“The secret of man/woman’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.”

~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

There are four means by which we can bootstrap ourselves toward happiness through purposeful action. These include:

• Deep love and family commitment
• Meaningful work and career
• Social and political involvement
• Transcendency and spirituality

 ~ Alexander Green

“Part of being a champ is acting like a champ. You have to learn how to win and not run away when you lose. Everyone has bad stretches and real successes. Either way, you have to be careful not to lose your confidence or get too confident.”

~ Nancy Kerrigan

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” 

~ Anatole France

“There are countless ways of attaining greatness, but any road to reaching one’s maximum potential must be built on a bedrock of respect for the individual, a commitment to excellence, and a rejection of mediocrity.”

~ Philip Guedella

To many people, the word “habit” evokes negative images. But according to an article in the New York Times, our habits can in fact be a source of creativity and innovation.

Making something fresh out of old habits is very simple: you simply have to ignore the old habits and strive to build better ones. The benefits of taking that route are numerous, and include making your mind better acquianted to innovation, and possibly greatness.

Habits – whether negative or positive – are developed over time and tie themselves around your being, defining who you are. Put simply, habit is a form of behavior that in time occurs automatically or unconsciously. In popular lingo, habits are often regarded with disdain.

That is if we strive to break the habits we have already formed and map new ones. The process of establishing new habits injects new sparks into the brain thereby helping an individual to think in a breakthrough manner.

“Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits,” says the article titled “Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?”.

“In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.”

Establishing new habits takes energy, commitment and time but instead of investing your time in fighting off old habits, the key to success is to develop a new repertoire of behaviors.

In other words, it is important to develop a vision of the new behaviors that one want to incorporate into their life, and then meticulously follow that plan.

According to the New York Times report, old habits get ingrained into the hippocampus, and cannot be fought.

“Don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads,” states the article.

Creating new habits helps to make your mind to be fascinated with wonder, so to speak, which is a quality essential for innovation and new discoveries,.

“A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities,” the article quotes Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners.

The article adds that real change occurs only when we are stretched into doing something that is awkward, that is, something that significantly takes us away from the path that we have been traveling.

According to the report, learning new things challenges our brains to create new pathways and, in the process, avoiding mental problems.

“Without AMBITION one starts nothing. Without WORK one finishes nothing. The prize will NOT be sent to you. You have to WIN it. The man who knows HOW will always have a job. The man who also knows WHY will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but PRINCIPLES are few. The man who grasps PRINCIPLES can successfully select his own METHODS. The man who tries METHODS, ignoring PRINCIPLES, is sure to have trouble.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

“All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won’t succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy.”

~ Wayne Dyer, Teacher

“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word “crisis.” One brush stroke stands for danger, the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of danger–but recognize the opportunity.”

~ John Kennedy, 35th President of the United States