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How to Destroy Your Enemies – Abraham Lincoln
How to Destroy Your Enemies – Abraham Lincoln
Our days are happier when we give people a bit of our heart rather than a piece of our mind
Our days are happier when we give people a bit of our heart rather than a piece of our mind
Your Family is your business, Mankind is your business
Your Family is your business, Mankind is your business
by Enzo Calamo
As this is the Holiday season, I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas.
The other night I was watching Charles Dickens‘ A Christmas Carol movie starring George C. Scott as Scrooge. One of the most impactful moments in the movie is when Scrooge tells Marley’s ghost, “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob.” Upon which Marley’s ghost cries out in anguish:
Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!
With that simple statement, Marley’s ghost teaches Scrooge, and all of us, three very important life lessons:
1) Real assets in the world are people, not possessions;
2) Your family is the first place that you experience true love and care. As a baby, and as a child, whether your memories are good or bad, you were completely dependent on others. In today’s aging world, many of our seniors are also completely dependent on others again. Is it not time that we learn that love is based on our ability of loving and caring for the living, who can love us back, AND keeping alive the memories of our loved ones who left us too soon? Material things will NEVER love us back!
3) Fulfilling your life purpose and helping others, not accumulating profits, should be man’s highest aims.
In an article Nothing Beats Family, posted on www.Inspire21.com, Ridgely Goldsborough addresses the importance of family as follows:
I’m deeply troubled by the number of parents who wake up too late with the realization: “My children grew up too fast. In the hustle-bustle of career and corporate rat race, I missed their childhood.” What they fail to say but too often inwardly think causes me even more pain: “…and I barely even know them.”This applies to couples as well – so in a hurry to get who-knows-where – a destination seldom defined. Relationships turn into co-habitations, romance into convenience. Very disturbing.
A hundred years from now, no one will remember the size of your bank account, the car you drove or the square footage of your house. The world might differ greatly however, based on your impact in the life of a small child. Your life will most certainly improve, if you pay attention to your significant other, make the choice to put her or him first. Your example will benefit the rest of us. Our world cries out for role models and heroes of every day living. What could you do today to let your loved ones know how much they mean to you? What will you do tomorrow? And the next day?
The following inspirational story, by author Jeff Davis at the Brobdingnagian Bards, further highlights the importance of spending time with loved ones:
The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it’s the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.
A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the basement shack with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as a typical Saturday morning, turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it.
I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind-he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business. He was telling whoever he was talking with something about “a thousand marbles”.
I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say. “Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. Too bad you missed your daughter’s dance recital.”
He continued, “Let me tell you something Tom, something that has helped me keep a good perspective on my own priorities.”
And that’s when he began to explain his theory of a “thousand marbles.” “You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy- five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.”
“Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900 which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now stick with me Tom, I’m getting to the important part.”
“It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail”, he went on, “and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy.”
“So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round-up 1000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside of a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear. Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away.”
“I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life. There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.”
“Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast.
This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time.”
“It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. 75 year Old Man, this is K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!”
You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter. Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. “C’mon honey, I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast.”
“What brought this on?” she asked with a smile. “Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. Hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.”
During this holiday season, it would be wise for us to remember the words of Robert Louis Stevenson:
That Person is a Success
Who has lived well,
laughed often and loved much;
Who has gained the respect of intelligent people
and love of children;
Who has filled his or her niche
and accomplished his or her task;
Who leaves the world better than he or she found it,
whether by improved poppy, a perfect poem,
or a rescued soul;
Who never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty
or failed to express it.
Who looked for the best in others
and gave the best he or she had.
Happy Holidays to everyone!!!!!!!!!
Dr. Srini Pillay on EMPATHY and NEURO-MIRRORING
Dr. Srini Pillay on EMPATHY and NEURO-MIRRORING
Dr. Srini Pillay, Harvard professor and famous brain science expert and leading authority in stress, anxiety and resilience, talks on empathy and neuro-mirroring.
The brain is not a generator of consciousness but a transmitter of consciousness. We mirror not only actions but emotions as well. What we feel is what someone else is feeling. We are not always in possession of our own feelings.
To bring a change in your life you must bring a change in your brain!
Sam Richards – A Radical Experiment in Empathy
Sam Richards is a sociologist and award-winning teacher who has been inspiring undergraduate students at Penn State since 1990. Every semester, 725 students register for his Race and Ethnic Relations course, one of the most popular classes at Penn State and the largest of its kind in the country. Through his natural ability of seeing a subject from many angles, Richards encourages students to engage more fully with the world and to think for themselves — something he did not do until his third year in college. Because of his passion for challenging students to open their minds, an interviewer recently referred to him as “an alarm clock for eighteen-year-olds.”
His career began at the age of 24 when he was hired to teach a cybernetics course — just 15 minutes before the first class meeting. He remembers walking into the room without having had a moment to create a lesson plan and greeting his students, “Welcome to the course. I’m your instructor. And if you have no idea what cybernetics is, you’re not alone — because I don’t either.” This characteristic willingness to be playfully transparent in the classroom, along with a talent for making complex ideas understandable and relevant, is the foundation of his success as a teacher.
Richards is also the co-director of the World in Conversation Project at Penn State (www.worldinconversation.org), whose mission is to create a kind of dialogue about social and cultural issues that invites the unexamined, politically incorrect thoughts of participants to the surface so that those thoughts can be submitted to conscious exploration and inquiry. The conversation topics span a range of cultural issues — from U.S. race relations to gender to faith to international racism. This year, nearly 7,000 University Park students will participate in one of more than 1,300 of these unscripted conversations. Furthermore, the project also sponsors video dialogues between Penn State students and students at other universities around the world.
Paul Collier on the “bottom billion”
Around the world right now, one billion people are trapped in poor or failing countries. How can we help them? Economist Paul Collier lays out a bold, compassionate plan for closing the gap between rich and poor.
Paul Collier’s book The Bottom Billion shows what is happening to the poorest people in the world, and offers ideas for opening up opportunities to all.
Why you should listen to him:
Paul Collier studies the political and economic problems of the very poorest countries: 50 societies, many in sub-Saharan Africa, that are stagnating or in decline, and taking a billion people down with them. His book The Bottom Billion identifies the four traps that keep such countries mired in poverty, and outlines ways to help them escape, with a mix of direct aid and external support for internal change.
From 1998 to 2003, Collier was the director of the World Bank‘s Development Research Group; he now directs the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, where he continues to advise policymakers.
“Collier sheds much light on how the world should tackle its biggest moral challenge. [He] shows, too, how far western governments and other external actors are from currently giving the sort of help these countries desperately need.” Martin Wolf, Financial Times
In the universally acclaimed and award-winning The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier reveals that fifty failed states–home to the poorest one billion people on Earth–pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines much-needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world’s people, often falling into an absolute decline in living standards. A struggle rages within each of these nations between reformers and corrupt leaders–and the corrupt are winning. Collier analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that ensnare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance. Standard solutions do not work, he writes; aid is often ineffective, and globalization can actually make matters worse, driving development to more stable nations. What the bottom billion need, Collier argues, is a bold new plan supported by the Group of Eight industrialized nations. If failed states are ever to be helped, the G8 will have to adopt preferential trade policies, new laws against corruption, new international charters, and even conduct carefully calibrated military interventions. Collier has spent a lifetime working to end global poverty. In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today.
Related articles
- Paul Collier on Why Nations Fail (economistsview.typepad.com)
