The entire writing process is fraught with perils.

Many writers would argue that the hardest part of writing is beginning. When asked what was the most frightening thing he had ever encountered, novelist Ernest Hemingway said, “A blank sheet of paper.”

Other writers believe that ideas are easy, it’s in the execution of those ideas that the hard work really begins. You have to show up every day and slowly give shape to your ideas, trying to find just the right words, searching for the right turn of phrase, until it all morphs into something real. Then comes the wait to discover how your writing will be received. Chilean author Isabel Allende once said that writing a book is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You never know if it will reach any shores.

So just how do you go about facing an empty page, coaxing your ideas into the world of form, and steering the end result toward shore? You can start by studying the tips and advice from writers presented below.

Tips For Writers From Stephen King

“If you want to be a writer,” says Stephen King , “you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

King, who has written over 50 books, emphasizes that writers have to be well-read. He adds that he has no patience for people who tell him that they want to be writers but they can’t find the time to read. The answer is simple: if you don’t read, you can’t be a writer. You have to read just about everything. In addition, you also have to write in order to develop your own style.

When it comes to the reading part of it, King explained during a lecture at Yale that if you read enough, there’s this magic moment which will always come to you if you want to be a writer. It’s the moment when you put down some book and say: “This really sucks . . . I can do better than this . . . And this guy got published.” So go ahead, read all you can, and wait for that magical moment. (Watch the YouTube video clip).

“On Writing”–published in 2000–is both a textbook for writers and a memoir of King’s life. Here’s an excerpt from “On Writing” in which King offers advice on pacing:

“Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings)…I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”

Tips For Writers From John Grisham

John Grisham–a former lawyer best known for his legal thrillers–advices young writers to find their career, and adds that at first it won’t be writing. He explains that before you can be a writer you have to experience some things, see some of the world, go through things–love, heartbreak, and so on–, because you need to have something to say.

You also need to have something to fall back on. Once you’re secure in life and you have a regular paycheck, then you can think about becoming a serious writer. (This is basically “The Survival/Sacred Dance” theory.)

He goes on to say that at first you have to treat writing as a hobby; you write a page a day in your spare time. Grisham explains that he created spare time to write, although he had a full time job. He adds that he always tells young aspiring writers that if they’re not writing a page a day, then nothing is going to happen. But if they make sure to write a page a day it becomes a habit, and before long they have a lot of pages piled up. (Source).

Tips For Writers From Erica Jong

“The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.” – Erica Jong

Erica Jong–who in “Seducing the Demon” defined a writer as “someone who takes the universal whore of language and turns her into a virgin again”, and who created compelling female characters such as Isadora Wing and Fanny Hackabout-Jones–tells us that she writes to get her life down on paper so that it can never be extinguished. She also writes to keep from going mad.

Jong admonishes aspiring writers not to expect approval for telling the truth, reminding them of Dante, Voltaire, Cervantes, and Swift. Then she adds: “Few are the great spirits who did not at one time or another write in jail, in exile, in the madhouse, or at the foot of the gallows.”

Tips For Writers From Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway–winner of the Nobel Prize in 1954–advices that each day’s work should only be interrupted when one knows where to begin again the next day. This helps the writer avoid the morning agony of facing the blank page. (From “Gabriel Garcia Marquez Meets Ernest Hemingway”).

Hemingway–knicknamed Papa–offers more invaluable writing tips in a rare interview he did with George Plimpton, original editor of “The Paris Review”, the magazine credited with inventing the modern literary interview. Here are some of the insights he offered during the inteview conducted in the Spring of 1958 (Source: “Conversations With Ernest Hemingway“):

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?

Hemingway: It depends, I re-wrote the ending to “Farewell to Arms”, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

Hemingway: Getting the words right.

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Interviewer: Who would you say are your literary forebears, those you have learned the most from?

Hemingway: Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgeniev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto . . . Goya, Giotto, Cezanne, Van Gogh . . . I put in painters, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers . . . I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.

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Interviewer: Does the title come to you while you’re in the process of doing the story?

Hemingway: No, I make a list of titles after I’ve finished the story or the book–sometimes as many as 100. Then I start eliminating them, sometimes all of them.

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If you enjoy reading writer interviews, The Paris Review’s Writers at Work interview series has elicited many of the most arresting, illuminating, and revealing discussions of life and craft from the greatest writers of our time. They’ve compiled their best interviews into three volumes: The Paris Review Interviews, I; The Paris Review Interviews, II; The Paris Review Interviews, III.

Tips For Writers From Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was a prolific American author known for works blending satire, black comedy and science fiction. He offers the following advice to aspiring writers: “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”

In the book “Bagombo Snuff Box”–an assortment of his short stories published in 1999, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Tips For Writers From Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott once received a rejection letter from an editor that said: “You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting.” That, however, didn’t discourage her from writing; she’s the author of several successful novels as well as a book on writing, which a lot of people are familiar with, entitled “Bird by Bird”.

As for the title of her book, she explains that when her older brother was ten years old he was trying to write a report on birds which he’d had three months to write. The day before the report was due he was sitting at the kitchen table at the family’s cabin surrounded by unopened books on birds, immobilized by the huge task ahead of him. He was close to tears when his father walked up, put his arm around his shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

As can be expected from the book’s title, Lamott explains in “Bird by Bird” that the secret of writing is to get started, and in order to get started you need to break the complex, overwhelming task of writing into small manageable tasks. Then you simply get going with the first task.

From Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” comes her concept of “the shitty first draft”.  Here’s an excerpt from “Bird by Bird” which explains that concept:

“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go – but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”

Here are three more writing tips found in “Bird by Bird”:

• “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”

• “Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.”

• “This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of–please forgive me–wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious. Try walking around with a child who’s going, “Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky!” And the child points and you look, and you see, and you start going, “Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!” I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world–present and in awe.”

Tips For Writers From Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard has written eleven books, including “An American Childhood” and “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”. In “The Writing Life” she goes into her life as a writer, and explains the ins and outs of what a writer needs to do to have a successful book.

Here are some gems from The Writing Life:

• “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place…. Something more will arise for later, something better.”

• “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.”

• “It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.”

• “When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.”

• “A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. . . it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, ‘Simba!’”

Tips For Writers From Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou is best known for her series of six autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adulthood experiences. In 1971 she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her volume of poetry, “Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie.’”

The following quote by Angelou is very reminiscent of Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk at Ted.com entitled “A Different Way to Think About Creative Genius”:

“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’”

Beginning with “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, Angelou has used the same writing ritual for many years (from: “Conversations With Maya Angelou”):

“When I’m writing . . . I get up at about five . . . I get in my car and drive off to a hotel room: I can’t write in my house, I take a hotel room and ask them to take everything off the walls so there’s me, the Bible, Roget’s Thesaurus and some good, dry cherry and I’m at work by 6:30. I write on the bed lying down–one elbow is darker than the other, really black from leaning on it–and I write in longhand on yellow pads. Once into it, all disbelief is suspended, it’s beautiful.”

Tips For Writers From Seth Godin

Seth Godin–marketing guru and best-selling author who’s been called “the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age”–generously offers nineteen pieces of advice for aspiring writers. Here are the first three pieces of advice:

1. Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don’t expect much.

2. The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you’ll need later.

3. Pay for an editor. Not just to fix the typos, but to actually make your ramblings into something that people will choose to read.

