Remember when we talked about how you do anything is how you do everything? Today’s quote is:
“Put your heart, mind, intellect, and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.”
~ Swami Sivananda Saraswati
Swami Sivananda left a medical practice to become a monk. He had many disciples including Krishnamurti. Also on his quote bio, “…He wrote more than 300 books on Yoga and spirituality. He died in 1963.”
That’s cool! “More than 300 books!”
Csikszentmihalyi: “When a person’s psychic energy coalesces into a life theme, consciousness achieves harmony.”
What is your psychic energy?
How does your psychic energy coalesce into a life theme?
Could you be detailed about how it is coalescing?
“When you get into a tight place and it seems that you can’t go on, hold on — for that’s just the place and the time that the tide will turn.”
~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
She could well be describing The Dip. If you’ve never heard about it before, read this brief and sweet post about point B by Seth.
“What is a Teacher? A Teacher is the special person who has the responsibility to provide the “Eyes” for a student, and helps the student to “See”. A good Teacher directs the student’s eyes to the simple parts first, and slowly, bit by bit, gently guides the seeking hands along a proven path. He carefully points out the next bits of knowledge, skillfully combining the simplicities, until the top of the mountain unfolds, not as a “complexity of facts”, but as a workable system, perfectly understood and usable by the student.”
~ Violin method book by Eden Vaning-Rosen
One of my favorite people in the world emailed me this today. I absolutely love it. So often, I say, “life is easy. it really is. I can choose the easy way to do something or the hard way. what if it were easy?” And the easy way needs to also be the right way.
I love too that this is in a violin book:
* Directs the student’s eyes to the simple parts first
* Points out the next bits of knowledge
until …
* a workable system
* the top of the mountain
I also like that the end result is not a “complexity of facts.” By the time you get there, you’re not memorizing facts; you’re using parts you understand. This is how I want to be as a teacher.
Why is it that when business people are taught about creativity, they start to create voraciously?! Writing poems, painting, singing, writing songs? You wouldn’t think that the pinnacle of business excellence is when the person could take some time off and pursue creative endeavors? But maybe that is the pinnacle, and maybe it should be.
Did you read the WSJ cover article last week about Peter Muller, the Morgan Stanley quant trader who took years off to do creative things, including writing songs and playing music in the NYC subway… the WSJ had a quote something along the lines of “if anyone had known that this particular subway musician was worth millions…”
Why is it that Mike Csikszentmihalyi, the creator of the concept and author of the book Flow, says that creativity is important? Is creativity important to flow? Why does creativity become so important along so many lines?
Maybe it’s because of this…
“I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.”
~ Etty Hillesum
Here is Etty’s quote bio from the Daily quote list:
About Etty Hillesum
Etty Hillesum, less famous than her contemporary, Anne Frank, lived a short life of great courage. She was born in 1914 in the Netherlands to a Dutch father and a Russian mother. She studied law, Slavic languages, and psychology. Hungry for knowledge, she cut down on food in order to buy books. She went voluntarily to the Westerbork camp to help fellow Jews interned by the Nazis. Her letters detail her experiences; her more meditative diary focuses on issues of faith. She died at Auschwitz in 1943.
On the day of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, I wish you to plan even bigger than you imagined before, and to meet with a success unparalleled in common hours, and I wish you comfort in your own approval of all these events. In other words, think big, act bigger.
Don’t be so humble, you’re not that great.
~ Golda Meir
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
~ Henry David Thoreau
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
~ Mark Twain
When all is said and done, more is said than done.
~ Margaret Greenberg (from here)
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
~ Mohandas Gandhi (from here)
“There’s a new way of creating in the world. I was just talking to a man who is very driven in his work in the stock market, and he said success is all a matter of will, and I said, no, I think it’s all a matter of belief.
“We talked about the image of sandpipers on the beach: they run up, get all the delicious food in the sand, then run back - and their feet never get wet. They’re always in harmony, and in rhythm with the ebb and flow of the ocean. And what’s happening with women now is they are bringing to the party of life the concept of that ebb and flow with natural law. There’s no willfulness around it. Willfulness is masculine energy, which this society has been built on, but it is not the natural way.
“And that’s what you need to do. You don’t finish the ten thousand things on the list, and then get to you, who is ten thousand and one; what you want to do is make a practice of what centering and what quietude really is. And quietude is actually flowing with the flow - back to the sandpiper again. He’s not frantic, running back and forth; he’s rhythmic with the flow.’”
“[O]ur lives inherently have the power and unlimited capacity of a mighty river. … Then through positive energy rituals to train our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual capacities, we will create a dam to harness the power of the river and continually refresh the lake that is our life.”
Dana Arakawa, paraphrasing Greg Martin
Where does the term “degugging” come from?
Welcome to Quote Thursdays. Is this below quote familiar to you?
“A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”
~ Grace Murray Hopper
This is Admiral Grace Murray Hopper,who is described in a quote bio as “the American computer pioneer, was the first woman to become a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. She was born in 1906 in New York. By age seven, she was taking alarm clocks apart to see how they worked. She worked for the U.S. Navy developing the first compiler, which allowed people to write computer programs in real language rather than machine code. When she found a moth inside a computer, she coined the term “debugging.” She died in 1992.”
I earlier described what I mean by a quote bio here. Wikipedia backs up this history of the origin of “debugging,” although adding that in non-computer circles such as aeronautics the term had had some popularity prior to Hopper.
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
If that’s true, then you should jump into the experiments… so double up on courage, and treat all of life as an experiment…
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
~ Winston Churchill
And once you have that courage, get EVEN MORE COURAGEOUS because you’ve got nothing to lose by flaunting it all …
Don’t be so humble, you’re not that great.
~ Golda Meir