There is that definition of leadership that says, 'Leadership is convincing people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't have done because you've made them believe it's the right thing to do.' And a great speech can do that.
Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.
Great businesses are not built by extraordinary people but by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Ask people to pitch in - hand them a spoon and ask them to stir. Doing things together, having everyone help, makes for a nicer party.
My goal is to encourage people to see the possibilities that life holds. So many great things can happen in life, if we can find our own way of doing things, and believe in ourselves, no matter what challenges surround you.
I am just doing photo shoots. It's not something that extraordinary. I'm not a great artist, I'm not writing books, I'm not a painter, and people in the streets ask me for a picture or a note, and I say, 'Why?'
I think the guys are starting to rally around my leadership style and the way I do things. I've been waiting for this opportunity my whole life.
I found myself doing extraordinary things that arent in the textbooks. Then the IMF asked the U.S. to please print money. The whole world is now practicing what they have been saying I should not. I decided that God had been on my side and had come to vindicate me.
When people send people on summer camps or bonding trips, they send them to do things like high rope climbing or extraordinary things. And when you do extraordinary things with people, like fighting battles or simulating huge wars, you do bond very quickly.
I've been playing piano my whole life but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand. I don't have professional pretensions. I've learned so much. So many things I've been doing in the visual, two-dimensional painting world parallel many of the inner working of music - how intervals resolve into each other, harmonic rhythm, tonal things - there's a whole vocabulary that overlaps. Sometimes people see pianos in my works - that I never think.
I think if you were to ask me when I was much younger what my definition of the good life was, I think it would have sounded a lot like what most people would say - a life with all the things you want and everything you think you need to make you happy, and these sorts of things.
The definition of successful people is simply ordinary people with extraordinary determination. You cannot keep determined people from success. If you place stumbling blocks in their way, they will use them for stepping-stones and climb to new heights. People who succeed have a goal, a dream and make their plans and follow them.
The only difference between an extraordinary life and an ordinary one is the extraordinary pleasures you find in ordinary things.
you have often seen in the cinema, erich, haven't you, that between extraordinary people extraordinary things like for example extraordinary love can arise. so we only have to be extraordinary and see what happens.
Punishment by definition isn't going to help. So what you need to do is to help people to change and recover is to help them find different areas of passion and help them find better ways of coping. Because about 50 percent of people with addiction have a preexisting mental illness, about two-thirds have had some type of severe trauma during childhood, and they are not using to the point where they're risking their lives because it's fun. They're doing something to help them cope.
I always seem to find myself fighting the law of equilibrium - the great leveling force that brings things to the mean and takes the 'cartoonishness' out of life. Perhaps I am doing a very unnatural thing... If Einstein were still alive I would ask him about it.