Stake life upon truth. ~Juvenal
This book is sublime. Truth after truth after truth. Your foundations will be shook and you probably won’t be happy about it; at least not initially. But truth ain’t about happy; it’s about truth.
Some Jems:
“Enlightenment isn’t when you go there, it’s when there comes here.”
“You’re either awake or you’re not.”
“I’ll tell you what I wish someone had told me when I was feeling confused and alienated. I wish someone had told me that there wasn’t something wrong with me and that I shouldn’t be trying to make it right; that I should stop trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. I wish someone had told me that I wasn’t like everyone else not because I was defective, but because I was designed for other things. Being different might seem like a curse, but the important part is that it’s also a blessing. I wish someone had told me to stop trying to fix the curse part and start figuring out the blessing part.”
Paul Arden is the author of this blog’s title. This book shoots straight from the hip, is clever, and leaves you with a feeling of “I should have known this!” And it’s a FAST read. Some excerpts:
When it can’t be done do it. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t exist.
A NEW idea can be either unfamiliar, or silly or both. It can’t be judged by description. It needs to be done (made) to exist.
It is unlikely that anyone will sanction the cost of something they don’t understand, therefore you have no choice but to do it yourself. At whatever cost. You may have to beg, steal and borrow to get it done. But that’s for you to work out how you do it. It’s exciting. It’s difficult and it’s fun. If it was easy anyone could do it.
The film Citizen Kane is a very good example. It was stolen not sanctioned. Orson Welles could not find any backers, but he did raise a small sum for casting. He begged, borrowed and cajoled people into building sets and shooting full-blown screen testes which eventually formed a third of the film.
IT EXISTED. Backers could see that they were getting. He got the money.
Without him doing it when it supposedly couldn’t be done, it would be another in the endless list of ideas that never happened.
The PEROSN Who Doesn’t Make Mistakes Is Unlikely to Make Anything
Benjamin Franklin said, I haven’t failed, “I’ve had 10,000 ideas that didn’t work.”
Thomas Edison said, “Of the 200 light bulbs that didn’t work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate into the next attempt.”
Theater director Joan Littlewood said, “If we don’t get lost, we’ll never find a new route.”
All of them understood that failures and false starts are a precondition of success.
At the last company I worked for you would not be fired for being wrong, but you would be fired for not having initiative. It had a positive attitude to mistakes. It was a great company. Failure was a major contributor to its success. *
What would it be like if you approached tomorrow with these two attitudes? Doing the impossible and happy when you made mistakes. What could you apply this to? Your career? Your relationships? Actually what couldn’t you apply this to?
* Excerpts from It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be, by Paul Arden
(#18 of 100 in 100 Blog Posting Challenge)
Stake life upon truth. ~Juvenal
