Top 10 changemakers who made it big after rejection

Warren Buffett to Elon Musk: Top 10 changemakers who made it big after rejection

Each of their stories inspires one to accept no's and let failures not break one's determination to stay on the course

Pursuing one's dream consistently despite rejections is one lesson that all aspiring entrepreneurs can learn from businessmen who made it big after rejections.

The list of changemakers include names from Warren Buffet to Elon Musk. Each of their stories inspires one to accept no's and let it not break one's determination to stay the course.

Here are the top 10 such changemakers that have made it big after rejection: 

Steve Jobs

Tech icon Steve Jobs was rejected and sacked from his own company, Apple, in 1985. In the interim, Jobs launched another business, software company NeXT, and purchased a little animation studio called Pixar Animation Studios from Lucasfilm. Pixar, which made him his first billion dollars, is reportedly the most successful animation studio of its kind.

In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple and set it on course to become one of the most valuable publicly traded companies.

"I am convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from non-successful ones is pure perseverance," Jobs advised entrepreneurs during a 1995 interview for an oral history project done by Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation.

JK Rowling
The worldwide known author of Harry Potter, JK Rowling, in 2016 shared some of the toughest rejection letters she received over the years. In a Twitter post, Rowling posted two rejection letters, one for Harry Potter book and for her Cormoran Strike detective series, which she wrote under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Interestingly, Harry Potter was turned down 12 times before Bloomsbury agreed to publish it. "I wasn't going to give up until every single publisher turned me down, but I often feared that would happen," Rowling wrote. "I had nothing to lose and sometimes that makes you brave enough to try."

Harry Potter's first book alone has sold over 100 million copies and the combined series is estimated to have sold close to 400 million.

Elon Musk

The success story of SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk entails a number of rejections.  Musk is said to have not received any traction when he applied for a gig at Netscape in 1995, following which he founded Zip2. The company's board, however, removed him as CEO.

Musk founded X.com, an online-payment company which went on to become PayPal. He was once again fired from his job as PayPal's CEO.

These rejections did not stop Musk. He went on to achieve his dream to build an aerospace business. When the Russian entities offered a deal worth $8 million for a rocket, Musk considered the deal was too expensive and decided to make affordable rockets. Thus, SpaceX came into existence.

He also co-founded Tesla, Neuralink and The Boring Company. While Musk continues to deal with setbacks such as Tesla production bottlenecks and rocket explosions, he is still reaching for the stars.

"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour," Musk said.

Oprah Winfrey

Before Oprah Winfrey became the star of daytime TV, she was fired from her job at a local Baltimore station. Winfrey found her true calling in the network's morning show, People Are Talking, which yielded some less than stellar reviews early on.

"Not all my memories of Baltimore are fond ones. But I do have fond memories of Baltimore, because it grew me into a real woman. I came in naive, unskilled, not really knowing anything about business or about life. And Baltimore grew me up," Winfrey said while reflecting on the experience to The Baltimore Sun.

The Oprah Winfrey Show became one of the highest ranking shows in American history, according to CNN. In 2011, Oprah was the best-paid female in the entertainment industry, according to Forbes Magazine, and remains the richest self-made woman and only black female billionaire.

Warren Buffett

The Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett, is known as one of the most profound investor. The 88-year-old has had a good mind for business and investment since he was a child. He started investing when he was just 11-years-old.

At 19, when Buffet was trying to get into his dream school Harvard, he was rejected. "I looked about 16 and emotionally was about 9. I spent 10 minutes with the Harvard alumnus who was doing the interview, and he assessed my capabilities and turned me down," Buffett said in an interview with Alice Schroeder in her biography of the tycoon.

Later, Buffett considered his rejection by Harvard as the 'pivotal episode of his life'. Since Harvard did not work out, it led him to Columbia where he honed his skills in investing. It has clearly paid off.

Barbara Corcoran

Barbara Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Group and star of TV's Shark Tank, had straight D's in her school and 20 jobs before age 23 in her resume.

In 2008, Corcoran was offered a position on ABC's Shark Tank only to have the offer rescinded. After she lost the job to another female entrepreneur, Corcoran wrote a powerful letter to the studio owner that persuaded him to give her another shot.

