[BOOKS] - ABRAHAM LINCOLN BY GR BENSON

14/10/2013

1. ”As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy” – Abraham Lincoln.
2. Lincoln discovered that marriage is “a field of battle and not a bed of roses” a battle in which we are forced to suspect that he did not play his full part.
3. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better, as it appears to me.
4. Lincoln’s judgement – If slavery is not wrong nothing is wrong.
5. Lincoln said “By God, body’s, let’s get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I will hit it hard.
6. Great advantage in having one’s choice restricted by circumstances to good books.

END

[BOOKS] - THE GREATNESS GUIDE 2 BY ROBIN SHARMA

14/10/2013

1. What you resist will persist. But what you befriend, you will transcend.
2. Success will come from simplicity.
3. Be so good they can’t ignore you.
4. Your life will expand or contract in direct relationship to your willingness to walk directly towards the things that you fear. Do your fears and you will shine.  Run away from them and you shrink from greatness.
5. So amazing what happens when you encounter a situation that makes you feel uncomfortable/ insecure/ scared and yet, instead of heading for the metaphorical exit door, you stay strong and do the thing you know you should do. First, you realize that the fear was mostly a hallucination. And second, you get some kind of unexpected reward for your bravery, because on the other side of every fear door lie gorgeous gifts, including personal growth, confidence and wisdom.
6. Leadership is not about your position; it’s a way of being leading without title, to be precise. Leadership is about holding yourself to world class standards, taking personal responsibility; being excellent within the sphere of your influence, building beautiful relationships and elevating others by your example.
7. The way you do the little things says a lot about the way you will do the big things.
8. The little things truly are the big ones.
9. Listening is a master skill for personal and professional excellence. Leaders listen.
10. Greatness in so many ways is determined by whether you persist through failure or let it consume you.
11. You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle and show up as a leader. Life is all about how you exercise the choices available to you. And your daily choices stack up to craft your destiny. Day by day, work by week, month by month, year by year.
12. Every so called mistake is actually a rich source of learning. An opportunity to build more awareness and understanding and gain precious experience.
13. It’s better to die standing than live your whole life on your knees.
14. What you value in your life increases in value. What you think about and focus on grows. What you appreciate begins to appreciate.
15. Leadership occurs in moments of challenge, not during moments of ease.
16. Ideation without execution is mere delusion.
17. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, powe r and magic.
18. Nothing happens until you move.
19. Human beings are the only creatures in the world that can step out of themselves and reflect on their thoughts and actions. Monkeys can’t do this, Dog can’t, Cats can’t; only we can.
20. The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul.
21. If you don’t try, you will never know.
22. The humblest is the greatest.
23. What we resist really does persist.
24. Every conflict carries within it a chance for you to learn a powerful lesson and to grow as a human being.
25. Better awareness drives better choices, and better choices create better results.
26. You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.
27. Leadership is about a lot more than trying to look good in the eyes of others. Its about standing for a cause.
28. It’s your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
29. People who are outstanding always get found out. The cliché is true. The cream always rises to the top.
30. Life does not give you what you want but just might send you what you need.
31. The actions you take each day create the results of your life.
32. You will never go any higher than your thinking.
33. It does not matter what other people think of you. All that matters is what you think of you.
34. At the end of each day, what matters most is whether you were true to yourself.
35. The best among us don’t take themselves too seriously.
36. The only way to truly get power is to give it away.
37. Real power comes when you spread your passion, offer people a reason to climb your strategic mountain tops, treat them with rare respect and give them permission to shine, grow and lead without title.
38. Good things happen to people who do good things.
39. No matter what life sends us, we are responsible for the way we respond.
40. You will only be as good as the chances you take.
41. When you know better, you can do better.
42. We really will become our associations.
43. The highest moments of our lives are the moments shared with those we love.
44. Money is not the most important form of wealth.
45. Success is all about a masterful consistently around fundamentals.
46. Leadership is all about believing in others and yourself when no one else does.
47. Develop, honor and inspire people and they will fly.
48. The finest things in life take patience, focus and sacrifice. To get to world class, you need to work at it daily, relentlessly, passionately.
49. The more painful the event, the more profound the lesson.
50. Wisdom only comes the hard way.
51. Your team will never be greater than you are(even if you are not the team leader). You set the standard to which you all can rise.
52. Everything begins with you.
53. Successful people don’t make excuses. They create results.
54. Leadership has so much to do with relationships.
55. The quality of your inner world eventually is reflected in the quality of your outer world. Your external life can never grow bigger than your internal one.
56. A person who dreams pristine dreams and who is impeccably honest, good, and ethical and stands for what’s best will soon act in alignment with those values. And those actions cannot help but drive extraordinary results.
57. Making mistakes is part of getting to success.
58. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the most of it without knowing what’s going to happen next.
59. Self-faith is a hallmark of greatness.
60. Do your best and let life do the rest.
61. With better awareness, you will make better choices. And as you make better choices, you are certain to experience better results.
62. You will never know if you don’t even try.
63. Nothing happens until you ask.
64. Become so good at your craft that your organization cannot run without you.
65. Sleep begets sleep.
66. There will be plenty of time to sleep when you are dead.
67. It is not possible to discover new oceans unless one is willing to lose sight of the shore.
68. Give support to get it. Give praise to receive it. Give your best to attract it. Give more respect to experience it. And give more love to become beloved.
69. Help others reach world class. And they will joyfully help you get to your cherished ideals.
70. Every great executive is strikingly disciplined, as is every great company.
71. The best thing in life requires sacrifice and devotion. Each of us, to get to our own unique forms of personal and professional greatness, must pay the price. And the more we pay, the more we will receive.
72. Give your best, and the best will come to you.
73. Each day we have the opportunity to make choices. And the way we choose shapes our destiny.
74. It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that things are difficult.
75. Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
76. Everyone who is causing you stress, struggle and challenge in your life just might be an angel of sorts. They just might be the very messengers carrying the lessons you most need to learn to get to your next level of greatness.
77. When people feel respected, they feel better about themselves. And people, who feel good, do well.
78. Life’s most painful experiences are the very circumstances that introduce us to our best.
79. We learn more from the times that test us than we do from times of success.
80. Success is all about being in the process of joyfully creating a life that reflects your highest values, your deepest beliefs and your greatest dreams.
81. 20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you did not do than by the ones you did.
82. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude to a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.

