GBE 2.2 - Success

The definition of success (səkˈses) in the dictionary is:
1. The accomplishment of an aim or purpose;
2. The attainment of popularity or profit.

I was raised and taught by my parents that successful people were happy with themselves and made a positive impact on the people around them. But when I was in middle and high school, I attended a school where the prevailing attitude was that you were only successful if you achieved fortune and fame. The more money you made, the higher your degree of success. In defense of the school, which was, and still is academically great and where I met some really fantastic people, I don't think they realized it.




Fast forward 30 years... I have not made a ton of money... yet (lol), nor has my life even gone in the direction I thought it would. "Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it's been". Those lyrics sure fit my life. I have some regrets over things I have not become and accomplished, but my life is far from over. All in all, I am happy with myself. I also like to think I have a "quiet impact" on the people around me.




The song I Was Here by Lady Antebellum has a line in it that I am striving for. "I wanna try to touch a few hearts in this life... And leave nothing less than something that says I was here."




If I can accomplish that and be happy, then I'll think myself a success. See, I consider the following definition from Ralph Waldo Emerson to be the correct one for success.




"What is success? To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty; To find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived; That is to have succeeded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson






Now... some views from other people. What, you thought I wouldn't list some quotes??? lol.

"Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable." - Coco Chanel







"The only place in life where you find success before work is in the dictionary." - Mary V. Smith







"Impatience never commanded success." - Edwin H. Chapin







"If you want success, then don't rely on other people to do what YOU can do!" - Sasha Azevedo















"Success is that old ABC - ability, breaks and courage." - Charles Luckman










"You must learn from your past mistakes, but not lean on your past successes." - Denis Waitley










"Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success." - Joyce Brothers










"The great success of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters." - Sir Harold Nicholson





















"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude." - Thomas Jefferson










"Learn to adapt. Things change, circumstances change. Adjust yourself and your efforts to what it is presented to you so you can respond accordingly. Never see change as a threat, because it can be an opportunity to learn, to grow, evolve and become a better person." - Rodolfo Costa










"Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom." - Euripides










"They can because they think they can." - Virgil





















"We are all motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is, the more he is inspired to glory." - Cicero










"Keep steadily before you the fact that all true success depends at last upon yourself."- Theodore T. Hunger











"The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen." - Frank Loyd Wright











"The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed." - Richard Brinsley Sheridan





















"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." - Aristotle Onassis










"A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience." - Elbert Hubbard










"There is only one success--to be able to spend your life in your own way." - Christopher Morley










"Success is sweet: the sweeter if long delayed and attained through manifold struggles and defeats." - A. Branson Alcott





















"The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will." - Vince Lombardi










"Success is refusing to accept defeat." - Zurek










"I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure--which is: Try to please everybody." - Herbert Bayard Swope










"The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes." - Earl of Beaconsfield





















"Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time." - Josh Billings










"Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration, desperation, perspiration and inspiration." - Evan Esar









"If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius." - Jospeph Addison










"The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do, well." - Henry W. Longfellow




















"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it." - W.C. Fields











"Try not to become a man of success but a man of value." - Albert Einstein











"Success is the accomplishment of that which most people think can't be done." - C. V. White











"Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out." - Robert Collier

GBE 2.1 - Expectations

Expectation/ekspekˈtāSHən/Noun





"In the case of uncertainty, expectation is what is considered the most likely to happen. An expectation, which is a belief that is centered on the future, may or may not be realistic. A less advantageous result gives rise to the emotion of disappointment. If something happens that is not at all expected it is a surprise. An expectation about the behavior or performance of another person, expressed to that person, may have the nature of a strong request, or an order." [1]






I used to have expectations... of myself, of family, of friends, of co-workers. I have learned (the hard way) that you can't have them of other people. I keep them for myself as motivation to learn and grow. Continue and read what some other people have said about expectations.

"A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations." - Patricia Neal



"Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience." - Samuel Alexander



"Confounding people's expectations was a way to maintain integrity." - Lindsey Buckingham



"Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable." - Wendy Wasserstein







"Don't lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations. Expect the best of yourself, and then do what is necessary to make it a reality." - Ralph Marston



"Don't show off every day, or you'll stop surprising people. There must always be some novelty left over. The person who displays a little more of it each day keeps up expectations, and no one ever discovers the limits of his talent." - Baltasar Gracian



"Dreaming is one thing, and working towards the dream is one thing, but working with expectations in mind is very self-defeating." - Michael Landon



"I don't have expectations. Expectations in your life just lead to giant disappointments." - Michael Landon









"Have you heard of this new thing called the internet? It's giving people new expectations. It's allowing them to become their own expert. Knowledge lies anxious at their fingertips. Gloss over the truth in your advertising and you'll quickly be dismissed as a poser." - Roy H. Williams



"I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine." - Fritz Perls



"I find my life is a lot easier the lower I keep everyone's expectations." - Bill Watterson







"I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine." - Bruce Lee



"I have great expectations for the future, because the past was highly overrated." - Sylvester Stallone



"I love the idea of stepping out of the band situation into a solo world with no boundaries, no expectations, where nothing is out of bounds." - Tommy Shaw




