Category Archives: Choosing
The Impatience of Mrs. Suzuki
Patience is a virtue … everybody agrees, right?
Back in the 14th century, British poet William Langland was probably the first to introduce this thought into English. And the ensuing seven hundred years have done nothing to disprove it. Just the opposite.
So why are so many people still so impatient?
Putting in Stars
Dreaming of Success
Maybe you want more… Tony did. Little Tony was born “in the wrong neighborhood” to relatively poor, working class parents who couldn’t afford to send him to college.
But even as a child, little Tony ached and yearned to amount to something, to be really big in the world. His grades weren’t all that special, but he had one burning desire. He wanted to be a big success.
Who’s That Knockin’ on Your Door?
Missing Messages
Imagine this: You’re at a friend’s house, cheerfully chatting, and there’s a knock at the front door. But your friend makes no move to go see who it is. The knocking continues, gradually becoming more insistent, but still your friend ignores it.
Finally, you offer, “Don’t you think you should go see about that?”
Grampa’s Business Rules
The Rules for Success Are Not New
You know, business doesn’t have to be a complex, Harvard-B-school kind of thing, all complicated and hard for ordinary mortals to understand. Much of it CAN be boiled down to some pretty simple stuff.
My paternal grandfather didn’t have a degree in business. In fact, he never got past the third or fourth grade, but that didn’t stop him from running several successful businesses and owning a significant part of the small north-Georgia town where he lived.
Iron-Clad Confidence
“He just oozed confidence.”
That’s the way a long-time friend described Aristotle Onassis when he was just a teenager. Some people are late bloomers. They don’t gain much real self assurance till they are well into adulthood.
But there are also early bloomers — Onassis was one — and the stories describing his early years don’t all agree on details. The do all agree, however, on one point: young Ari had charisma, and lots of it. They all describe a young man with brains and drive and overflowing with confidence.
Information Overload? No Such Thing
So Much Information, so Little Time
How will I ever keep up? … that feeling grips many of us.
When it does, we shrug our shoulders and curse the glut of data pouring into and through our lives. It has, in fact, become quite trendy to complain about feeling harassed and overwhelmed by all the incoming info that we need to know. Somebody even coined the term “information overload,” right?
The Most Unpopular Secret of Personal Power
HELEN KELLER SAID, “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved.”
So you hate the hard times you’ve passed through? Maybe you need to think again.
Easy times never stretch us, never enlarge our strengths, never give us a new, expanded grasp of our capabilities.
But I Don’t Want to Wait THAT Long
Impatience
Years ago, I worked in a camera shop with a man named Sam who was constantly bemoaning his bad luck. He often talked about Mr. Dawson, a man in our town. He was in his seventies, and he was really lucky. Dawson was “lucky” according to Sam because he owned buildings all over the western suburbs of Chicago.
One day when he mentioned Dawson, I commented, “Hey, Sam, you’re only thirty-five now. Why don’t you start buying buildings this year? By the time you’re seventy-five you’ll have become as rich as Dawson.”