"I said that all the best things happened to me on the heels of rejection and I considered his rejection a lucky charm," Corcoran told Entrepreneur. "I cited half a dozen similar situations throughout my career where obstacles turned into my greatest opportunities."

Jeff Bezos

The founder of the US giant Amazon Jeff Bezos is the richest man on the planet. While Amazon's success is well known to people, Bezos had to struggle in the initial days to raise early funds for the business.

In an interview with 60 Minutes, Bezos explained: "I had to take 60 meetings to raise $1 million, and I raised it from 22 people at approximately $50,000 a person. It was nip and tuck whether I was going to be able to raise that money. So, the whole thing could have ended before the whole thing started. That was 1995 and the first question every investor asked me was: ‘What’s the internet?'"

Amazon recently overtook Microsoft to become the world's most valuable listed company. The online giant was valued at $810 billion as compared to Microsoft at $789 billion.

Sallie Krawcheck

Sallie Krawcheck, the most recognisable women on Wall Street, was publicly fired from her position as Citigroup’s CEO after she said that the firm had an obligation to pay back some of the money that their clients had lost because of its advice.

Krawcheck, however, channelled her rejection into becoming an entrepreneur and launching an investing platform for women called Ellevest. "The biggest risk is not taking any career risk," Krawcheck told Entrepreneur. "We all need to be pushing ourselves in different directions, otherwise we risk having the world just pass us by."

Jack Ma

Alibaba co-founder and China's richest man, Jack Ma's success story also entails various incidents of rejection. Ma was rejected from all the 30 jobs, including a job at KFC, where he had applied for work in his initial days. Even Harvard rejected his application for a total of 10 times.

At KFC, where 24 people applied for the job, Ma said, 23 were hired but he wasn't one of them.

The early rejections, however, taught him an important business lesson: "You have to get used to failure," Ma said while speaking at the University of Nairobi.

Bill Gates
When Microsoft went public in 1986, making Bill Gates a 31-year-old billionaire, Gates shared that 900 people out of 1,200 rejected his idea. Driven by his passion for computer programming, he built what would become the world's largest software company.

"There's no secret. I worked really hard on my idea to get it as good as I could, and then knocked on door after door," Gates said when asked about his secret to this success.

How you treat people makes a difference!

His phone rang in church during prayers as he had forgotten to mute it ...

The pastor scolded him.

The worshippers admonished him after prayer for interrupting the silence.

His wife kept on kept on lecturing him on his carelessness till they reached home.

You could see the shame, embarrassment and humiliation on his face.

He has never stepped foot in the church ever again. 🤭

That evening, he went to a bar.

He was still nervous and trembling.

He spilled his drink on the table by accident.

The waiter apologized, gave him a napkin to clean himself up.

The janitor also mopped the floor.

The female manager offered him a complimentary drink.

She also gave him a huge hug while saying "Don't worry man. Who doesn't make a mistake?"

He has never stopped going to that bar since then. 🤗💃🥃😇

"You can make a difference by how you treat people especially when they make mistakes." 😊

US foreign policy as explained by Barack Obama

THERE’S A FINAL dimension to U.S. foreign policy that must be discussed—the portion that has less to do with avoiding war than promoting peace. The year I was born, President Kennedy stated in his inaugural address: “To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” Forty-five years later, that mass misery still exists. If we are to fulfill Kennedy’s promise—and serve our long-term security interests—then we will have to go beyond a more prudent use of military force. We will have to align our policies to help reduce the spheres of insecurity, poverty, and violence around the world, and give more people a stake in the global order that has served us so well.

Of course, there are those who would argue with my starting premise—that any global system built in America’s image can alleviate misery in poorer countries. For these critics, America’s notion of what the international system should be—free trade, open markets, the unfettered flow of information, the rule of law, democratic elections, and the like—is simply an expression of American imperialism, designed to exploit the cheap labor and natural resources of other countries and infect non-Western cultures with decadent beliefs. Rather than conform to America’s rules, the argument goes, other countries should resist America’s efforts to expand its hegemony; instead, they should follow their own path to development, taking their lead from left-leaning populists like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, or turning to more traditional principles of social organization, like Islamic law.

