Discouraged?As I was driving home from work one day, I stopped to watch a local Little League baseball game that was being played in a park near my home. As I sat down behind the bench on the first-baseline, I asked one of the boys what the score was."We’re behind 14 to nothing,” he answered with a smile.“Really,” I said. “I have to say you don’t look very discouraged.”“Discouraged?” the boy asked with a puzzled look on his face. “Why should we be discouraged? We haven’t been up to bat yet.

There are many stories and accounts about the winners of lotteries whoare jubilant when they win, but whose lives descend into a nightmareafter acquiring that unearned money. (No challenge, no skill.) Thelottery looks like "the answer" to people because they associate moneywith pleasure. But the true enjoyment of money comes in part from theearning of it, which involves skill and challenge.Watching television is usually done for pleasure. That's why so fewpeople can remember (or make use of) any of the 30 hours of televisionthey have watched in the past week.

The way I choose to start my day sets its tone. When I make the decision to begin by giving thanks for the positive things in my life, no matter how seemingly few or bountiful they might be, I am setting the flow for new opportunities to come my way. Each and every day I will remind myself that I can steer my outcome in any direction I wish by the actions I take. The steps I take day in and day out are the determining factors as to whether or not I achieve the success I desire. I take comfort in knowing that I have control over the actions I choose to do or not do.

Everything you say, everything you do and every decision you make comes back to you. If you want to make friends, be friendly. If you want to be rich, be generous, if you want to be understood by others, take time to be understanding of them. And if you want to be heard, then listen. Life is what you make out of it. So If you want the world to change, start with the one in the mirror. What you give is eventually what you get. Whatever it is you hope to achieve in this life, give it, nurture it, be it, and you will enjoy a lifetime filled with it many times over.

[T]he more we do this, the more I learn about what I think Chains was really training us for. And this is it. He wasn't training us for a calm and orderly world where we could pick and choose when we need to be clever. He was training us for a situation that was fucked up on all sides. Well, we're in it, and I say we're equal to it. I don't need to be reminded that we're up to our heads in dark water. I just want you boys to remember that we're the gods-damned sharks.""Right on," cried Bug. "I knew there was a reason I let you lead this gang!

Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or political pre-occupations, and, if he were English, his pipe-smoking reveries. On occasions, individual genius allowed a more subtle emanation to envelope the human nucleus of the poem - as we find in Baudelaire for example. But this splendour was a by-product. All the poet wished was to be a human being.When he writes, I believe today's poet simply wishes to be a poet.

The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.

Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigor and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility.

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.

I told you it would be difficult! If I were you I would just not bother trying these tasks! They are great challenges, clearly too great for you.” said Guya, but there was a certain sparkle in his eye as he said it. “I shall complete your tasks, ” said Yoshiko firmly. “And I’ll be back sooner than you think!” With that he spread his wings to head for Fire School. “Oh and one more thing Guya” Yoshiko added. Perhaps when I return you will be so kind as to stop calling me a little dragon!” As Yoshiko flew off Guya chuckled to himself.

Making life changing decisions are never easy but are a very important part of life. Some people will not like your decision and some may even get emotionally hurt. Ultimately it all comes back to what decisions are best for you. Remember this is "Your" life in which God gave you. So seek unbiased advice and not yes men, nor people attempting to influence your decision based on their motives. I heard a pastor once say " God did not call you to be unhappy to make others happy" you are not responsible for others happiness, but you are responsible for your own happiness -Live out your Dreams-

Maybe we feel meaning only when we deal with something bigger. Perhaps we hope that someone else, especially someone important to us, will ascribe value to what we've produced? Maybe we need the illusion that our work might one day matter to many people. That it might be of some value in the big, broad world out there [...]? Most likely it is all of these. But fundamentally, I think that almost any aspect of meaning [...] can be sufficient to drive our behaviour. As long as we are doing something that is somewhat connected to our self image, it can fuel our motivation and get us to work much harder.

It's about personal development. It's about creating your own character and pushing it to the limit. It's about pushing yourself so far out of your own and everybody else's idea of who you are and what you're capable of, that you no longer believe in limits. It's about reaching beyond your so-called potential, because your potential is never where you or anyone else expects it to be, not even close. It's about being able to say with the last breath of your life “I used all my potential and all my talents and pushed myself to the limit. I could not have fought any harder.

It’s easy to think that if we had a different house, different car, different job, different relationship, different city, everything would be different; that we would feel different then.The problem is, you are the main character in the story that is your life. No matter how much you alter the setting of that story, you can’t escape from yourself. There are many factors which contribute to your experience on this planet, but ultimately, you are the one creating your experience here. In order to get to the life you are here to live, you must begin by becoming the person you are here to become.