Wish you a happy New Year

Wish you all a happy new year 2010. Remember the learnings from the year 2009 and conquer the year 2010.

Weight Loss - Motivation

I have been browsing through the web for weight loss tips. I found a wonderful piece of article here...

Motivation is one of the most important factors which determines how successful we are at what we do. It is the driving force that gives us the will to accomplish tasks and eventually succeed at reaching an ultimate goal. Motivation levels can vary each day depending on how we feel, or how we view certain experiences. For anyone to succeed at slimming motivation will be the most important part to work at, it will provide us with the determination to get up and exercise even if we don't feel up to it. Motivation also drives us to stick to the low fat selections and recipes required to keep our progress moving.

Read the rest here: http://www.weightlossforall.com/motivation.htm

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

One of the best motivational videos.

You want something. Go get it. Period - Pursuit of Happyness.

Pursuit of Happyness- Thanks for the wonderful motivation video.

Wallpapers with quotes

Got these wallpapers in a mail, looked interesting and most of them were true.

Thanks to the creator of these pictured and sender of this mail

Inches Speech - Al Pacino - Any Given Sunday

I don't know what to say really.
Three minutesto the biggest battle of our professional livesall comes down to today.Eitherwe healas a teamor we are going to crumble.Inch by inchplay by play till we're finished.We are in hell right now, gentlemen, believe me andwe can stay hereand get the shit kicked out of us or we can fight our wayback into the light.We can climb out of hell.One inch, at a time.

Now I can't do it for you.I'm too old.I look around and I see these young facesand I thinkI meanI made every wrong choice a middle age man could make.I uh....I pissed away all my money. believe it or not.I chased off anyone who has ever loved me.And lately,I can't even stand the face I see in the mirror.You know when you get old in life things get taken from you.That's, that's part of life.But,you only learn that when you start losing stuff.You find out that life is just a game of inches.So is football.Because in either game life or football the margin for error is so small.I mean one half step too late or to early you don't quite make it.One half second too slow or too fastand you don't quite catch it.The inches we need are everywhere around us.They are in ever break of the game every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch.We CLAW with our finger nails for that inch.Cause we know when we add up all those inches that's going to make the f***ing difference between WINNING and LOSING, between LIVING and DYING.

I'll tell you this, in any fight it is the guy who is willing to die who is going to win that inch.And I know if I am going to have any life anymore it is because, I am still willing to fight, and die for that inch, because that is what LIVING is.The six inches in front of your face.

Now I can't make you do it.You gotta look at the guy next to you.Look into his eyes.Now I think you are going to see a guy who will go that inch with you.You are going to see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team because he knows when it comes down to it,you are gonna do the same thing for him.That's a team, gentlemen and either we heal now, as a team,or we will die as individuals.That's football guys.That's all it is.Now, whattaya gonna do?

Balanced Life

By Chetan Bhagat.

Don’t just have career or academic goals. Set goals to give you a balanced, successful life. I use the word balanced before successful. Balanced means ensuring your health, relationships, mental peace are all in good order.

There is no point of getting a promotion on the day of your breakup. There is no fun in driving a car if your back hurts. Shopping is not enjoyable if your mind is full of tensions.

"Life is one of those races in nursery school where you have to run with a marble in a spoon kept in your mouth. If the marble falls, there is no point coming first. Same is with life where health and relationships are the marble. Your striving is only worth it if there is harmony in your life. Else, you may achieve the success, but this spark, this feeling of being excited and alive, will start to die. ……………….

One thing about nurturing the spark - don't take life seriously. Life is not meant to be taken seriously, as we are really temporary here. We are like a pre-paid card with limited validity. If we are lucky, we may last another 50 years. And 50 years is just 2,500 weekends. Do we really need to get so worked up? …………….

It's ok, bunk a few classes, scoring low in couple of papers, goof up a few interviews, take leave from work, fall in love, little fights with your beloved ones. We are people, not programmed devices........." :)

Note: I received this forward from one of my friend and not sure if Chetan is actually the narrator of this message. However since it made a lot of sense, i have posted it here. Enjoy.

Why Some People Have All the Luck ?

- By Professor Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire

Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve?

A psychologist says he has discovered the answer.

Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are always in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experience ill fortune. I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.

Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and over the years, I have interviewed them, monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments.

The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.

I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: "Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50."

This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.

As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties’ intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.

Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. My research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

Towards the end of the work, I wondered whether these principles could be used to create good luck. I asked a group of volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person.

Dramatic results! These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck. One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80% of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier.

The lucky people had become even luckier and the unlucky had become lucky.

Finally, I had found the elusive "luck factor".
Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming lucky:
1) Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right
2) Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine
3) Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well
4) Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call.
Have a Lucky day and work for it.

Note: I Sincerely thank the sender of this mail.

Obstacles

Don't be lake and get stagnated, Be a river and take 'em all down.

I remember the day when my cousin’s baby stood up for the first time. My cousin’s house was just a 10 minutes’ walk away from my home. So generally every day morning I used to go and play with her for some time. That day, I spent some time playing with her and then got busy reading my newspaper. I suddenly noticed that one of the dolls she was playing with had sharp edges. So I took it from her and placed it over the tea table next to the sofa in the living room and started to drown myself again in the newspaper. After few minutes I was shocked and amazed to see the baby trying to stand up by one of the leg of the sofa. Eventually I understood she was trying to walk across the sofa and reach the tea table to get her doll back. She was struggling to stand up. Before I could go and help her she fell down to the ground a little hard and started to cry. From next day there was no doll, but she was still trying to stand up and walk across the sofa. Each day she did a lot mistakes and fell down, but she never gave up. Every time she improved and it was apparent that each time she fell, she learnt what she should not do next time in order to successfully stand up. Within three days she reached the other end of the sofa. To celebrate her success she clapped and laughed summoning all of us to join her celebration.

Now when I think of that day, I can remember my mother telling me a similar incident about me. And I am sure that you would have a similar story about you. As babies, we all had the ability to learn from our failures and we never gave up. We learned that fire is hot; ice is cool and lot more things. We successfully walked and talked and did much more than that, all by ourselves. But slowly those abilities diluted in the ocean of negativity. Now when we fall, we are terrified to try it the next time or we did not care to analyse what was wrong in the previous failures and kept failing again and again by doing the same fault. When you face obstacles in life, thank god for what he has given for us to learn. Learn from it. Try again and again and again. Remember No Pain, No gain.

World is not a guest house for you to come and rest. It is a workshop. You want to be happy, you should work for it. You want to lose weight; you have to work for it. Money! Work for it. Never give up until the goal is reached. Be determined. If the baby did not have the determination to stand up and walk, it would have never stood up. All we have to do to overcome these obstacles is just to go a little back to days when we had all those abilities. Remember, what and all you did to make your parents shake their heads for your first bicycle. Now you have to be that adamant again, not with your parents but with yourself.

Regards,

R.K