To read all 19 tips from Seth, visit his blog post “Advice For Authors”.

Seven More Tips For Writers, From Writers

Here are seven more tips from writers, for writers:

• William Stafford, explaining how he managed to be so prolific, said: “Every day I get up and look out the window, and something occurs to me. Something always occurs to me. And if it doesn’t, I just lower my standards.”

• Neal Bowers was told by his first creative writing teacher, Malcolm Glass, to “Trust the process and the reader.” His teacher also had a colorful metaphor of grabbing the tail of a wild hog as it runs by and letting it drag you through the thicket. Back when he first heard it, that metaphor didn’t help Neal much. However, he adds the following: “These days, though, I often look back at those unplanned and unpredictable trails my writing makes through the brush, with me hanging on, and I think of Malcolm’s wild hog. (Source).

• James Patterson’s method is simple: “I’m always pretending that I’m sitting across from somebody. I’m telling them a story, and I don’t want them to get up until it’s finished.” (Source).

• “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” — Mary Heaton Vorse

• “You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.” — Octavia Butler

• “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood

• “I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.” — Joan Didion

Conclusion

Another common piece of advice from successful writers is to write about what you know. Hemingway was an avid hunter and fisherman–two activities which feature prominently in a lot of his writing–and he lived within walking distance of the fishing village in Cuba from which “Santiago” from “The Old Man and the Sea” hailed.

Isabel Allende–author of “The House of Spirits”–recalls that when she was growing up every Thursday there was a seance at her house, and that it was widely rumored that her clairvoyant grandmother could move objects with her mind. She adds that her family was very strange, and that she didn’t have to invent anything for her stories: everything was given to her. While the magical realism in her novels may be something new for the reader, Allende is simply writing from experience.

Want more writing tips? Here’s 350 of them.

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• Ray Bradbury’s Best Writing Advice
• Creativity Tools: 24 Free Online Creative Thinking Tools
• 75 Creativity Quotes
• 119 Journal Prompts for Your Journal Jar

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In order to succeed, learn, and make progress, you need to cultivate a growth mindset.

In her book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”, Carol Dweck, Ph.D.–a professor at Stanford University and a social psychologist– explains that there are two different kinds of mindsets: a “fixed mindset” and a “growth mindset”. One mindset leads to success, while the other leads to risk aversion and feelings of limitation.

People with a “fixed mindset” believe that intelligence and talent are fixed traits: they’re born with a certain amount and that’s that. People with a “growth mindset” believe that abilities and talents can be cultivated through instruction and practice. That is, they believe that throughout their lives they can get smarter and more talented.

The “fixed mindset” inhibits growth and learning. People with this mindset see obstacles and challenges as a threat to their sense of their ability. If they fail, that must mean that they’re not as smart or as talented as they previously thought. That is, failure equals a lack of ability. Even effort is a threat, because they believe that things should just come naturally if they have the necessary ability. People with a “fixed mindset” believe that if you have to exert effort at something, then you must not be very good at it.  Stars are born, not made.

The second view–the “growth mindset”–promotes the taking on of challenges and resilience in the face of obstacles. People with this mindset believe that effort is what makes you smarter.

In addition, they believe that success comes from practice and hard work, and that their intelligence and their talent can be developed. People with a “growth mindset” chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, not to a lack of ability; this leads them to persist in the case of failure, until they succeed.

This post will go into greater detail on cultivating a “growth mindset”.

A Growth Mindset Encourages People to Grow and Learn New Things

One of the experiments which Dweck uses in order to prove her theory is to go to schools and give the kids an easy puzzle. Once they complete the puzzle, she tells half of them: “You did really well, you must be very smart”. She tells the other half: “You did very well; you must have put a lot of effort into this”.

Then she asks all of the students what they would like to work on next: more puzzles like the one they just did, or difficult puzzles which will teach them something new.

The kids who were told that they’re smart tend to want to continue doing the puzzles that are similar to the one they just did. They’re afraid that if they try the difficult puzzles, they won’t be able to solve them or it will take them a long time, and then they won’t look so smart any more.

On the other hand, most of the kids who were praised for their effort chose to do the more difficult puzzles. They saw the harder puzzles as an opportunity to grow.  In addition, these kids reported having more fun solving the puzzles. They’re getting the message that the joy is in the process of learning, trying hard, and being challenged.

Kids with a fixed mindset go out into the world wanting to look smart. If you feel that your intelligence and talents are static things that live within you, then you feel like it’s something that you have to demonstrate over and over again.

Kids with a growth mindset go out into the world curious to learn. If you believe that intelligence and talents are dynamic and malleable, then you always want to be taking steps to increase your ability, even if this means taking risks and failing.

The Growth Mindset at Work

Dweck explains that the best managers have a growth mindset. They believe that all of their employees have the capacity to improve. If you’re a manager, you can promote a growth mindset among your employees by doing the following:

“Instead of just giving employees an award for the smartest idea or praise for a brilliant performance, they would get praise for taking initiative, for seeing a difficult task through, for struggling and learning something new, for being undaunted by a setback, or for being open to and acting on criticism.”

What About the Famous IQ Test?

Alfred Binet invented the IQ test, which lots of people believe was meant to summarize a child’s unchangeable intelligence. However, Dr. Dweck points out in her book that Binet designed this test to identify the children who were not profiting from the Paris public schools, so that new educational programs could be designed to put them back on track.

Although Binet did not deny individual differences in children’s intellect, he believed that education and practice could bring about fundamental changes in intelligences. Here’s a quote which Dweck cites from Binet’s book, “Modern Ideas About Children”:

“A few modern philosophers . . . assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism . . . With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment, and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.”

Conclusion

Dweck explains that the view that you adopt–the “fixed mindset” or the “growth mindset”–has a huge impact on whether or not you accomplish the goals that you set for yourself.

• When a person with a “fixed mindset” fails at something, they feel like a failure and are likely to give up on that goal. After all, why bother trying again if they just don’t have what it takes?
• If a person with a growth mindset fails, they decide to try harder the next time.  They keep challenging themselves, they keep stretching, and they persist until they reach their goal.

Keep in mind that Dweck’s findings apply to everything: intelligence, athletic ability, artistic talent, sports ability, business skills, mathematical ability, emotional intelligence, and so on. Although people do differ in their initial talents and aptitudes, everyone can change and grow–in any area–through application and experience.

What do you think? Is it nature or nurture? Which of these two statements do you agree with:

• Your intelligence, talents, and abilities are set in stone at birth. You either have it or you don’t.
• You can become smarter and more talented through purposeful engagement. Abilities can be cultivated.

 

Related Posts:

• Five Mindsets that Will Transform Your Life
• 9 Things That Are Making You Dumber
• Fourteen Ways to Increase Your IQ
• 16 Thinking Habits that Will Make Your Smarter

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Below you’ll find 24 creativity tools to help kick your creativity into high gear. This list of creative thinking tools includes creativity cards, tools to scribble, idea markets, and more. And, best of all, they’re all free!

1.  Need a “Jump Start”?  Go here for a free creativity tool that will give you the oomph you need to get going. Here’s how it works:

• Define your challenge in the form of a “How can I?” question.
• Click on “generate adjectives” to jump start your thinking.
• Brainstorm your challenge using the randomly generated adjectives as idea sparkers.

