I found this YouTube video on How to fix a broken USB charger in five seconds to be most helpful today in repairing micro USB chargers. You will need a small, but strong pair of tweezers to make the fix. The video lasts about 70 seconds and walks you through the repair. It sure beats running out to buy a new charger.
My Favorite Quotes of the Magic of Big Thinking by David J. Schwartz:
Page 156, “There’s a lot of incorrect thinking that successful people are inaccessible. The plain truth is that they are not. As a rule, it’s the more successful people who are the most humble and ready to help.”
Page 54, “No one ever does anything worthwhile for which he is not criticized.”
Page 91, “Big thinkers see themselves as members of a team effort, as winning or losing with the team, not by themselves. They help in every way they can, even when there is no direct and immediate compensation or other reward.”
Page 192, “Success depends on the support of other people.”
Page 116, “Big people monopolize the listening. Small people monopolize the talking.”
Page 101, “Creative thinking is simply finding new improved ways to do anything. The rewards of all types of success-success in the home, at work, in the community-hinge on finding ways to do things better.”
Page 122, “Don’t let ideas escape. Write them down. Every day lots of good ideas are born only to die quickly because they aren’t nailed to paper. Memory is a weak slave when it comes to preserving and nurturing brand-new ideas. Carry a note-book or some small cards with you. When you get an idea, write it down.”
Page 35, “Remember the thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than how much intelligence you have.”
Page 33, “With a positive, optimistic, and cooperative attitude a person with an IQ of 100 will earn more money, win more respect, and achieve more success than a negative, pessimistic, uncooperative individual with an IQ of 120.”
Page 33, “Just enough sense to stick with something- a chore, task, project-until it’s completed pays off much better than idle intelligence, even if idle intelligence be of genius caliber. For stickability is 95% of ability.”
Page 194, “We are lifted to higher levels by those who know us as likable, personable individuals. Every friend you make lifts you just one notch higher. And being likeable makes you lighter to lift. Successful people follow a plan for liking people.”
Page 179, “People do more for you when you make them feel important.”
Page 176, “Transmit good news to the people you work with. Give them encouragement, compliment them at every opportunity. Tell them about the positive things the company is doing. Listen to their problems. Be helpful. Encourage people and win their support. Pat them on the back for the job they’re doing. Give them hope. Let them know you believe they can succeed, that you have faith in them. Practice relieving worriers.”
Page 264, “Goals, intense goals can keep a person alive when nothing else will.”
Page 288, “Praise your subordinates personally at every opportunity. Praise them for their cooperation. Praise them for every extra effort they put forth. Praise is the greatest single incentive you can give people, and it costs you nothing. You never know when your subordinates can do you a turn by coming to your defense.”
Page 248, “When you believe there is a way you automatically convert negative energy (let’s quit, let’s go back) into positive energy (let’s keep going, let’s move ahead). A problem, a difficulty, becomes unsolvable only when you think it is unsolvable. Attract solutions by believing solutions are possible. Refuse, simply refuse, to even let yourself say or think that it’s impossible.”
Page 231, “Be a crusader. When you see something that ought to be done, pick up the ball and run.”
Page 232, “Be a volunteer. The volunteer stands out. He receives special attention. Most important of all, he gives himself an opportunity to show he has special ability and ambition by volunteering. By all means, volunteer for those special assignments.”
Page 230, “Initiative is a special kind of action. It’s doing something worthwhile without being told to do it. The person with initiative has a standing invitation to join the high income brackets in every business and profession.”
Page 227, “Thinking in terms of now gets things accomplished. But thinking in terms of someday or sometime usually means failure.”
Page 225, “People who get things done in this world don’t wait for the spirit to move them; they move the spirit.”
Page 226, “A simple pencil is the greatest concentration tool money can buy. If I had to choose between an ultrafancy, deeply carpeted, beautifully decorated, soundproof office and a pencil and paper, I’d choose the pencil every time. With a pencil and paper you can tie your mind to a problem.”
Page 219, “Meet problems and obstacles as they arise. The test of a successful person is not the ability to eliminate all problems before he takes action, but rather the ability to find solutions to difficulties when he encounters them.”
Page 197, “Take the initiative in building friendships-leaders always do. The most important person present is the one person most active in introducing himself.”
Pages 181-182, “Make it a rule to let others know you appreciate what they do for you. Never, never let anyone feel he is taken for granted. A person whether he is garbage collector or company vice president, is important to you. Treating someone as second-class never gets you first-class results.”
Page 182, “Practice calling people by their names. People like to be called by name. It gives everyone a boost to be addressed by name.”
