages from select people come through instantly, AwayFind can monitor your inbox and get your attention when something notable arrives. Otherwise, it’s a gradual but rewarding process of training interruptors and coworkers not to expect instantaneous morning response to anything they send in your off-hours.
Gain Awareness, Be Grateful
One smart, simple question on curated Q & A site Quora asked “How do the most successful people start their day?”. The most popular response came from a devotee of Tony Robbins, the self-help guru who pitched the power of mindful first-hour rituals long before we all had little computers next to our beds.
Robbins suggests setting up an “Hour of Power,” “30 Minutes to Thrive,” or at least “Fifteen Minutes to Fulfillment.” Part of it involves light exercise, part of it involves motivational incantations, but the most accessible piece involves 10 minutes of thinking of everything you’re grateful for: in yourself, among your family and friends, in your career, and the like. After that, visualize “everything you want in your life as if you had it today.”
Robbins offers the “Hour of Power” segment of his Ultimate Edge series as a free audio stream (here’s the direct MP3 download). Blogger Mike McGrath also wrote a concise summary of the Hour of Power). You can be sure that at least some of the more driven people you’ve met in your career are working on Robbins’ plan.
Do the Big, Shoulder-Sagging Stuff First
Brian Tracy’s classic time-management book Eat That Frog gets its title from a Mark Twain saying that, if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, you’ve got it behind you for the rest of the day, and nothing else looks so bad. Gina Trapani explained it well in a video for her Work Smart series). Combine that with the concept of getting one thing done before you wade into email, and you’ve got a day-to-day system in place. Here’s how to force yourself to stick to it:
Choose Your Frog
“Choose your frog, and write it down on a piece of paper that you’ll see when you arrive back at your desk in the morning, Tripani advises.“If you can, gather together the material you’ll need to get it done and have that out, too.”
One benefit to tackling that terrible, weighty thing you don’t want to do first thing in the morning is that you get some space from the other people involved in that thing–the people who often make the thing more complicated and frustrating. Without their literal or figurative eyes over your shoulder, the terrible thing often feels less complex, and you can get more done.
Ask Yourself If You’re Doing What You Want to Do
Feeling unfulfilled at work shouldn’t be something you realize months too late, or even years. Consider making an earnest attempt every morning at what the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford to do:
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
“Customer Service” (or Your Own Equivalent)
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark answered the first hour question succinctly: “Customer service.” He went on to explain (or expand) that he also worked on current projects, services for military families and veterans, and protecting voting rights. But customer service is what Newmark does every single day at Craigslist, responding to user complaints and smiting scammers and spammers. He almost certainly has bigger fish he could pitch in on every day, but Newmark says customers service “anchors me to reality.”
Your own version of customer service might be keeping in touch with contacts from year-ago projects, checking in with coworkers you don’t regularly interact with, asking questions of mentors, and just generally handling the human side of work that quickly gets lost between task list items. But do your customer service on the regular, and you’ll have a more reliable roster of helpers when the time comes.
