Month: May 2017
30 Best Inspirational and Motivational Quotes of the Day
One thing that successful people share is that they are driven to set goals and meet them every time. There are various techniques that you can employ to feel inspired every day and one of them is getting positive reinforcement from the best motivational quotes.
You can surf the internet for websites that specialize in quotes or you can download a daily quotes app to deliver the best motivational quotes to you on a daily basis. We are rarely ever apart from our mobile phones so it makes sense to use it as a tool to get our daily dose of inspiration.
We’ll share this little tidbit with you. Apparently, there are three things that make inspiring quotes highly effective.
First of all is the measure of self-selection. You see, in general, not all people are drawn to those quotes and anecdotes. However, when one feels an extreme connection, it triggers a self-dialogue that pushes us to try harder.
Haven’t you ever read a quote and thought, “This is it. This is my quote! The universe is sending me a message.”
Another factor is good wordsmithing. It’s relatively easy to say a motivational piece. But, once you add good rhyming and arrangement of words, the message becomes a lot stronger and more appealing for us.
Work for a cause,
Not for applause.
Live life to express,
Not to impress.
Finally, in addition to those two things, motivational psychology plays a big role, too. Humans are highly aspirational. We tend to look to others for inspiration. We look up to successful and credible people and we follow what those people say. Think Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, or Nelson Mandela.
How To Choose A Good Motivational App For Your Phone
There are tons of motivational apps you can download on your phone but not all of them can keep you engaged. The best daily quotes app should be able to stimulate your senses so you can stay motivated to improve your life.
It should also have the following features:
- Gives you the option to set your goals and track them
- Has a friendly user interface
- Contains a wide range of quotes from famous and successful personalities
- Has no typographical errors
- Has beautiful imagery
- Features sharing options
- Sends notifications
- Has the option to customize and save your favorite quotes
- Provides the opportunity to come up with a list of goals
One great example of a daily quotes app that has these add-on features is Motive. You don’t just get your daily dose of inspiration, you can also use it as a tool to easily track goals and to-do’s. It is Inspiration and Productivity all in one handy little app.
Here are some example quotes that you can get from motivational apps. Is there any one quote that resonates with you in particular?
30 Inspirational Quotes That Can Change Your Life
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney
“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” – Bruce Lee
“Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” – Dolly Parton
“If you want happiness for an hour — take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day — go fishing.
If you want happiness for a year — inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime — help someone else.”
– Chinese Proverb
“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 that has been opened for us.” – Helen Keller
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.” – Albert Ellis
“ Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
“The first recipe for happiness is: avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.” – Andre Maurois
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” – Herman Cain
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” – Ken Robinson
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” – Paulo Coelho
“Remember that failure is an event, not a person.” – Zig Ziglar
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” – J.K. Rowling
“Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.” – Mia Hamm
“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” – Paul J. Meyer
“Being lazy does not mean that you do not create. In fact, lying around doing nothing is an important, nay crucial, part of the creative process. It is meaningless bustle that actually gets in the way of productivity. All we are really saying is, give peace a chance.” – Tom Hodgkinson
“Happiness is not having what you want. It is appreciating what you have.” – Unknown
“Whatever you decide to do make sure it makes you happy.” – Paulo Coelho
“Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.” – Denis Waitley
“If you’re doing your best, you won’t have any time to worry about failure.” – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
“Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn’t stop to enjoy it.” – William Feather
“Take risks: if you win, you will be happy; if you lose, you will be wise.” – Anonymous
“Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic.” – Anonymous
“Most people chase success at work, thinking that will make them happy. The truth is that happiness at work will make you successful.” – Alexander Kjerulf
“Happiness is the art of never holding in your mind the memory of any unpleasant thing that has passed.” – Unknown
“Being happy doesn’t mean everything is perfect. It means you have decided to look beyond the imperfections.” – Unknown
“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” – Abraham Lincoln
“Losers quit when they fail. Winners fail until they succeed.” – Robert Kiyosaki
“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg
If you’re feeling stuck in your career growth or feeling depressed with how things are going in your life, that one special quote heard at the perfect time can be just the very thing to shake you out of your funk. So pay attention! Be inspired and do the work.
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The 9 biggest misconceptions everyone has about cologne and…
Syria: Stories from the Barrel of a Cannon
The short fiction of the Syrian writer Osama Alomar uses animals that are also recognizable types (his ants tend to be hard workers too), but the effect isn’t usually charming or edifying. Instead of a comedy of manners, his non-human characters are, like their human models, stuck in a nightmare of dictatorship and social paranoia.