END

[BOOKS] - EAT THAT FROG! BY BRIAN TRACY

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18/09/2013

1. Galileo - You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
2. Napoleon Hill - There is one quality that one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants and a burning desire to achieve it.
3. Stephen covey - Before you began scrambling up the ladder of success, make sure that it is leaning against the right building.
4. Goals are the fuels in the furnace of achievement.
5. Proper prior planning prevents poor performance.
6. Time management is really life management, personal management.
7. Orison Swelt Marden - Every great man has become great, every successful man has succeeded in proportion as he has confined his powers to one particular channel.
8. What can i and only i do that if done well will make a real difference?
9. What is the most valuable use of my time right now?
10. Goethe - A) Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least. b) Only engage and the mind grows heated. Begin it and the work will be completed.
11. You can get your time and your life under control only to the degree to which you discontinue lower value activities.
12. You can get better only when you are open to the constructive input of other people.
13. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
14. Your rewards, both financial and emotional, will always be in direct proportion to your results, to the value of your contribution. If you want to increase your rewards, you must focus on increasing the value of what you do.
15. While you are setting goals and priorities, getting organized, concentrating single-minded on one task at a time and disciplining yourself to complete your most important tasks, you must never forget that your ultimate goal is to live a long, happy and healthy life.
16. Fully 85 percent of you happiness in life will come from happy relationships with other people, especially those closest to you, as well as the members of your family. The critical determinant of the quality of your relationships is the amount of time that you spend face to face with the people you love and who love you in return.
17. It is the quality of time at work that counts and the quantity of time at home that matters.
18. You must never lose sight of the fact that the reason for working efficiently is so that you can enjoy a higher quality of  life at home with your family.
19. The only way to overcome your fear is to "do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain".
20. The way you develop the courage you need is to act as if you already had the courage and behave accordingly.
21. Learn what you need to learn so that you can do your work in an excellent fashion.
22. Remember, however good you are today, your knowledge and skills are becoming obsolete at a rapid rate. Anytime you stop striving to get better, you are bound to get worse.
23. Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.
24. The more you learn, the more you can learn. Just as you can build your physical muscles through physical exercise, you can build your mental muscles with mental exercises.
25. Concentrate all your thoughts on the task at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
26. The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.
27. Successful people continually put the pressure on themselves to perform at high levels.
28. Most of your emotions, positive or negative are determined by how you talk to yourself on a minute to minute basis. It is not what happens to you but the way that you interpret the things that are happening to you that determines how you feel.
29. You should never share your problems with others because 80% of people don't care about them anyway and the other 20% are king of glad that you've got them in the first place.
30. Difficulties come not to obstruct but to instruct.
31. When you continually visualize your goals and ideals and talk to yourself in a positive way, you feel more focused and energized.
32. For you to stay calm, clearheaded and capable of performing at your best, you need to detach on a regular basis from the technology and communication devices that can overwhelm you if you are not careful.
33. Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all of your energies on a limited set of targets.
34. You job in time management is to deliberately and creatively organize the concentrated time periods you need to get your key jobs done well and on schedule.
35. Do not wait; the time will never be "just right". Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command and better tools will be found as you go along.
36. Perhaps the most outwardly identifiable quality of high performing man and women is action orientation. They are in a hurry to get their key tasks completed.
37. Self discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.
38. Self discipline, self mastery and self control are the basic building blocks of character and high performance.

END

[BOOKS] - HOW TO STOP WORRYING ANS START LIVING BY DALE CARNEGIE

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12/08/2013

Preface

1. Leadership usually gravitates to the man who can get up and say what he thinks.
2. Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction.
3. Learning is an active process, we learn by doing.
4. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.
5. The rapidity with which we forget is astonishing.

PART ONE

Unit-1  Live in "Day-tight compartments"

1. "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand".
2. The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past. The future is today. There is no tomorrow.
3. The best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm on doing today's work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.
4. Good thinking deals with causes and effects and leads to logical, constructive planning; bad thinking frequently leads to tension and nervous breakdown.
5. Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hour glass. You and I everyone else are like the hour glass.
6. Every day is a new life to a wise man.
7. Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
8. The rule is jam tomorrow, and jam yesterday but never jam today.
9. By kalidasa

                 SALUTATION TO THE DAWN

LOOK TO THIS DAY!

FOR IT IS LIFE, THE VERY LIFE OF LIFE

IN ITS BRIEF COURSE

LIE ALL THE VERITIES AND REALITIES OF YOUR EXISTENCE

THE BLISS OF GROWTH

THE GLORY OF ACTION

THE SPLENDOR OF BEAUTY,

FOR YESTERDAY IS BUT A DREAM

AND TOMORROW IS ONLY A VISION,

BUT TODAY WELL LIVED MAKES EVERY YESTERDAY A DREAM OF HAPPINESS

AND EVERY TOMORROW A VISION OF HOPE

LOOK WELL THEREFORE, TO THIS DAY!

SUCH IS THE SALUTATION TO THE DAWN.

Unit - 2  A Magic formula for solving worry situations

1. One of the worst features about worrying is that it destroys our ability to concentrate.
2. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step in overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

Unit - 3 What worry may do to you

1. Those who do not know how to fight worry die young.
2. Worry makes you tense and nervous and affects the nerves of your stomach and actually changes the gastric juices of your stomach from normal to abnormal and often leads to stomach ulcers.
3. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
4. Face the facts; Quit worrying; then do something about it.

18/08/2013

PART TWO   BASIC TECHNIQUES IN ANALYZING WORRY

Unit - 4  How to Analyze and solve worry problems

1. If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries will visually evaporate in the light of knowledge.
2. Rule 1 for solving our problems is: Get the facts.
3. A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
4. I banish about 90% of my worries by taking these four steps.

•         Writing down precisely what i am worrying about.
•         Writing down what i can do about it.
•         Deciding what to do.
•         Starting immediately to carry out that decision.

     5.  I find that to keep thinking about our problems beyond a certain point is bound to create confusion and worry. There comes a time when any more investigation and thinking are harmful. There comes a time when we must decide and act and never look back.

Unit - 5  How to eliminate 50% of your business worries

1. What is the problem?
2. What is the cause of the problem?
3. What are all possible solutions of the problem?
4. What solutions do you suggest?

PART THREE  HOW TO BREAK THE WORRY HABIT BEFORE IT BREAKS YOU

Unit - 6  How to crowd worry out of your mind

1. The remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive.
2. I must lose myself in action, lest i wither in despair.
3. Without purpose, the days would have ended, as such days always end, in disintegration..
4. Emerson said "If you and i don't keep busy - if we sit around and brood - we will hatch out a whole flock of what charles darwin used to call the 'Wibber Gibbers", and the wibber gibbers are nothing but old-fashioned gremlins that will run us hollow and destroy our power of action and our power of will."
5. George bernard shaw said " The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not."

Unit - 7  Don't let the beetles get you down

1. We often face the major disasters of life bravely and then let the trifles, the "pain in the neck".
2. Little things in marriage drive people to the edge of insanity and cause half the heartaches in the world.
3. Trivialities are at the bottom of most marital unhappiness.
4. Life is too short to be little.
5. Let's not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget, Remember "Life is too short to be little".

Unit - 8  A law that will outlaw many of your worries

1. It has been said that nearly all of our worries and unhappiness come from our imagination and not from reality.
2. Let's examine the record. Let's ask ourselves: What are the chances, according to the law of averages, that this event i am worrying about will ever occur.