2 .  Roger von Oech is a creativity expert who has authored several books on creativity–including “A Whack on the Side of the Head”–, and who has created different creativity tools, including creative card decks. If you go here and click to the left of Roger’s head you’ll see a different creativity card from his “Creative Whack Pack” each time you click.

3.  “Idea Sandbox” has a free problem solving tool called “The Big Dig”. You just click to scoop suggestions, such as: “Consider double-checking that you’re solving the right problem. Is there a more significant one you’re overlooking?”

4. Here are some free “Eyewire Creativity Cards” which you can cut out and glue on heavy-stock paper for when you’re having a creativity crisis. For example, here’s one:

Reconsider the old. Redesign something you see all the time (a stop sign, a penny, etc.). This forces you to look at old things in a new way—and challenges you to try different design approaches.

5.  Take a Gator Break. Here’s one:

“If at first an idea is not absurd, then there’s no hope for it.” — Albert Einstein

6. The “Idea Lottery” is another free tool by Idea Champions. Here’s how it works:

• Write your challenge as a “How can I?’ question
• Write up to 15 “elements” of your challenge in the boxes
• Write up to 6 random words unrelated to your challenge
• Click “generate grid”
• Brainstorm (using new connections on your grid to spark ideas)

7. Get free creativity prompts that will help you look at a problem from different perspectives. How would a bounty hunter meet this challenge? How would a mortician meet this challenge?

8. Watizit (pronounced like “what is it”) is the online version of an idea-generating technique used by Dave Dufour in live seminars and other creative sessions. It uses ambiguous graphics to push to the user to conceptualize visually. It’s fun, easy,and free!

9 – 10. Give your mind a creative work out with these puzzles and/or these.

11. Are you writing a novel and are having trouble coming up with a good name for your secondary characters, or even the heroine of your story? Here’s a tool that will help you: Name Finder.

12. Here are some fabulous prompts to get your creative writing juices flowing: Imagination Prompt Generator.

13. Need some help applying the “Random Element” creativity technique? Use the Random Word Generator.

14 – 16. Doodling is a great way to generate ideas. You can use this tool to create your very own “Jackson Pollock” to get the ideas flowing. Or, you can scribble on here or here.

17. Create your very own Picasso Head.

18-21. Maybe what you need is to take a look at the ideas of others to start coming up with your own. Here are four web sites where you can find ideas:

• Idea a Day

• Idea Explore

• Half Bakery

• Invention Ideas – Creativity Pool

22. Create cartoons in order to express yourself. Here’s a tool that will help you do that: Toondoo.

23.  Luciano over at the blog “Litemind”  has a creativity tool to help you with the SCAMPER creativity technique here.

24. Star Force asks how famous people might solve your problem.

• How would Vladimir Putin solve your problem?
• How would Socrates solve your problem?
• How would John Lennon solve your problem?

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Creativity quotes can help to inspire your creative soul.

Reading quotes about creativity can do many things for you. For starters, they can provide inspiration when your creativity well seems to have run dry. Secondly, they can help give you the push that you need to get started on your creative endeavors, whether it’s writing a screen play, putting together a presentation for a client, or simply being more creative in your everyday life.

In addition, creativity quotes can help keep you motivated when your creative pursuits are taking longer than you hoped they would, and they can help you persevere until you cross the finish line. Finally, they can give you the necessary courage to put your creative projects out there and share them with the world.

Here, then, are 75 creativity quotes to get your creative juices flowing.

1. “There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.” — Edward de Bono

2. “There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.”  — Martha Graham

3. “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” — Theodore Levitt

4. “A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.”  — Charles Brower

5. “When we engage in what we are naturally suited to do, our work takes on the quality of play and it is play that stimulates creativity.” –  Linda Naiman

6. “The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.” — Alan Alda

7. “It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” — Edward de Bono

8. “A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . .” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

9. “Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” — William James

10. “The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things-ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later, or six months, or six years. But he has faith that it will happen.” — Carl Ally

11. “Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” — Mary Lou Cook

12. “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London

13. “Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.” — Henry Ward Beecher

14. “The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.” — Abraham Maslow

15. “Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The greatest picture is not yet painted, the greatest play isn’t written, the greatest poem is unsung. There isn’t in all the world a perfect railroad, nor a good government, nor a sound law. Physics, mathematics, and especially the most advanced and exact of the sciences are being fundamentally revised. . . Psychology, economics, and sociology are awaiting a Darwin, whose work in turn is awaiting an Einstein.” — Lincoln Steffens

16. “The world is but a canvas to the imagination.”  — Henry David Thoreau

17. “We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.”  — Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

18. “So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”  — Brenda Ueland

19. “Creativity is… seeing something that doesn’t exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.” — Michele Shea

20. “The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.”

– Stephen Nachmanovitch

21. “As competition intensifies, the need for creative thinking increases. It is no longer enough to do the same thing better . . . no longer enough to be efficient and solve problems” — Edward de Bono

22. “Listen to anyone with an original idea, no matter how absurd it may sound at first. If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.” — William McKnight, 3M President

23. “Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.” — Nolan Bushnell

24. “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.” — Albert Camus

25. “You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.” — Sean Connery

26. “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney

27. “God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.” — Pablo Picasso

28. “To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.” — Pablo Picasso

29. “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

30. “The wastebasket is a writer’s best friend.” — Isaac Bashevis Singer

31. “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” — Jonh Steinbeck

32. “If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” — Vincent van Gogh

33. “Where observation is concerned, chance favors the prepared mind.” –  Louis Pasteur

34. “I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.” — Erich Fromm

35. “I began by tinkering around with some old tunes I knew. Then, just to try something different, I set to putting some music to the rhythm that I used in jerking ice-cream sodas at the Poodle Dog. I fooled around with the tune more and more until at last, lo and behold, I had completed my first piece of finished music. ” — Duke Ellington

36. “Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they (creative people) are willing to make silly mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible; he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are.” — Frank Goble

37. “Invention strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come from nothing.” — Sir Joshua Reynolds

38. “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.” — Huxley, Thomas

39. There is no use trying,” said Alice. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” — Lewis Carroll

40. “Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.” — Albert Einstein

41. “The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done – men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.” — Jean Piaget

42. “The creative person is willing to live with ambiguity. He doesn’t need problems solved immediately and can afford to wait for the right ideas.” — Abe Tannenbaum

43. “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” — Victor Hugo

44. “An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.” — Edward de Bono

45. ” Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.” — Erich Fromm

46. ” Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity that you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach – how you look at things . . . Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing is not purely economical, then it is creative.” –  Osho

47. “You become more divine as you become more creative. All the religions of the world have said God is the creator. I don’t know whether he is the creator or not, but one thing I know: the more creative you become, the more godly you become. When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative, you live in God. So he must be the creator because people who have been creative have been closest to him. Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it – whatsoever it is!” — Osho

48. “Every day is an opportunity to be creative – the canvas is your mind, the brushes and colours are your thoughts and feelings, the panorama is your story, the complete picture is a work of art called, ‘my life’. Be careful what you put on the canvas of your mind today – it matters.”  — Innerspace

49. “It seems to be one of the paradoxes of creativity that in order to think originally, we must familiarize ourselves with the ideas of others.” — George Kneller

50. “The highest prize we can receive for creative work is the joy of being creative. Creative effort spent for any other reason than the joy of being in that light filled space, love, god, whatever we want to call it, is lacking in integrity. . .
– Marianne Williamson

51. “To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” –Osho

52. “The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” — Henry David Thoreau

53. “We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own and other’s people’s models, learn to be ourselves and allow our natural channel to open.” — Shakti Gawain

54.