Havana
Havana, City of Smoke. From peerless Montecristo #2s, if you are a wishful cigar aficionado; from pirate raids repeatedly reducing the city to ashes after plundering its entrepôts of Spanish gold, or — more grimly — from firing squads putting down slave rebellions, if your heart beats to a different drummer. There is the skin-smoking white heat of the sun, coaxing the eternal question Mark Kurlansky gives voice to in his new book, Havana: a Subtropical Delirium: “How can it be so fucking hot?” Havana smokes like the best film noir. Smokes in attitude, literature, cinema, its fiery political arguments. It’s smoky from the fumes of living under occupiers, oligarchs, plutocrats, dictators, and ideologues. No doubt the Tainos, the indigenes at the time of European encounter, have plenty to smoke about, if there are any left alive.
Havana, too, is the City of Columns, the Rome of the Caribbean. It’s all in your angle of approach. Drive into town from the airport, and your escorts will be the state psychiatric hospital “and drab, gray buildings, or rust-streaked, turquoise, and rotting pink ones — resembling birthday cakes left out too long.” Come at the city by boat, off the deep blue of the Gulf Stream and into the robin’s-egg and violet waters of the port, and a spell — part intrigue, part eyeful — is spontaneously cast. These approaches will condition what you experience next. Will the city be narrowly and confusedly congregated or an adventure in exploration? Is the paint dingy or tropical? (Federico García Lorca had no issue: “Havana has the yellow of Cádiz, the pink of Seville turning carmine and the green of Granada, with the slight phosphorescence of fish.”) Is the place a dump or delicately deliquescing? Kurlansky has taken both roads over the last thirty-five years of visits, and his verdict: “Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.” Keep your City of Light, your City of Love, and your Serenissima, too.
As in Kurlansky’s other discerning and obsessive investigations — such as Salt, Cod, Paper, and The Big Oyster — Havana‘s generous historical narrative is sparked by, or sparks, some Technicolor tidbit he has dug up. In Cod there were the Irish monks in their coracles — big teacups, but not all that big — floating their way to the Faroes and Iceland, the tonsured ones sustained by dropping a hand into the great sea and simply pulling out readymade sashimi. In Havana, that curio might be the nexus of narrow sidewalks and big windows (and street life in general), or the semiotics of shaven ice, the pop-up restaurants now appearing in Habanero homes, or Fidel’s twenty-six flavors of ice cream (Howard Johnson had twenty-eight, but Fidel ate all his at one sitting, according to rumor, a fable that might be read as either heroic or deflating), or the live-and-let-live of perspiration: “Havana is not a city for people who are squeamish about sweat. Sweat is one of the many defining smells in redolent Havana and it is a leitmotif in almost all Havana literature.”
Cuban literature — it takes willpower not to lay aside Havana to read one of the many books Kurlansky suggests, with their gritty magic realism/existentialism: Alejo Carpentier’s The Chase, say, or Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés, a “condemnation of slavery and slavery’s impact on society.” Contemporary Cuban writers are well in the political mix, where criticism abounds. So, too, with the cinema taking on the island’s bugaboo: homosexuality. “Until recently, there was almost nothing less acceptable in Cuban society than homosexuality.” A little late for those who spent years in that hospital on the airport road, and a sad holdover of Che Guevara’s New Man, but New Man was a bit of an automaton anyway, a perfect example of “subtropical delirium.” It is true that “the state accepts criticism”; it even admits its blame for many things, including “the state of Havana. The capital was never its priority.” (Nor did the U.S. government’s waywardly malicious embargo help by hurting all the wrong people, a classic variation on our Drug War.) Then again, “the strength of the Cuban police state is that it is difficult to know what will lead to trouble.”
Throughout Havana, the city’s history is called to speak. Here again, Kurlansky displays his talents as a chronicler well up to the challenge of a true, panoramic story, spinning with humanity and its evil twin, with predicaments, circumstances, forces and counterforces, incidents, availabilities, accidents, signs and wonders, down-and-outs. He starts with the Tainos’ eradication and the early years of Spanish Havana, a backwater founded by Diego Velázquez’s lieutenant, Pánfilo de Narváez, a man both “exceptionally brutal, even for that crowd, but also unusually stupid.” Still, smart enough to stay away from the mosquito-infested, disease-plagued swamps of Santiago and the earlier South Coast towns. To boot, newly founded Havana had the amusement of “so many tortoises and crabs crawling through the young town that after dark a tremendous racket of clawing and shuffling was heard.” One account told of a nighttime raiding party that, thinking the noise was a considerable army, retreated to their ship.