Unit - 9  Cooperate with the inevitable

1. It is astonishing how quickly we can accept almost any situation, If we have to and adjust ourselves to it and forget about it.
2. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortunes.
3. Teach me neither to cry for the moon nor over split milk.
4. A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.
5. We are stronger then we think.
6. For every ailment under the sun, there is a remedy, or there is none;If there be one, try to find it; If there be none, never mind it.
7. J.V. Penny said "I wouldn't worry if i lost every dollar i have because i don't see what is to gained by worrying. I do the best job i possibly can! and leave the results in the laps of the gods. Henry ford told me much the same thing. When i can't handle events, he said ' I let them handle themselves'"
8. Epictetus(Rome) - 19 Centuries ago said "There is only one way to happiness, ie. To cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will."
9. When we stop fighting the inevitable, we release energy which enables us to create a richer life.
10. Try to bear lightly what needs must be.
11. God grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, the courage to change the things i can and the wisdom to know the difference.
12. Cooperate with the inevitable.

Unit - 10  Put a "Stop-Loss" order on your worries

1. We are fools when we overpay for a thing in terms of what if takes of our very existence.
2. A great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made or the value of things and by their giving too much for their whistles.
3. Whenever we are tempted to throw good money after bad in terms of human living, let's stop and ask ourselves these three questions.

• How much does this thing i am worrying about really matter to me?
• At what point shall i set a "Stop - loss" order on this worry and forget it?
• Exactly how much shall i pay for this whistle? Have i already paid more than it is worth?

Unit - 11  Don't try to saw sawdust

1. The past can be constructive and that is by calmly analyzing our past mistakes and profiting by them and forgetting them.
2. It is easier to teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.
3. Knowledge is not power until it is applied.
4. When you start worrying about things that are over and done with, you are merely trying to saw sawdust.
5. Wise men never sit and wail their loss, but cheerily seek how to redress their harms.  

25/08/2013

Unit - 12  Eight words that can transform your life

1. A man is what he thinks about all day long.
2. Our life is what our thoughts make it.
3. You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.
4. Concern means realizing what the problems are and calmly taking steps to meet them. Worrying means going around in maddening, futile circles.
5. All causation was mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon.
6. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
7. He who conquers his spirit is mightier than he who taketh a city.
8. Our peace of mind and the joy we get out of living depends not on where we are, or what we have, or who we are, but solely upon our mental attitude.
9. Milton said " The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven out of hell, a hell of heaven.
10. Nothing can brng you peace but yourself.
11. William james said "We cannot instantly change our emotions just by 'making up our minds to' - but that we can change our actions. And that when we change our actions, we will automatically change our feelings".
12. A man can only rise, conquer and achieve by lifting up his thoughts.
13. Think and act cheerfully and you will feel cheerful.

Unit - 13  The high cost of getting even

Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred there with.

A soft answer turneth away wrath.

We may not be saintly enough to love our enemies, but, for the sake of our own health and happiness. Let's at-least forgive them and forget them.

Let's never try to get even with our enemies, because if we do we will hurt ourselves far more than we hurt them. Let's do as general Eisenhower does: let's never waste a minute thinking about people we don't like.

Unit - 14  If you do this, you will never worry about ingratitude

"An angry man," said confucious, "s always full of poison".

Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation. You do not find it among gross people.

It is natural for people to forget to be grateful; So, if we go around expecting gratitude, we are headed straight for a lot of heartaches.

"The ideal man," said aristotle, "takes joy in doing favors of others".

We must remember that our children are very much what we make them.

Unit - 15  Would you take a million dollars for what you have?

1. I had the blues because i had no shoes, until upon the street, i met a man who had no feet.
2. We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack.
3. You can express only what is in your own consciousness.
4. The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a year.
5. Logon pearsall smith said "There are two things to aim at in life first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second."
6. Count your blessings - not your troubles.

Unit - 16  Find yourself and be yourself; Remember there is no one else on earth like you

1. Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.
2. For better or for worse, you must cultivate your own little garden. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.
3. Envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.
4. It isn't by size that you win or you fail. Be the best of whatever you are!
5. Let us not imitate others. Let's find ourselves and be ourselves.

Unit - 17  If you have a lemon, make a lemonade

1. Two men looked out from prison bars, one saw the mud, the other saw the stars.
2. The best things are the most difficult.
3. Happiness is not mostly pleasure; it is mostly victory.
4. The most important thing in life is not to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The really important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence; and it makes the difference between a man of sense and a fool.
5. When fate hands us a lemon, let's try to make a lemonade.

Unit - 18 How to cure depression in 14 days

1. Always remember that it takes a bigger man to walk away from a fight than it does to stay and fight.
2. You can be cured in 14 days if you follow this prescription. Try to think every day how you can please someone.
3. Dr.Adler urges us to do a good deed every day. And what is a good deed? "A good Deed," said the prophet mohammed, " is one that brings a smile of joy to the face of another".
4. The necessity of making other people happy in order to be happy ourselves. Happiness is contagious.
5. Doing good to others is not a duty. It is a joy, for it increases your own health and happiness.
6. Benjamin franklin said "When you are good to others, you are best to yourself".
7. Taking an interest in people makes them beam with pleasure.
8. A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives you roses.
9. The man who forgot himself in service to others would find the joy of living.
10. Let's never waste a minute thinking about people we don't like.
11. Count your blessings - not your troubles!

31/08/2013

Unit - 19  How my mother and father conquered worry

1. Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.
2. Religion: An oasis of peace amidst the whirling sands of life.
3. The blackest moments we live through can only last a little time and then comes the future.
4. Gandhi: Without prayer, i should have been a lunatic long ago.
5. A mere man alone can easily be defeated, but a man alive with the power of god within him is invincible.
6. "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you".
7. Prayer is the most powerful form of energy one can generate.
8. Few men in their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used.

Part Six - How to keep from worrying about criticism

Unit - 20  Remember that no one ever kicks a dead dog

1. Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.
2. Remember that unjust criticism id often a disguised compliment. Remember that no one ever licks a dead dog.

Unit - 21  Do this and criticism can't hurt you

1. The more i tried to pacify and to smooth over injured feelings in order to escape personal criticism, the more certain i was to increase my enemies.
2. Do the very best you can; and then put up your old umbrella and keep the rain of criticism from running down the back of your neck.

Unit - 22  Fool things i have done

1. I myself, in the last analysis, aim to blame for almost all my misfortunes.
2. No one but myself can be blamed for my fall.
3. Benjamin franklin faults: wasting time, stewing around over trifles, arguing and contradicting people.
4. The small man flies into a rage over the slightest criticism, but the wise man is eager to learn from those who have censured him and reproved him and disputed the passage with him.
5. The opinions of our enemies come nearer to the truth about us than do our own opinions.
6. We are creatures of emotions.
7. If we hear that someone has spoken ill of us, let's not try to defend ourselves. Every fool does that. Let's be original and humble and brilliant!

08/09/2013

Part -7  Six ways to prevent fatigue and worry and keep your energy and spirits high.

Unit - 23  How to add one hour a day to your waking life

1. You cannot continue to worry if you relax.
2. Rest is not a matter of doing absolutely nothing, Rest is repair.
3. What the army does - take frequent rests. Do what your heart does - rest before you get tired, and you will add one hour a day to your waking life.

Unit - 24  What makes you tired and what you can do about it

1. Relaxation is the absence of all tension and effort.
2. Work as much as possible in a comfortable position.

Unit - 25  How to avoid fatigue and keep looking young! 