“When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don’t state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.”

–Lewis Carroll

55. “Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.” — Goethe

56. “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” John Cage

57. “What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one…. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one—which is really the realm of the artist.” — Federico Fellini

58. “Some people use things; they destroy. You’re a creator, a builder.” — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Quotes

59. “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” — Joseph Chilton Pierce Quotes

60. “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou

61. “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” Nikos Kazantzakis

62. “Behind all creation is silence. Silence is the essential condition, the vital ingredient for all creation and all that is created. It is a power in its own right. The artist starts with a blank canvas – silence. The composer places it between and behind the notes. The very ground of your being, out of which comes all your thoughts, is silence. The way to silence is through meditation. When you arrive in your own silence you will know true freedom and real power. Stop, take a minute, and listen to the silence within you today. Then be aware of what disturbs your inner silence. It could be negative thoughts, memories, sensations. And when you are aware, you will know what is draining your creative power, and you will know what needs to change…on the inside!” — Relax7.com

63. “One of my early mentors, poet David Wagoner, who divides the creative process into three phases – madman, poet and critic – once told me that you need to find your own magic to stay in the world of creative play.” — Sonia Gernes

64. “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” — John F. Kennedy

65. “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” — Bertrand Russell

66. “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” — John Maynard Keynes

67. “Held in the palms of thousands of disgruntled people over the centuries have been ideas worth millions – if they only had taken the first step and then followed through.” – Robert M. Hayes

68. “Life is trying things to see if they work.” – Ray Bradbury

69. “The stone age didn’t end because they ran out of stones.” – unknown

70. “Truly creative people care a little about what they have done, and a lot about what they are doing. Their driving focus is the life force that surges in them now.” — Alan Cohen

71. “An artist paints, dances, draws, writes, designs, or acts at the expanding edge of consciousness. We press into the unknown rather than the known. This makes life lovely and lively.” — Julia Cameron

72. “A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.” — Gerald G. Jampolsky

73. “Creative power, is that receptive attitude of expectancy which makes a mold into which the plastic and as yet undifferentiated substance can flow and take the desired form.” — Thomas Troward

74. “Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.” — George Lois

75. “A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.” — Charles Caleb Colton

Discover how to get your creativity to go off the charts in my eBook, “How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists”.

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In this post I’ve identified seven essential ways to build wealth, based on the advice provided in some of the best wealth creation books available (including one that was published in the 19th century). They are the following:

• Ask Yourself: “Why Not Me?”
• Think Long-Term
• Be Frugal
• Choose Work You Enjoy
• Be Cautious and Bold
• Allocate Your Time, Money, and Energy Efficiently
• Know What “Being Rich” Means to You

Each of these is explained below.

Build Wealth by Asking Yourself, “Why Not Me?”

In his book “100 Ways to Create Wealth”, Steve Chandler indicates that in order to create wealth you have to constantly ask yourself the following question: “Why not me?” He adds that in life we only achieve what we think we can achieve. Think of the following:

• When you see someone driving by in a brand new Mercedes-Benz, do you think to yourself, “It’s unimaginable that I would ever be driving a car like that”?
• Maybe having a successful business seems like something that’s so far out of your reach, that you won’t even allow yourself to seriously entertain the thought, for fear of being disappointed.
• Perhaps you can’t picture yourself being able to send your kids to a top-ranked college.

As long as you believe that you can’t, you never will.  Steve explains that money is just cause and effect: you provide value for others, and you receive money in return. That formula works for everyone. Including you. So the next time you catch yourself thinking, “I could never have that”, think to yourself instead, “Why not me?”

Build Wealth By Thinking Long-Term

Keith Cameron Smith explains in ““The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class” that millionaires think long-term, while everyone else thinks short-term. He breaks society down into five groups, and explains how each group thinks:

1. The very poor think day to day.
2. Poor people think week to week.
3. The middle class thinks month to month.
4. The rich think year to year.
5. The very rich think decade to decade.

The very poor and the poor seek to survive; the middle class seeks comfort; and the rich and the very rich seek freedom. The rich and the very rich ask themselves questions such as the following:

• How can I double my net worth this year?
• How can I legally lower my taxes so that I can invest in more income-producing assets?
• What do I want ten years from now? How about twenty years from now?
• How can I set up my estate so that my heirs will be protected?

The author adds that the middle class wants instant gratification: whatever they want, they charge it on their credit card or make a down payment with the intent of paying out the balance later on. After all, they’re focused on comfort. The rich put freedom ahead of gratifying immediate wants. It’s this long-term thinking that allows them to pull ahead. Change your thinking from the short-term to the long-term.

Three Tips for Building Wealth From P.T. Barnum

P. T. Barnum (1810 – 1891) was an American showman, businessman, and entertainer, who founded what became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He became a very wealthy man and he shares some advice on how to acquire wealth in his book “The Art Of Money Getting”. Here are three of the tips he shares in his book:

Be Frugal

“Wear the old clothes a little longer if necessary; dispense with the new pair of gloves; mend the old dress, live on plainer food if need be; so that, under all circumstances, unless some unforeseen accident occurs, there will be a margin in favor of the income. A penny here, and a dollar there, placed at interest, goes on accumulating, and in this way the desired result is attained.”

Choose Work You Enjoy

“The safest plan, and the one most sure of success for the young man starting in life, is to select the vocation which is most congenial to his tastes . . . We are all, no doubt, born for a wise purpose . . . Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed.”

Be Cautious and Bold

“Among the maxims of the elder Rothschild was one, all apparent paradox: ‘Be cautious and bold’. This seems to be a contradiction in terms, but it is not, and there is great wisdom in the maxim. It is, in fact, a condensed statement of what I have already said. It is to say: ‘you must exercise your caution in laying your plans, but be bold in carrying them out.’ A man who is all caution, will never dare to take hold and be successful; and a man who is all boldness, is merely reckless and will eventually fail.”

Build Wealth By Allocating Your Time, Energy, and Money Efficiently

In “The Millionaire Next Door”, the authors describe the following three types of people:

1. Under Accumulators of Wealth (UAW)
2. Average Accumulators of Wealth (AAW)
3. Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth (PAW)

Then they add the following: “PAWs allocate nearly twice the number of hours per month to planning their financial investments as UAWs.” PAWs do the following:

• They hire quality accountants, attorneys, and investment counselors.
• They attend investment planning seminars.
• They do their homework and make sure that they understand the investments that they’re making.

There is a strong positive correlation between investment planning and wealth accumulation. Devote time and energy to making sure that you’re handling your money efficiently.

Build Wealth by Knowing What “Being Rich” Means to You

Ramit Sethi is the owner of a popular blog called “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”, and is the author of a best-selling book by the same name. In his book, “I Will Teach You To Be Rich”, he indicates that he always asks people these two questions: “Why do you want to be rich?” and “What does being rich mean to you?”. Being rich means something different to everyone. Here are three examples of people making decisions based on their own definition of “being rich”:

• Sethi tells his readers about a friend of his who got a promotion, and immediately moved to a smaller apartment. Why? Because his friend didn’t really care where he lived. What he cared about was hiking and going on biking excursions. Therefore, that’s how he was going to spend his money.