Page 183, “Remember, praise is power. Invest the praise you receive from your superior. Pass praise on down to your subordinates, where it will encourage still greater performance. When you share praise, your subordinates know you sincerely appreciate their value.”
Page 292, “When you take over the leadership of a group, the persons in that group immediately begin to adjust themselves to the standards you set.”
Page 298, “Remember the main job of a leader is thinking. And the best preparation for leadership is thinking. Spend some time in managed solitude every day and think yourself to success. “
Page 299, “Take time out to confer with yourself and tap your supreme thinking power. Managed solitude pays off. Use it to release your creative power. Use it to find solutions to personal and business problems. So spend some time alone every day just for thinking. Use the thinking technique all great leaders use: confer with yourself.”
Page 209, “Don’t be a conversation hog. Listen, win friends, and learn.”
Page 51, “Action cures fear.”
Page 55, “And remember, hesitation only enlarges, magnifies the fear. Take action promptly. Be decisive.”
Pages 67-68, “Doing what’s right keeps your conscience satisfied. And this builds self-confidence. Do what’s right and keep your confidence. That’s thinking yourself to success. To think confidently act confidently.”
Page 169, “To activate others, to get them to be enthusiastic, you must first be enthusiastic yourself.”
Page 64, “”Underneath he’s probably a very nice guy. Most folks are.” Remember those two short sentences next time someone declares war on you. Hold your fire. The way to win in situations like this is to let the other fellow blow his stack and then forget it.”
Page 157, “The person with a constructive off-the-job life nearly always is more successful than the person who lives in a dull, dreary home situation.”
Page 144, “When I worry ask yourself, would an important person worry about this? Would the most successful person I know be disturbed about this?”
Page 19, “The only wise thing to do is fire Mr. Defeat. You don’t need him. You don’t want him around telling you that you can’t, you’re not up to it, you’ll fail, and so on. Mr. Defeat won’t help you get where you want to go, so boot him out. Use Mr. Triumph 100 percent of the time. When any thought enters your mind, ask Mr. Triumph to go to work for you. He’ll show you how you can succeed.”
Page 13, “Believe, really believe, you can succeed, and you will. Think victory and succeed.”
Page 14, “A person is a product of his own thoughts. Believe Big.”
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My favorite excerpts and quotes are cited below. Babauta blogs at ZenHabits.net
The tale of the two newspaper reporters: pages 4 to 5
“Imagine two reporters working at a newspaper: One goes for a high volume of articles each week, and the other decides to do only one. The reporter writing thirty articles a week scans a vast amount of sources for any little bit of information that’s remotely interesting, turning each into a short, quick, and fairly limited article that doesn’t get much attention. His editor is pleased by the amount of work he’s doing, and he gets rewarded with praise.
The second reporter decides that if he’s just going to do one article this week, he’d better make it count. He spends half of the first day researching and brainstorming and thinking until he chooses a high impact story that he knows will knock people’s socks off. It’ll be an article that wins awards. He spends two days researching it and another couple days writing it and checking facts.
Guess what happens? Not only does he produce the best article of the week, but it becomes an award-winning article, one that the readers love and that gets him a promotion and long-term and widespread recognition. From that article, and others like it, he can build a career. The first reporter was thinking high-volume, but short-term. The second reporter focused on less, but it did much more over the long term.
That’s the Power of Less.”
The first two principles: pages 5 and 6
“Principle 1: By setting limitations, we must choose the essential. So in everything you do, learn to set limitations.”
“Principle 2: By choosing the essential, we create great impact with minimal resources. Always choose the essential to maximize your time and energy.”
How limits help page 13:
“It simplifies things. It focuses you. It focuses on what’s important. It helps you achieve. It shows others that your time is important. It makes you more effective.”
Page 23, “Principle 3: Simplifying-Eliminating the Nonessential “
Page 25, “Principle 4: Focus is your most important tool in becoming more effective”
Page 28, on why multitasking is bad:
“Multitasking is less efficient, due to the need to switch gears for each new task and then switch back again.”
“Multitasking is more complicated, and thus leaves you more prone to stress and errors.”
“Multitasking can be crazy-making, and in this already chaotic world, we need to rein in the terror and find a little oasis of sanity and calm.”
Page 33, “Principle 5: Create new habits to make long-lasting improvements. “
Page 39, “Start new habits in small increments to ensure success”
Page 58, “The power of limitations works on the task level by choosing only three Most Important Tasks (MITs) that will become the focus of your day.”
Page 60, “Anytime you find yourself procrastinating on an important task, see if you can break it into something smaller. Then just get started. Small tasks are always better than large ones.”
Page 63, “Immersing yourself in a task, completely, is a phenomenon called “flow.” Basically, flow is a state of mind that occurs when you lose yourself in a task, and the world around you disappears.