1. We have to share worry, we have to find there is someone in the world who is willing to listen and able to understand.
2. Don't dwell too long on the shortcomings of others.
3. Rhythmical breathing is one of the best methods ever discovered for soothing the nerves.

Unit - 26  Four good working habits that will help prevent fatigue and worry.

1. Order is heaven's first law.
2. Men do not die from overwork. They die from dissipation and worry.
3. Two priceless abilities: First, the ability to think, second, the ability to do things in the order of their importance.
4. Charles luckman - president - Pepsodent.  "As far back as i can remember, i have gotten up at 5'0 clock in the morning because i can think better than any other time. I can think better then and plan my day, plan to do things in the order of their importance.

Unit - 27  How to banish the boredom that produces fatigue, worry and resentment

1. Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment.
2. The lucky folks are the ones that gets to do things they enjoy doing. Such folk are lucky because they have more energy, more happiness, less worry, and less fatigue. Where your interests are, there is your energy also.
3. If i do my work as if i really enjoy it, then i do enjoy it to some extent. I also found i can work faster when i enjoy my work.
4. Give yourself a pep talk every day.
5. Our life is what our thoughts make it.
6. If you don't find happiness in your work, you may never find it anywhere.
7. When the fierce, burning winds blow over our lives and we cannot prevent then - let us too, accept the inevitable and then get busy and pick up the pieces.

Unit - 28  How to keep from worrying about insomnia

1. Rest before you get tired
2. Learn to relax at your work.
3. Learn to relax at home.

Part - 8  How I conquered worry

1. One of the chief reasons for success of life is enthusiasm.
2. I try to see my troubles iin their proper perspective.
3. When the time comes that i so fear, the strength and wisdom to meet it will be given me.
4. I realized then that i alone responsible for all my troubles.
5. God will take care of you.
6. The large mental mountains of trouble become minute molehills that new thoughts and acts quickly smooth down.
7. I find the best antidote for worry is exercise.
8. Find out precisely what is the problem you are worrying about.
9. Find out the cause of the problem.
10. Do something constructive at once about solving the problem.
11. He that sent me is with me - the father hath not left me alone.
12. Don't take yourself too seriously.
13. Few things cause more worry than dishonesty.
14. It was sink or swim before everybody.
15. Life is bigger than processes and overflows and dwarfs them.
16. Don't cry over spilt milk.
17. Nothing is going to stop me.
18. Making positive statements like that to myself, and thinking positive thoughts, helped me a lot.
19. What a foll you are to be worrying about something that has not happened and may never happen. Life is short. I have only a few years to live, so i must enjoy life. I kept saying to myself. Nothing is important but my health.
20. Now listen, as long as you can walk and feed yourself and are free from intense pain, you ought to be the happiest person in the world. No matter what happens, never forget that as long as you live/ never / never!
21. The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Why even try it?
22. George bernard shaw: "The secret of being miserable is to have leisure bother about whether you are happy or not. Keep active, keep busy!"
23. If only i have patience, the worry that is trying to harass me will often collapse like a pricked balloon.
24. Times solves a lot of things. Time may also solve what you are worrying about today.
25. Jesus: As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.
26. I was told that today was the only day over which i had any control and that i should make the most of my opportunities each day.
27. If a situation seems insurmountable, face it! start fighting! Don't give in!
28. God grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, the courage to change the things i can and the wisdom to know the difference.

END

[BOOKS] - TOUGH TIMES NEVER LAST, BUT TOUGH PEOPLE DO! BY ROBERT H.SCHULLER

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11/08/2013

1. People who never take a chance, "never get ahead".
2. Great people are ordinary people with extraordinary amounts of determination.
3. If we hold on, we will win out.
4. I am stuck like a dope with a thing called hope.
5. Determination alone would give me the victory. I resolve never to surrender.
6. We cannot merely talk about strategies for success. We have to get down to hard-core principles that will work.
7. There is not necessarily a solution for every problem; however, every problem can be managed positively.
8. You can do anything you want to do. You can be anything you want to be. You can go anywhere from where you are - If you are willing to dream big and work hard.
9. It's all in how they perceive their problems.
10. The arriver often has greater problems than the striver.
11. When you can't solve the problem, manage it.
12. If you want to solve the problem, don't wait for somebody else to help you. Tackle it yourself. Understand that you alone are personally responsible for managing your problem. Don't expect anybody else to do it for you.
13. Nobody is defeated until he starts blaming somebody else.
14. Don't fix the blame;fix the problem.
15. Nobody has a money problem;it is always an idea problem.
16. The person who knocks at the door,telephones, dates and plays the field is the person who is going to get the job.
17. Doors will open to the enthusiastic person first.
18. Unexpected sources of help come from unpredictable quarters to the person who remains positive and enthusiastic and cheerful.
19. Avoid cynical people like a plague.
20. Leadership is the force that selects your dreams and sets your goals. It is the force that propels your endeavors to success.
21. The shoe doesn't tell the feet how big to grow. The body doesn't surrender leadership to the garment.
22. I had rather attempt something great and fail than attempt nothing and succeed.
23. Every loser who tries to do something great is really a winner.
24. Attitude is more important than facts. Your attitude needs to remain positive and in the control position. Never let yourself be defeated by the facts.
25. Management is control. It is the control of a resource in order to minimize waste and maximize the development of latent possibilities.
26. Never underestimate the value of an idea. Every positive idea has within it the potential for success if it is managed properly.
27. God can do tremendous things through the person who doesn't care who get the credit.
28. Decide today: Would you rather satisfy your ego or enjoy the fruit of success.
29. People who never change their minds are either perfect or stubborn. I'm not perfect and neither are you. I would rather change plans while still in port than to set sail and sink at sea.
30. A super successful person has very few resources, except the capacity to take an idea and marshal stronger and smarter people around him to pull it off.
31. Success is never certain, and failure is never final.
32. If you won't win if you don't begin.
33. Begin by believing that you possess latent gifts of creativity. You will respect, trust and admire your own thoughts. Every person can be creative.
34. Don't play it alone. Play it with problem-solving people. Play it with possibility thinking people. Play it with people who have a record of achievement and success. You can play it alone. But a lot of ideas might come from others.
35. We fail when we give up on our faith.
36. Greatness does not depend upon your position in life, but upon your respect of the positive ideas that flow into your imagination.
37. Common people are brilliant if only they believe in their own ideas. Most human beings have the same basic brain capacity. The major difference is the attitude that a person has toward his own ideas!
38. Decision making is easy if there are no contradictions in your value system.
39. Suddenly tough times become good times when our positive reaction becomes an inspiration to others.
40. There are far more possibilities than you think. Examine them.
41. Brownouts do not have to be burnouts.
42. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst mood.
43. It is impossible to be at the top of the needle without getting pricked.
44. It doesn't matter how young or how old you are - if you want your life to thrive you must have the courage to step into tomorrow.
45. Winning starts with beginning! and to begin, you must do something now.
46. Don't wait until you are ready, or you will never make the move!
47. Life today is nothing more than a collection of results of the choices you have made. Today's decisions are tomorrow's realities.
48. You and only you will design and shape your personality.
49. I deserve to succeed as much as anyone else.
50. Nobody who tries to do something great but fails is a total failure.
51. When you want to give something back over and beyond what you have earned in your paycheck, then you are going to be noticed.
52. You have to give it all away before you can get anything back.
53. The people who really succeed are the people who give extra effort and push themselves beyond their normal limits.
54. You may not be able to control everything that happens to you, but you can control how you will react.
55. What you focus your thoughts on will be manifested in your outer life.
56. Be willing to start smaller and add to your plans as you grow.
57. When you give it all you have got, then you win.
58. God can do tremendous things through the person who doesn't care who get the credit and is willing to share the credit, share the power, and share the glory.
59. What you see is what you will be.
60. See yourself as a successful person, and you will be a successful person.
61. You can be anything or anyone you want to be if you can learn to believe in yourself.
62. Success doesn't come from where you are but from the way you think.
63. The people at the top of the ladder work harder than anyone else.
64. Success is spelled W-O-R-K.

