One Small Step …

One small step at a time is  about the big idea of “Kaizen”, which is Japanese for “taking small steps to continual improvement.”

Kaizen is an ancient philosophy captured in this powerful statement from the Tao Te Ching: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Though it is rooted in ancient philosophy, it is just as practical and effective when applied to our hectic modern lives. Japanese corporations have long used the gentle technique of kaizen to achieve their business goals and maintain excellence. Now this elegant strategy can help you realize your personal dreams.

Kaizen has two definitions:

a) using very small steps to improve a habit, a process, or product.

b) using very small moments to inspire new products and inventions.

This philosophy of small steps toward improvement was introduced to Japan after the war, when General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation forces began to rebuild that devastated country.

“When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. When you improve conditioning a little each day, eventually you have a big improvement in conditioning. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.” 

—John Wooden, one of the most successful coaches in the history of college basketball

Just take one small step at a time for everlasting result ....

Source : “One Small Step Can Change Your Life” by  ROBERT MAURER

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Fly Free Fly High

One seagull, dreams of flying better than a seagull has ever flown, instead of spending his days looking for scraps of food.

“Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight—how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly…This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one’s self popular with other birds.”-  Richard Bach

There is one seagull in a flock, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who cares a lot less about scrounging for food than the other gulls, and cares more about learning how to fly well. He gets thrills from figuring out how to fly faster and more dangerously than any gull has flown before. He crashes a lot, but always gets up, fluffs his feathers, and begins again. The other gulls in the flock don't understand why he cares at all about this, and the elders take his determination in this as a sign that he does not care about the right things. They declare him an Outcast. He pleads, but they ignore him and send him away. He gets to a ‘Heaven’, how he call it, he finds other seagulls, who like flying like he does. Chiang (He is one bird who is in ‘Heaven’ and he teaches Jonathan to ‘fly’)  teaches him to fly and Jonathan comes closer and closer to perfection. After practising some time he wants to return to the earth to teach other seagulls who would want to. He soon found several good flight students. Fletcher Gull (He is also a very questioning seagull who thinks that there must be more in life then just thinking of how to get food) was one of them, he has a desire to learn to fly. Jonathan teaches Fletcher to fly like Chiang has told him. Fletcher soon develops enough to take Jonathan’s place as an inspired, powerful teacher, and so Jonathan moves on to a higher level of consciousness.

To fly high and to fly free one must try to achieve excellence.

And the price needs to be paid for excellence. Excellence requires leaving the flock, being alone, and practising. And the practice requires "fierce concentration."

"You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past"-  Richard Bach

Source : “Jonathan Livingston Seagull: A Story” — Richard Bach

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The Secret of Achieving More with Less

 The secret in simple terms as per  Richard Koch ~~

  “Do more of what makes best use of time and money.”

You have probably observed that often the majority of output stem from the minority of input. It could happen in your business when the majority of sales come from a little subset of your products. Often this ratio is around, but not limited to 20% and 80%.

People expect life to be fair and balanced, but it’s not. That’s why it’s called the 80/20 rule or principle. Aka the Pareto principle, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity.

“The 80/20 Principle tells us that, at any one point, a majority of any phenomenon will be explained or caused by a minority of the actors participating in the phenomenon, Eighty percent of the results come from the 20 percent of the causes, A few things are important, most are not.” ~~ Richard Koch

 Taken literally, this means that, for example, 80 per cent of what you achieve in your job comes from 20 per cent of the time spent. Thus for all practical purposes, four-fifths of the effort—a dominant part of it—is largely irrelevant. This is contrary to what people normally expect. So the 80/20 Principle states that there is an inbuilt imbalance between causes and results, inputs and outputs, and effort and reward. A good benchmark for this imbalance is provided by  the 80/20 relationship: a typical pattern will show that 80 per cent of outputs result from 20 per cent of inputs; that 80 per cent of consequences flow from 20 per cent of causes; or that 80 per cent of results come from 20 per cent of effort.

“The way to create something great is to create something simple.” ― Richard Koch

“Strive for excellence in few things, rather than good performance in many.” — Richard Koch

Source : “The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less”  — Richard Koch

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Sense of Purpose

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” 
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

 Frankl was a psychologist, and he founded a school of psychology called Logotherapy .Viktor Frankl was also a holocaust survivor, and this in so many ways informed his work. One might think that this was the most horrible experience of Viktor Frankl’s life, and in many ways that was true. Frankl was trained in psychology and neurology, and had achieved some renown when the Nazi’s sent him to Auschwitz in 1944. It was a most horrible and dehumanizing experience. 

Frankl survived the experience of a concentration camp because he realized that there was an important task he personally needed to complete: the completion of a manuscript he had been working on. That manuscript later became one of the most influential book of the post-war period: Man’s Search for Meaning, a book that explains the basis for his psychological theory, called Logotherapy, which holds that a fundamental basis for psychological and spiritual health is a sense of purpose.

Frankl noticed that there was a difference among those who survived and those who did not: a sense of purpose.

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” 
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source:  “ Man’s Search for Meaning " by Viktor Frankl

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The dilemma “ be strong or be intellegent”

“According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
 — Leon C. Megginson, Civilisation Past and Present, 1963

The thing that separates us humans from other animals is that we constantly change into new forms, new avatars. We are sad, we are happy, we are emotional, and we are angry. We communicate through different languages, we do different kinds of work, and we deal with different kind of people differently. Effectively, we keep on changing ourselves as per the demands of time and situation.

In fact, success in life depends largely on whether we are able to change ourselves with changing times.

If we are flexible and formless – like water – taking the form of whatever is around us, we gain power and succeed against those who rigidly hold on to their ground.

