I knew for sure that I didn’t want the lecture to focus on my cancer. My medical saga was what it was, and I’d already been over it and over it.
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted... It’s a phrase worth considering at every brick wall we encounter, and at every disappointment. It’s also a reminder that failure is not just acceptable, it’s often essential.
I always liked telling my students: “Go out do for others what somebody did for you.
If you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable !
If other people owe you an apology, and your words of apology to them are proper and heartfelt, you still may not hear from them for a while. After all, what are the odds that they get to the right emotional place to apologize at the exact moment you do?
I know you’re smart. But everyone here is smart. Smart isn’t enough.
I told her I had nothing against yoga or meditation. But I did think it’s always best to try to treat the disease first. Her symptoms were stress and anxiety. Her disease was the money she owed. “Why.
The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us the chance to show how badly we want something.
While I could easily feel sorry for myself, that wouldn’t do them, or me, any good.
All right,” I said. “That is what it is. We can’t change it. We just have to decide how we’ll respond. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
My dad, a pretty able woodworker, made me that bed. The smile on that kid’s face, the wood slat, the look in his eyes: that photo reminds me that I won the parent lottery.
I also think my dad would be reminding me that kids – more than anything else – need to know their parents love them. Their parents don’t have to be alive for that to happen.
Anybody out there who is a parent, if your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let them do it. It’ll be OK. Don’t worry about resale value on the house.
I don’t know how many more times I will get to visit my childhood home. But it is a gift every time I go there. I still sleep in that bunk bed my father built, I look at those crazy walls, I think about my parents allowing me to paint, and I fall asleep feeling lucky and pleased.
Watch What They Do, Not What They Say.
Filing in alphabetical order is better than running around and saying, ‘I know it was blue and I was eating something when I had it.
Failure is not just acceptable, it’s essential.
I let the slide linger, so the audience could follow the arrows and count my tumors. “All right,” I said. “That is what it is. We can’t change it. We just have to decide how we’ll respond. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
I was heartbroken, but I was not deterred. I would find a way around this brick wall.
If I only had three words of advice, they would be, ‘Tell the Truth.’ If got three more words, I’d add, ‘all the time.’ People lie for lots of reasons, often because it seems like a way to get what they want with less effort. But like many short-term strategies, it’s ineffective long-term. You run into people again later, and they remember you lied to them. And they tell lots of other people about it.
THIS IS beautiful advice that I got once from Jon Snoddy, my hero at Disney Imagineering. I just was so taken with the way he put it. “If you wait long enough,” he said, “people will surprise and impress you.” As he saw things: When you’re frustrated with people, when they’ve made you angry, it just may be because you haven’t given them enough time.