The way to get into flow:
- Choose a task you’re passionate about.
- Choose a task that’s challenging.
- Eliminate distractions.
- Immerse yourself in the task.”
Page 75, “A common productivity tip is not to check e-mail first thing in the morning, and it’s good advice. By checking email in the morning, you’re allowing e-mail to dictate the rest of your day, instead of deciding for yourself what your Most Important Tasks will be for that day.”
Page 80, “Too often we feel the need to reply to every e-mail. But we don’t. Ask yourself, “What’s the worse that will happen if I delete this?” If the answer isn’t too bad, just delete it and move on. You can’t reply to everything. Just choose the most important ones and reply to them. If you limit the emails you actually reply to or take action on, you get the most important stuff done in the least amount of time. The eighty-twenty rule at work.”
Page 84, Babauta cites three platforms to track your internet usage. These are Toggl, yaTimer, or Tick.
Page 85, “One of the best things I’ve ever done to increase my productivity is to disconnect from the Internet when I want to get focused, uninterrupted, serious work done.”
Page 106, “Protect your time-it’s your most valuable commodity. Guard it with your life.”
Page 114, “With a well –planned morning routine:
You can prepare for your day and set your goals.
You can get in exercise, reading, writing, or other things you normally don’t have time for;
You can do something enjoyable, calming, and relaxing.”
Page 120, “Benefits of a Clean Desk:
- It allows you to focus.
- It gives you a Zen-like sense of calm.”
Page 133, “Along the same lines, working at a slower pace can be more productive, as contradictory as that might sound. If you can focus on the important tasks and projects, and keep your focus on those tasks, you will accomplish important things. In contrast, someone can work frantically for twelve hours a day, doing as many tasks as possible, and yet not accomplish anything important. That’s not just theory-many people do it all the time. They work hard at a fast pace, and yet wonder why they don’t get anywhere, and nothing seems to get done. They multitask and work as quickly as possible, getting stressed out the whole time. It’s not the most effective way to work.”
Page 160, “The best kind of motivation, then, is for you to really want something, to get excited about it, to be passionate about it.”
Recently read Theologian Matthew Fox‘s book Creativity. The whole book is beyond great! I am placing my favorite quotes (in no particular order) here.
Page 185, “Let the struggle of other artists support you in your struggle. Develop imaginations together. Read the biographies and autobiographies of artists to learn what their lives are really like. Ask them questions. Seldom have I found artists to have an easy life. Those who find balance of an interior kind have often found it at a great price: by living as hermits for a while; by honoring their own mistakes; by admitting when they have trusted too much or gone too far; by taking risks and sometimes failing. The artist’s life is not an easy one, especially in a culture that respects creativity less than it does competition and rationality.”
Page 31, “Creativity and imagination are not frosting on a cake. They are integral to our sustainability. They are survival mechanisms. They are the essence of who we are. They constitute our deepest empowerment.”
Page 24, “Gratitude is the ultimate enabler. Gratitude moves us from apparent laziness to heroic giving. Never underestimate the power of gratitude. It can move mountains. It can build great things. It can arouse us to action. That is why gratitude is the ultimate prayer, as Meister Eckhart tells us when he says: “If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘thank you’ that would suffice.” It suffices to get us moving, get us giving birth, get us creating.”
Page 174, “….Learning is one of the most spiritual, ecstatic, mystical, and prayerful experiences available to us all. I write books in order to learn. That is what makes it so fun even when much drudgery is involved. Learning (unlike education, alas!) is non-elitist-we can all do it. It is available to everyone with senses and with a mind still intact. Our minds were made for learning just as our stomachs were made for eating, and, like eating, our learning ought to be delicious and healthy.”
Page 134, “Meditation teaches us not to fear being alone. In meditation we learn to calm the mind and its infinite powers of distraction and projection so that stillness might be entertained on a regular basis. With the stillness comes Spirit. Silence gives way for Spirit to arrive. “
Page 179, “To reconnect to wonder is to awaken the child inside…”
Page 179, “Play is a kind of meditation, for it takes us back to the Source of all things, including joy and beauty.”
Pages 180-181, “Carl Jung felt that creativity comes from play and fantasy. He is right. The true artist plays with his or her tools, inspiration, intuition, forms, colors, musical instruments, even mind. Play takes us to realms that are preconscious and prejudgmental. Let judgment happen later , after the play. Give play its due. In play our imaginations not only get refreshed, they also get set up to connect with new and untried possibilities. Play is the mother of surprise. Surprise is a sure sign of Spirit at play, Spirit at work.”
Page 102, “Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann comments on the relationship between the prophet and the artist when he says: “Every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.” And Thomas Aquinas felt that the proper language of the prophet was always metaphor and symbol. Thus, there are no prophets who are not artists.”
