Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.
* John Wooden

Wisdom is divided into two parts: (a) having a great deal to say, and (b) not saying it.
* Anonymous

A loser doesn’t know what he’ll do if he loses, but talks about what he’ll do if he wins, and a winner doesn’t talk about what he’ll do if he wins, but knows what he’ll do if he loses.
* Eric Berne

No man becomes rich unless he enriches others.
* Andrew Carnegie

An effort made for the happiness of others lifts us above ourselves.
* Lydia M. Child

I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.
* Helen Keller

Every man I meet is in some way my superior. In that I learn of him.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

The test of a man is how much he can bear and how much he can share and how soon he confesses a mistake and makes amends for it.
* Dada J. P. Vaswani

To keep our faces toward change, and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate, is strength undefeatable.
* Helen Keller

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.
* Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)

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*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

Consider the all-too-familiar boss’s pet employee at an office. He uses flattery, goes out of his way to help the boss, curries personal favors, and constantly tows the boss’s line no matter how unreasonable it is. He never corrects the boss when necessary. He either sugarcoats or withholds information that the boss would rather not hear. Over time, he has perfected the art of stroking his boss’s exaggerated sense of self-worth.

How about leaders who go overboard on their intention to exceed customer expectations and turn out to be “customer compelled?” They bend over backward to fulfill every whim and fancy of their customers to the likely peril of their own organization’s values and priorities.

Sucking up or brown-nosing is widespread approach to win a boss’s approval solely with one’s own self-interest in mind. Consider the consequences of sucking up:

• An employee that sucks up to his boss loses the respect of his peers and employees. They assume positive discrimination and favoritism because of his ingratiatory behavior. The suck-up recursively promotes sucking up in his organization — he encourages others to establish themselves in his good graces.
• Suck-ups quickly get into a pattern of slavishly reacting to every impulse of the boss. Without realizing, they become vulnerable to obligations to support their boss. Neither can they set limits on favors, nor do they stand up for themselves or their employees.

Be Resourceful, Don’t Suck Up

“One does not make the strengths of the boss productive by toadying to him. One does it by starting out with what is right and presenting it in a form which is accessible to the superior.”
* Peter Drucker, in The Effective Executive

Contrary to popular opinion, a vast majority of promotions are not handed out to employees who are most willing to suck up. Research and empirical evidence proves that employees who are honest, sincere, open, straightforward, and helpful earn management’s respect and attention over time. They move up fast because of their demonstrated ability to make the right choices. In addition, most people can innately distinguish the brown-nosers and differentiate genuine compliments from insincere flattery.

Do not get me wrong. There is enormous value in being helpful to the boss. After all, making yourself resourceful can go a long way in staying in the boss’s good graces. It can open professional opportunities and increase your access to new ideas, initiatives, and restricted information. However, there is an obvious boundary between doing favors and sucking up. Running an urgent errand when the boss is busy preparing for an important meeting or watching over his pet when he is travelling are well within reason. Compromising your values and priorities just to get on the boss’s side will not get you anywhere in the long term. Try these suggestions:

• Be sincere and timely in your compliments. Refrain from making flattering remarks.
• Use facts and logic to support or challenge the boss’s ideas. Never praise, or comment on your boss or his plans in front of others.
• Ask your boss how you could help him achieve his goals and follow-up earnestly.

Recommended Reading

• Four keys to an excellent relationship with your boss
• Never surprise your boss
• How to seek proactive feedback from your manager
• Are you ready for a promotion?
• Talent is more than skin-deep

***See other articles related to Managing the boss, flattery, promotions, career planning, managing people, sucking up

Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.
* Don Herold

Never mistake activity for achievement.
* John Wooden

The soul is a fire that darts its rays through all the senses; it is in this fire that existence consists; all the observations and all the efforts of philosophers ought to turn towards this ME, the centre and moving power of our sentiments and our ideas.
* Germaine de Stael

Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
* James Russell Lowell

The surest way to happiness is to lose yourself in a cause greater than yourself.
* Unknown

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow enormous benefits upon the world.
* Robert Louis Stevenson

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
* Rabindranath Tagore

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.
* Helen Keller

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*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
* Benjamin Franklin

Music is the art of the prophets, the only art that can calm the agitations of the soul…
* Martin Luther

Be true when you are tempted, be true when you don’t want to be, be true when it means standing alone from the rest of the world.
* Ruth B. Wright

Each of us is great insofar as we perceive and act on the infinite possibilities which lie undiscovered and unrecognized about us.
* James Harvey Robinson

A knowledge of the path cannot be substituted for putting one foot in front of the other.
* M. C. Richards

A helping word to one in trouble is like a switch in a railroad track… an inch between wreck and smooth, rolling prosperity.
* Henry Ward Beecher

So it’s probably eighty percent luck and twenty percent skill.
* Chris LeDoux

Anger is that powerful internal force that blows out the light of reason.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
* Rabindranath Tagore

We are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it is possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.
* Samuel Johnson

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*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

Every dawn signs a new contract with existence.
* Henri-Frederic Amiel

The company of the distinguished, fetches respect even to the unworthy. Because of its association with flowers (in a garland), the thread is also worn on head.
* Subhashita Manjari

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.
* Sophocles

I’d rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent.
* John Wooden

It may be possible to forcibly snatch a jewel from the midst of powerful jaws of a crocodile. It may also be possible to cross a raging sea swimming across its high-running violent waves. One may even wear a furious snake around his head as if it is a garland of flowers. But it is impossible to win over a conceited fool!
* Subhashita Manjari

No one has yet calculated how many imaginary triumphs are silently celebrated by people each year to keep up with their courage.
* Athenaeus

Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.
* Rabindranath Tagore

If you have nothing else to do, look about you and see if there isn’t something close at hand that you can improve! It may make you wealthy, though it is more likely that it will make you happy.
* George Matthew Adams

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*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life.
* Benjamin Franklin

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
* Helen Keller

Between Yes and No, lies mediocracy.
* Ligia Kasten

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.
* Samuel Johnson

Never do anything which you would not wish to do during the last hour of your life.
* Dada J. P. Vaswani

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase: if you pursue happiness you’ll never find it.
* C.P. Snow

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: He that thinks himself the happiest man really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.
* Charles Caleb Colton

We never understand a thing so well, and make it our own, as when we have discovered it for ourselves.
* Rene Descartes

Be of good hope in the face of death. Believe in this one truth for certain, that no evil can befall a good man either in life or death, and that his fate is not a matter of indifference to the gods.
* Socrates

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*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

Quite often, goals — even the SMART ones — fail to stimulate action beyond the initial burst of motivation. The simple reason for this slip is that goals tend to lack visibility for the “true ends.”

Make Your Goals Stick

A goal that lacks an underpinning of meaning and personal significance is likely to run out of steam. Therefore, a goal or resolution can be inspiring only when you can connect it to a larger purpose.

When you define any goal, identify its “true ends” — what benefits you expect to gain by successfully pursuing an idea or goal. For example,

• Instead of “Join a fitness center and workout every day,” try “Lose fifteen pounds by 6-June to drop a clothes-size and look and feel better at my best friend’s wedding.”
• Instead of “Reduce credit card debt,” try “Reduce expenses and pay off $12,000 in credit card debt in three months so that I can save $135 per month in interest fees.”
• Instead of “Attend fewer meetings,” try “Attend fewer meetings or delegate participation to reduce time at work and enjoy more quality time with family.”

Recognizing the true ends of your goals will sustain you through internal and external resistance to pursue your goals.

