Life Optimizer is about how to live life to the fullest through personal growth. You can read the newest posts below and some featured posts on the sidebar. If you find them useful, make sure to get free content updates via e-mail or RSS feed.
How to Live Life to the Fullest Through Personal Growth
Note: This is a guest post by Josh Lipovetsky of Film Insight
Ralph Waldo Emerson. A literary pioneer. Not only did he find the basis of Transcendentalism, or Bright Romanticism writing; he made great contributions to the field of personal development, and gave us some great practical ideas about living, that we will ponder upon for centuries to come. He valued the individual over society, and had many works of literature to enforce his views. In his works, there were many inspirational quotes that reflected what an individual is. Emerson’s highest values were: courage, peace, and the power of the individual.
I have selected 6 quotes, which represent Ralph Waldo Emerson’s views on life. Each quote has its own meaning, and its own method of practical application.
“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
I recently read an interesting article titled Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem. It tells the story of how 3D Realms, a video game company in Texas, developed Duke Nukem Forever, a 3D first-person-shooter game that they hoped would set new standards for the industry.
The development was started in 1997, just a year after the company released the wildly successful Duke Nukem 3D. Sadly, the company eventually shut down the project in… 2009. That’s 12 years of failed development! It sounds like a nightmare project to be in. Devoting so much time to a single project (as compared to the typical two to four years for game development) and yet ended up in failure. This is not to mention the estimated 20 million dollars wasted on the project.
But why did it happen? What turned the project into such a nightmare? The story contains a lot of lessons on what not to do to get results. These are expensive lessons for those involved, so hopefully we don’t need to go through such experiences to learn them.
Today is the last day of the decade. I still remember how my day was at December 31, 1999. The whole world was waiting for the new millennium. There were big celebrations all around the world. Some people worried that the computers would crash when the new millennium began.
It’s hard to believe, but that day had been ten years ago! It’s amazing how fast time flies.
How has your life been this decade? How are you today compared with you were ten years ago? Do you think you’ve been the best that you can be?
Let’s ponder these questions as the new decade coming. And let’s make the new decade a much better one for all of us.
Happy new year!
Photo by mangloard
Note: This is a guest post by Mark Foo of 77 Success Traits
If you’re leading a group of people towards success, you must learn how to motivate others. If you concentrate on understanding what motivates others and you meet the needs of these people, you’ll be on the right track for a positive and enlightening experience for all involved.
Once a person’s base needs are met, they usually move on to working on certain needs of self fulfillment. For example, if someone is hungry, they won’t be able to concentrate on a critical thinking task. In this case you’ll need to make sure that this person has had lunch before the task needs to be completed. But how can you motivate them to complete certain tasks once base needs have been fulfilled?
Try one or more of the following ways of motivating people:
1. Treat People Kindly. As a leader you need to treat the people helping you with the utmost respect and kindness. Hand out praise when it’s warranted. You might not know it, but it’s a big motivation booster when people are treated right. People enjoy knowing when they’re doing a good job and enjoy working with people that treat others with kindness.
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln
There are times in life when things don’t go as expected. Perhaps an important project of yours ended up in failure. Or you got laid off from your job. Whatever it is, it might make you depressed. But you need to get things back under control. You need to keep moving forward. For that, you need to make yourself feel better so that you can face the situation with a positive attitude.
Here are some tips to make yourself feel better when you’re depressed:
1. Calm down
Before anything else, calm yourself down. Don’t panic. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. You can only apply the tips below if you are calm.
2. Feed your mind with positive thoughts
When you’re depressed, it’s easy to fall into a vicious cycle of negative thoughts. The negative cycle makes things look worse than they actually are. It’s important that you break this cycle so that you don’t become a victim of your own thoughts.
Do you want to make your career crisis-proof? Do you want it to thrive even in difficult times? The key is to be quick to adapt to changing conditions. Change is the only constant in the market and you are crisis-proof only if you can quickly adapt to new conditions.
As I wrote in my post about learning and people skills, these quick-to-adapt people are called versatilists. But how can they be crisis-proof? And how can we be one of them? We will answer these two questions here.
Wikipedia has a good description of versatilists:
To illustrate this using a math phrase, the versatilist has a higher area under the curve rating. Think of a person having some level of knowledge/experience in 15 knowledge areas. That person may have a very high competency (score 5) in 3 areas, a medium level of competency (score 3) in 5 areas an introductory level of competency (score 1) in 4 areas and no competency (score 0) in 3 areas. This creates an area under the curve of 34. This is different from a specialist who may score very high in 1 area and have no competency in others. This is also different from a generalist who may score a 1 or 3 in every area. This breadth of knowledge and experience is what enables faster changes to other roles.
