39 Motivational Quotes That Will Make You Want To Start A Business

39 Motivational Quotes That Will Make You Want To Start A Business

Starting a business takes the  decision, willingness, commitment and the determination to finally do it. Just do it. There has never been an opportune moment to start something, do something and make something happen that will change the course of history no matter how small it is. Just begin to make an impact today not tomorrow. You can do what you are thinking about doing. All it takes is the very first step.

Make that step today and somebody will-stop and listen, stop and respond, stop and purchase, stop and buy, stop and read. You are right if you think you can and guess what you are right if you think you can’t because you are the only one stopping yourself.

These 39 inspirational and motivational quotes will Inspire you to start a business, work harder, be more productive and live fearlessly in the face of challenges.

1. You are not your resume, you are your work. – Seth Godin

2.  Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. – Will Rogers

3.   Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it and spend it rather than invest it. –Jim Rohn

4. Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death. – Seth Godin

5. Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves, to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today. -Stewart B. Johnson

6. To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted. – George Kneller

7. Learn to listen. Opportunity could be knocking at your door very softly.— Frank Tyger

8. If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing. — William Edwards Deming

9. If plan A fails, remember there are 25 more letters.–  Chris Guillebeau

10. Success is what comes after you stop making excuses.–Luis Galarza

11. If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.– Napoleon Hill

12. The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploit it as an opportunity.–Peter F. Drucker

13. People are best convinced by things they themselves discover. – Ben Franklin

14. Screw It, Let’s Do It.– Richard Branson

15. The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing. – Seth Godin

16. The number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep on trying.–Tom Hopkins

17. You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.~ Zig Ziglar

18. You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself. –Seth Godin

19. The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear. –Brian Tracy

20. Work like there is someone working twenty-four hours a day to take it all away from you.” – Mark Cuban

21. Have the end in mind and every day make sure your working towards it. – Ryan Allis

22. I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.–Estée Lauder

23. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.–Walt Disney

24. An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.–Roy Ash

25. The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.–Benjamin Mays

26. Give yourself an even greater challenge than the one you are trying to master and you will develop the powers necessary to overcome the original difficulty.–William J. Bennett

27. An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything and in this lies the great distinction between great men and little men.–Thomas Fuller

28.  Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.–Winston Churchill

29.  Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.-- Thomas J. Watson

30. If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.–William Arthur Ward

31. You will never influence the world by trying to be like it.

32. Study while others are sleeping; work while others are loafing; prepare while others are playing; and dream while others are wishing.–William Arthur Ward

33. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.–Wayne Gretzky

34. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.–Ralph Waldo Emerson

35. Stop holding yourself back.

36. If not now, when?

37. The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

38. A year from now you will wish you had started today. -Karen Lamb

39. Start. Fail, fail, fail fast, learn, start over, succeed faster.

How to Prepare a Simple Gantt Chart?

http://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/gantt-chart/

Courtesy of  JONATHAN O'DONNELL

In every grant application, I want to see a simple visual guide (a Gantt chart) that shows what you are planning to do. It is the perfect time to plan your project clearly. It shows the assessors that you have thought about your research in detail and, if it is done well, it can serve as a great, convincing overview of the project.

Clearly, these charts are hard to do. If they were easy, more people would do them, right?

Here are five steps to create a simple guide to your research project.

1. List your activities

Make a list of everything that you plan to do in the project. Take your methodology and turn it into a step-by-step plan. Have you said that you will interview 50 people? Write it on your list.  Are you performing statistical analysis on your sample?  Write it down.

List of tasks for "Simple Privacy", a one year project

Check it against your budget. Everything listed in the budget should also be listed on your uber-list? Have you asked for a Thingatron? Note down that you will need to buy it, install it, commission it… What about travel? Write down each trip separately.

2. Estimate the time required

For each item on your list, estimate how long it will take you to do that thing. How long are you going to be in the field? How long will it take to employ a research assistant? Realistically, how many interviews can you do in a day? When will people be available?

• Initial meeting: about 3 weeks to find a time.
• Desk audit: 4 weeks.
• Draft key elements: about 1 week each.
• Testing: about 1 week each, but can start organising as soon as first element is drafted.
• Write up: 2 weeks.
• Final report: no time, really – just need to find a time to meet.