• Sethi has another friend who loves trying out new restaurants, and would gladly pay $100 for a gourmet meal. However, there are many high-status items that his friend would never even think of plucking down $100 for, because he just doesn’t consider them to be worth the expense.

• In addition, Sethi adds that he doesn’t care about having a flashy car, but it’s important to him to be able to make career decisions based on what he wants to do, and not based on the amount of money that’s involved. So he makes his financial decisions based on his own criteria of what wealth is, and drives a car others probably wouldn’t consider to be “sexy”.

“Being rich” doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone. Make sure that you know why you want to have more money, and what you intend to do with it.

Conclusion

I’m a big proponent of taking the time to decide what you want, planning how you’re going to get it, and then taking the necessary action.  One of the main reasons that people identify for not going after what they really want in life is that they don’t have the money to do it.

The seven ways to build wealth identified above are meant to help you start moving along the path to acquiring the necessary wealth to be able to do with your life what you want.

Sometimes we all need a gentle reminder that the most important thing is to be happy.

Happiness quotes are bite-sized pieces of wisdom that remind us that happiness is a choice. They can help lift us out of a funk, improve our mood, and give us a better outlook on life. In addition, happiness quotes can inspire us to make choices each day that will make us happy, instead of miserable.

Look through the happiness quotes below and do the following:

• Copy your favorite ones down.
• Share them with a friend.
• Make a list of action steps that you’ll take based on the wisdom contained in these happiness quotes.
• Memorize one or two of these quotes and repeat them to yourself whenever you need a lift-me-up.

Here are 65 happiness quotes to brighten your day and bring a smile to your face.

1. “All seasons are beautiful for the person who carries happiness within.” — Horace Friess

2. “The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.” — Allan K. Chalmers

3. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” — Albert Schweitzer

4. “The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.” — Anne Frank

5. “Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place. But there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.” — E.L. Konigsburg

6. “The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.” — H.H. the Dalai Lama

7. “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” — Helen Keller

8. “The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.” — James Oppenheim

9. “We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.”– Frederick Keonig

10. “There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.” — Anthony de Mello

11. “How to be happy when you are miserable. Plant Japanese poppies with cornflowers and mignonette, and bed out the petunias among the sweet-peas so that they shall scent each other. See the sweet-peas coming up. Drink very good tea out of a thin Worcester cup of a colour between apricot and pink . . .” — Rumer Godden

12. “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

13. “How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.” – Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

14. “Health is not just the absence of a disease. It’s an inner joyfulness that should be ours all the time; a state of positive well-being.” — Deepak Chopra

15. “The really happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery when on a detour.” — Unknown

16. “Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.” — Margaret Lee Runbeck

17. “Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.” — Anon

18. “When I meet people from other cultures I know that they too want happiness and do not want suffering, this allows me to see them as brothers and sisters.” — H.H. the Dalai Lama

19. “Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.” — William Makepeace Thackeray

20. “Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.”– Jacques Prévert

21. “All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.”– Doris Lessing

22. “Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self- gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” — Helen Keller

23. “It’s not how much we have, but how much we enjoy that makes happiness.”– Unknown

24. “To live long and achieve happiness, cultivate the art of radiating happiness.”– Malcolm Forbes

25. “Happiness is really a deep harmonious inner satisfaction and approval.” — Francis Wilshire

26. “Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.” – – Joseph W. Krutch

27. “Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don’t collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don’t really mean anything.” — Norman Lear

28. “A person will be called to account on Judgement Day for every permissible thing he might have enjoyed but did not.” — Talmud

29. “A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

30. “When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It’s to enjoy each step along the way.” — Wayne Dyer

31. “A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.” — Helen Keller

32. “If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.” — Helen Keller

33. “Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.”– Norman Vincent Peale

34. “Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune. He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power.” — Seneca

35. “Happy people plan actions, they don’t plan results.” –Dennis Wholey

36. “Being happy doesn’t mean everything is perfect. It means you have decided to look beyond the imperfections.” –Unknown

37. “Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although eating honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. — A.A. Milne

38. “True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.” — Joseph Addison

39. “Happiness is a conscious choice, not an automatic response.” — Mildred Barthel

40. “The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others. — William Lyon Phelps

41. “Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don’t set any condition.” — Arthur Rubinstein

42. “Like swimming, riding, writing, or playing golf, happiness can be learned.” — Boris Sokoloff

43. “If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing Double Dahlias in his garden.” — W Wolfe

44. “Happiness radiates like the fragrance from a flower, and draws all good things toward you.” — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

45. “The happiness of society is the end of government.” — John Adams

46. “Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.” — Sigmund Freud

47. “I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.” — Willa Cather, My Antonia

48. ” . . . {B}ut then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere . . . ” — Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

49. “Money is a needful and precious thing, and when well used, a noble thing, but I never want you to think it is the first or only prize to strive for. I’d rather see you poor men’s wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace.” — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

50. “I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.” — Arthur Rubinstein, Polish-American classical pianist

51. “We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same.” — Carlos Castañeda

52. “All happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that being unhappy leads people to complain, but it’s truer to say that complaining leads to people becoming unhappy.” — Dennis Prager

53. “I believe… that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.” — Thomas Jefferson

54. “Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

55. “To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy . . . is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

56. “So often, we blame other people when, really, the problem is right down in here. I’m not happy. I don’t know what’s wrong. If I just had another job, I could be happy. If I just get married, I would be happy. Well if I just wasn’t married, I would be happy. Well, if I just had some kids, I’ll be happy. I’ll be happy when these kids finally grow up and get out of here. If I had a bigger house, I would be happy. Well, I got a big house. Now if I just had a maid to clean, I’d be happy. Well, now if I just had a maid I could get along with better, I’d be happy.” — Joyce Meyer

57. “I think there is a serious corruption in the idea sold through advertising that you can attain spiritual peace through lifestyle and the notion of building your happiness from the outside-in by acquiring things . . . which if you think about it, is the essence of advertising” — Edward Norton

58. “I care less about the gross national product and more about the gross national happiness.” — King of Bhutan

59. “Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” — Groucho Marx

60. “You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy ice cream. And that’s kind of the same thing.” – Unknown

61. “It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” — Dale Carnegie

62. “Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.” – Colette

63. “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” — Harold Whitman

64. “The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.” – Claudius Claudianus

65. “This is the true joy of life–the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown to the scrap-heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances.” — G. Bernard Shaw

Choose your favorite happiness quotes from those above, and put them up where you’ll be sure to see them often. Then, use them as encouragement to live your best life.

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Forgiving allows us to let go of the pain of the past.

When you’ve made the decision to live your best life, it’s time to consider letting go of the things that don’t serve you well, so that you can make room for good things to come into your life.

One of the things you should consider doing is forgiving those who have wronged you—whether you’ve experienced rejection, ridicule, deception, or abuse–, and clearing out the mental clutter that comes from holding on to grudges and resentments. After all, the person that you hurt the most by holding on to resentment and anger–constantly replaying painful scenarios in your head and reliving hurtful memories–is yourself.

Forgiving someone who has mistreated or wronged you is hard, isn’t it? So, how do you forgive someone who has hurt you?

Below you’ll find five ways to embark upon the journey of forgiveness in order to release yourself from past hurts and rid yourself of any emotional baggage which may be weighing you down and holding you back.

