Category: Words of Wisdom

Here are some very thought-provoking quotes from Seth Godin’s STOP STEALING DREAMS (click to download):

“By their nature, dreams are evanescent. They flicker long before they shine brightly. And when they’re flickering, it’s not particularly difficult for a parent or a teacher or a gang of peers to snuff them out.”

“The dreams we need are self-reliant dreams. We need dreams based not on what is but on what might be. We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen….I think we’re doing a great job of destroying dreams at the very same time the dreams we do hold onto aren’t nearly bold enough.”

“There really are only two tools available to the educator. The easy one is fear. Fear is easy to awake, easy to maintain, but ultimately toxic…The other tool is passion…Passion can overcome fear—the fear of losing, of failing, of being ridiculed.”

“Greatness is frightening. With it comes responsibility…If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook.”

“The future of our economy lies with the impatient. The linchpins and the artists and the scientists who will refuse to wait to be hired and will take things into their own hands, building their own value, producing outputs others will gladly pay for. Either they’ll do that on their own or someone will hire them and give them a platform to do it…The only way out is going to be mapped by those able to dream.”

“Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat…If I’m going to make the investment and hire someone for more than the market rate, I want to find an incompetent worker. One who will break the rules and find me something no one else can.”

“Dreams fade away because we can’t tolerate the short-term pain necessary to get to our longterm goal. We find something easier, juicier, sexier, and more now, so we take it, leaving our dreams abandoned on the side of the road.”

“The only source of innovation is the artist willing to be usefully wrong. A great use of the connection economy is to put together circles of people who challenge each other to be wronger and wronger still—until we find right.”

You can download the free e-book HERE (Stop Stealing Dreams).

There are many things people don’t usually agree at, but I think there are certain givens:

• Life has to have a meaning somewhat.
• We don’t walk through life alone.
• Life is meaningless without being seen and loved.

When we can’t figure out what our life means, we all go a little bit crazy inside.  When day after day, we walk that meaningless life alone, we start going mad.  We no longer have to wonder whether we’ve seen a crazy person.  By then, we already know what crazy means.

We see people walking around, but they merely pass us by.  Nobody’s looking.  Nobody gives a damn.  And if somebody does look, we are looked at with either pity or disgust. 

We are not meant to live like that.  We are meant to be seen, to be heard, to be touched.

We were supposed to have been born of love, to be raised in love, to be given to people who will love us and watch over us.  We were supposed to know what love is and what a life of meaning is.

But sad to say, not all parents know how to love their children.  Not all wives know how to love their husbands.  Not all husbands know how to care for their wives.  Not all children know how to love in return.

Somewhere along the way, there is a flaw, an undeniable flaw to everything that should have been good.

And that’s why we are lost, naked and empty deep inside.

It is a given.  This life is not as perfect as it should be.  And that is why we’re all a bit crazy inside.  And that is why those of us who believe in the life beyond this one are a bit less crazy after all.  For them, not all is lost and not all his hopeless.  For them, we can still find the love we’ve been crazily aching for.

Related Posts:

What Is The Meaning of Your Life Right Now
Invisible
All The World Is Meaningless Without Love

What if you’re granted just one wish right now?  What would your wish be?  Would it be wealth, fame, an ideal relationship, or an ideal body?

Be careful for what you wish for though.  What if it comes true?  Could you handle the outcome of your wishes?  If you’re wishing for success, could you even maintain it?

Maintaining Your Success Is More Than Twice as Difficult as Reaching It

You can get rich quickly, but maintaining your riches would always have to be for the long run, that is, unless you want to lose it quickly, too!

Impatience provokes us to reach for the things we want in the soonest possible time.

• We want to get rich – NOW
• We want to be famous – NOW
• We want to have our ideal relationship – NOW
• We want to lose weight – NOW

But what if we could have all those things NOW?  For how long could we hold on to them?  For how long could we prevent losing them again?

Many people have succeeded using get-rich-quick schemes. Some have even won a huge fortune through the lottery. But how many have ever succeeded in maintaining their riches?  Many have lost weight through crash diets that almost starved them to death. But how many have been able to maintain their desired weight?  Many people have also seemingly found their ideal relationships.  They followed certain books that told them how to behave like somebody else just to get the people they want.  For how long could they pretend and fool the ones they loved?

You may magically see a genie right now who could grant your wishes of sudden fame, fortune and happiness NOW.  But before ever making that wish, think about it deeply.  Could you hold on to what you’re given?  Achieving these things only to lose them over again would only be more painful in the end.  It could also trap you into a life you don’t really want.

• Before you attain your riches, try to discern deep in your heart how you would really like to earn money.  Would you like to earn money through a certain means over and over again?
• Before attaining fame, try to imagine how it is to be a famous person.  Could you tolerate all the attention given to you?  How would you handle all the requests and pressures around you?
• Before getting into a quick relationship with someone by pretending to be somebody else, try to see if you would really want to be loved for the person that you are not.
• Before getting into that crash diet or exercise program, ask yourself if you could maintain a lifestyle that supports that kind of body you want.

Maintaining your success is more than twice as difficult as reaching it.  Seek not for success first.  Seek for the person you really want to be and for the kind of life you truly desire.

There are many times when we think nothing really happens in our lives, nothing spectacular or worth saving.  But what if you lose the last five years of your life?  Would you feel like you have lost something that is very important to you?  Would you want to take it back?

The movie “The Vow” made me think of just that.  (For a very brief summary of the story, it’s about a couple who really love each other.  One night, they met an accident, and one of them loses her memory of the last five years of her life when she wakes up, including all memory of her husband.)