Generally, I use weeks to estimate time. Anything that takes less than a week I round off to a week. Small tasks like that will generally disappear from the list when we consolidate (see Step 4).

3. Put activities in order

What is the first thing that you are going to do?  What will you do next? What will you do after that?

In the comments, Adrian Masters provided some great questions to help with this stage:

• What do I need to do by when?
• What do I need from others & when?
• How do I check that I am still on track?

One by one, put everything in order. Make a note of any dependencies; that is, situations where you can’t do one thing until another is started or finished. If the research assistant is going to do all the interviews, then the interviews can’t start until the research assistant is hired.

Where possible, you should eliminate as many as possible dependencies. For example, if you can’t find a decent research assistant, you will do the fieldwork yourself (but that might mean that work will be delayed until you finish teaching). It isn’t a necessary step to getting your time-line in order, but it is good project management practice.

4. Chunk it up

Now that you have an ordered list, and you know how long everything will take, you need to reduce the list without losing any specificity. At the same time, if you are combining tasks, you might want to add a bit of time as a contingency measure.

1. Meet with partners: 3 weeks.
2. Review data protection regimes: 4 weeks.
3. Draft three key elements: 3 weeks.
4. Test three key elements: 3 weeks, with some overlap.
5. Analyse test results and report: 3 weeks.

How you divide up your time depends on your project. If it is only one year long, you might list items by month. If your project is three years long, then you might list items by quarter. If you are planning over five years, you might break it down to six-month periods.

5. Draw me a picture

If you use project management software to manage your project, and you are comfortable with it, then use it to produce a summary of your project, too.

Most project management software (e.g. like Microsoft Project) will allow you to group activities into summary items. Chunk your tasks into major headings, then change the time interval to your months, quarters, half-years, or whatever you have chosen to use.

Or you can just draw it up with word-processing software (which is what I always do), spreadsheet software, or even hand-draw it.

Example of a Gantt chart

Trust Yourself Even When Life Hurts

Trust Yourself Even When Life Hurts

Maybe you feel jaded because your trust has been betrayed and you have built high walls of protection  around your heart. Thats understandable. Life can be harsh, and people can be cruel. Now you have a choice. You can either let the betrayal define you and become closed and bitter, or you can rise above the hurt and become even more determined to do whatever you can to create a world of unconditional love. Trust without any guarantee that your trust will be respected. Love without any guarantee that your love will be returned. Be kind without any guarantee that your kindness will be appreciated. This is the dance of authenticity, the risk that being completely yourself will open you to the most satisfying of all relationships.

Learning to trust an unpredictable world changes your whole outlook on life. It makes the world a more open, inviting and friendly place. Don’t give your trust recklessly. Give your trust mindfully; aware that there are no guarantees and there is always the chance you will be hurt again. In your calmest moments, you know that the risk to keep your heart closed is nothing in comparison to the joy of sharing love.

Are There Any Guarantees?

It seems backward, but the first step to building trust in relationships is to accept that there are no guarantees. As Comedian, Randy Millholand said, “There are people I know who won’t hurt me. I call them corpses.” Trust offers no certainties, or else trust would not be required. But don’t give up working on trust no matter how jaded you feel, or else you might as well be a corpse.

Find your balance. Being jaded and being idealistic are equally dangerous when it comes to relationships.

Be realistic. I have presided over too many weddings where young couples stand before me with stars in their eyes and no idea of how much they will likely hurt each other at some point. Some of these same couples have knocked on my door within weeks or months with awful stories of broken trust.

If people truly realized the intensity of making vows of commitment to another human being for life, they would wear a crash helmet to the wedding. Not a veil, but a crash helmet. Love is an act of faith. I sometimes feel like sending couples out with the instructions, “Do not try this at home without a safety net. It’s risky!”

Be realistic. There are risks involved. But also believe. Believe that there is something stronger than the risk- that is the joy of dropping your guard with another person, letting that person into your private wthoughts and dreams and making a commitment to love each other through thick and thin. Risk your trust in return for the adventure of being in love. Trust opens the gates to love.