Rethink Your Definition of Forgiveness

You might think that forgiveness is about the following:

• Condoning what the other person did.
• Giving in.
• Turning the other cheek.
• Pretending that nothing happened or that it really wasn’t such a big deal.
• Admitting that your anger isn’t justified or that you’re not entitled to it.
• Forcing yourself to get along with someone who you feel may hurt you again.

If so, then you’re probably going to be very reluctant to forgive. And with good reason. Instead, try changing your definition of forgiveness to the following:

• Forgiveness is about freeing up and putting to better use the energy that is being consumed by holding on to grudges, harboring resentments, and nursing old wounds.
• Forgiveness is about moving on.
• Forgiveness is about choosing serenity and happiness over righteous anger.
• Forgiveness is about refusing to replay past hurts in your mind over and over again, like a broken record.
• Forgiveness is about realizing that anger and resentment don’t serve you well.
• Forgiveness is about giving yourself a clean slate.

If This Hadn’t Happened, My Life Would Be Perfect

In “Forgiveness: How to Make Peace With Your Past and Get on With Your Life”, Sidney B. Simon and Suzanne Simon explain that for many people, not forgiving provides them with an excuse for everything that is wrong in their life.

They use the fact that so-and-so did this-or-that to them to explain why they can’t achieve certain life goals. If only that hadn’t happened to them, then their life would be much better than it is. That is, they use the hurt that they experienced to get off the hook. If they forgive and heal, then they’re out of an excuse.

Stop telling yourself that because certain things happened to you in the past, you can’t have what you want in the present or in the future. Instead, take responsibility for getting on with your life, in spite of anything that anyone may have done to you.

You can do this by shifting from a Victim mentality, to a Creator mentality, which I wrote about in great detail in this post: From Drama to Empowerment.

What If You Don’t Want to Forgive?

Is forgiving the only way to heal the hurt that someone else has caused you? What if the person who hurt you won’t admit what they did, or they just won’t show any remorse? Or what if you simply can’t get yourself to genuinely forgive the other person?

Psychologist Janis A. Spring argues in her book “How Can I Forgive You?: The Courage to Forgive, the Freedom Not To”, that you can heal yourself and clear your head of emotional clutter—such as anger, resentment, and thoughts of getting even—without forgiving. She adds that you’re free to decide who you will, and who you won’t, forgive.

Lots of people argue that there are only two options:

1. Forgive, and release yourself from the hurt.
2. Refuse to forgive, and be forever trapped in a prison of your own poisonous thoughts.

However, Spring explains that there’s another option. It’s acceptance. Acceptance helps you do the following:

• Clear your head of emotional poison.
• Be true to yourself.
• Forgive yourself for any of your own failings which led you to allow yourself to be placed in harm’s way.
• Choose to get along with the person who hurt you—even if you don’t love or even like them—if it’s in your best interest to do so.

Acceptance involves the following:

• Honor the full sweep of your emotions.
• Give up the need for revenge, while continuing to seek a just resolution.
• Stop obsessing about the injury. You can do this by challenging your negative thoughts, using relaxation and meditation, and implementing a program of self-care.
• Frame the offender’s behavior in terms of their own personal struggles.
• Look honestly at your own contribution to what happened.
• Take any necessary steps to protect yourself from further abuse.
• Decide what kind of a relationship—if any—you want with the offender.

Questions to Ask Yourself to Help You Forgive

Jim Dincalci, the author of “How to Forgive When You Can’t: The Breakthrough Guide to Free Your Heart & Mind”, has spent the last 16 years putting together methods to help people forgive. He integrates not only the effective thinking and emotional processes of psychology, but also time-proven spiritual methods and perspectives.

One of the exercises he includes in his book is talking with the person who hurt you directly, if it would help you come to a better understanding of what happened. In particular, what happened from their perspective? Also, what’s their emotional intelligence?  Is there something in their background that led them to take this action?

He also suggests that you turn the situation around and ask yourself the following:

• How would an impartial observer see this?
• Have I done the same thing to another or to myself?
• Is this similar to a pattern in my family?
• Has something like this happened to me before? Am I reliving a situation I’ve gone through before, but with different players?
• What can I learn from this?
• Can anything positive come from this? Am I stronger or more resourceful as a result of this having happened?
• What do I get by holding on to this resentment? Who benefits and how?
• Am I keeping the situation alive by refusing to let go?

Nine-Step Forgiveness Exercise

This forgiveness exercise is a modified version of the 9-Step Exercise recommended by the Stanford Forgiveness Project. Here are the steps:

1. Make a list of all the people you feel have wronged you in some way. Write down what each one did and why it’s not OK.

2. Acknowledge that those things did happen, and that they did hurt you.

3. Make a commitment to yourself to do what you need to do in order to feel better.

4. Recognize that your distress is coming not from what happened, but from the thoughts that you have about what happened. Your thoughts are within your control.

5. When you feel yourself getting upset over what happened, practice stress reduction techniques to calm your body’s fight or flight response.

6. Another thing you can try when you start getting upset about a past experience is to ask yourself, “What am I thankful for?” Ask this repeatedly until you feel better.

7. Put your energy into looking for ways to achieve your goals, instead of wasting your energy by continuously reliving the negative experiences in your head.

8. Know that the best revenge is a life well lived. Forgiveness is about taking back your power.

9. Amend your grievance story to include how you moved on.

Conclusion

To conclude, I once heard an interview with former President Bill Clinton in which he was talking about Nelson Mandela.  Clinton was recalling the time in which he asked Mandela how he had forgiven those who had unjustly deprived him of his freedom for so long. Mandela answered:

“I didn’t want to be in prison anymore.”

When you refuse to let go of hurts from your past, you’re keeping yourself imprisoned.

When you have a few minutes, watch the video below (it’s less than 4 minutes long). It’s an interview with Sunny Jacobs who was found innocent of murder after 17 years of incarceration. During that time, her husband—who was also found innocent–had been executed in the electric chair. She shares her journey to forgiveness.

 

Related Posts:

• 13 Ways to Bring More Mindfulness Into Your Life
• 50 Quotes on Letting Go of the Past
• Dealing With Life’s Challenges – Life Is Like a Game of Chutes and Ladders
• 8 Ways to Release the Ghosts of the Past and Be Happy in the Present

The following 37 tidbits of  higher consciousness were derived from the perennial bestseller “Handbook to Higher Consciousness”, written in 1972 by Ken Keyes. This book has helped countless people to experience dramatic changes in their lives, and to increase their ability to experience happiness. It’s a reference book for being at peace with whatever happens in your life.

Here, then, are 37 tidbits of higher consciousness:

1. The only real problem in your life is how you’re using your mind.

2. You always have enough to be happy. It’s the patterns in your head that make you unhappy.

3. View others as unfolding beings in their journey toward higher consciousness.

4. Think of the world as a loving place that is designed to give you everything that you need.

5. You add to the suffering in the world when you take offense, just as much as you do when you give offense.

6. Happiness does not lie in getting people and things outside of you lined up exactly to suit your desires.

7. An addiction is any emotion-backed demand that you may have. It’s any desire that makes you upset or unhappy if it is not satisfied. Your addictions are your attachments, demands, expectations, emotional programming, and models of how life should treat you.

As an example, if you get angry when someone cuts you off in traffic as you drive to work, it’s because you’re “addicted” to having a smooth and completely hassle free trip to work. If you get upset when you ask a friend for help and they respond that they can’t help you because they’re busy, it’s because you’re “addicted” to having people acquiesce to your requests.