END

[BOOKS] - BUSINESS @ THE SPEED OF THOUGHT BY BILL GATES

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10/08/2013

Unit - 1 Manage with the force of facts

1. The big work behind business judgment is in finding and acknowledging the facts and circumstances concerning technology, the market and the like in their continuously changing forms. The rapidity of modern technological change makes the search for facts a permanently necessary feature.
2. How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose.
3. The critical thing is that a company's managers have the information to understood their competitive edge and what their next great market could be.
4. Information technology and business are becoming in inextricably interwoven.
5. The immediate availability of accurate information changes strategic thinking from a separate, stand-alone activity to an ongoing process integrated with regular business activities.
6. Information work is thinking work.
7. Companies should spend less time protecting financial data from employees and more time teaching them to analyze and act on it.
8. Pilots like to say that good landings are the result of good approaches. Good meetings are the result of good preparation.
9. Without facts it's impossible to put a sound policy into effect. I am optimistic enough to believe that if you have sound facts, you can put a sound policy into effect.
10. The more interactive a site is, the more business activity it gets from its visitors.
11. Michael dell puts it well when he says that process innovation is now the fundamental source of competitive advantage.

Unit - 2 Can your digital nervous system do this?

1. A firm's IQ is determined by the degree to which its IT infrastructure connects, shares and structures information. Isolated applications and date, no matter how impressive, can produce idiot savants but not a highly functional corporate behavior.
2. No company will prosper for long if products don't go out the door or if the bills and the employees don't get paid.
3. Too-often, important customer and sales information is pulled together on a one time only basis when consultants arrive. You should have that information available on an ongoing basis for your regular business staff.
4. Integrating sales data with partners not only streamlines reporting processes, but also raises the business discussions to a more strategic level.
5. The ability to touch their customers with individualized service is increasing their revenue.
6. The web life style is about broadening horizons not narrowing them.

Unit - 8 Change the boundaries of business

1. The re-engineering principle is that companies should focus on their core competencies and outsource everything else.
2. By and large the changes in organizational structure will empower good employees.
3. Technology threatens us if we sit back and let someone else use it. It helps us if we use it to move quickly to design services where the bank becomes the value-added intermediary to our customers.
4. Almost all the time involved in producing an item is in the coordination of the work, not in the actual production.
5. An essential quality of a good manager is a determination to deal with any kind of bad news head on to seek it out rather than deny it. An effective manager wants to hear about what's going wrong before he or she hears about what's going right.
6. To get into a new business, you have to believe at-least for a while. But you also have to be alert to bad news and you have to be agile enough to adapt if the opportunity morphs into something new.
7. Meeting time is so precious that you want to be sure you are dealing with facts and good recommendations based on solid analysis, not just anecdotal evidence. You want to be sure that meetings produce actionable decisions, that you don't just sit around speculating and talking about philosophical stuff.
8. Ignoring bad news is a formula for decline.
9. We need to expose ourselves to lower level employees, who when encouraged, will tell us a lot what we need to know.
10. Boeing built jet-powered 707 on speculation, without a single customer order on hand and never looked back.
11. It doesn't do any good to be receptive to bad news if you can't get bad news up through your organization and then do something about it in a hurry.
12. I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don't act on it your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that's the beginning of the end.
13. A company's ability to respond to unplanned events, good or bad, is a prime indicator of its ability to compete.

Unit - 11  Convert bad news to good

1. Once you embrace unpleasant news not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you are not defeated by it. You are learning from it. It's all in how you approach failures.
2. Learning from mistakes and constantly improving products is a key in all successful companies.
3. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
4. The business side of any company starts and ends with hard core analysis of its numbers.
5. A number on a piece of paper is a dead end. A number in digital form is the start of meaningful thought and action.
6. The secret to success with information products is understanding the profile and buying habits of your most likely customer.
7. As software extracts more and more ore from the mine of information, people will always have work turning into gold.
8. Apply software analysis first to those aspects of your business where you are most able to act on the results.
9. Information is a verb not a static noun.
10. Power come not from knowledge kept, but from knowledge shared.

Unit - 15  Big wins require big risks 

1. Big bets mean big failures as well as successes
2. If you decline to take risks early, you will decline in the market later.
3. In high-tech businesses digital information is the only way to drive new breakthroughs.
4. Managing a process instead of executing tasks makes someone a knowledge worker.
5. Anything that can eliminate "touches" reduces the opportunities for error and helps to assure quality.
6. Identifying the primary, focused objective of any process is the way to begin solving process problems.
7. Very few corporate applications need a center point of view.
8. Business leaders, not IT alone, must own decisions about processes involving technology.
9. Companies that try to manage down to direct every action from the center will simply not be able to move fast enough to deal with the tempo of the new economy.

END

[BOOKS] - FIRST THINGS FIRST(by Stephen Covey)

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Unit 1 How many people on their death bed?

1. The peace of mind and spirit are achieved only by aligning our lives with governing principles.
2. In this ever changing world, the only things we really control are the choices we make.
3. Quality of life cannot be achieved by taking the right shortcut, but there is a path.
4. Meaningful life is not a matter of speed or efficiency. It's much more a matter of what you do and why you do it, than how fast you get it done.
5. The enemy of the best is the good.
6. What is needed out there and what is my unique strength, my gift?
7. Time management essentially ignores the reality that most of our time is spent living and working with other people who cannot be controlled.
8. Time management itself is a management not leadership perspective.Management works within the paradigm. Leadership creates new paradigms.
9. The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them - Albert Einstein.
10. The unexamined life is not worth living - Plato.

Unit 2 The Urgency Addiction

1. What is the one activity that you know if you did superbly well and consistently would have significant positive results in your personal life?
2. What is the one activity that you know if you did superbly well and consistently would have significant positive results in your professional or work life?
3. Urgency addiction is a self-destructive behavior that temporarily fill the void created by unmet needs.
4. The more urgency we have in our lives, the less important we have.
5. Many important things that contribute to our overall objectives and give richness and meaning to life don't tend to act upon us or press us.Because they are not urgent, they are the things we must act upon.
6. Preparation, prevention, values clarification,planning,relationship building, true-recreation, empowerment.
7. Many important activities become urgent through procrastination or because we don't do enough prevention and planning.  