I don’t dismiss these critics out of hand. America and its Western partners did design the current international system, after all; it is our way of doing things—our accounting standards, our language, our dollar, our copyright laws, our technology, and our popular culture—to which the world has had to adapt over the past fifty years. If overall the international system has produced great prosperity in the world’s most developed countries, it has also left many people behind—a fact that Western policy makers have often ignored and occasionally made worse.

Ultimately, though, I believe critics are wrong to think that the world’s poor will benefit by rejecting the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy. When human rights activists from various countries come to my office and talk about being jailed or tortured for their beliefs, they are not acting as agents of American power. When my cousin in Kenya complains that it’s impossible to find work unless he’s paid a bribe to some official in the ruling party, he hasn’t been brainwashed by Western ideas. Who doubts that, if given the choice, most of the people in North Korea would prefer living in South Korea, or that many in Cuba wouldn’t mind giving Miami a try?

No person, in any culture, likes to be bullied. No person likes living in fear because his or her ideas are different. Nobody likes being poor or hungry, and nobody likes to live under an economic system in which the fruits of his or her labor go perpetually unrewarded. The system of free markets and liberal democracy that now characterizes most of the developed world may be flawed; it may all too often reflect the interests of the powerful over the powerless. But that system is constantly subject to change and improvement—and it is precisely in this openness to change that market-based liberal democracies offer people around the world their best chance at a better life.

Our challenge, then, is to make sure that U.S. policies move the international system in the direction of greater equity, justice, and prosperity—that the rules we promote serve both our interests and the interests of a struggling world. In doing so, we might keep a few basic principles in mind. First, we should be skeptical of those who believe we can single-handedly liberate other people from tyranny. I agree with George W. Bush when in his second inaugural address he proclaimed a universal desire to be free. But there are few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention. In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi’s campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening.

We can inspire and invite other people to assert their freedoms; we can use international forums and agreements to set standards for others to follow; we can provide funding to fledgling democracies to help institutionalize fair election systems, train independent journalists, and seed the habits of civic participation; we can speak out on behalf of local leaders whose rights are violated; and we can apply economic and diplomatic pressure to those who repeatedly violate the rights of their own people.

But when we seek to impose democracy with the barrel of a gun, funnel money to parties whose economic policies are deemed friendlier to Washington, or fall under the sway of exiles like Chalabi whose ambitions aren’t matched by any discernible local support, we aren’t just setting ourselves up for failure. We are helping oppressive regimes paint democratic activists as tools of foreign powers and retarding the possibility that genuine, homegrown democracy will ever emerge.

A corollary to this is that freedom means more than elections. In 1941, FDR said he looked forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Our own experience tells us that those last two freedoms—freedom from want and freedom from fear—are prerequisites for all others. For half of the world’s population, roughly three billion people around the world living on less than two dollars a day, an election is at best a means, not an end; a starting point, not deliverance. These people are looking less for an “electocracy” than for the basic elements that for most of us define a decent life—food, shelter, electricity, basic health care, education for their children, and the ability to make their way through life without having to endure corruption, violence, or arbitrary power. If we want to win the hearts and minds of people in Caracas, Jakarta, Nairobi, or Tehran, dispersing ballot boxes will not be enough. We’ll have to make sure that the international rules we’re promoting enhance, rather than impede, people’s sense of material and personal security.

That may require that we look in the mirror. For example, the United States and other developed countries constantly demand that developing countries eliminate trade barriers that protect them from competition, even as we steadfastly protect our own constituencies from exports that could help lift poor countries out of poverty. In our zeal to protect the patents of American drug companies, we’ve discouraged the ability of countries like Brazil to produce generic AIDS drugs that could save millions of lives. Under the leadership of Washington, the International Monetary Fund, designed after World War II to serve as a lender of last resort, has repeatedly forced countries in the midst of financial crisis like Indonesia to go through painful readjustments (sharply raising interest rates, cutting government social spending, eliminating subsidies to key industries) that cause enormous hardship to their people—harsh medicine that we Americans would have difficulty administering to ourselves.