Page 220, “Whether our everyday lives and the countless decisions they demand of us are creative or not depends most of all upon our attitude and our sense of self. We can choose or not choose to be creative. Navajo painter David Paladin put it this way: “Look at yourself as magicians, as healers, as lovers of humanity, as givers and sharers. From that perspective living becomes an art in itself. Then everything you do becomes magic!”
Page 147, “There are some wild things I cannot do. I cannot handle rattlesnakes or anacondas or live among the wolves as one friend of mine, a filmmaker, carver, and painter, does. But I do renew my creativity by walking near the sea as it rages and by walking near the waters when they are calm, by reading the mystics, who are wild poets of the wild soul, and by learning to laugh at self, soul, and others. “
Pages 146-147, “Awe is about chaste fear, healthy fear. Not a fear that freezes us or shrinks us into non-action or addiction or defensiveness or denial, but a fear that invites us to stretch and grow and trust. This fear results in courage, for it challenges us to explore, not to run away. And in the exploring come new learning and new growth. This fear grows our souls instead of shrinking them.”
Page 145, “For where creativity is lost, soul is lost.”
Page 139, “This is why all art work can be meditation itself: It is a discipline that opens us up to the joy of Divinity at work.”
Page 209, “Fun belongs everywhere in a postmodern time. The more dire the times, the more we need fun in our lives and in our culture. By letting imagination in, we are letting fun in. When fun returns, fantasy finds its healthy place, options are put before us, possibilities return. Hope happens, for hope is about the possible, while despair is about the impossible. Creativity banishes despair-at least for a while.”
Page 206, “As long as we ignore the imagination of the cosmos in our classrooms, we will have an Imagination Deficit Disorder.”
Page 196, “If Otto Rank is correct when he defines the artist as one who wants to leave behind a gift, and if all of us are artists in some way, then we all want to leave behind a gift.”
Page 89, “The liver cleanses and recycles. The artist, too, cleanses and recycles the toxins in a culture. Artists turn pain into insight and struggle into triumph and darkness into light and ugliness into beauty and forgetfulness into remembering and grief into rejoicing. Artists add awe to awe and beauty to beauty and wonder to wonder. When the liver is healthy the person is healthy. The artist is to the community or body politic what the liver is to the human body; a cleanser and recycler of waste and toxins.”
Page 26, “”Creativity” may be the nearest one-word definition we possess for the essence of our humanity, for the true meaning of “soul.”
Page 76, “I recently saw a slogan that I like a lot: “Quit whining and read. “ “Study”, which I define as the disciplines pursuit of our holy curiosity, is a necessary part of remaining alive and remaining creative and resisting cynicism. We must pursue truth, work at it, sweat for it, just as we have to work at keeping our bodies healthy. The mind requires no less attention. The imagination can grow stale and flabby and weak if we do not seek out healthy food with which to nourish it.”
Page 75, “Creativity stands up to temptations to guilt for disturbing the peace. Many in a culture do not want to hear about innovation and new direction that creativity unleashes. Creativity takes courage.”
Page 54-55, “A return to our origins is long overdue for all professionals but especially for artists, because their task is to lead the rest of us in moving through perilous times of cynicism, boredom, and despair.”
Page 19, “It is not the essence of the human to be passive. We are players. We are actors on many stages. We initiate contacts, ideas, movements, inventions, babies, institutions, sport, exercise, relationships of all kinds. We are curious, we are yearning to wonder, we are longing to be amazed, we are eager to grow, to learn, to be excited, to be enthusiastic, to be expressive. In short to be alive.”
Page 136, “In a culture where Muzak reigns and the void is always being filled with noise of some kind, one must go out of one’s way to find solitude and learn it. This is the role of mediation. Meditation becomes more important than ever for the survival of the imaginative mind. It is difficult to imagine creativity without it.”
Page 11, “…The number-one survival issue of our time: the sustainability achieved when creativity is honored and practiced not for its own sake but for justice and compassion’s sake.”
Page 9, “As the Dalai Lama has put it: “We can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion.”
Page 9, “To allow creativity its appropriate place in our lives and our culture, our education and our family relationships, is to allow healing to happen at a profound level.”
Pages 7-8, “Chaos is a prelude to creativity. We need to learn, as every artist needs to learn, to live with chaos and indeed to dance with it as we listen to it and attempt some ordering. Artists wrestle with chaos, take it apart, deconstruct and reconstruct from it.”
Page 90, “Was it not a good thing for Adam and Eve to have the courage to eat of the tree of good and evil in order to know the difference, to taste the difference? Why should they be punished for acquiring wisdom?”