Inspiration

Inspiration is an emotional trigger that propels us to seek new possibilities overcoming our ordinary experiences and limitations. Inspiration is the force that helps us to shatter our limiting beliefs. It motivates us to trust our capabilities and that we can achieve greater things.

Inspiration offers us a different perspective to get our thinking right and start looking at things in a meaningful way, one that makes more sense to us.

Here are the words – quotes, beliefs, and core values, that stir my thoughts and motivate me to develop clarity of thought, keep focus, take action and move towards my goals. This is the page I return to whenever I feel low, confused, or seek clarity on something. It served me well.

Read through the page and I am sure that your perspective would have changed for good.

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“The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.”

– Josh Waitzkin

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“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.”

– Stephen Covey

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“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”

– Woody Allen

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“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

– Arthur Ashe

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“The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don’t define them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them.”

– Denis Watiley

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“Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.”

– George Herbert

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“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.”

– Mark Twain

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“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it – but all that had gone before.”

– Jacob Riis

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“The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.”

– Mark Caine

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“Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.”

– Joshua J Marine

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“Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you’re not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.”

– David Rockfeller

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“A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.”

– Napoleon

A belief is an attitude that something or some proposition is true. Beliefs are tiny software installed in our brain that decides the way we think and function.

Belief systems are the stories we tell ourselves to define our personal sense of Reality. Every human being has a belief system that they utilize, and it is through this mechanism that we individually, “make sense” of the world around us.

Beliefs are the assumptions we hold to be true. They stem from real life experiences. As human beings, our values and beliefs affect the quality of our life, our work, and our relationships. Since what we believe is what we experience, we tend to think that our beliefs are founded on reality.

Beliefs are programmable / can be changed. Old limiting beliefs can be flushed and new uplifting beliefs can be installed by offering our mind a new perspective.

Our beliefs can have both positive and negative impacts on us. With the right kind of beliefs. we can have a great attitude, mindset, and positive vibes about everything that we are and we can be. Negative beliefs work the other way round.

If you are confused or lack clarity on anything, just go through your beliefs and you will find an answer.

Here are few of my strong beliefs:

• A confused mind says NO whereas a clear mind says GO.
• The world is an unfair place and POSITIONING gives you an unfair advantage.
• We tell ourselves a story and believe it.
• See yourself as a brand.
• Trust does not demand a moral absolute. It demands absolute consistency.
• Success in life is directly proportional to the amount of uncertainty you are ready to deal with.
• If you can view it, you can do it. Imagination is the best nation in the world.
• Who you spend time with is who you become.
• You become the combined average of the five people you hang out with the most.
• If it bleeds, it leads.
• Leaders do what is right, not what is popular.
• People come, people go. Purpose remains.
• Real Leaders Ship.
• Learning is not about gaining knowledge. It’s about making connections.
• Great design results from connecting the dots between seemingly disparate things.
• Be driven by your vision. Else, you’ll be taken for a ride in someone else’s.
• The best results don’t show up in the search engines. They show up in people’s lives.
• There are those who create and there are those who clap.
• There is more to life than just money or meaningless work
• Obsolete yourself, or the competition anyway will
• 95% of your problems are pure excuses.
• Make your goals so big, so compelling, and so inspiring that your problems seem insignificant by comparison.
• You can’t become a millionaire by following the strategy of the masses.
• You can change your attitude in a moment.
• You don’t have any weaknesses, you only have varying degrees of strengths starting from Zero.
• For the greatest connection with someone, just listen.
• Are you on your way or in your way?
• When you make others visible, they make you valuable.
• Change small and change often, for good.
• What’s get measured, can be mastered.
• Smaller agreements lead to larger agreements
• You cant change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.
• You can’t win if you don’t begin.
• You can never outperform your self-image.
• If you put a small value on yourself, rest assured, the world will not raise the price.
• Once you learn to quit, it quickly becomes a habit.

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Almost all major organizations have core values. I worked in a large organization as an employee and interacted with many large organizations as part of my business engagements. Most organizations have core values. Core values are the values held by organizations that form the foundation on which they perform work and conduct business.

There is an entire universe of values, but organizations latch onto only a few core values which become a non-negotiable trait of the organization. Irrespective of what happens to the business landscape, politics, social and technology trends, they are STILL the core values that the organization will abide by.  In an ever-changing world, core values are constant.

I draw a parallel to corporate core values and believe that it is essential for everyone to have personal core values. These personal core values shall be the values that underlie who we are, how we treat and interact with others, what we stand for, how we set our vision, goals and go about our life and work.  They are the practices we use (or should be using) every day in everything we do.

The following are my personal core values:

Do you know what your core values are? To get a sense of what your core values are, ask yourself what activities bring you the most joy, or what you couldn’t live without. What gives your life meaning or what do you want to achieve?

If you can articulate those answers, you’ll likely see a pattern that you can boil down into a single concept. They shall be your core values.