Now get inspired!

1. “I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however – I think it applies to other painters I know – is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it.” – Mark Rothko

2. “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” – Henry Ford

3. “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” -T.S. Eliot

4. “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” – Albert Einstein

5. “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” – Goethe

6. “The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost

7. “Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.” – Voltaire

8. “We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.” – Emerson

9. “When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.” – Nelson Mandela

10. “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” – Walt Disney

11. “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” – Steve Jobs

12. “The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.” – Bruce Feirstein

13. “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? – the cuckoo clock.
” -Orson Wells

14. “Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.” – Nietzsche

15. “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.” – Leonardo da Vinci

16. “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” – Mark Twain

17. “Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.” – Maya Angelou

18. “Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.” – George S. Patton

19. “Action expresses priorities.” – Mahatma Gandhi

20. “Live the life you’ve dreamed” – Henry David Thoreau

21. “It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.” – William Somerset Maugham

22. “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’ ” – Muhammad Ali

23. “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” – Pablo Picasso

24. “What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.” – Goethe

25. “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.” – Tesla

26. “Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.” – Machiavelli

27. “Eureka! I’ve got it.” – Archimedes

28. “I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.” – G. K. Chesterton

29. “The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible — and achieve it, generation after generation.” – Pearl S. Buck

30. “A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.” – Richard Branson

31. “There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose the ventures before us” – William Shakespeare

32. “Hell! There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish somep’n” – Thomas Edison

33. “There are those who are so scrupulously afraid of doing wrong that they seldom venture to do anything.” – Vauvenargues

34. “Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture” – William James

35. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” – André Gide

36. “Age considers; youth ventures.” – Rabindranath Tagore

37. “Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it.” – Billy Durant

38. “The two important things I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision.” – Robyn Davidson

39. “It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.” – Seneca

40. “Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don’t. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.” – Phillip Adams

41. “Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.” – Demosthenes

42. “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill

43. “In Ourselves are Triumphs and Defeats.” -Longfellow

44. “It matters not the number of years in your life. It is the life in your years.” – Abraham Lincoln

45. “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” – Mark Twain

46. “As soon as the fear approaches near, attack and destroy it.” – Chanakya

47. “The ones who want to achieve and win championships motivate themselves.” – Mike Ditka

48. “Motivation is simple. You eliminate those who are not motivated.” – Lou Holtz

49. “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.” – Michael Jordan

50. “One of the things that my parents have taught me is never listen to other people’s expectations. You should live your own life and live up to your own expectations, and those are the only things I really care about.” – Tiger Woods

51. “Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.” – François de La Rochefoucauld

52. “I still feel like I gotta prove something. There are a lot of people hoping I fail. But I like that. I need to be hated.” -Howard Stern

53. “It’s funny how all the magazines can dwell on my race, but they could never say that my shit is whack because they know my shit is tight!” – Eminem

54. “Actors search for rejection. If they don’t get it they reject themselves.” – Charlie Chaplin

55. “No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess” – Newton

56. “Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.” – David Hume

57. “Anyone can dabble, but once you’ve made that commitment, your blood has that particular thing in it, and it’s very hard for people to stop you.” – Bill Cosby

58. “Learning is not child’s play; we cannot learn without pain” – Aristotle

59. “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” – Einstein

60. “Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what he loves.” – Blaise Pascal

61. “When you set yourself on fire, people love to come and see you burn. ” – John Wesley

62. “One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.” – E. M. Forster

63. “Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft will become an unimportant company” – Bill Gates

64. “When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for everyone telling you you’re nuts.” -Larry Ellison

65. “A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.” – Sigmund Freud

66. “Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.” – Clint Eastwood

67. “Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.” – Sun Tzu

68. “Do not sleep under a roof. Carry no money or food. Go alone to places frightening to the common brand of men.” – Miyamoto Musashi

69. “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” – Michel de Montaigne

70. “All that counts in life is intention.” – Andrea Bocelli

71. “Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.” – Cicero

72. “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Feynman

73. “We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.” – Jean Jacques Rousseau

74. “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.” – Emerson

75. “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Edison

76. “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” – Michelangelo

77. “Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.” – Buddha

Life would be simple indeed if only some things, like eating and studying and working and saving and giving, were absolutely good; and other things, like drinking and smoking and spending and theatre-going and dancing and sexual love, were absolutely bad. To be sure, men and schools and churches have often tried to dissect life into these two halves; but it never works well. Material things and natural appetites are in themselves neither good nor bad; they become good when rightly related, and bad when wrongly related. The cardinal virtues are the principles of such right relation.

