Diary Of Thoughts

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People By Steven Covey

2013-10-09T00:50:00.000-07:00

Gerhardt sevenhabits from oneblogup

This presentation is the crux of a famous book Seven Habits Effective People by Steven Covey.

You can download the complete presentation

Your Life Your Decision

2013-10-01T01:09:00.000-07:00

This is the post from quora.com. Most people don't agree. As in life, we often take other's decision and consider it as ours.
Ask yourself. Was it you? Is this really what you want?

Best Day Of Life

2013-09-27T02:01:00.000-07:00

"The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own.
No apologies or excuses.

No one to lean on, rely on or blame.
The gift is yours-it is an amazing journey-and you alone are responsible for the quality of it.This is the dayyour life really begins."

-Bob Moawad

Real Men

2013-09-19T04:27:00.000-07:00

"Real Men Don't Lurk In Shadows, What's Done In Dark Shall Come To Light"

--- Ernesto Che Guevara

Lesson From Karate Kid Movie

2013-09-18T02:38:00.002-07:00

Life will knock us down, but we can choose whether or not to stand back up

Excellent quote from the movie The Karate Kid

Plan & Punch

2013-09-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."

Mike Tyson.............

Bruce Lee Poster

2013-08-11T08:39:00.001-07:00

Swami Vivekananda on Self Confidence

2012-12-27T04:11:00.001-08:00

It Couldn’t Be Done

2012-02-21T07:43:00.000-08:00

It Couldn’t Be Done
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But, he with a chuckle replied
That "maybe it couldn’t," but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
Somebody scoffed: "Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one has done it";
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat,
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure;
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle it in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start to sing as you tackle the thing
That "couldn’t be done," and you’ll do it.

- Edgar Albert Guest - 1881-1959

You've got to find what you love

2012-02-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

These were the words of one of the most inspiring person-Steve Jobs.

The following speech was delivered on the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

This speech was provided by one of the reader of this blog: Mr. Jim Syndris

Star & Dust

2012-01-14T10:23:00.000-08:00

When you go for stars, it is quite possible, you won't get one. But you won't come up with handful of dust either.

Get up.....Get going....Aim Higher

Change the Thinking, Change the world

2011-11-14T02:46:00.001-08:00

Thoughts

2011-10-29T00:29:00.000-07:00

Thoughts,Words and actions are the factions
that make or break our day.

And thoughts are the things from whence they all spring.

To be the best we can possibly be, to grow, and learn in every adversity, and not lose the success that's ours to be requires control of our thoughts explicitly.

Never doubt the possibilities to be, and obstacles will never become a reality.

We create our own success you see but only with a positive mentality.

- Anonymous

Our Deepest Fear

2011-10-13T23:52:00.000-07:00

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It’s our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We were all meant to shine, as children do. It’s not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine. We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear…. Our presence automatically liberates others."

- Marianne Williamson

This is the great thought. It actually reveals the truth. The thought was delivered in the movie Coach Carter 2005. We as a human has lot of capabilities, and this is where the problem persists. We forget that we are an entity in this world and our presence should create a positive environment in this world. We are the bundle of energies and according to the science, the energy is always transferred.

Power Of Thinking

2011-09-23T09:34:00.000-07:00

Thinking can play a vital role in your development and achievements. These are the words of motivation from Walter D. Wintle - 1905.

If you think you are beaten, you are
If you think you dare not, you don't,
If you like to win, but you think you can't
It is almost certain you won't.
If you think you'll lose, you're lost
For out of the world we find,
Success begins with a fellow's will
It's all in the state of mind.
If you think you are outclassed, you are
You've got to think high to rise,
You've got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.
Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the man WHO THINKS HE CAN!

Success is not a Victory

2011-09-18T03:21:00.000-07:00

Every time I wonder that, what is success. People have different definitions to it. Society has different parameter to measure it.

But I, as an individual have no idea of success. May be due to a dumb mind. But whatever.

There are few examples:
Mr. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet etc. etc.

Are they successful. Well very few people will agree with me or may be none. They are not successful. They had never thought of getting success.

They are victorious. Success is just 1% of victory. It is because of their victory, we site examples and read about them. However, there are plenty of successful people out in this world. But we barely know them or talk about them.

Remember: Success is not a Victory.

Victorious people never think of success. It's not a battle, it's the war. A war between you, your ideologies, your thinking,your mind, your soul and of course the milieu, which wants you to be one of them.

Your entire belief system will be on war if you are chasing victory. Only few, may be .01% of the worlds population posses these guts to chase.

Today is a Present

2011-09-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

Famous quote from movie Kungfu Panda: Present is a gift. Live it. The past is over and you don't know the future.

Success And Failure Alternatives

2011-09-11T00:21:00.000-07:00

"Success has no alternative and failure has none."

- Anonymous

Our Doubts Are Traitors

2011-09-10T22:20:00.000-07:00

"Our doubts are traitors, and make us loose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."

- William Shakespeare

Shakespeare uses the word "Traitor" to describe our doubts. The doubts are created in mind. Despite being created by our own mind,our doubt cripple us, immobilise us and prevent us from reaching our potential.

Teacher And Boss

2011-08-03T08:01:00.000-07:00

If you think your teacher is tough,

wait until you get a boss.

He dosen't have a tenure.

Yes Mr. Gates you are right.....!!!!

Life is a game

2011-07-28T09:33:00.001-07:00

Life is the game. A game of confidence and consistency.

Have confidence and be consistent and increase your chances

of winning.