8. Life is warning you to get rid of an addiction every time you are emotionally uncomfortable in any way.

9. Upgrade your addictions to the status of preferences. Here’s the distinction between an addiction and a preference:

• When an addiction is satisfied, you feel momentary pleasure, relief, or indifference. If an addiction is not satisfied, you feel emotional distress.
• When a preference is not satisfied, you are simply indifferent — it was only a preference after all. But when it is satisfied, it adds to the texture and beauty of your life.

10. Allow yourself emotion-backed demands only for physical necessities such as air to breathe, food if starving, and shelter if freezing.

11. If your washing machine stops working and you’re addicted to appliances that work, you’ll get upset and you will suffer. If you prefer that your appliances work well, then when your washing machine breaks down you won’t compound the problem by superimposing your uncomfortable emotions on the situation.

12. There is nothing that you can do to change the present moment. It simply is. You may be able to change the situation one second, one minute, one hour, or one day from now, but there’s absolutely nothing you can do to change the way things are right here and now. By not getting irritated you will be more effective in doing what needs to be done to change the situation for the next moment.

13. When a tire blows, you simply accept that this is the here and now reality of your life. You’ve lost the tire, but that doesn’t mean that you have to lose your peace and serenity. Now, serenely, begin to take the necessary steps in order the change the tire.

14. Giving up an addiction means re-programming that part of your brain that makes you restless and unhappy if a desire is not realized.

15. Keep in mind that you don’t need to be addicted to money in order to acquire it. You can prefer to have money; you will then be able to enjoy whatever money you receive, but your happiness will not be contingent on the size of your bank account.

16. We see things not as they are, but as we are. Your addictions distort how you process the enormous flow of information that is constantly flooding in through all of your sensory inputs.

17. By tuning in to your minute-to-minute stream of consciousness, you discover the addictions that make you worried, anxious, resentful, uptight, afraid, angry, bored, etc. You thus use every uncomfortable emotion as an opportunity for consciousness growth. Even though you may still be feeling emotional and uptight, you begin to get at the roots of your ups and downs — your brief bits of pleasure and your long periods of unhappiness.

18. All there is in your life is the eternal now moment — and your experience of this moment is created by the programming in your head.

19. Watch your own body and mind, and the people and things surrounding you, from the deep, calm place inside of you. When you do that you’ll have insights as to what you need to do in order to flow with the river of life around you.

20. You can make really effective changes when your consciousness is free of emotional turmoil.

21. By fully tuning in to the now moment in your life, you will discover that you always have enough to enjoy every moment of your life. The only reason you have not been happy every instant is that you have been dominating your consciousness with thoughts about something you don’t have– or trying to hold on to something that you do have but which is no longer appropriate in the present flow of your life.

22. Whenever you’re unhappy, your emotions are telling you that the people or things around you are not conforming to your vision of the world, or the way you think things should be.

23. You stop viewing yourself as being “pushed around” by the world when you realize that only you can “push” yourself. To quote Buddha: “Nothing is upsetting you. You get upset because you are upsettable.”

24. If you want those around you to act in a more loving and conscious manner, act in a way that helps them to do so.

25. Acceptance doesn’t mean that you’ve resigned yourself to live the rest of your life with a particular person, or in a particular situation. It just means that you won’t cause yourself emotional discomfort because of the way things are in this moment.

26. The outside conditions of your life do not make you feel either secure or insecure. One person may feel secure with practically no money at all, while another may feel insecure with a million dollars in the bank. Your feelings of security or insecurity are due to your emotional programming.

27. Lots of people look for happiness through sensations, whether it’s through sex, the taste of food, the sound of music, the sensations of movies and plays, creating a certain environment in their home, and so on. Looking for happiness through sensations keeps you constantly searching for the next “fix” and for more varied sensations. Sensations become addictions, and nothing is ever enough.

Once again, when you upgrade sensations from an addiction to a preference, you can enjoy things such as gourmet food and music, without having your happiness depend on them.

28. Some people look for happiness by wielding power. They look for happiness in the following:

• Having more money, not for security, but so that they can manipulate others.
• Having more prestige (they surround themselves with status symbols).
• Having knowledge and lots of hobbies (so that other people perceive them as being interesting and a high achiever).

None of the above items create what we are all truly looking for: peace, serenity, and a feeling of oneness with others.

29. No one is suggesting that you renounce worldly activities: the world is there for you to enjoy it. The idea is to renounce the emotion-backed demands which keep you from enjoying the bountiful life which has always been around you.

30. We are not the personalities that our egos are so valiantly defending. Our personalities are simply the result of our current programming.

31. You are the awareness of your consciousness. If you visualize a television screen in the middle of your head where all of your thoughts, images, and emotions are being projected, you are what is watching the screen. As Ram Dass puts it, “Observe your scene from a quiet corner of your mind in which there is nothing to do but ‘see.’”

32 . As the watcher of the screen, you are perfect. The movie that is playing on the screen might be horrendous, but you are not the movie. You are what is watching the movie.

33. By tuning in to the ocean of loving energy around you, you can have far more security, enjoyable sensations, effectiveness, and love than you would ever need in order to live a continuously beautiful life.

34. Whenever you feel upset, take full responsibility for the emotions that you are experiencing. Get to work as quickly as possible identifying the programming, or the addiction, that is leading you to reject what other people are saying or doing.

By taking full responsibility, you give your ego and rational mind an entirely different direction in which to operate. They begin to work on helping you to reprogram yourself, instead of egging you on to manipulate and fight the people in your life.

Here’s the process to follow, in a nutshell:

• Explore the suffering.
• Pinpoint the addiction.
• Reprogram the addiction.
• The suffering stops.

35. Ask yourself the following questions in order to determine which addiction is causing you to feel alienated from the here and now:

• What is happening right now? (Just state the facts; the what, when, where, who, and how.)
• What specific emotion am I experiencing?
• What am I telling myself right now?
• What pains or tensions are being evoked in my body at this moment?
• What do my posture and face look like?
• What dance is my rational brain doing in order to prove me right and everyone else wrong?
• What am I trying to change in the outside world instead of doing the inner work to change my response to it?
• What phony front is my ego trying to maintain? What mask am I wearing?
• What happened to me in the past that makes me upset whenever anything similar happens?
• Do I want to be free from this automatic response?
• What am I rejecting in the here and now?
• What am I rejecting about myself?
• What am I rejecting about the situation?
• What threat does this person or situation represent to me?
• What’s the worst that could happen?
• What am I demanding in order to be happy?
• Could I accept this and still be happy?
• What is the model I have of the way I should be, must be, or have to be?
• What is the model I have of the way I should be treated?

36. Once you have pinpointed the addiction, your next step is to reprogram it into a preference. When you reprogram, you use your will and determination to give yourself clear, firm operating instructions. You tell your brain that you want it to function in a different way in processing incoming data in the future.

Here are some sample reprogramming instructions you can use:

• Life is my teacher.
• I am not my addictive programming.
• I am lovable.
• I am the master of my life.
• I don’t need to control people.
• I can accept what is.
• I don’t need other people’s approval.
• It’s okay to make mistakes.
• It’s okay to be me.
• I can let go and just be.
• I love myself.
• I am enough.
• It’s OK to be right where I am.
• I am getting free.
• I don’t have to get caught up in his/her programming.
• I can accept him/her just the way he/she is.
• I don’t need outside acceptance.