Trust is more important than love. Saying to another person ‘I trust you” is often more profound than saying “I love you.” You may not always trust the person you love, but you can always love the person you trust. Trust is a gift. When you offer someone the gift of trust, you create an opening for something greater. Trust frees you from your fears and helps you give birth to love.

Building Trust in Relationships

Stephen Covey, son of Stephen Covey who wrote Seven Habits of a Highly Effective People, is the author of The Speed of Trust; The One Thing that Changes Everything. He offers the analogy that every relationship has a trust account. When you build trust, you make a deposit. When you break a trust, you make a withdrawal. The withdrawals are typically larger than the deposits. Therefore the fastest way to rebuild the trust account is to stop making withdrawals. The other way to rebuild trust is to make new deposits.

Here are 10 practical ways to build trust.

1. Practice with small and safe deposits first. There are big things to entrust to someone, and there are smaller things. How many people would you trust with your life savings? Probably very few. What about telling someone a secret, or starting a new business with someone? Again, very few. But would you be prepared to trust someone with a smile, or a kind word, even knowing that they might abuse your vulnerability? Start by making small deposits into your trust account and build confidence from there.

2. Gather information to get the greatest return on your investment. Trust, to a certain extent, is built on information. Instead of taking a blind leap of faith, take a calculated risk. Gather as much information as you can before you trust, but keep in mind that trust implies incomplete information. Wendell Berry said this- “Knowledge, like everything else, has its place, and… we need urgently now to put it in its place… Let us…abandon our superstitious beliefs about knowledge: that it is ever sufficient, that it can of itself solve problems… Let us give up our forlorn pursuit of the ‘informed decision.” Gather information, but also be prepared to take a leap with incomplete information.

3. Be transparent. Suspicions often emerge in relationships when people act in a way that is outside their character or routine. Even if you don’t know why you are behaving the way you are, or if you don’t know why you are pushing love away, just express that you are going through something and need some space. Transparency leaves less room for imagination that can easily create unnecessary drama.

4. Be consistent. Make sure your words match the way you live. Mean what you say and say what you mean. There is nothing that can devastate trust more quickly than inconsistency.

5. Believe in the strength of your partner. He/ she can deal with your feelings and doubts and questions. Express yourself as lovingly as you can, and trust your partner to stay with your honest thoughts and feelings.

6. Agree to boundaries with other family and friends. Your relationship has its own intimacy boundaries, and this has as much to do with sharing private information and personal feelings as sexual intimacy. If you are telling a friend something that you haven’t or wouldn’t tell your partner, you may have crossed a line into emotional infidelity. This can create major barriers to trust.

7. Don’t confuse trust with forgiveness. They operate differently. You usually forgive people well before you trust them. You might forgive an apologetic jewel thief, but not leave him alone in a jewelry store. You might forgive people who have hurt you, but not leave them alone with your heart. If there has been a breach of trust, work at forgiveness as the first step towards trust.

8. Each person has their own trust account. People operate their trust accounts differently. You need to deposit into the other person’s trust account in a way that speaks to that person. Garrison Keilor tells a story about a couple who had been married for many years. The woman wrote a sonnet to her husband that amongst all the things she loved about him it was when he was working on the broken washing machine that she gained a “trust for tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.” Be clear about how trust accrues, and ask direct questions to know how trust builds for others.

9. If you have breached a trust, don’t make things worse by lying about it. Take responsibility quickly, and begin regaining broken trust. The more time that passes, the more tangled the web, the harder it is to come back from broken trust.

10. If in your situation the broken trust is too deep, then work at a healthy ending to the relationship. There is more at stake than the relationship (and kids if there are kids involved). Your ability to trust yourself and get back on a path with integrity is the biggest issue at stake. Work towards loving and leaving the relationship, giving thanks for what it has meant, forgiving life for disappointing your expectations and moving forward positively.

Trust – What Are You Ultimately Protecting?

A Zen Master lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening, while he was away, a thief sneaked into the hut only to find there was nothing in it to steal. The Zen Master returned and found him. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.” The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away. The Master sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused,” I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

The beautiful thing about this story is that the Zen Master wasn’t holding on too tightly, so trust was easier for him. Be generous in your relationships. The more freely you give, the less you will feel that you have to lose.

