In order to speed up, slow down. In order to make progress, be still. In order to get all you want, let go. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not difficult to be successful. It’s easy. What’s difficult is giving yourself permission to relax, to enjoy yourself, to find the joy in hard times.
There is one unchallengeable truth – if you cannot control your thoughts, you can never succeed. If you get upset easily, you can never succeed. If you are easily offended, insulted or disappointed, you’ll never win. If you let your environment control your emotions, you can never succeed.
Successful people generate their own energy and optimism. They have the ability to detect the opportunity in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. They insulate themselves against the negativity of others.
Where others find reason to despair, they find reasons to celebrate. They know that it’s not what happens to them that it’s important. It is the meaning they attach to what happens to them.
Someone once said that the reason why so many of us are unhappy is that we spend what we don’t have, to buy things we don’t have, to buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t like. And it’s true.
We live our lives with one eye constantly on how we are doing relative to the people around us.
If you live your life in comparison to the people around you, you will never be happy because you are not in control of your happiness.
Your happiness becomes a function of how the people around you are performing. You will never rejoice in the achievements of others because they make you feel inadequate, and there’s always going to be someone better than you.
The single-minded pursuit of money and status will put you on the path to personal destruction. Status and money are treacherous and seductive. The more wealth you obtain, the more afraid you will be of losing it. You will regard others either as a means to acquire more money or as a threat to the money you already have.
You will feed off the people around you, not feed the people around you. You will attract like-minded people to you. You will be like the shark whose fellow creatures bite him when they smell blood.
I’m not saying that wealth and status are not significant attributes of highly successful people. All but the most advanced souls love recognition – but money and status should be consequences of our actions, not the causes of our actions.
True success is an inside job. Success is only sustainable if it comes from within. So be the best you that you can be. Focus in bringing joy to others. Don’t compare yourself to the people around you. Don’t’ dwell on past losses or hurts. Be grace-full, and the money and status will follow!
One of the main differences between those who succeed and those who don’t is that the successes do things the failures don’t want to do, or don’t feel like doing.
I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.
I had had to wait until I was sixty-two years old before I could vote, Nelson Mandela until he was seventy-six.
There were scores of cars outside in its parking lot. I pointed to those cars and remarked that the Afrikaners were clearly a God-fearing and certainly a churchgoing lot. My mother-in-law replied quietly, with a chuckle, ‘My child, if God treated me as He is treating them, I too would be a very regular churchgoer!’
Job reservation prohibited blacks from doing certain jobs, which were the preserve of whites – and today they cry ‘foul’ at affirmative action.
A certain man worked as a gardener in
Apartheid systematically stripped Coloureds, Indians and especially blacks of their rights and denuded their humanity. It offered them a travesty for education; inadequate housing; insufficient health care, so that children suffered from easily preventable deficiency diseases; and it undermined black family life with the migrant labour system and its single-sex hostels. Apartheid was pervasive and inflicted unnecessary and untold suffering on all its victims. And you might say without exaggeration that every person who was not white to some extent was a victim of this horrendous policy. Black people should by rights have been filled with hatred and resentment and should have been baying for the blood of white people for all that apartheid had done to them.
Steve Biko had been driven naked on the back of a police truck over 1 500 km to
A person is a person through other people’. It is not ‘I think therefore I am’. It says rather ‘I am human because I belong.’ I participate, I share. A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good; for he or she has a proper self assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are.
You are devastated by the fact that it could be possible at all for human beings to shoot and kill a fellow human being, burn his body on a pyre and whilst this cremation is going on actually to be able to enjoy a barbecue on the side. What had happened to their humanity that they could manage to do this? How were they able literally to stomach it? Burning human flesh has a peculiar odour which is stomach-turning for most normal human beings.
He just grabbed an iron pipe and beat the poor old man several times on his head…I noticed that the blood was oozing from the old man’s nostrils and ears as well as the mouth. I saw the old man’s eyes turning into white pupils. They were turning, it was as if he was fainting or just about to die…The beatings went on and on until I saw the old man lying prostrate on the ground with blood all over his head and face…Warrant-Officer Beeslaar took out the testicles of Champion Galela and squeezed them very hard until they became the size of almost golf balls. Then with his right hand he punched them severely, very hard. I saw the man changing, the colour of his face becoming pale and blueish and there was some yellowish liquid that spattered out from his genitals. That was the most brutal thing I ever witnessed in all my life of hell in Vlakplaas. It was the most dehumanising experience of my life.
The first thing that I did to Stompie was to hold him with both sides, throw him up in the air and let him fall freely onto the ground. “Mummy” [Mrs. Mandela] was sitting and watching us…I slaughtered him. I slaughtered him like a goat. We made him lay on his back and I put garden shears through his neck and the garden shears penetrated to the back of his neck and I made some cutting motion…I killed Stompie under the instructions of Mummy [Mrs. Mandela]. Mummy never killed anyone, but she used us to kill a lot of people. She does not even visit us in prison. She used us!
What really bothered me were the rats…These were huge rats, the size of cats that were in the cells, in the passages all the time. I would sit and eat my food and three of these rats would just sit and look at me. I’d be in the yard praying, the rats would just be around me and I’d get up and chase them but they’d come back in…
But it did teach me something…that no human being can live alone…because there’s nothing you can do to survive all by yourself…
They took the body secretly to what was then the
by Desmond Tutu
You strive, struggle and fight to get things that you think will make you happy. And all the while, happiness is already yours to choose without the things, without the struggle, without the fight.
You place limits and conditions on your happiness, and tie it to things that do not last. And all the while, happiness is already yours to choose without the limits, without the conditions.
When happiness is conditional and dependent, it ceases to be happiness and becomes merely another chore, another thing to struggle for, another thing to lose. True and lasting happiness is not a result but is a cause.
Let the happiness you seek flow out from you, rather than trying in vain to get it flowing into you. Let the world around you be an expression of your happiness, instead of depending on it to provide you with happiness.
Do you want to be happy? Then know that nothing is stopping you other than the limits and conditions you place on that happiness. Let joy and happiness flow out from you. And the rest of your world will soon follow along.
Author: Unknown to me...