Unit 3 To Live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy

1. Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.
2. The need to learn is our mental need to develop and to grow.
3. Peak experience is self-transcendence or living for a purpose higher than self.
4. I want to be thoroughly used up when i die.
5. Our ability to create quality of life is a function of the degree to which our lives are aligned with extrinsic realities as we seek to fulfill the basic human needs.
6. Values will not bring quality of life results unless we value principles.
7. All the history can be written in a simple little formula challenge,response.
8. The greatest fulfillment in improving ourselves comes in our empowerment to more effectively reach out and help others.
9. We are the product of our choices.
10. Writing truly imprints the brain, it also helps you remember and apply the things you are trying to do.
11. An educated conscience impacts every aspect of our lives.
12. Dis-obedience to conscience makes conscience blind.
13. Our security doesn't come from the way people treat us or in comparing ourselves to others. It comes from our basic integrity.
14. Your body is the only instrument through which you operate in life.If you don't get control of your body, how can you control the expressions that come through your body and your mind.
15. The greatest battles we fight are in the silent characters of our own souls.
16. Our lives are the results of our choices. To blame and accuse other people, the environment or other extrinsic factors is to choose to empower those things to control us.
17. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and to others, little by little we increase our strength until our ability to act is more powerful than any of the forces that act upon us.
18. The best way to predict your future is create it.
19. We are not in control of our lives, principles are.
20. If we act based on principles, it will produce quality of life results.
21. Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.

Unit 4 Quadrant II Organizing "The Process of putting first things first".

1. Where there is no gardener, there is no garden.
2. What's most important? What gives your life meaning? What do you want to be and to do in your life?
3. What difference would a clear vision of my principles, values and ultimate objectives make in the way i spend my time?
4. How would i feel about my life if i knew what was ultimately important for me?
5. Would a written statement of my life's purpose be valuable to me? Would it affect the way i spend my time and energy?
6. How would a weekly re-connection to such a statement affect the things i choose to do during the week?
7. An hour a day spent "Sharpening your saw" creates the "private victory" that makes public victories possible.
8. With the "more is better" paradigm, we are always trying to fit more activities into the time we have. But what does it matter how much we do if what we are doing is not what matters most?
9. To begin organizing the next week - pause to ask question such as 

 - What goals did i achieve?

- What challenges did i encounter?

- What decisions did i make?

- In making decisions, did i keep first things first.

10. The greatest value of the process is not what it does to your schedule, but what it does yo your head.

11. Keep the main thing the main thing.

Unit 5 The passion of vision

1. It's easy to say no! when there is a deeper yes! burning inside.
2. We don't invent our mission, we detect it. It's within us waiting to be realized.
3. Empowering mission statement is the blue print before the construction! the mental before the physical creation.
4. We can act, instead of being acted upon.
5. You want to be good, but you want to be good for something.
6. An empowering mission statement deals with both character and competence. What you want to be and what you want to do in your life.
7. When we talk about time management, it seems ridiculous to worry about speed before direction, about saving minutes when we may be wasting years.
8. Creating and integrating an empowering personal mission statement is one of the most important quadrant II investment we can make.

12/06/2013

Unit 6 - The Balance of Roles

1. The faster i run, the more out of balance i feel.
2. The way we see the problem is the problem.
3. Gandhi observed, "one man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department.Life is one indivisible whole.
4. Trust was the foundation for effective corporate synergy.Integrity was essential to lasting corporate influence.
5. Socrates observed that "over whatever a man may preside, he will if he knew what he needs and is able to provide it.
6. Roles that are truncated from needs,principles and mission, a work role that has no meaning except economic security, a relationship based on illusion instead of principle; or community service based on the expectation of others instead of inner conviction have no sustaining power because they don't tap into that deep burning."Yes".
7. A steward is "one called to exercise responsible care over possessions entrusted to him or her" we are stewards over our time, our talents, our resources. We have stewardship's at work, in the community and at home.
8. Instead of a task orientation, that gets in the way of relationships,awareness of the social dimension of each role helps us develop a people orientation that creates rich, rewarding relationships with the people with whom we live and work.
9. Organize your planner or organize around your roles.
10. Work on mission statements or stewardship's agreements for each of your roles.

14/06/2013

Unit 7 The Power of Goals 

1. Only a few had the strength to make it.
2. It takes strength to set a heroic goal, to work on chronic problems instead of going for the "quick fix" to stay with your commitments when the hide of popular opinion turns against you.
3. Conscience - the deep connection of goals to mission, and principles.
4. Self-awareness - the accurate assessment of our capacity and the balance in our personal integrity account.
5. Goals that are connected to our inner life have the power of passion and principle.
6. Be loyal to those not present.
7. It soon becomes apparent that knowing what to do and even deeply wanting to do it are not enough. The doing has to be based on the principles that create quality of life.
8. Doing the right thing for the right reason in the right way is the key to quality of life and that can only come through the power of an educated conscience that aligns us with vision,mission and true north.
9. If change is driven primarily by urgency, mood or opposition, it takes us away from the best, if change is driven by mission ,conscience and principles, it moves us towards the best.
10. Without principles, goals will never have the power to produce quality of life results.
11. A principle based goal is all three: the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way.
12. When we exercise the courage to set and act on goals that are connected to principles and conscience,we tend to achieve positive results.
13. Identify each of your goals for the week as a determination or concentration.

Unit 8 The perspective of the week 

1. Priority is a function of context.
2. Personal leadership is cultivating the wisdom to recognize our need for renewal and to ensure that each week provides activities that are genuinely recreational in nature.
3. Life is one indivisible whole.
4. The person who comes home from work at night is stronger and better than one who left for work in the morning.
5. It's the abundance seeing that leads to abundance doing and abundance living.
6. We can put content in context and choose the best over the good.
7. Quadrant II organizing is not prioritizing what's on the schedule;It's scheduling priorities. It's not filling every time slot with scheduled activity;It's putting the "big rocks" in first and filling in with whatever sand, gravel and water we need to add.
8. The objective is not to fill the container to the brim, but to make sure that the big rocks are there and that the container is not so full it can't accommodate conscience directed change.
9. The moment of clarity when we organize the week gives us the perspective to set aside the time necessary to make that preparation possible. Obviously, when things go as planned, we are generally much more effective when we're prepared.But even if things change, time spent in preparation empowers us to move quickly and effectively recognize the value and cost of change and to move in the right direction.
10. The best way to understand the difference is to experience it.
11. The point was not to schedule every little thing, but to work on first things first.