Another branch of the international financial system, the World Bank, has a reputation for funding large, expensive projects that benefit high-priced consultants and well connected local elites but do little for ordinary citizens—although it’s these ordinary citizens who are left holding the bag when the loans come due. Indeed, countries that have successfully developed under the current international system have at times ignored Washington’s rigid economic prescriptions by protecting nascent industries and engaging in aggressive industrial policies. The IMF and World Bank need to recognize that there is no single, cookie-cutter formula for each and every country’s development.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with a policy of “tough love” when it comes to providing development assistance to poor countries. Too many poor countries are hampered by archaic, even feudal, property and banking laws; in the past, too many foreign aid programs simply engorged local elites, the money siphoned off into Swiss bank accounts. Indeed, for far too long international aid policies have ignored the critical role that the rule of law and principles of transparency play in any nation’s development. In an era in which international financial transactions hinge on reliable, enforceable contracts, one might expect that the boom in global business would have given rise to vast legal reforms. But in fact countries like India, Nigeria, and China have developed two legal systems—one for foreigners and elites, and one for ordinary people trying to get ahead.

As for countries like Somalia, Sierra Leone, or the Congo, well, they have barely any law whatsoever. There are times when considering the plight of Africa—the millions racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of twelve-year-old guerrillas who know nothing but war wielding machetes or AK-47s—I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair. Until I’m reminded that a mosquito net that prevents malaria cost three dollars; that a voluntary HIV testing program in Uganda has made substantial inroads in the rate of new infections at a cost of three or four dollars per test; that only modest attention—an international show of force or the creation of civilian protection zones—might have stopped the slaughter in Rwanda; and that onetime hard cases like Mozambique have made significant steps toward reform.

FDR was certainly right when he said, “As a nation we may take pride in the fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.” We should not expect to help Africa if Africa ultimately proves unwilling to help itself. But there are positive trends in Africa often hidden in the news of despair. Democracy is spreading. In many places economies are growing. We need to build on these glimmers of hope and help those committed leaders and citizens throughout Africa build the better future they, like we, so desperately desire.

Moreover, we fool ourselves in thinking that, in the words of one commentator, “we must learn to watch others die with equanimity,” and not expect consequences. Disorder breeds disorder; callousness toward others tends to spread among ourselves. And if moral claims are insufficient for us to act as a continent implodes, there are certainly instrumental reasons why the United States and its allies should care about failed states that don’t control their territories, can’t combat epidemics, and are numbed by civil war and atrocity. It was in such a state of lawlessness that the Taliban took hold of Afghanistan. It was in Sudan, site of today’s slow-rolling genocide, that bin Laden set up camp for several years. It’s in the misery of some unnamed slum that the next killer virus will emerge.

Of course, whether in Africa or elsewhere, we can’t expect to tackle such dire problems alone. For that reason, we should be spending more time and money trying to strengthen the capacity of international institutions so that they can do some of this work for us. Instead, we’ve been doing the opposite. For years, conservatives in the United States have been making political hay over problems at the UN: the hypocrisy of resolutions singling out Israel for condemnation, the Kafkaesque election of nations like Zimbabwe and Libya to the UN Commission on Human Rights, and most recently the kickbacks that plagued the oil-for-food program.

These critics are right. For every UN agency like UNICEF that functions well, there are other agencies that seem to do nothing more than hold conferences, produce reports, and provide sinecures for third-rate international civil servants. But these failures aren’t an argument for reducing our involvement in international organizations, nor are they an excuse for U.S. unilateralism. The more effective UN peacekeeping forces are in handling civil wars and sectarian conflicts, the less global policing we have to do in areas that we’d like to see stabilized. The more credible the information that the International Atomic Energy Agency provides, the more likely we are to mobilize allies against the efforts of rogue states to obtain nuclear weapons. The greater the capacity of the World Health Organization, the less likely we are to have to deal with a flu pandemic in our own country. No country has a bigger stake than we do in strengthening international institutions—which is why we pushed for their creation in the first place, and why we need to take the lead in improving them.

