Tag: The Oprah Winfrey Show

Besides perspiration

Hard work is a given, a prereq for success. But that necessary spark, the 10% inspiration, must be there.

Two candidates, with  equal experience, the one with a great attitude wins. You must have the mojo.

It shows up in conversation, in off-hand moments (kicking the dog on the way out or giving the finger in the driveway to the one who ends up interviewing you).

In the Orient, job interviews often take on a new dimension. 3 finalists. Two walked by the broom that fell on the floor. The third picked it up and thereby, secured the job.

Attitude.

I just learned that Oprah ran the 1994 Marathon. On your way to success, you will have to walk across many “brooms”.

Just pick them up. Get used to removing obstacles. Habits of Effective (and not Deffective) People.

Tell me a success story, I will tell you how many obstacles he/she had to overcome:

– Colonel Sanders almost gave up until his last-ditch effort: a bar owner asked him to toss in more salt which is now the KFC recipe.

– Khan‘s wife offered herself to Silk Road traders to bail her husband out

– Al Gore, accepting defeat, but not becoming a failure, went on to win the Nobel Prize

– yesterday, at the London Olympic, Michael went on to break world swimming record.

Life gives us those stories to instruct and illustrate the point, unveiling new heights and setting new benchmarks.

Stay away from the Nay sayers. Prove them wrong. Or even better, think of them as never existed, for the longer we do, the more likely that this will come to pass.

Yesterday, I blogged about The Limits. But that was just one side of the coin. Today, there is another.

We have physical limits. But we reach out still to the stars. Feet on the ground, but eyes on the prize.

One more try. Then one more.

Another heart beat, then another. Breathe in and breathe out. Wax on and wax off. Karate Kid all grown up. Use all the pain and suffering and waste them not. They were there  to make us and not to break us. Each of us is different, not because of our limits, but because of how we dealt with those limits.   90 per cent inspiration, 10 per cent perspiration. Multiply that to the nth time. While perspiration is limited, inspiration is limitless.

Parting

Chicago‘s If you Leave Me Now is easy to listen to,but  hard to sing.

“You take away a part of me”.

Changes are necessary.

Progress and modernity.

More convenience, more amenities.

Full service.

One-stop shop.

Once we have upgraded to some fancy levels, our memory muscles kick in full gear. Gotta get back on top.

Taste of success.

Gotta to do it again.

One more time.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to say goodbye.

Even mediocrity has its values: that of security and stability.

But progress is triggered by self-disruption. A new way of doing things, of looking at life.

Stripping and dethroning.

The emperor without his clothes.

Hail to the chief, say the Yes men.

The right road often times is a lonely one.

Every generation got its victims (sacrificial lambs) and victors (Jay Lo  or Jay Leno).

In Oprah, we find both .

Well deserving.

Unquestionable success. Can’t argue with it.

So we leave things behind. When I was a child, I spoke like a child.

Then in parting, we reunite. In leaving “a part of me ” now, we soon find it again, face to face.

The extraordinary of daily life

If you look hard enough, you will find them: a Queen wearing Green, a show host wearing “color purple”, bidding farewell to a dream career a black, single mom couldn’t have imagined 50 years ago, or a fairy tale went awry with California Dreamer, bodybuilder that pumped more tragedy to the Kennedy clan than pumping iron.

Reports about the tsunami clean-up in Japan (10 years at least), and financial tsunami are still trickling in(bottle-necked at foreclosure proceedings.) For personal “escape”, I picked up “Last Men Out”, true story of the last Marines out of Vietnam (embassy guards). Their last day was “le jour le plus long” of my generation. ie. tragedy which brought out the best and worst in human being.

It’s ironic that they couldn’t junk helicopters fast enough to clear the aircraft carrier’s deck, while just a few years later, during the Iranian hostage crisis, the team was short of just one to pull it off.

Pundits and philosophers have pondered about outliers: how gene pool could produce extraordinary out of the hurdled mass: a Van Gogh here, an Elton John there.

All I know is that Sir John thought highly of Lady Gaga. And she of Farmville. There must be a trend worth- noticing for game developers. First generation gaming was mostly about kill-or-be-killed. Maybe gaming 2.0 will help players discover the extraordinary in the ordinary: planting tomatoes, milking a cow… For two generations now, kids (in a less-than-3-percent-agriculture environment) have grown up not knowing where milk came from.

We went to the store, and brought home a flat screen TV. From there, our real life turns to just “being there”: mummified and dumbed down. This came from a horse’s mouth, Mary Hart “we do, we do want to know what’s going on with celebrities, the high-profile ones”.

OK, so Kardashian lost a few pounds. That’s great. But Oprah didn’t stop there. She went on to build a media empire, so huge that the O in ChicagO might as well be capitalized. Now, that’s extraordinary!

It triggers the imagination. It inspires and motivates us. Perhaps we, single mom or stay-at-home dad, can rise to touch the face of God after all. If Stephen Hawking is right (that we are like computers), then let’s boot it up, I-pad as launching pad. Still, I believe the extra-ordinary in daily life.