I believe in God. I believe in destiny. I feel he plans everything for you. If not for the accident, we would not have moved from the village to Tanuku, a town. There I joined a missionary school, and my father built a house next to the school. Till the tenth standard, I studied in that school.
If I had continued in Teeparu, I may not have studied after the 10th. I may have started working as a farmer or someone like that after my studies. I am sure God had other plans for me.
Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right. - Henry FordWe would be living in Utopia right now, if not for our submissiveness to social conditioning, I think.
The story of Roger Bannister is an inspirational one. For many years it was widely believed to be impossible for a human to run a mile (1609 meters) in under four minutes. In fact, for many years, it was believed that the four minute mile was a physical barrier that no man could break without causing significant damage to the runners health. The achievement of a four minute mile seemed beyond human possibility, like climbing Mount Everest or walking on the moon.
It was a windy spring day, on the 6th of May 1954, during an athletic meeting between the British AAA and Oxford University, that Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. He crossed the finish line with a time of 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds, and broke through the “four munite mile” psychological barrier. John Landy a great runner of that day never run faster than within 1.5 seconds of the four minute barrier. Then 56 days after Roger Bannisters breakthrough, John Landy ran the four minute mile in 3 minutes and 57.9 seconds in Finland. Later Bannister and Landy raced in the Mile of the Century where Bannister won in 3 minutes and 58.8 seconds.The breaking of the four minute mile was so significant, that is was named by Forbes as one of the greatest athletic achievements. What made this event so significant is that once the four minute barrier was broken by Roger Bannister, within three years, by the end of 1957, 16 other runners also cracked the four minute mile.
The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime. - Babe Ruth
An Amazing and must see video! I wonder if India would have gained independence a little earlier, if INC had access to this video 100 years ago!
The only survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small, uninhabited island. He prayed feverishly for God to rescue him. Every day he scanned the horizon for help, but none seemed forthcoming.
Exhausted, he eventually managed to build a little hut out of driftwood to protect himself from the elements, and to store his few possessions.
One day, after scavenging for food, he arrived home to find his little hut in flames, with smoke rolling up to the sky. He felt the worst had happened, and everything was lost.
He was stunned with disbelief, grief, and anger. He cried out, "God! How could you do this to me?" Early the next day, he was awakened by the sound of a ship approaching the island!
It had come to rescue him! "How did you know I was here?" asked the weary man of his rescuers. "We saw your smoke signal," they replied.
Moral of the Story:
It's easy to get discouraged when things are going bad or things have caused undue stress, but we shouldn't lose heart, because God is at work in our lives, even in the midst of our pain, suffering, or stress. Remember that the next time your little hut seems to be burning to the ground, it just may be a smoke signal that summons the Grace of God.
On reading a quote from the Bible on my blog last year, one of my childhood buddies (and a distant relative) wondered about my reason for quoting Bible, when so much wisdom is available in Hinduism.
My answer is, if we find some water when we are really thirsty, we probably will not be finicky and try to find if it was extracted from an aquifer or river of our choice. If it looks good and tastes good, we would gladly quench our thirst with it. Finally, I love the following song.
Chris Gardner's unlikely road to riches started in the parking lot of San Francisco General Hospital in 1982. Then age 29 and the father of year-and-a-half-old Christopher, he was barely making ends meet as a medical equipment salesman. He was about to get into his car when he saw a red Ferrari searching for a parking space. Impulsively, he waved the driver over and said, "I'll give you my spot, but I want to ask you two questions: What do you do, and how do you do it?"
The Ferrari's owner said he was a stockbroker. Gardner asked what the job paid. At the time, the top salespeople where Gardner worked were making $80,000 a year. "This broker was making $80,000 a month," Gardner recalls.
The two men hit it off. Over occasional lunches, the broker explained how the business worked and how to break into it. He even gave Gardner a list of referrals. Gardner began knocking on doors -- but had them slammed in his face. "At the time, brokerage firms were starting to require MBA degrees," he explains. "I didn't even go to college. It wasn't racism. It was place-ism. I did not have a college degree. I did not come from a politically connected family. I had no money. So who was going to do business with me?"
After ten months of pursuing fruitless leads, Gardner found someone willing to give him a shot. He quit his job and showed up for his appointment, only to discover his contact had been fired. No one knew who he was or why he was there.
But life remained precarious. After an argument Gardner had with his girlfriend, someone called the police. A routine check of his license plate number turned up a backlog of unpaid parking tickets. And that led to ten days in jail.
Once out of jail, Gardner went to the interview wearing all he had -- the Windbreaker and bell-bottom jeans he had been arrested in. The interviewer glanced up and said, "Deliveries in the rear."
Gardner decided to take a desperate chance. "I could not think of a lie bizarre enough, so I told the truth. I said, 'I just got out of prison on a parking ticket charge, my ex left me, and I don't know where my child is. But I am here because I believe I am supposed to be in this business.'" The interviewer had been through a couple of divorces and could sympathize. Gardner won a place in the training program. Now he had to do well enough to be offered a job.
"We would leave the shelter in the a.m., my son in his stroller, my duffel bag with all his clothes and diapers, my briefcase, one suit on my back and one in a bag. Many nights we slept in bathrooms in transit stations or under my desk at work."
* According to Mr. Gardner, the misspelled title refers to a sign he saw at the daycare center his son attended during their dark days on the street.Gardner took to the trade and, within a few years, fulfilled his dream of working on Wall Street. In 1987, he opened his own brokerage firm, Gardner Rich & Co., in Chicago. And he bought his own Ferrari.
Gardner doesn't see his story as a rags-to-riches fairy tale. Rather, he says, "mine is a story of how to empower yourself and beat the odds stacked against you. My life could have been easily derailed by domestic violence and homelessness, but I made a choice to not let those things sink me. You can break the destructive cycles that ensnare you. Be smart, have a plan and hold on to the people you love."
A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the coffee.
When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee in most cases, just more expensive; and in some cases, even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups... and then began eyeing each other's cups.
Now consider this: Life is the coffee, and the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of Life we live. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee.
