Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do.
~~ Confucius ~~ (551 BC - 479 BC)
Herein lies the secret of success. If we are always afraid of falling, we can never reach anywhere. As a matter of fact, falls are to be expected in any journey we may decide to undertake. The key to successfully completing the journey is to get up every time we fall, carefully analyze why we fell, learn some lessons from the fall to avoid similar falls in future and keep going.
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
~~ Confucius ~~ (551 BC - 479 BC)
The quote is true but not very practical. Choosing a job you love is easier said than done. The reality of life is that most of us do not get to choose the job we love; the practicality of paying one’s bills starts hitting home pretty quick. Even if you find a job, which at the hiring stage you thought will be ideal for you, may, in reality, turn out to be quite different than you thought it would be. Once you get a job, the tendency is to stick with it even though you may not like it.
If you are one of those brave souls and quit 4 or 5 jobs after working for short periods of time because you didn’t love them and put these in your resume; you’ll probably not get any job let alone the job you love. That’s because most employers will look at your resume and won’t even call you for an interview as they think of you as a “quitter”.
So the idea of getting a job that you love is mostly a pipe dream; it very rarely happens in real life. I think most of the studies peg the percentage of people who love their jobs at around 1% to 2%. As a matter of fact, in a recent survey conducted by Ipsos Reid for the Royal Bank of Canada, 30% of Canadians said they are stuck in dead-end jobs. That is almost 1 in 3 Canadians! And Canada is one of the best countries to live in. If so many people in Canada can’t find a job they love, one can safely assume the situation in the rest of the world is far worse than in Canada.
To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.
~~ Confucius ~~ (551 BC - 479 BC)
So basically we have to start with ourselves first and then work upwards. Just like the song says ‘If you wanna change the World, take a look at the mirror and make the change’. But nobody seems to be interested in setting ourselves right first. We all want to set others right first!
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
~~ Confucius ~~
This is a quote that almost everybody has heard of. I remember hearing it way back in school. It is one of those quotes that doesn’t fade with time; it was true in the past, it is true now and it’ll be true in future.
On the surface it seems simple but if you really think about it, one can’t start any journey without taking that first single step. Whether one is headed to the corner store or to the Moon, one must start with that first single step.
I think the author also implies that no matter how far away the destination, one must start with a single step and then keep taking steps in that direction to reach the destination. I intentionally chose this famous quote as my first post as it represents the first step.