37. With persistence and determination, you can reprogram all of your addictions — no matter how long-standing or how strong they are. Keep telling yourself that you programmed yourself many years ago and that you can reprogram that which you programmed.

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Overcome procrastination once and for all.

Think of a dartboard with a bull’s eye smack in the middle of it. If you’re in the bull’s eye, you’re working on the most important task of the day. However, instead of spending time in the bull’s eye working on your task, you’re all over the dartboard.

Here’s what you’re doing instead of working on your high priority task:

• Chatting with that co-worker who popped into your office a few minutes ago.
• Tweaking the formatting on the report that’s due on Friday, although it already looks fine (after all, you want it to look perfect).
• Catching up on industry news by looking through a stack of trade magazines.

Below you’ll find 18 powerful tips to help you overcome procrastination, so that you start spending more time in the bull’s eye working on what’s really important, instead of wandering aimlessly around the rest of the dartboard.

1. Don’t blow tasks out of proportion. Stop telling yourself that your career, the future of your business, and even your success in life hinges on the outcome of this one action that you have to take. If you do this, you’re just going to put so much pressure on yourself that you’ll be looking for any excuse you can find to avoid taking the necessary action.

2. Stop all-or-nothing thinking. Don’t tell yourself that if you can’t do something perfectly, you might as well not do it at all. Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.

3. Change your thinking from “have to” to “choose to”. You may be procrastinating because you feel that you’re being forced by someone else to perform a task that you don’t want to do. For example, you may be telling yourself that your spouse is trying to manipulate you into mending the broken fence. Since you don’t like being manipulated, you procrastinate:

• You watch TV.
• You play video games.
• You take the dog for a walk.

Instead of telling yourself that you have to fix the fence, tell yourself that you choose to fix the fence in order to make your spouse–whom you love–happy.

4. Break tasks down into smaller pieces. One of the main reasons that people procrastinate is because the project that they need to tackle is so big, that they don’t know where to start. This makes them feel overwhelmed. Studies show that when children are watching television and they don’t understand what they’re watching, they look away.

Adults do the same thing when they feel confused: if you don’t know how to start a project, you’ll “look away” and start searching for a distraction or something else to do. What you need to do is break the project down into small pieces, so that they feel manageable.

5. Reward yourself. Tell yourself that if you sit at your desk and work on your taxes for 45 minutes without interruptions, you’ll reward yourself with that delicious brownie that’s in the fridge.

6. Three questions to ask. Before you start working on any task, ask yourself the following three questions:

• Is this the best use of my time at the moment?
• Am I the best person to perform this task?
• Am I using this task as an excuse to avoid working on something else that’s more important?

7. Keep track of how you spend your time. Grab a notebook and a pen; for an entire week, write down everything that you do and how much time you spend on it. You may be shocked to discover that you waste enormous amounts of time aimlessly surfing the web, reading blogs that don’t really help improve your quality of life, “chatting” on Twitter, and so on.

Ask yourself how your life would improve if you used that time productively instead.

8. Set a timer. When you’re going to start working on a task which you’ve been avoiding, set a timer for a specific amount of time–for example, forty minutes–, and tell yourself that you will not take your focus off the task until the timer rings. When the timer rings, take a short break; then, set the timer for another forty minutes and do it again.

9. Get Rid of Overlong Visitors. If a visitor begins to dilly dally, follow this process to get rid of them politely:

• Take control of the conversation.
• As you’re talking, suddenly interrupt yourself.
• Look at your watch and say emphatically: “Oh no! It’s already 3:15 p.m.!”

This process works, and it’s not rude because you’re not interrupting your visitor, you’re interrupting yourself. (This is one of the tips recommended by Mark Woods, author of the book Attack Your Day! Before It Attacks You: Activities Rule. Not the Clock!).

10. Block it out. Block out a day of the week, or an hour of every day, in which you don’t schedule appointments, accept invitations, or allow interruptions. That day, or that hour, is blocked off for working on a project that’s important to you.

11. Stop telling yourself that you have to wait until you’re “in the mood” before you take action. As an illustration, if you want to be a writer, you have to set a time at which you’re going to write, at least every weekday. At said time, you sit down and you begin to write. Even if you don’t feel inspired, and you don’t feel like writing, you get to it.

In much the same way, you have to take consistent action toward the attainment of your objectives, whether you feel like it or not.

12. Keep asking yourself, “What needs to be done next?” You don’t have to wait until you have a perfect, detailed plan of how you’re going to achieve your goal before you begin to act. Simply center yourself in the moment and ask yourself:

• “What’s right in front of me?”
• “What can I do right now to move forward, even if it’s just by a little bit?”

Always continue to move forward, even if it’s just by one inch at a time.

13. Make the task more enjoyable. If the task that you need to get done is boring, it’s very likely that you won’t want to get started. If this is the case, find ways to make the task more enjoyable.

As an illustration, if you keep putting off going to the grocery store because it’s something that you don’t like to do, try to turn it into a game. See if you can get everything on your list, and at the same time beat your record of saving money.

14. Get rid of distractions. A lot of the time you’ll procrastinate because there are just too many distractions, including email, social media sites, your cell phone, and so on. When you’re going to work on something important, you need to turn off all distractions. That way, you can give all of your attention to the task at hand.

15. Set a penalty. Just as you’re going to reward yourself every time that you finish one of the tasks that you’ve set for yourself, you should set a penalty that you’ll have to face if you don’t complete the task.

For example, tell yourself that for every day you don’t sit down to work on your novel at the pre-established time, you have to put $10.00 in a fund. At the end of the month, you have to donate the money to a nonprofit that you don’t like, such as the Bush Foundation if you don’t like Bush, or the NRA if you don’t like guns.

16. Have someone hold you accountable. Accountability is one of the best methods for warding off procrastination. You’re much more likely to get a task done if there’s someone holding you accountable. If you’re having trouble getting started on a task, find someone to hold you accountable.

17. Make sure that you schedule time for play. It may seem counterintuitive, but scheduling time for play is a great way to stop procrastinating. We all need to set aside time to let loose, relax, and just goof off.

If you know that at three o’clock you’re hitting the golf course with your best friend–and golf is one of your favorite activities–you’re much more likely to sit down and get to work than you would be if you were facing an entire day of drudgery.

18. Set deadlines for each subtask. Suppose that your boss assigns you a project that’s due in three months. Instead of focusing on the three-month deadline, break the project down into subtasks, and set a deadline for each subtask. That way, you can make sure that you work steadily on the project during the three month period, instead of leaving everything to the last minute.

Conclusion

What important task or project have you been procrastinating on? Maybe it’s one of the following:

• Starting a blog.
• Writing an ebook.
• Winning NaNoWriMo
• Starting an exercise program.
• Going back to school.
• Decluttering and organizing your home.
• Your graduate thesis.
• Clearing out the basement and turning it into a home office.
• Getting your finances in order; starting a retirement plan.

Whatever you’re procrastinating on, my ebook, “Make It Happen! A Workbook for Overcoming Procrastination and Getting the Right Things Done”, will help you get started and see the task or project through to completion.

 

Related Posts:

• 12 Things to Stop Doing If You Want to Be Happy
• 8 Ways to Release the Ghosts of the Past and Be Happy In the Present
• Five Powerful Ways to Forgive Those Who Have Wronged You
• 21 Ways to Create and Maintain a Positive Attitude