It made me think about my own life and what happened during the last five years.  If I lose all memory of it, here are some of the things that will happen:

• I would think that I was still an auditor, not a blogger or a writer or anything of the sort.
• I would lose all memory of having migrated to Australia, of all the challenges I faced there and of all the people I met at that time, who made an impact in my life.
• I would lose all memory of the mistakes I’ve made along the way and of all the lessons learned that helped me to know myself better.

No, I wouldn’t want to lose any of that, even the painful memories.  Everything is now part of who I am and who I’ve become.  Sometimes, we don’t really realize how valuable something is until we lose it and regret losing it.

Here’s a “spoiler” though.  In the movie, even if the girl forgot about the decisions she made during those five years she lost, she eventually made the same decisions when given the chance to start over.

It’s like she never really lost those five years in her life.  She never really lost what she became.  She’s always been who she was, and only time stood in her way to re-claim all that.  What a comfort to know that even if we lose our most important memories, we could always find our way back if we could just find our way to who we really are.

Being Loved at Our Very Worst!

 “We want people to see us at our best, but we need them to love us at our worst because our worst is just as much a part of ourselves as our very best!”

Other People’s Expectations

There are many things that may keep us from revealing who we really are.  One of these things is other people’s expectations.  Being a famous person or a person in high position often requires us to maintain a certain reputation without which, we would lose our credibility, and even our position may be in danger.

Some of us experience this in one way or another, too.  We may hide some aspects of our personality because we are expected to behave in a certain way by the people around us.  This includes our peers, our parents, our mentors and colleagues.

Boundaries

Sometimes, our efforts of hiding our true selves stems from our lack of boundaries.  In our attempt to be accepted, we have learned to focus so much on pleasing other people that we have lost a sense of our true selves along the way. Healthy boundaries are what keep us from knowing who we really are and how other people see us.  When we lose these boundaries, our sense of who we are may already be dependent on how other people see us.

Black and White Thinking

“Black and white thinking” is seeing one thing as either very good or very bad, and nothing in between.  There are no gray areas here, everything is grouped into an extreme category.  When one can no longer be good, then one is classified as bad.

If we learn to apply this to our sense of self, then we’d be in trouble of always trying to keep up a perfect image less we fall into the other extreme of being evil, and with that, we could no longer accept who we are.

We have to learn that we are neither perfect nor totally corrupt.  We are stained with imperfections, yes, but we have also been originally created in the image of a good and loving God.  We have various aspects of being, we have some aspects of ourselves that we are proud of, and some that we are not so proud about, but all of these things belong to us, we are a whole person composed of diverse and sometimes seemingly contradicting components.

“The tyranny of the image of the perfect Christian leads to its own type of depression, a depression that swirls around the fear that God doesn’t love those who don’t live up to ‘my’ – not God’s – expectations. By confusing God’s expectations with our own, we are led to a sense of failure and defeatism.  We expect perfection of ourselves (‘God, I thank you that I am not greedy, dishonest, and unfaithful in marriage, like other people,’ Lk 18:11).  God instead, extends the gift of reconciliation.” – Surviving Depression

Self-Sabotage

In our subconscious attempt to integrate the many conflicting parts of ourselves, we sometimes resort to self-sabotage.  Since we could no longer put up the perfect image that we want other people to see, and since this merely leaves other parts of us rejected and unloved, we resort to the other extreme.  In this mode, everything comes out in reverse.  What has been hidden for a long time suddenly comes out.  What has been feared for so long suddenly happens.

Hence, we see quiet people suddenly erupt in anger.  We see successful people suddenly throw away all they have and walk away from the limelight.  We see strong people suddenly appear weak and helpless.

The Purpose of Failure

The purpose of failure in such a case is not to remain in failure, but to re-integrate one person’s many conflicting parts into one integrated whole that will achieve true and lasting success.

The part that is angry is given a chance to heal.

The part that is fearful of other people’s expectations is given a chance to be accepted.

The part that is hurting and weak is given a chance to be loved.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.  When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.  Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

“No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared.

-John 8:6-11, NIV

What’s Left After We Fail

Once we hit rock bottom, many of our fears depart from us.  We realize that the thing we feared most has already happened, but we are still alive.  We have feared our lack of possessions, but we realize that even without such things, we are still ourselves.  We have feared our lack of power, but we realize that even without that, we have the power to do something else, something good and something beautiful.  We realize that even in our simple lives, the important things remain.

We are after all, not our jobs, nor our bank accounts, nor our titles and positions.  We are more than that.  God has meant us to be far more than that!  What’s left after our failures is our true selves, and with that, we can start the real journey towards our true passions and desires.

“The real measure of a man’s worth is how much he would be worth if he lost all his money.” – Harold J. Smith

“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” – J.K. Rowling (Bestselling Author of Harry Potter)

Being loved for our best selves is something we should rejoice at, but being loved for our very worst is a joy that reaches to the innermost parts of hearts, healing us, blessing us, and providing us with the strength we need to live a full and beautiful life.

“If you will love me I cannot promise you that I will not hurt you. I cannot promise you that I will not make you cry and that I’ll never break your heart. But if you will love me, I will bare my whole self naked before you, and I will reveal to you my soul. If you will love me, you can be certain that it is I that you will love, not a mask that fools you and gives you only what your eyes desire to see. If you will love me, you can be certain that you will love the depths of me, all of me that is in me, and I in turn will love you with all of me, with all my soul, with all my mind, with all my spirit, with all my flaws and beauty, and with all my very heart.” – Will You Still Love Me Even If I’m Not Perfect?