WEEK 14.2 (APRIL 5-APRIL 11) – THOMAS EDISON AND OUR UNTAPPED POTENTIAL
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison
At age 12 Thomas Edison came home from school and handed a sealed envelope to his mother. He told her, “My teacher gave this to me and told me to give it only to my mother.”
As his mother Nancy read the note here eyes became full of tears… “What does it say mother?” She then took a breath and read it out loud to her child: “Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him and doesn’t have enough good teachers for training him. Please teach him yourself.”
That she did and the rest it seems… is history. Thomas Edison became one of the greatest inventors of the century.
Many, many years, after Edison’s mothers death, Edison was looking through old family things. Suddenly he saw a folded paper in the corner of a drawer in a desk. He took it and opened it up. On the paper was written: “Your son has a severe learning disability and is mentally deficient. We won’t let him come to school any more. He is expelled.”
Edison cried for hours and then wrote in his diary: “Thomas Alva Edison was a mentally deficient child with severe learning disability that, by a hero of a mother, became the genius of the century.”
“The tragedy of many is not that they lose, but that they almost win. Success is often just over the next horizon, People often don’t fail, they just quit trying.” – David Scott
“Hope is the last emotion to die in a human. The yogi that has a why can endure any experience. Turn your wounds into wisdom; don’t cry to give up, but cry to keep going.” – David Scott
“Some people are lost in the fires of life, others are forged by them. Some fall into the flames and are consumed, other’s fly out victoriously, with their wings on fire, but forever transformed, purified and forged stronger by the experience.” – David Scott
“If love appears, boundaries will disappear.” – Osho
“What you love, you empower and what you fear, you empower and what you empower, you attract ~ unknown
“At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done. We will be judged by ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was naked and you clothed me, I was homeless and you took me in.’ Hungry not only for bread – but hungry for love. Naked not only for clothing – but naked for human dignity and respect. Homeless not only for want of a room of bricks – but homeless because of rejection.” ~Mother Teresa
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
“Perhaps the biggest mistake I made in the past was that I believed love was about finding the right person. In reality, love is about becoming the right person. Don’t look for the person you want to spend your life with. Become the person you want to spend your life with.”
“The well-worn, easy path is the one usually leading to mediocrity. Take the more difficult, less traveled path or create your own. The greater the challenge, the greater the joy experienced in overcoming it.” – David Scott
“Some walks in life, you just have to take alone,” – David Scott
“It was when she walked alone, that she discovered her strength. It is hard to walk alone, but sometimes that is the walk that makes us the strongest.”
“Do not judge her, you have no idea the storms I have asked her to walk through.” – God
“Monsters are real, ghost are real, they live inside us and sometimes we allow them to win.” Steven king
“They laugh at me because I am different, I laugh at them because they are all the same.” – Kurt Cobain
“You need a level of darkness, to see the stars.”
“She conquered her demons and wore her scars like wings. Love her but leave her wild.” – Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild
“What good are wings without the courage to fly? Sure she was afraid of heights but she was much more afraid of never flying.” – Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild
“From the moment I saw her I knew this one was worth the broken heart.” – Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild
“There’s too much risk in loving, the young boy said, ‘no,’ said the old man, there’s too much risk in not.” – Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild
“Strength does not come from doing what you can do, it comes from overcoming what you first thought was impossible.”
“The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.” – Albert Einstein
What is your passion… “If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” – Steve Jobs
“Success isn’t the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”
“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.”-Thomas J. Watson (IBM CEO)
“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be brave enough to stand for what you believe in, even if it means you stand alone
“The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.” – Anthony Robbins
“A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.”
“Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.” – Will Rogers
Just because the war is lost, it does not mean that you must be conquered.
The one who falls and gets up is so much stronger than the one who never fell.
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” –Thomas Edison
“Everything in life that is “worth achieving,” requires risk and should scare you just a little bit.” – David Scott
“Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.” – Bill Bradley
“Success is not the absence of failure; it’s the persistence through failure.” – Aisha Tyler
“Success is sequential, not simultaneous. It is the last stoke of the pick ax that finally cracks the rock.” David Scott
“Adversity causes some to break, others to break records.” William A. Ward
“We have not crossed that subtle line from childhood to adulthood until we stop saying “It got lost” and instead say “I lost it.” – Sydney Harris
“The confident person admits to their mistakes, honoring them like hard fought battle scars; the cowardly must instead blame others, learning nothing but shame from their experience.” – David Scott
“You must not allow your long term goals and dreams to be derailed off track by short term defeats. A stumble can often prevent a fall.” – David Scott`
“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” – Margaret Thatcher
“Every path has a puddle.”
“Buried within every problem are the seeds of its own solution. Often it is not that the solution that cannot be seen, but that the problem is never first fully understood.” – David Scott
“The block of granite, that was an obstacle for the weak, becomes a stepping stone in the path of the strong.” Thomas Carlyle
“Only he who does nothing, makes no mistakes.” – French Proverb
“Everything is going to be difficult. In order to build muscle you have to first feel the burn.” David Scott
“If you get tired along the way, rest don’t quit.”
“To reach our goals, we must first learn to focus. If you aim your arrow at two birds you will bring down none.” – David Scott
“He that cannot endure the bad, will not live to see the good.” Yiddish Proverb
“It is always easier to start well than to finish well. The tiny drops of rain, create holes in rock, not by brute force, but by soft perseverance.” David Scott
“Determination is the wind in our sails, pushing us onward, over and through the waves of fear and doubt.” David Scott
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” – Beverly Sills
“Victory belongs to the most persevering” – Napoleon Bonaparte
“The two hardest things in life to handle, are failure and success.”
“Happy the person that gets up every morning with enthusiasm and falls asleep with satisfaction in their heart.” David Scott
“Determination is the wind in our sails that pushes us onward, over and through the waves of fear and doubt.” David Scott
“My biggest struggles have been my biggest teachers.” – Kathryn Budig
“The amazing untapped power you have within you is of a force and quality that you cannot fully comprehend. Therefore, do not let yourself be a victim of the dismal concept of self-assumed personal limitation.” – Dr. Norman Vincent Peale
“When our talents meet perseverance, opportunity presents itself. The door of opportunity will not open unless you do a little pushing. The person that does nothing except wait for their ship to come in, has already missed the boat.” – David Scott
“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” – Walt Disney.
“There lies within each person a huge reservoir of untapped potential for achievement, success, happiness, health and greater prosperity. It’s like an ocean unsailed, a new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be released and channeled toward some great good.” – Jim Rohn