Recommended Reading

• Use the ‘10-Minute Dash’ to overcome procrastination
• Don’t Let ‘Perfect’ Be the Enemy of ‘Done’
• How hard you should work
• Think and perform like a CEO

***See other articles related to goals, aspirations, resolutions, ambition, dieting success, perspective

Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
* Isaac Bashevis Singer

When a man feels throbbing within him the power to do what he undertakes as well as it can possibly be done, this is happiness, this is success.
* Orison Swett Marden

To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something; to secure it in this world, we must do something.
* Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Toleration is the greatest gift of mind, it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.
* Helen Keller

The spirit of man communes with Heaven; the omnipotence of Heaven resides in man. Is the distance between Heaven and man very great?
* Hung Tzu-ch’eng

When I work fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, I get lucky.
* Armand Hammer

Eventually, we all need to be willing to face the deepest, darkest beliefs we have about ourselves. Only in this way can we come to know that they are only beliefs, and not the truth about who we are.
* Ezra Bayda

The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit for doing them.
* Benjamin Jowett

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*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

Some sources suggest that the term may have originated from the expression “fire a gun” as in “discharge a gun.” However, legend has it that the term originated in the 1910s at the National Cash Register (NCR) Company.

NCR founder John Henry Patterson (1844–1922) is widely recognized as the pioneer of sales management and for developing formal methods for training and assessing salespersons. Nevertheless, Patterson, for all his genius, was quirky. He was obsessed with total control of everything around him. He imposed his personal values on employees. As a food and fitness fanatic, he had employees weighed every six months. He often dismissed employees for trivial reasons just to break their self-confidence and recruited them back soon after.

John Patterson’s employees and customers branded him abusive and confrontational. Patterson once dismissed an executive by asking him to visit a customer. When the executive drove back to NCR headquarters, he observed his desk tossed out into the lawn. Right on time, his desk burst out into flames. He was “fired.”

Thomas Watson Sr. was “fired” by NCR

Famously, NCR’s star sales executive Thomas Watson Sr. met a similar fate. In 1914, Watson argued that NCR’s dominant product, mechanical cash registers, would soon go obsolete. He proposed that NCR develop electric cash registers. Peterson resisted the idea. He demanded that Watson focus on nothing but sales and not worry about innovation. Following an argument at a meeting, Patterson dismissed Watson. In a fit of anger, Patterson had workers carry Watson’s desk outside and had it lit on fire. Thomas Watson Sr. was thus “fired.” Thomas Watson Sr. then joined a smaller competitor, Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R,) which soon grew into International Business Machines (IBM.) Thomas Watson Sr. led IBM for forty years and turned IBM into the world’s leading technology company.

Suggested Reading

• More Folklore: Mahatma Gandhi on being the change you wish to see
• Warren Buffett’s ‘Newspaper Test’ on Personal Integrity
• Are you ready for a promotion?
• Four telltale signs of an unhappy employee
• Jack Welch’s four types of managers

***See other articles related to business legends, folklore, anecdotes, employee termination, leaders and bosses, NCR, IBM

The problem is not that there are problems.
The problem is in expecting otherwise and
thinking that having problems is a problem.
* Theodore Rubin

Life is a pure flame, and
we live by an invisible sun within us.
* Thomas Browne

The more you think of yourself as shining immortal spirit,
the more eager you will be to be absolutely free of matter,
body, and senses. This is the intense desire to be free.
* Swami Vivekananda

The worst bankrupt is the man who has lost his enthusiasm.
Let a man lose everything in the world but
his enthusiasm and will come through again to success.
* H. W. Arnold

Leadership usually gravitates to person who can say what he thinks.
* Anonymous

If everything seems under control,
you’re just not going fast enough.
* Mario Gabriele Andretti

The place to improve the world is first
in one’s own heart and head and hands.
* Robert M. Pirsig

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
* Martin Farquhar Tupper

Carry on, no matter what happens.
Hide your sorrows under a smile and carry on.
* Anonymous

Visit www.Inspiration.RightAttitudes.com for my compilation of inspirational quotations by author and topic. You may also subscribe to the weekly newsletter of inspirational quotations by sending a blank email to iqml-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations