HOW TO SUCCEED WHILE REALLY TRYING

(New thoughts are added twice a week)

Success can become a reality if you follow the rules.

Don't believe in the count of ten. Everyone gets knocked down but everyone doesn't lie there and allow themselves to be counted out. Don't settle for stagnation. Refuse to have a love affair with the status quo. Creativity can be dangerous. Indeed it makes some people nervous. But if you settle for worshiping at the altar of Sag you will only reap the rewards of hopelessness and helplessness.

Don't become a futurist until you conquer the present. Plan for tomorrow, but not if in the process you ignore today. To lavish all your attention, enthusiasm and knowledge on what is to come is the stuff New Year's resolutions are made of. And worth just about as much.

If you can't build a castle then shine up your cottage. Building the Empire State Building required engineering skills and building materials that just a century earlier didn't exist. It would have been foolish for even that grand old man of inventiveness, Ben Franklin, to have attempted such a project.

So yes, dream your dreams bigger but also think them through and beyond. Take care less you build dream castles so unrealistic it is a guarantee they will collapse. When I ran track I competed against myself. I could not beat one of my teammates who broke records that had stood for years, but I could beat what I did yesterday.

Read the right books and in the process remember that the best way to tune out trash is to tune in something better.

Touch other human beings with acts of kindness and patience so many times it becomes a habit. It will make you a better human being and better human beings have a way of finding success where rude and thoughtless individuals never do.

What is success? It is realizing with all your mind, heart and soul that quitting must never be allowed to be an option. An anonymous philosopher once penned the following.

. "When things go wrong as they sometimes will When the road you're trudging seems all up hill. When funds are low and the debts are high. And you want to smile, but you have to sigh. When care is pressing you down quite a bit. Rest, if you must, but don't you dare give up and quit. Life is strange with its twists and turns. As everyone of us sometimes learns. And many a failure turns about When he might have won had he stuck it out:Don't give up though the pace seems slow - You may succeed with another blow. Success is failure turned inside out - The silver tint of the clouds of doubt. And you never can tell how close you are. It may be near when it seems so far: So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit It's when things seem worst that you must not QUIT.