COURAGE

If man were merely a mind, wisdom to see particular desires in the light of their permanent consequences to self, and justice to weigh the interests of self to the impartial scales of a due regard for the interests of others, would together sum up all virtue. Knowledge, in these two forms, would be virtue, as Socrates taught.

We feel, however, as well as know. Nature, for purposes of her own, has placed the premium of pleasure on the exercise of function, and attached the penalty of pain to both privation of such exercise on the one hand, and over-exertion on the other. Nature, too, has adjusted the scale of intensity of pleasures and pains to her own ends; placing the keenest rewards and the severest penalties on those appetites which, like nutrition and reproduction, are most essential to the survival of the individual and the race; thus enforcing by her rough process of natural selection a crude wisdom and justice of her own. Moreover, these premiums and penalties were adjusted to the needs of the race at a stage of evolution when scanty and precarious food supply and a high death rate, due to the combined inroads of war, famine, and pestilence, rendered nutrition and reproduction of vastly more relative urgency, in comparison with other interests, than they are to-day.

Pleasure and pain, therefore, though reliable guides in the life of an animal struggling for existence, are not reliable guides for men in times of artificial plenty and elaborate civilization. To follow the strongest appetites, to seek the intensest pleasures and shun the sharpest pains, is simply to revert to a lower stage of evolution, and live the life of a beast. Hence that combat of the moral nature with the cosmic process to which Mr. Huxley recently recalled our attention; or rather, that combat of man with himself which Paul and Augustine, Plato and Hegel, have more profoundly expressed. This fact that Nature’s premiums and penalties are distributed on an entirely different principle from that which wisdom and justice mark out for the civilized man renders it necessary for wisdom and justice to summon to their aid two subordinate virtues — courage and temperance: courage to endure the pains which the pursuit of wisdom and justice involves; temperance to cut off the pleasures which are inconsistent with the ends which wisdom and justice set before us.

The wide, permanent ends at which justice and wisdom aim often involve what is in itself, and for the present, disagreeable and painful. The acquisition of a competence involves hard work, when Nature calls for rest; the solution of a problem requires us to be wide awake, when Nature urges sleep; the advocacy of a reform involves unpopularity, when Nature suggests the advantages of having the good opinion of our fellows; the life of the country calls for the death of the soldier, when Nature bids him cling to life by running away.

Now, since we are not ascetics, we must admit that per se pleasure is preferable to pain. If it were a question between rest and work when weary, between sleep and waking when tired out, between popularity and unpopularity, between life and death, every sensible man would choose the first alternatives as a matter of course. Wisdom and justice, however, see the present and partial pain as part of a wider personal and social good, and order that the pain be endured. True courage, therefore, is simply the executor of the orders of wisdom and justice. The wise and just man, who knows what he wants, and is bound to get it at all costs, is the only man who can be truly brave. For the strength of one’s courage is simply the strength of the wise and just aims which he holds. All bravery not thus rooted and grounded in the vision of some larger end to be gained is mere bravado and bluster.

Of the many applications of courage, two of the simplest will suffice for illustration: the courage of space, to take the pains to keep things in order; and the courage of time, to be punctual, or even ahead of the hour, when a hard task has to be done.

Even if our life is a small, sheltered one, even if we have only our house or rooms to look after, things tend to get out of order, to pile themselves up in heaps, to get out of our reach and into each other’s way. To leave things in this chaos is both unwise and unjust; for it will trouble us in the future, and trouble the people who have to live with us. Yet it costs pain and effort to attack this chaos and subject it to order. Endurance of pain, in the name of wisdom and justice, to secure order for our own future comfort and the comfort of our family and friends, is courage. On the other hand, to leave things lying in confusion around us; to let alien forces come into our domain and encamp there in insolent defiance of ourselves and our friends, is a shameful confession that things are stronger than we. To be thus conquered by dead material things is as ignominious a defeat as can come to a man. The man who can be conquered by things is a coward in the strict ethical sense of the term; that is, he lacks the strength of will to bear the incidental pains which his personal and social interests put upon him.

The courage of time is punctuality. When there is a hard piece of work to be done, it is pleasanter far to sit at ease for the present, and put off the work. “The thousand nothings of the hour” claim our attention. The coward yields to “their stupefying power,” and the great task remains forever undone. The brave man brushes these conflicting claims into the background, stops his ears until the sirens’ voices are silent, stamps on his feelings as though they were snakes in his path, and does the thing now which ever after he will rejoice to have done. In these crowded modern days, the only man who “finds time” for great things is the man who takes it by violence from the thousands of petty, local temporary claims, and makes it serve the ends of wisdom and justice.

