Creative inspiration and energy can come from many sources, but the most important source is us – our own abilities, thoughts and feelings, including the inner stuff we may not want to look at because we think it is “immoral” or “sick” or otherwise “bad.”
Artists, of course, realize that it is not only okay to [...]
“It is also good every so often to go away and relax a little for when you come back to your work your judgment will be better, since to remain constantly at work causes you to deceive yourself.” Leonardo da Vinci
In her article What’s the rush?, Jenna Avery describes how constantly striving and being urgent [...]
“Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don’t want people to know.
“White Oleander, for example, was so much about loneliness, and I was revealing something about myself. You have to work as deeply as you can to give the reader something [...]
In his Wired magazine article The World Needs More Rebels Like Einstein, Walter Isaacson notes that Einstein’s concept that “time is relative depending on your state of motion” had been explored by other scientists, who “had come close to his insight, but they were too confined by the dogmas of the day.
“Einstein alone was impertinent [...]
The Beethoven Factor is “SIG – Stress Induced Growth.â€
Like the composer, there are persons for whom adversity is a stimulus for personal growth and creativity. Also like Beethoven, they aren’t “super humans.”
Like all of us, they are flawed beings, but something within and about them allows them to [...]
Isn’t self-expression really self-direction? How you think, how you move, how you motivate yourself. …
Positive self-direction says, “I know who I am and I know where I want to go. I’m accumulating knowledge and experiences and feelings and philosophies that will help prepare me for opportunities that I know will show up without notice or [...]
“Most of you, if not all of you, like me, feel inadequately educated. That is an ordinary feeling for a member of our species. One of the most brilliant human beings of all times, George Bernard Shaw said on his 75th birthday or so that at last he knew enough to become a mediocre office [...]
In his article The “Secret” Is Really No Secret At All, Dennis Merritt Jones, DD says “There is, without question, a spiritual element that is infused in the Law of Attraction that is no secret.
“Buddha certainly knew the power of the Law of Attraction, when, in the Dhammapada, he is quoted as saying, ‘Our life [...]
Clinical Hypnotherapist Steve G. Jones writes in his article Motivate Yourself through Hypnosis about the value of hypnosis: “Ideas, goals, and dreams could be a reality if only you could make yourself do the necessary steps to achieve them. That is how hypnosis works to motivate you to put into action the plans you have [...]
In her article How to Turn a Negative Experience Into a Positive Way to Make a Living Without a Job, Valerie Young talks about seven people who have found adversity to be a catalyst for new career opportunities, such as Scott Adams who used his “mind-numbing experience in corporate America as the inspiration for his [...]
One myth is that success can only be obtained if you select your goals early on, know exactly where you’re headed, develop a road map and focus on specific steps toward your long-term goal. The problem with that approach is that your path to success becomes very narrow.
You can become so focused on a distant [...]
“Prudence and conservatism have not advanced our culture. It took the voices on the outskirts to make a noise that changed the world.
“It’s taken a handful of rabble rousers to vote for women’s rights, freedom from slavery, and to oppose war, hunger, and hatred.
“It takes fools to raise awareness and fools to raise the bar. [...]
“Warren Buffett might look at himself as an investor and/or businessman, but there’s another way he sees himself as well: as an artist. He looks at the business he owns as a piece of art.
“Something he’s always looking to add to and improve. In his mind, his businesses are a canvas, and like an artist [...]
My studies of the highly successful prove that they continually achieve their results by doing “certain things in a certain way.”
I have also found that “like causes produce like effects.” Therefore, if you and I consistently employ the same thought processes and actions of these highly-successful individuals, we must produce the same results.
This is why [...]
In her article The Price Isn’t Right, Arianna Huffington comments about how destructive and self-limiting our inner critic can be:
“If we can’t completely stop playing the comparison game, we can at least start changing whom we compare ourselves to… When we do this, we are sure to tap into our reserves of empathy and gratitude [...]
“I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do.
“I believe, in short, that we are equally beholden to heart and mind, and that those [...]