Maybe you don’t need a crash helmet after all. Life is generous, and always offers second chances. People are flawed, but there are always opportunities to rebuild trust. You have an inner courage to get back up after being hurt and keep loving anyway. Let go, trust the adventure of being alive and enjoy intimacy without defensiveness.

Cope With Stress Productively - AMA Playbook

Cope With Stress Productively - AMA Playbook

How can you cope with stress productively? Here’s a five-step process from Nicole Lipkin to help you transform how you deal with stress.

After a weeklong conference in Chicago, John and Peter, both senior executives in the financial services industry, meet in the lounge at O’Hare Airport. As they prepare to go to the boarding area, they hear an announcement that their flight to Los Angeles will not depart for another two hours. John drops his briefcase, kicks his carry-on bag, and utters

profanity that turns every head in the room. Pete lets out a long sigh, dials his wife to explain his delay, and gathers his briefcase and suitcase. Then he heads to the airport restaurant for a leisurely meal and a careful review of the notes he took at the conference.

Why does John lose his cool while Peter remains calm and collected? Both face the same irritating situation. The answer, of course, resides in their heads. Let’s take a peek at how they cope with stress.

1. Identify the activating event: John and Peter’s plane is delayed.

2. Determine the core belief or ingrained thought process: John believes that these types of inconveniences always happen to him and he takes it as a grave personal insult. Peter believes this sort of inconvenience comes with the job and views it as an opportunity to do something productive.

3. List the behavioral consequences. John feels enormous stress and displays his anger with physical and verbal abuse. As a result, he will not accomplish anything productive during the two-hour delay; by contrast, he may stew and feel restless the entire time. If you ever react to a stressful situation the way John did, you should move on to the next step.

4. Dispute the belief. If a given belief causes you a lot of grief, you should try disputing it the way John did.

Questions to uncover why you aren’t coping well with stress

• What is my problematic belief?   John believes: Bad stuff and inconveniences always happen to me.
• What evidence supports my belief?   The evidence is that the plane delay is an inconvenience to me.
• What is a better explanation for what happened?   The inconvenience is not happening to me, it is happening to everyone on this flight.
• What are the consequences of this belief?   Anger and stress have sent me into a tailspin.
• What would happen if I changed my belief right now? Permanently?  I could enjoy a nice dinner and catch up on some work and calls at the airport.
• What are my new core beliefs?   I can manage  inconvenience better.

If you conclude that you would gain some real benefits if you changed your belief, you can go to the final step in this process.

Imagine more effective ways to cope with stress

Step 5 involves coming up with better ways to deal with stress. Control what you can. Since you cannot change many aspects of stressful situations, focus on what you can change. For example, John could brainstorm and then act on more productive ways to use the two-hour delay.

Go away. Try removing yourself from a stressful situation by taking a walk, leaving a room, or just doing something else. A temporary break can refresh your mind and help you gain a more positive perspective.

Breathe.Breathe with your diaphragm. Use your belly to pull in a deep breath. Hold it for ten seconds, then let it out slowly. Repeat at least five times. Taking a few deep breaths won’t abolish the stress, but it will counteract some of the adverse physiological effects of stress and buy you a moment to reset your thoughts.

Hydrate. Drink plenty of water. Most of us live in a regular state of mild dehydration. Stressful situations can further dehydrate you, and dehydration contributes to a bad mood. Stopping to sip water not only increases your mood in the moment, it may also distract you from the stressor, albeit momentarily. That brief distraction might buy you just enough time to gain some perspective on the situation,

Once you move yourself to a place where you do not feel so all consumed by your emotions and can think a little more clearly, reframe that negative core belief into a more positive one that won’t send you flying off your rocker in the future.

If you have disputed the negative core belief and accept the fact that it causes you problems, you will automatically find yourself coping more effectively. In John’s case, he recognizes that his negative core belief that “inconveniences

and bad things always happen to me” has created a lot of physiological, psychological, and reputation problems for him. With this in mind, he can reframe his core belief. In addition, John can use this specific “freak-out” to remind himself that such behaviors do not work for him when he encounters a stressful inconvenience.

- See more at: http://playbook.amanet.org/cope-with-stress-productively/#sthash.gx1NGsw1.p5Vwy788.dpuf