There are three places where one may draw the line for getting a piece of work done. One man draws it habitually a few minutes or hours or days after it is due. He is always in distress, and a nuisance to everybody else. There is no dignity in a life that is as perpetually behind its appointments as a tail is in the rear of a dog.

It is very risky — ethically speaking, it is cowardly — to draw the line at the exact date when the work is due; for then one is at the mercy of any accident or interruption that may overtake him at the end of his allotted time. If he is sick or a friend dies, or unforeseen complications arise, he is as bad off as the man who deliberately planned to be late, and almost as much to blame. For a man who leaves the possibility of accident and interruption out of account, and stakes the welfare of himself and of others on such miscalculation, is neither wise nor just; he is reckless rather than brave. Even if accidents do not come, he is walking on the perilous edge all the time; his work is done in a fever of haste and anxiety, injurious alike to the quality of the work and the health of the worker.

The man who puts the courage of punctuality into his work will draw the line for finishing a piece of work a safe period inside the time when it is actually due. If one forms the habit and sticks to it, it is no harder to have work done ten days, or at least one day, ahead of time than to finish it at the last allowable minute. Then, if anything happens, it does no harm. This habit will save literary workers an incalculable amount of anxiety and worry. And it is the wear and tear of worry and hurry, not the amount of calm, quiet work, that kills such men before their time.

I am aware that orderliness and punctuality are not usually regarded as forms of courage. But the essential element of all courage is in them — the power to face a disagreeable present in the interest of desirable permanent ends. They are far more important in modern life than the courage to face bears or bullets. They underlie the more spectacular forms of courage. The man who cannot reduce to order the things that are lying passively about him, and endure the petty pains incidental to doing hard things before the sheer lapse of time forces him to action, is not the man who will be calm and composed when angry mobs are howling about him, or who will go steadily on his way when greed and corruption, hypocrisy and hate, are arrayed to resist him. For whether in the quiet of a study and the routine of an office, or in the turmoil of a riot or a strike, true courage is the ready and steadfast acceptance of whatever pains are incidental to securing the personal and public ends that are at stake.

Modern science posits that human intelligence is not a singular phenomenon. Popular belief is that intelligence is set at birth even though genes account for less than half and it’s understood that function of prenatal care, environment and education make up the lion’s share. Another common belief is that verbal and mathematical reasoning skills measured by SATs and IQ tests are the sine qua nons of intelligence.

As any good college admittance expert knows, SATs can winnow out those who don’t make the cut, but there are many other intelligences that must be measured to understand the whole person. Some of the best institutions of higher education have developed a daunting process to understand the whole candidate. Many of the best hiring organizations do their best to replicate this filtering process but have much more stringent labor laws around what can and can’t be discussed at a job interview – much to the disadvantage of the candidate! (That is why you need to know what information to volunteer at a job interview!)

So what are the seven intelligences?

1. Logical – Mathematical
2. Verbal – Linguistic
3. Spatial – Mechanical
4. Musical
5. Bodily – Kinesthetic
6. Interpersonal – Social
7. Intrapersonal – Self-knowledge

While there are many geniuses who we identify with particular items on the above list, Leonardo da Vinci had mastered them all.

How did he do this? What were his secrets? Clearly da Vinci was able to take advantage of the new technological advances of his day – movable type, cheap paper, the pencil. He also clearly had a great head start with being born to a large family with many siblings. But one of his strengths was his driving principles that kept his course on life long learning. He developed what are now referred to as the Seven Da Vincian Principles. They are:

Curiosità – An insatiable curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continued learning.

Dimostrazione – A commitment to test knowledge thought experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

Sensazione – The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.

Sfumato – Literally “Going up in smoke” – A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.

Arte/Scienza – The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. “Whole-brain” thinking.

Corporalita – The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.

Connessione – A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnected ness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking.

Hopefully, many of these do not seem foreign to you. They should seem like common sense. You possess all of these. The key is to develop each one every day.

What are some habits you need to work on? What are some that you excel at?

What do you need to do to be more intelligent?

www.crs.org

“A hundred years from now
it will not matter
what your bank account was,
the sort of house you lived in,
or the kind of clothes you wore,
but the world may be much different
because you were important
in the life of a hungry child.”
~ Author Unknown

Learning Business Consulting – Episode 4: The Communication Model

Learning Business Consulting – Episode 3: Business Analyst versus Project Manager

Learning Business Consulting – Episode 2: What does a business analyst do?

Learning Business Consulting – Episode 1: Introduction