15/06/2013

Unit 9 Integrity in the moment of choice

1. Quality of life depends on what happens in the space between stimulus and response.
2. The purpose of Quadrant II organizing is to empower us to live with integrity in the moment of choice. Whatever detours may come up, whatever new roads may be built after the may is created, we can depend on our internal compass to keep us moving in the right direction.
3. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedom - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
4. We may find it convenient to live with the illusion that circumstances or other people are responsible for the quality of our lives, but the reality is that we are responsible - response-able- for our choices.
5. I can't believe the difference in my life once i started to realize that i have my own inner guide. I feel a sense of direction in every thing do and as long as i am true to it, everything seems to work together to make it happen.
6. We pause between stimulus and response to proactively choose a response that is deeply integrated with principles,needs and capacities.
7. It's the manifestations that our desire to do the right thing is greater than our desire to just do something.
8. People are more empowered when they use words that most effectively communicate in their own language.
9. What's the best use of my time right now?
10. What most important right now?
11. What is life asking of me?
12. What's the right thing to do now?
13. Wisdom is a marriage - a synergy of heart and mind.
14. The wisdom of the heart transcends the wisdom of the mind.
15. It takes courage to realize that you are greater that your moods, greater them your thoughts and that you can control your moods and thoughts.
16. "That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do" said Emerson, "not that the nature of the thing has changed, but that our ability to do has increased.
17. Educating the heart is the critical complement to educating the mind.
18. When we are tired or ill, we often tend to be more reactive.
19. Our body is a fundamental stewardship,it's the instrument through which we work to fulfill all other stewardship's and responsibilities.
20. The most fundamental ingredients to success were such things as honesty, integrity, humility, fidelity, justice, patience and courage.
21. Time is life.
22. An individual's life is part of a greater whole.
23. In his book " The pursuit of happiness", David meyers said study after study shows that those who have this bigger picture orientation in their lives are happier, more satisfied, contributing people.
24. If i had been doing the things in my own life, i knew i ought to be doing, i never would have had those feelings in the first place.
25. "People seem not to see", said Emerson, "That their opinion of the world is also a confession of character". One of the best ways to educate our heart is to look at our interaction with other people, because our relationships with others are fundamentally a reflection of our relationship with ourselves.
26. When we don't listen to or live by our conscience, we tend to blame and accuse other people in an attempt to justify our own inner dissonance.If we don't have a sense of mission and principles to measure ourselves against, we benchmark against other people instead of our own potential, We are into comparative thinking and win-lose mentality.We become self-centered and autobiographical.We impose our motives on the actions of others. We see their strengths and weaknesses in  terms of how they affect us. We empower their weakness to control us.
27. Don't you think that the main source of all these tensions and pressures is that you are not being true to your conscience? You inwardly know what you should do
28. The challenge is to develop the character and competence to listen to it and live by it - to act with integrity in the moment of choice.

18/06/2013

Unit 10 Learning from living

1. As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
2. The value of any week is not limited to what we do in it;it's also in what we learn from it and become as a result of it.
3. I have found that regular personal evaluation and renewal time is a vital part of learning from living.
4. The repeated process of organizing, acting and evaluating helps us see the consequences of our choices and actions more clearly. It's the four endowments in action.It empowers us to learn from living and to live what we learn.
5. Connect to mission, Review your roles, Identify your goals, organize the week, Exercise integrity, Evaluate.

Unit 11 The Interdependent Realty

1. Love is not love till you give it away.
2. To learn is to grow, to feel ourselves expanding.
3. The world we live in is the legacy of those who have gone before us.The choices we make in it create a legacy for those who will follow.
4. We bring children into the world, but we are not committed to the tremendous time and effort it takes to teach and train, to love and listen.
5. Learning is superficial - we are into skills, methods and techniques without understanding the principles that empower us to act in a variety of situations.
6. The independent achievement focus to "\the development of a cancer,whose most characteristic feature is that it cares only for itself.Hence it feeds on the other parts of its own host until it kills the host and thus commits biological suicide.Since a cancer cell cannot live except within the body in which it started its reckless, egocentric development.
7. Total quality begins with total personal quality.Organizational empowerment begins with the individual empowerment. That's why work in our deep inner life and integrity are so important.
8. Gandhi once observed "A person cannot do right in one department of life whilst attempting to do wrong in another department.Life is one indivisible whole".
9. If we are duplicitous or dishonest in any role,it affects every role in our lives.
10. People who are into control have basically internalized sufficient principles or natural laws of life so that they think they are the ones making things happen. But its really their obedience to those natural laws and principles that make things happen.
11. Self-awareness empowers us to have other awareness.Because we know how to listen to our heart, we can listen to the hearts of others.

19/06/2013

Unit 12 First Things First Together

1. Cooperation is far more productive than competition.
2. We look at life through the glasses of win-lose and if we fail to develop self-awareness, we spend our lives competing for "dinner" instead of cooperating for "dollars".
3. Gandhi said, "Three-fourths of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world will disappear if we step into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint".
4. When both people understand both perspectives, instead of being on opposite sides of the table looking across at each other, we find ourselves on the same side looking at solutions together.
5. The high performance companies spend significantly more time doing things that are important, but not urgent and significantly less time doing things that are urgent but not important. The principal reason behind these differences , in most cases, is in the degree of clarity about what is important.
6. A powerful shared vision has a profound, effect on quality of life in the family, in the organization, in any situation where we work with others. We become contributing parts of a greater whole.We can live,love,learn and leave powerful legacies together.
7. Universal mission - "To improve the economic well being and quality of all stakeholders".
8. Empowering mission statements focus on contribution, on worthwhile purposes that create a collective deep burning "Yes".
9. In our personal lives, when we see our roles as segmented parts of life,they conflict and compete with each other.But when we see them as parts of a highly interrelated whole, the parts work together to create abundance living.
10. Frustration is essentially a function of expectation.
11. The spirit of true empathy is foundation to effective synergy.
12. In a high trust culture, people supervise themselves according to the agreement.

22/06/2013

Unit 13 Empowerment from the Inside Out

1. Anytime we think the problem is "Out there" that thought is the problem.
2. We empower circumstances and the weaknesses of other people to control us. We put our energy into our circle of concern into things over which we have no control.
3. Character is what we are, Competence is what we can do. And both are necessary to create trustworthiness.
4. Competence without character doesn't inspire trust either.
5. The reality is that character and competence drive everything else in the organization. To nurture character and competence is the most high-leverage thing we can do to create empowerment.
6. There is no such thing as organizational behavior; there is only behavior of individuals within the organization.
7. Anytime we help create shared vision and strategy with a boss, a peer, a direct report, a spouse, a child, an associate - we empower ourselves and others.
8. Do i typically wait until I'm told to do things i already know ought to be done?
9. While management works in the system, leadership works on the system.
10. We accept the responsibility for our own excellence.
11. Criticism or praise from others is secondary to our own connection with conscience.
12. We also have the wisdom to realize that feedback tells us as much about the people from we receive it as it does about ourselves. 

01/07/2013

1. Continue, Stop and Start: "What are the things I'm now doing you'd like to see me continue to do? What would you like to see me stop doing? What would you like to see start doing that I'm not doing now?"
2. Feedback should be given against performance and effectiveness criteria not character criteria.
3. Management focus actually generates the need for more management to deal with all the problems that result from neglecting leadership.
4. Weekly organizing encourages leadership with vision and perspective.
5. It takes humility to seek feedback.It takes wisdom to understand it,analyze it, and appropriately act on it.Bit it truly is the lunch of champions.
6. Winning companies realize that they are only as strong as the intelligence, judgement and character of their employees.
7. When someone comes to you with a problem, ask him or her, what do you recommend? Don't be quick to solve problems that people can and should solve for themselves.Encourage them to use their creativity to find newer, better ways to do things. Hold people accountable for results, not methods.
8. I discovered that being a leader/servant was a lot tougher at-least the first time then being a controlling leader.
9. Accomplishing tasks through people is a different paradigm than building people through the accomplishment of tasks. With one, you get things done. With the other, you get them done with far greater creativity, synergy and effectiveness and in the process, you build the capacity to do more in the future as well.

