Success in Balance

Teen is running out of innings, but the game still isn’t over

When asked where he gained his wisdom, he answered, “Through cancer.”

Wow, as I read this I was inspired and thought perhaps that’s the direction Success in Balance should go. Perhaps this should be a site full of encouraging links. There’s so many things to be thankful for, it all depends on what we focus on. We can learn so much from and through adversity. We can also learn a lot from others…if we jst slow down for a minute to reflect. This story reminded me of that and I need to be reminded more often.

Grace & Peace!

ABC News: The Last Lecture: A Love Story for Your Life

Professor Randy Pausch’s inspiring last lecture at Carnegie Mellon about living life to the fullest struck a chord with people all over the country. Seven months later, Pausch talks about his battle with cancer, his family and how that last lecture changed his life.

Wow, every time I listen to Randy I  get something of value. I came across this web page by ABC News with interviews and links to his lectures and just found it so inspirational. So I thought I would share. I hope you find it encouraging as I did.

Yes, what an interesting word. Sometime we say yes and we mean it, sometimes we say yes and we are simply trying to move something forward without conflict. But have you ever thought how yes impacts no? Well, one of the first things we learned when learning about how to take control of our time and achieve success is that we need to learn to say No! Sounds simple, but before we can really say no, and mean it, we need to learn to say Yes! But to really say yes we need to know what is important to us and why we are saying yes in the first place. Over the years I have learned to say no more often (still not often enough) but I am still struggling with yes. Sometime I say yes because of the person that is asking. I still say yes way too often, but I am really not saying Yes! Rather I am saying “ok” or simply agreeing. We need to move beyond ok and get to Yes!

So what does all this rambling mean? Take some time to think about what you are really saying yes too. If you can really say yes to the things that are most important to you, it makes saying no that much easier.

Hoping you find your Yes! And I find mine

Laziness

A friend told me about this great website called Despair. It is a site devoted to demotivation. Now that might seem silly, but they creators realized that motivation is huge business, but the reality is most people are not motivated and do not really want to be motivated. As I looked through many of the sayings it was simply amazing how many I connected with. This one was on of my favorites, but for different reasons:

Success is a journey is one of my favorite sayings, so at first I was a bit annoyed. But then as I thought about it in the context of Success in Balance with the rest of my life, I started liking it more and more. Often my life is out of balance because I am being driven by urgency instead of importance. I react to situations. I deal with the things that come my way. At times I need to slow down to “smell the roses.” You can’t smell them if you run right by them. So while life is a journey, we need to slow down and enjoy the journey. Funny how a demotivational poster can be so motivating

Often words strike me as simple ways to show complex meaning. Yesterday as I was listening to an expert speak in church I thought how can he handle all of life’s changes and still be successful in balance with the rest of life. As I thought one word came to mindCentered

A simple yet powerful word. Dictionary.comsays this about centered:

Self-confident, goal-oriented, and well-balanced: “He’s a centered guy. He’s always seemed to know what he wanted, and gone after it in a concrete way” (Vanity Fair)

So think about the word centered today and make sure what you do is based on who you are and not things that are going on around you.