Cuba was a slave market as well as a slave country, though it also had free blacks as well, which in turn resulted in both considerable mixing of races and considerable racism. And slavery would stay with Cuba long after the other islands had foresworn it, a result of the political power of the sugar latifundia. Sugar, leather, tobacco, and shipyards, all slave-driven. Slavery shaped and defined the identity of Havana, socially and culturally. This is not to belittle the profound influence of Havana being a port, with all the amenities necessary to sailors: booze, gambling, and prostitution.
The United States would make its burgeoning imperial presence felt at the turn of the twentieth century, occupying the country until its needs became too onerous to continue financing — a fixer-upper that required seemingly endless renewed investment — when control-at-a-distance became the preferred arrangement. The Platt Amendment, which turned Cuba into a vassal state, was finally defeated by the Cuban legislature, but a series of false starts and fiascos landed Cuba with a military dictatorship under Fulgencio Batista — murder was his go-to solution to nearly every problem — who found a cozy bed with American organized crime. Cuba’s party scene became an infamous stage for tourism at its most exploitative and indulgent, a wretched and poisonous case of bloat.
The 26th of July Movement was as inevitable as an American holiday maker’s sunburn. With the revolution that swept Fidel & Co. into Cuba on January 1, 1959, Kurlansky goes full reporter, trying to winnow fact from fiction and myth. Yes, there was rampant cronyism, and there were incredible strides in education and healthcare; yes, living under the thumb of conspicuous consumptionists became a thing of the past, and yes, there were Che’s tribunals, which “executed so many people by firing squad that Castro removed him from the post and made him the country’s bank president.” That was hitting below the belt. Che would move on to the Congo, then Bolivia.
Kurlansky’s Cuba is a well-stirred cauldron of turmoil, which he spices up with recipes for Cuban delectables: guajiras in song and ajiaco in the kitchen, and, from behind the bar the daiquiri — perfected in Havana, “in part by adding maraschino liqueur” (that being subject to debate), the mojito, and the Cuba Libre. That last required Coca-Cola, and thus local replication of the soda. ‘Twas done, as Cubans made do, ingenuity their stock-in-trade. Certainly, Havana is “a city of unfinished works, of the feeble, the asymmetrical, and the abandoned,” as wrote its native son Alejo Carpentier. Kurlansky: “Havana, to be truthful, is a mess,” as so often is the one we love. But consider: who wouldn’t love a mechanic who kept your 1949 Ford coupe on the street by replacing the burned-out motor with a boat engine? He’s in Havana.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2qnmzS7
A Cozy Woodland Fairy Tale in a Vermont Cottage
Designed by the architectural firm Designed by the architectural firm HGA Architects and Engineers, this cottage was conceived in order to host musicians spending the summer in rural Marlboro, Vermont, USA. The Marlboro Music Cottages are located on the 500-acre (202-hectare) campus of Marlboro College, tucked into the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains. The Marlboro College campus has hosted Marlboro Music, a seven-week summer festival for Young musicians to collaborate..
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The North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona opens…
The North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona opens today! Closed for snow during the winter, visitors can now enjoy sweeping views of this natural wonder from Point Imperial, Cape Royal and Bright Angel Point. Fewer than 10 percent of visitors come to the North Rim, it invokes a sense of solitude and serenity. This is a place that invites you to slow down, to ponder, to feel your own innate creativity and to fall in love with this amazing landscape. Photo from Cape Royal by Michael Quinn, National Park Service.
7 Habits I Started Last Year That Dramatically Changed My Life
Being an entrepreneur and building a business is a big challenge- a very big challenge.
What if you work full time elsewhere, but you’re really passionate about it? Would you still do it?
That’s the case for me, but there’s more to it than just that.
I’m a dentistry student who got a 3.92 GPA in his first year and built a 5-figure freelancing business that same year.
All that and I’m just 20 years old. Sounds challenging, right?
But, I was able to do it. My secret?
I use the power of habits. I keep building habits that help me become productive so that I can reach my goals.
To help you achieve the same things, here are the 7 productive habits that I formed last year that had a huge effect on my life and my business.
Read More… by Smart Reading
It’s no secret that most of the leaders and high achievers in most fields are avid readers. For example, Warren Buffet, the billionaire investor, says that he spends 80% of his day reading.
Back then, I wasn’t able to spend a lot of my time reading due to my studies. That’s when I saw this Ted Talk by Tai Lopez entitled Why I Read a Book a Day (And Why You Should Too).