27/07/2013

1. In almost every situation,if you build your skills and capacities and work within your circle of influence, you can change people's paradigms of you and your job over time. If you don't have a clear vision of what you want to do in your job and a willingness to pay the price to create change, it's easy to dis-empower yourself, to get into blaming and accusing. The key is to stay empowered, to realize that you can make the choice to try to change the paradigm or to change the situation.
2. This manager shared his personal experience with them and encouraged his staff to build their security on their capacity instead of their job.
3. Examine your fears and free yourself so that you can be and give your best.
4. Often negative judgments about character grow out of misunderstandings.
5. It's important to realize that we are not ultimately responsible for the development of anyone else. WE can never really change someone; people must change themselves, but we can help.
6. If a person is highly dependent on others opinions, he or she will likely have serious blind spots - weakness that are too sensitive to be admitted to consciousness.
7. Establishing excessive controls to protect against the problems of a few people will affect the performance of the entire organization.
8. In a high trust culture, honest mistakes are taken for what they are an opportunity to learn.
9. People are not truly self governing unless they are free to fail.
10. The Chinese bamboo tree is planted after the earth is prepared, and for the first four years, all of the growth is underground. The only thing visible above the ground is a little bulb and a small shoot coming out of it. Then in the fifth year, the bamboo tree grows up to eighty feet. Principle centered leaders understand the metaphor of the bamboo tree. They understand the value of working in Quadrant II.
11. A high trust, empowered culture is always home grown.
12. Only by acting in harmony with correct principles, exercising patience,humility and courage and working within your circle of influence, can you transform yourself and positively influence your organization. You can only create empowerment from the inside out. 

Section 4  The power of peace of principle centered living

1. Principle centered living is not an end in itself. It's the means and the end. It's the quality of our travel along life's road. It's the power and peace we experience each day as we accomplish what matters most.
2. In a principle centered life, the journey and the destination are one.

Unit 14. From time management to personal leadership

1. Which of these activities is most important?
2. What can i safely postpone?
3. What can i delegate?
4. What can i get out of?
5. What can i do more quickly?
6. How can i arrange my schedule to accomplish what is most critical?
7. It's not only a matter of when to to things, but whether or not to do them at all.
8. You would see tasks, not as things to do, but as indicators of a larger process that you want to improve.
9. Involve people in the problem; work out the solution together. As you solve the problem, build relationships that will empower you to effectively solve problems in the future as well.
10. Communicate your criteria. Help that person become more capable. Nurture self government and self accountability, build capacity.
11. To involve every member of the family in understanding what they want to accomplish and in deciding how to work together to accomplish it is empowering.
12. One of the greatest legacies we can leave our children is a sense of purpose and responsibility to correct principles.
13. What happens when I am in harmony with principles, I see a pattern, a beauty an order. The more I align with principles, the more opportunities I see.
14. Each part of life starts to add to the others. There is more of every good thing. 

Unit 15. The peace of the results

1. Peace and quality of life come only as we discover and align with the fundamental laws of life.
2. Peace is essentially a function of putting first things first.
3. We see that there are purposes higher than self toward which we can focus our energies and efforts with passion and confidence that we can create quality of life results.
4. Skills alone don't produce effectiveness and leadership need character.
5. Sharpening the saw is daily and weekly renewal. Each moment of choice becomes a space in which we can exercise our human endowments to act with integrity.
6. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition, such as lifting weights, we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.
7. What difference does it make when we expect people to see things differently, when we value that difference.
8. One of the riches areas for eliminating much of the frustration we experience in our lives is to examine our expectations.
9. Only as we focus on contributing than consuming can we create the context that makes peace in all aspects of life possible. It's in leaving a legacy that we find meaning in living, loving and learning.
10. Courage comes as a result of knowing there are principles, of fulfilling our needs and capacities in a balanced way of having clear vision, balance between roles, the ability to set and achieve meaningful goals.
11. Wherever we are, the best way to develop courage is to set a goal and achieve it, make a promise and keep it.
12. C.S. Lewis observed, "Pride is a spiritual cancer, it eats up the very possibility of love or contentment or even common sense". It eventually leads to hate, envy and war.
13. When the cry of competition is louder than the whisper of conscience, what's the impact in terms of really putting first things first in our lives.
14. The antidote for the poison of pride is humility.
15. We can only free ourselves to work on first things first as we let go of other things and focus our time and effort on the most important.

28/07/2013

1. The only real mistake in life, "said one" is the mistake not learned from.
2. Each decision we make is an important decision. Some may seem small at the time, but the reality is that they add upon one another to become habits of the heart that move us with increasing force toward some destiny.
3. There is a wisdom for greater than my own, and that living in harmony with it is the key to contribution and joy.
4. There are key turning points - times when we must take a stand and make deep personal commitments in order for change to take place.
5. The family is the key institution that shapes the emotional, intellectual, spiritual, moral, social and economic future of individuals and of our society.
6. Humility is the mother of all virtues.
7. There is simply nothing that has greater impact on our time, on the quality of every moment of our lives, then learning to listen to and live by conscience.
8. Our two greatest gifts are time and the freedom to choose - the power to direct our efforts in the use of that time. The key is in not spending time, but in investing it in people, in empowerment, in meaningful projects and causes. Like any capital resource, if we spend time, it's gone. We dwindle away our inheritance. If we invest it, we increase our inheritance, and it will redound to the blessing of generations that follow.
9. Gandhi said "we must become the change we seek in the world".
10. Emerson said, "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles".

Appendix A

1. I will to keep commitments not only to others but to myself as well. I know that my mountain may seem no more than a hill to others and i will accept that. I will be renewed by my own personal victories and triumphs no matter how small.
2. Controlling all my actions is a strong sense of integrity which i believe the most important character trait.
3. You can do anything you want, but not everything. It builds on the goal approach and adds the important concept of sequence: "Concentrate your efforts on your most important tasks first". It includes techniques such as values clarification and task ranking. The assumption is that if you know what you want to accomplish and focus on those things first, you will be happy.
4. When goals are not based on principles and primary needs, the focused drive and single mindedness that makes achievement possible can blind people to imbalance in their lives.
5. If our goals are not deeply anchored in correct principles, we will never be able to achieve deep fulfillment and quality of life.
6. Skills alone do not provide the answer.
7. More than skill or technique, individual and organizational quality is a function of aligning both personal character and personal behavior with principles.
8. There are many times when accomplishing what's important means exercising independent will and swimming upstream instead of merely going with the flow.
9. Life is better when we treat others as we would be treated.
10. The great apparent dichotomy is that the more we give, the more we get. 

END