49 Ways to Improve Your Life Today

1. Radiate Joy

Smile at everyone—yourself in the mirror, your boss, your family, strangers, co-workers, the clerk at the store.  Smile, just because. Smiling creates friendship, acceptance, understanding, and it’s more fun! (Kalama Hochreiter )

2. Take a Risk

Do something outside your comfort zone. Whether it’s talking to someone outside your social circle at a party when you’re shy, offering to help someone with a project that will require learning new skills at work, or trying a new ethnic restaurant instead of the usual Pie ‘n Burger, you’ll expand your horizons and, with them, your ideas about who you are and what you can do.  (Liz Pruyn)... READ MORE

Soichiro Honda: A Story Of Persistence

“Success is 99 percent failure.” - Soichiro Honda

The life of Soichiro Honda is often quoted as an inspiring story of a man who overcame unbelievable obstacles and went on to achieve great success. The story of Soichiro Honda is an inspirational tale of motivation and persistence in the face of adversity. His story serves as an important lesson for all of us and it teaches us not to give up when we suffer a setback. Despite suffering failure, ridicule and endless financial difficulties, Honda believed strongly enough in himself to make his success a reality.

Soichiro Honda was born in 1906 and he grew up helping his father repair bicycles in the small town of Komyo in Japan. While Soichiro Honda was in school he started a workshop with the intention of developing a piston ring which he planned to sell on to Toyota. He spent day and night working away in his workshop believing that he could produce the perfect design. He struggled financially during this period, even selling his wife’s jewelry for capital and occasionally slept in his workshop.

When he finally completed his finished piston ring, Soichiro took his design to Toyota who told him that his work was not up to their standards. After suffering this terrible setback, Soichiro was forced to go back to school and was taunted by those around him for failing. Other engineers laughed at his design but Soichiro refused to give up despite being ridiculed by those around him. Soichiro Honda paid little attention to school work that did not relate to his business and, when verbally attacked by his teacher, Honda responded that ‘A ticket will get you a seat in a movie theater, but a diploma won’t get you a job!’.

Soichiro believe strongly in his idea and refused to give up on his dream. He struggled on for two more years before finally gaining a contract with Toyota. By this time Japan was gearing up for war and Honda found it hard to find the building materials he needed to create a factory to produce his work. Despite this potentially disastrous set back, Honda persisted and found a new way of making concrete which allowed him to finish building the factory he needed.

Sadly this was not the end of Soichiro’s troubles as the factory he had struggled so hard to build was bombed twice during the war and steel became unavailable. Whilst most people would have given up at this point, Honda persisted and found a way to get past these obstacles. He started collecting gasoline cans which had been discarded by US fighters to help regenerate his factory, objects he described as “gifts from President Truman”. When Honda started rebuilding his factory an earthquake finally destroyed it. This setback would have spelled the end for most people but Honda carried on chasing his dream.

After the war, Honda found a way of attaching a small engine onto his bicycle and quickly found that other people were interested in his strange new idea. Sadly the materials Honda needed were not available to supply the demand for his new creation. Rather than give up, Honda dug deep and sought out a way to get the finance he needed to continue with his project.

He wrote an inspiring letter to 18,000 bicycle shop owners which asked them to help him revitalize Japan through innovation. A huge number of the shop owners he wrote to responded by giving Honda what little money they could to help him. Soichiro battled away with several redesigns before finally producing the ‘Super Cub’ which became an overnight success. By 1963, Honda was the top-selling brand of motorcycles in the United States.

Honda Corporation now employs more than 100,000 people in the USA and Japan and it is now second only to Toyota in Japan. Honda succeeded because of the passion and determination of one man who was committed to his ideas and making them a success. Despite suffering more failures and set backs than most of us will see in a lifetime, Honda persisted and never once allowed himself to give up on his dreams.

SOURCE: FAMOUS AND RICH

The Legacy You Leave

All your actions, words, and knowledge that you share while you are living become the gift that you leave when you are gone.

~ Jim Allen

The Legacy You Leave

All You will leave behind for the world to remember is
Your Legacy, so ask yourself:

Will you have earned the respect of your peers and the admiration of your critics?

Will you have acted humbly at the peak of success
and graceful in the face of defeat?

Will you have kept your childlike wonder and reveled in the beauty of the world and the small miracles
that each day brought?

Will you be remembered for how often you laughed and brought smiles to the hearts of others?

Will small children and the elderly have been overjoyed
to be around you?

Will others have trusted you with their inner most secrets?

Will you have forgiven and offered heartfelt apology?

Will you have looked for the very best, and done your utmost to build worth, in others?

Will you have fed a hungry child or clothed a naked man
or given hope to a stranger in dire need?

Will you have left this world a better place
by the life you have lived?

What kind of Legacy will You Leave?

By Rick Beneteau


SOURCE: ACHIEVE EZINE

I Will Persist Until I Succeed (by Og Mandino)

I was not delivered unto this world in defeat, nor does failure course in my veins. I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd. I am a lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. I will hear not those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious. Let them join the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny.

I will persist until I succeed.

The prizes of life are at the end of each journey, not near the beginning; and it is not given to me to know how many steps are necessary in order to reach my goal. Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner.

Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult.

I will persist until I succeed.

Henceforth, I will consider each day's effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today.

I will be liken to the rain drop which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking.

I will persist until I succeed.

I will never consider defeat and I will remove from my vocabulary such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are the words of fools. I will avoid despair but if this disease of the mind should infect me then I will work on in despair. I will toil and I will endure. I will ignore the obstacles at my feet and keep mine eyes on the goals above my head, for I know that where dry desert ends, green grass grows.

I will persist until I succeed.

From: The Greatest Salesman In The World by Og Mandino.

The Art Of A ComeBack - Kim Clijsters

Kim Clijsters

The Belgian tennis star isn’t the first female athlete to take a timeout from her career to start a family, but she might have made one of the most triumphant returns to sports ever.

Just 18 months after the birth of her daughter, Kim Clijsters won the 2009 U.S. Open, becoming the first unseeded player to capture the title and the first mother to win a major tennis championship in almost 30 years.

Who can forget watching Clijsters raise her trophy while little Jada toddled around the court?

“I think motherhood makes you mentally stronger,” Clijsters says. “I love my sport and I train hard. I hope I am showing that you can have your own life and still be a good mother and a good wife.”

What an inspiration to women everywhere.

SOURCES: DAILY MAIL, LAUREUS AWARD,
US OPEN 2010 CHAMPION (She does it again)