Despite this, when it comes to our ideas – especially when we have only one – we rigidly hold on to them.

This is very much like Henry Ford who supposedly said, “People can have the Model T in any colour – so long as it’s black.” This nearly ruined Ford Motors Company in the 1920s, because while Mr. Ford was in love with his idea of “only black Model T” cars, Americans were shifting to bigger, faster, fancier, and brightly painted automobiles.

Source:  “Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin 

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Art of work… ?

There was a painter named Peter Paul Rubens who found himself inundated with requests for paintings. To alleviate this, he created a system. He employed dozens of extremely talented painters, one specializing in robes, another in backgrounds, and so on. He created a vast production line in which a large number of canvases would be worked on at the same time.

When an important client would visit he would ask all his painters to leave for the day. Rubens would work at an incredible pace, with unbelievable energy. The client would leave in awe of this prodigious man, who could paint so many masterpieces in so short a time.  

Another story centers around a young Serbian scientist named Nicola Tesla and US inventor Thomas Edison. The significance of this story is contained within the lessons of how Nikola Tesla was taken advantage of and how he is the real inventor of many critical inventions to the technological advancement of our society, such as AC power system. This story illustrates how Edison observed this law and Tesla became the transgression. 

When Tesla met Edison in New York, the famous inventor hired him immediately. Tesla worked 18 hour days finding ways to improve the primitive Edison dynamos. Finally, Edison offered him a big reward to redesign them completely — a monumental task that could last years without success. Tesla finally did it, as he went to Edison to break the good news and claim his big reward. Edison told Tesla, “you don’t understand our American humor!”, offering him a small raise instead.

A lesson from 48 laws of power..

“Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you a godlike aura of efficiency and speed. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you.”

Source:  “The 48 Laws Of Power" by Robert Greene 

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Yes Face' Attitude

What you do when you don’t have to will determine what you’ll be when you can’t help it – William D. Hersey

In his book, The Grace Awakening, Charles Swindoll tells a story about Thomas Jefferson and a group of companions who were travelling across country on horseback. They came to a river which had left its banks because of a recent downpour. The swollen river had washed the bridge away. Each rider was forced to ford the river on horseback, fighting for his life against the rapid currents.

The very real possibility of death threatened each rider, which caused a traveler who was not part of their group to step aside and watch. After several had plunged in and made it to the other side, the stranger asked President Jefferson if he would ferry him across the river. The president agreed without hesitation. The man climbed on, and shortly thereafter the two of them made it safely to the other side.

As the stranger slid off the saddle onto dry ground, one in the group asked him, “Tell me, why did you select the president to ask this favor of?” The man was shocked, admitting he had no idea it was the president who had helped him. “All I know,” he said, “is that on some of your faces was written the answer ‘No,’ and on some of them was written the answer ‘yes’. His was a ‘yes’ face.

Maintaining a ‘yes face’ attitude can be challenging, even for the best of leaders.

Source : “The Grace Awakening “ by Charles Swindoll

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The River and the Lion

"After the great rains, the lion was faced with crossing the river that had encircled him. Swimming was not in his nature, but it was either cross or die.

The lion roared and charged the river, almost drowning before he retreated. Many more times he attacked the water, and each time he failed to cross.

Exhausted, the lion lay down, and in his quietness he heard the river say, "Never fight what isn't here."

Cautiously, the lion looked up and asked, "What isn't here?"

"Your enemy isn't here," answered the river. "Just as you are a lion, I am merely a river."

Now the lion sat very still and studied the ways of the river. After a while, he walked to where a certain current brushed against the shore, and stepping in, floated to the other side."

Is there something you are fighting? 

Take a moment to pause, quieten and study the situation. You may find that there is nothing to fight.

Source : "The little book of Letting Go"   by Hugh Prather

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Be like water, my friend

"Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend."

-- Bruce Lee

A similar thing I have read in the following book by RUSKIN BOND , the author  says being like water will help us being soft and limpid , finding the way through ,over and under any obstacle ,  sometimes travelling underground for great distances before emerging into the open . It does not quarrel ; it simply moves on….

So... Be like water my friend...

Source : A Book of Simple Living by Ruskin Bond     

                   Brief Notes from the Hills...

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STORY that can change your life

In 1972, Jim Cathcart was working at the Little Rock, Arkansas Housing Authority, making $525 a month, with a new wife and baby at home, no college degree, no past successes, and not much hope for the foreseeable future.

One morning, he was sitting in his office listening to the radio, to a program called "Our Changing World" by Earl Nightingale, who was known as "the Dean of Personal Motivation." That day, Nightingale, in his booming voice, said something that would change Jim's life forever: "If you will spend an extra hour each day in study of your chosen field, you will be a national expert in that field in five years or less."

Jim was stunned, but the more he thought about it the more it made sense. Although he had never given a speech, he had always wanted to help people grow in areas of personal development and motivation. He began his quest to put Nightingale's theory to the test by reading books and listening to tapes whenever he could. He also started exercising, became better organized, and joined a self-improvement study group. He persisted through weeks of temptations to quit, just by doing a little more each day to further his goal. Within six months he had learned more than he had in his few years of college, and he began to believe he could turn his goal of becoming a motivational speaker into reality. All the hard work, the discipline, and study paid off. Jim now has delivered more than 2,500 speeches worldwide and has won every major award in the speaking industry.

Just like companies have market value, so do people. In the simplest terms, your market value increases by knowing and doing more. Knowledge is power, not only for your career, but also to improve your family and spiritual life. I once heard a quote that sums it up well, 

"Knowledge is like climbing a mountain; the higher you reach the more you can see and appreciate."

Source : The Nature of Success by Mac Anderson             

Founder, Simple Truths

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