Finally, for those who chafe at the prospect of working with our allies to solve the pressing global challenges we face, let me suggest at least one area where we can act unilaterally and improve our standing in the world—by perfecting our own democracy and leading by example. When we continue to spend tens of billions of dollars on weapons systems of dubious value but are unwilling to spend the money to protect highly vulnerable chemical plants in major urban centers, it becomes more difficult to get other countries to safeguard their nuclear power plants. When we detain suspects indefinitely without trial or ship them off in the dead of night to countries where we know they’ll be tortured, we weaken our ability to press for human rights and the rule of law in despotic regimes. When we, the richest country on earth and the consumer of 25 percent of the world’s fossil fuels, can’t bring ourselves to raise fuel-efficiency standards by even a small fraction so as to weaken our dependence on Saudi oil fields and slow global warming, we should expect to have a hard time convincing China not to deal with oil suppliers like Iran or Sudan—and shouldn’t count on much cooperation in getting them to address environmental problems that visit our shores.

This unwillingness to make hard choices and live up to our own ideals doesn’t just undermine U.S. credibility in the eyes of the world. It undermines the U.S. government’s credibility with the American people. Ultimately, it is how we manage that most precious resource—the American people, and the system of self-government we inherited from our Founders—that will determine the success of any foreign policy. The world out there is dangerous and complex; the work of remaking it will be long and hard, and will require some sacrifice. Such sacrifice comes about because the American people understand fully the choices before them; it is born of the confidence we have in our democracy. FDR understood this when he said, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that “[t]his Government will put its trust in the stamina of the American people.” Truman understood this, which is why he worked with Dean Acheson to establish the Committee for the Marshall Plan, made up of CEOs, academics, labor leaders, clergymen, and others who could stump for the plan across the country. It seems as if this is a lesson that America’s leadership needs to relearn.

I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history—whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline. On the same trip that took me to Baghdad, I spent a week traveling through Israel and the West Bank, meeting with officials from both sides, mapping in my own mind the site of so much strife. I talked to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in suicide bombings; I heard Palestinians talk of the indignities of checkpoints and reminisce about the land they had lost. I flew by helicopter across the line separating the two peoples and found myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from Arab towns, all of them like fragile outposts against the green and stony hills. From the promenade above Jerusalem, I looked down at the Old City, the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, considered the two thousand years of war and rumors of war that this small plot of land had come to represent, and pondered the possible futility of believing that this conflict might somehow end in our time, or that America, for all its power, might have any lasting say over the course of the world.

I don’t linger on such thoughts, though—they are the thoughts of an old man. As difficult as the work may seem, I believe we have an obligation to engage in efforts to bring about peace in the Middle East, not only for the benefit of the people of the region, but for the safety and security of our own children as well.

And perhaps the world’s fate depends not just on the events of its battlefields; perhaps it depends just as much on the work we do in those quiet places that require a helping hand. I remember seeing the news reports of the tsunami that hit East Asia in 2004—the towns of Indonesia’s western coast flattened, the thousands of people washed out to sea. And then, in the weeks that followed, I watched with pride as Americans sent more than a billion dollars in private relief aid and as U.S. warships delivered thousands of troops to assist in relief and reconstruction. According to newspaper reports, 65 percent of Indonesians surveyed said that this assistance had given them a more favorable view of the United States. I am not naive enough to believe that one episode in the wake of catastrophe can erase decades of mistrust.

But it’s a start.

Excerpt taken from book: Audacity of hope (by Barack Obama)

We Need Cost-of-Living-Adjustment Act! (Report based on 2018 and 2019 data)

A person earning minimum wages today cannot survive on it year after year.

Following case study done for two years for person in Delhi proves this point:

Item	Expense	Month
Total	7955	Dec-2016
Total	8221	Jan-2017
Total	9006	Feb-2017
Total	9254	Mar-2017
Total	8284	Apr-2017
Total	8497	May-2017
Total	9912	Jun-2017
Total	9051	Jul-2017
Total	7453	Aug-2017
Total	8541	Sep-2017
Total	9880	Oct-2017
Total	11678	Nov-2017

Average Monthly Expenses (2017): 8978

Item	Expense	Month
Total	15128	Dec-2017
Total	10794	Jan-2018
Total	10989	Feb-2018
Total	10385	Mar-2018
Total	13462	Apr-2018
Total	10790	May-2018
Total	10525	Jun-2018
Total	10159	Jul-2018
Total	10340	Aug-2018
Total	13508	Sep-2018
Total	11655	Oct-2018
Total	13777	Nov-2018

Average Monthly Expenses (2018): 11793 (Yearly Change: 31%)
Average Monthly Expenses (2019): 15624 (Yearly Change: 33%)

We see here that there is an increment of over 31 percent in 2018 and 33 percent in 2019 in average monthly expenses that is when a person is living hand to mouth and there is no improvement in quality of any aspect of life.