"I've always got such high expectations for myself. I'm aware of them, but I can't relax them." - Mary Decker Slaney








"If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome." - Michael Jordan



"If you paint in your mind a picture of bright and happy expectations, you put yourself into a condition conducive to your goal." - Norman Vincent Peale



"It's great being blonde - with such low expectations it's easy to impress." - Pamela Anderson



"It's when ordinary people rise above the expectations and seize the opportunity that milestones truly are reached." - Mike Huckabee







"Keep high aspirations, moderate expectations, and small needs." - William Howard Stein



"Let your dreams outgrow the shoes of your expectations." - Ryunosuke Satoro



"Life... It tends to respond to our outlook, to shape itself to meet our expectations." - Richard M. DeVos



"Lower your expectations of earth. This isn't heaven, so don't expect it to be." - Max Lucado







"My expectations of other people, I double them on myself." - James Brown



"Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations." - Leo Buscaglia



"Other people may not have had high expectations for me... but I had high expectations for myself." - Shannon Miller



"Our environment, the world in which we live and work, is a mirror of our attitudes and expectations." - Earl Nightingale







"Our limitations and success will be based, most often, on your own expectations for ourselves. What the mind dwells upon, the body acts upon." - Denis Waitley



"Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations." - Paul Rand



"So, yeah, I can say I always set my expectations so high that I had a lot to live up to." - Johnny Bench



"The best things in life are unexpected - because there were no expectations." - Eli Khamarov







"The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools." - Confucius



"The fewer expectations you have, the better." - Laurie Anderson



"The first and most optimistic response was complete rational expectations econometrics. A rational expectations equilibrium is a likelihood function. Maximize it." - Thomas J. Sargent



"The first step in exceeding your customer's expectations is to know those expectations." - Roy H. Williams







"The interval between a cold expectation and a warm desire may be filled by expectations of varying degrees of warmth or by desires of varying degrees of coldness." - Samuel Alexander



"The secret to true happiness is a combination of low expectations and insensitivity." - Olivia Goldsmith



"There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love." - Erich Fromm



"To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect." - Joan Didion







"We all participate in weaving the social fabric; we should therefore all participate in patching the fabric when it develops holes mismatches between old expectations and current realities." - Anne C. Weisberg



"We don't want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else." - Lauryn Hill



"We live in an era of revolution, the revolution of rising expectations." - Adlai Stevenson



"Winners make a habit of manufacturing their own positive expectations in advance of the event." - Brian Tracy







"You can't base your life on other people's expectations." - Stevie Wonder



"Your expectations opens or closes the doors of your supply, If you expect grand things, and work honestly for them, they will come to you, your supply will correspond with your expectation." - Orison Swett Marden

[1] Wikipedia

Another open letter to Senator Andy Gardiner re: Wekiva Parkway

Hey Andy... me again

So let's add 1.8 billion to the "$2.3 billion in debt the authority has piled up over 46 years" Oh yeah, that's brilliant!

Yep, politics, pure and simple. Again, I must repeat something I said in my last two, count them, two emails that you never responded to. Go back and read them.

Why is it that politicians are so hyped to get this road built, but not the public whom they are elected to represent? I remember hearing a man say in regards to Rich Crotty's push to build it: That all he wanted was his name on the plaque. With mostly just politicians pushing it, it does make me wonder. Maybe it's that I just don't see the "whole picture" as to why this beltway is so freaking important.

I must also stress that the education and future of our children is more important than the completion of the beltway. You are saddling them with a debt that will not be payed off in their lifetime.

And why is a senator who doesn't represent or even live in the district it will impact pushing so for it to be built?

It does make me wonder...

An open letter to Senator Andy Gardiner re: Wekiva Parkway

Hello Mr. Gardiner. I tried to email you about this: State senators to Xway: Build Wekiva Parkway now, but got a "form letter" out-of-office response. Here is an open letter to you from me:

This is my opinion and I wanted to share it with you. I just read the article in the Sun Sentinel regarding your push to build a road that I feel is, not only NOT necessary, but also something that will put us further in debt.

You may wonder how I know we don't need it... that's because I live off SR 46W. Although it does get congested at times, it is nothing that four-laning would not solve. The land is there to four lane and to have turn lanes. But to add 10 lanes is not only idiotic, but you would also be bankrupting the future generations, which is immoral. Why is it that politicians are so hyped to get this road built, but you hardly hear a word from the public?

I have lived in Florida all my life and I have been hearing talk about this final, and needless, part of Orlando's beltway for years now. Just like high speed rail, it was a pipe dream and should remain such.

This is the first time I have ever felt compelled to email a congressman regarding how I felt about a situation. Yes, the area where I've lived for over 20 years will be disrupted. Sanford is still a small town at heart and this will kill that.

Use the money that you get for Education. The future of our children is FAR more important than a 26-mile long expressway. Use common sense.

I don't mean to sound harsh, but this road is a unicorn; a "bridge to nowhere". At least I've always thought that it was.

Andy, I wonder if YOU will even read this; I doubt it. I doubt you'll respond either. I guess I just had to vent.

Best regards