Authors often put a lot of fluff in their books to make it 300 pages long. What you need to do is to extract the golden nuggets, even if that means reading only a few chapters of a book.
For a detailed step by step guide, check out this video from Alex Becker, How To Read A Book Every Day (3 Step Speed Reading).
See Also: 7 Reasons To Start Reading Books? Here’s why!
Get the right amount of sleep, even if you’re busy
When I tell any of my friends about my GPA and successful business, they always say something like, “That means you’re sleeping 2 hours a day.”
Imagine the shocked look on their faces when I say that I always try to sleep no less than 7.5 hours a day. Yes, there are a few days here and there, especially during exam time, when I sleep less.
But, sleep is very important for productivity so don’t compromise your sleep just to get more done. To start learning about the importance of sleep, check out the article by James Clear, The Science of Sleep.
Try to avoid exposure to blue light 2 hours before you sleep. This is a fast hack you can apply to get better sleep.
The short wavelength blue light — which is emitted from your laptop and mobile screens — can decrease the secretion of the hormone melatonin. It’s the sleeping hormone that can affect your sleep quality and is essential in getting into deep sleep.
Of course, I can’t stop working 2 hours before bedtime every day. So, I dim the display and I use a blue light filter where the screen turns orange/yellow. I use F.lux and it’s free.
Going on a walk for 30 minutes
I used to have a lot of days where I was completely burned out and I couldn’t study or do any work. When I look at the screen, I can’t write a word and when I try to study, all I get is zero even after an hour.
That is when one of my friends suggested taking a walk for just 30 minutes a day.
In a nutshell, it was worth it.
To get the maximum benefits, I listen to Tony Robbins or a podcast, like the Tim Ferriss Show, Entrepreneur on Fire, the School of Greatness by Lewis Howes and the Fizzle Show.
The benefits of walking included improved sleep and decreased burnout. Plus, I also got to learn new ideas to improve myself and my business.
You need to start this habit, even if it’s just for 10 minutes.
Journaling
Thanks to Robin Sharma, this is an essential part of my life now. It helps me feel positive all day.
In the morning, I write my to-do list and one thing I am grateful for. In the evening, I write notes about what happened during my day, especially what made me feel negative.
Before I sleep, I write 5 small wins. This makes me feel good about myself and it helps me to focus on making a few more wins the next day so I can write them down, too.
I use the bullet journal system. You can check out this cool 101 series from Boho Berry.
Don’t skip this one. It’s invaluable!
See Also: 5 Benefits of Journaling To Inspire and Motivate You
Just waking up earlier than usual
Most people wake up at the last minute and get dressed and go to work/college.
After reading The Miracle Morning, I stopped doing that.
Not only did my stress levels become lower, but my productivity became higher, too. What’s great is that you can even customize your morning routine by adding a few short activities, such as exercise, journaling, and affirmations.
If you’re not yet doing this, do yourself a favor and read The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod– ASAP.
Using the Pomodoro technique
I’ve saved the best tip for last.
If you want to know how I achieve more while working less, this is the secret.
The Pomodoro technique is a simple technique where you do focused sessions of 25 minutes of work and then take a rest for 5 minutes. That’s it.
It helps you eliminate distractions and focus on the tasks at hand so you get more done.
Check out this cool article from Chris Winfield, How to Get 40 Hours of Work Done in 16.7.
These are the 7 habits I started practicing last year to achieve what I accomplished today. And these are the exact things that you need to achieve more in your life.
Yes, you can achieve great results in your life, too. All you need to do is take the time and use the right habits to guide you along your way.
You can do it and these 7 productive habits are going to help you get started! To help you apply them, I have created this cheat sheet to guide you along the way. Click HERE to grab it.
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A Unique Urban Garden in Kuwait
This residential project was designed by the architectural firm Line Design Architects, based in Kuwait. The most distinctive feature of the project came from the challenge of incorporating an urban garden as part of the exterior into the courtyard within the scheme. The structure, which resembles a perfect cube, has concrete walls. It is built in a small and narrow space, so it is developed with a vertical orientation. In..
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A Unique and Modern Remodeling in Vila Madalena
This innovative project consists of an apartment purchased by two friends and covering only 18 square meters. It is located on the ground floor of a building on Rua Fradique Coutinho, in Vila Madalena, the bohemian neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil. As a premise, the project included the intention to fulfill all requirements born of mixing a social and private purpose for this interior, and the main goal was to..
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Sig Nordal 