We not only need 'Minimum Wages' act but we also need COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) act as well.

How much increment did you get in your last appraisal? If it is below 10 percent, don't even bother to mention it.

Related articles:

Are Minimum Wages Sufficent?

Article showing minimum wages set by Indian government:

 

Barack Obama's Encounters With Death

There are some things that I’m absolutely sure about—the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace.

Those beliefs were driven home two years ago when I flew down to Birmingham, Alabama, to deliver a speech at the city’s Civil Rights Institute. The institute is right across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site where, in 1963, four young children—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair—lost their lives when a bomb planted by white supremacists exploded during Sunday school, and before my talk I took the opportunity to visit the church. The young pastor and several deacons greeted me at the door and showed me the still-visible scar along the wall where the bomb went off. I saw the clock at the back of the church, still frozen at 10:22 a.m. I studied the portraits of the four little girls.

After the tour, the pastor, deacons, and I held hands and said a prayer in the sanctuary. Then they left me to sit in one of the pews and gather my thoughts. What must it have been like for those parents forty years ago, I wondered, knowing that their precious daughters had been snatched away by violence at once so casual and so vicious? How could they endure the anguish unless they were certain that some purpose lay behind their children’s murders, that some meaning could be found in immeasurable loss? Those parents would have seen the mourners pour in from all across the nation, would have read the condolences from across the globe, would have watched as Lyndon Johnson announced on national television that the time had come to overcome, would have seen Congress finally pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Friends and strangers alike would have assured them that their daughters had not died in vain—that they had awakened the conscience of a nation and helped liberate a people; that the bomb had burst a dam to let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. And yet would even that knowledge be enough to console your grief, to keep you from madness and eternal rage—unless you also knew that your child had gone on to a better place?

My thoughts turned to my mother and her final days, after cancer had spread through her body and it was clear that there was no coming back. She had admitted to me during the course of her illness that she was not ready to die; the suddenness of it all had taken her by surprise, as if the physical world she loved so much had turned on her, betrayed her. And although she fought valiantly, endured the pain and chemotherapy with grace and good humor to the very end, more than once I saw fear flash across her eyes. More than fear of pain or fear of the unknown, it was the sheer loneliness of death that frightened her, I think—the notion that on this final journey, on this last adventure, she would have no one to fully share her experiences with, no one who could marvel with her at the body’s capacity to inflict pain on itself, or laugh at the stark absurdity of life once one’s hair starts falling out and one’s salivary glands shut down.

I carried such thoughts with me as I left the church and made my speech. Later that night, back home in Chicago, I sat at the dinner table, watching Malia and Sasha as they laughed and bickered and resisted their string beans before their mother chased them up the stairs and to their baths. Alone in the kitchen washing the dishes, I imagined my two girls growing up, and I felt the ache that every parent must feel at one time or another, that desire to snatch up each moment of your child’s presence and never let go—to preserve every gesture, to lock in for all eternity the sight of their curls or the feel of their fingers clasped around yours. I thought of Sasha asking me once what happened when we die—“I don’t want to die, Daddy,” she had added matter-of-factly—and I had hugged her and said, “You’ve got a long, long way before you have to worry about that,” which had seemed to satisfy her. I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang. Walking up the stairs, though, I knew what I hoped for—that my mother was together in some way with those four little girls, capable in some fashion of embracing them, of finding joy in their spirits.

I know that tucking in my daughters that night, I grasped a little bit of heaven.

Excerpt from: Audacity of Hope
Book available here: Download Fiction Books (Nov 2018)

Ideas to live by (Carlos Slim Helu)

Carlos Slim Helu:
He is a Mexican business magnate, engineer, investor and philanthropist. From 2010 to 2013, Slim was ranked as the richest person in the world by the Forbes business magazine.

Advice from the business mogul:

1. Have a firm handshake.
2. Look people in the eye.
3. Sing in the shower.
4. Own a great stereo system. Music is life.

5. If in a fight, hit first and hit hard.

6. Don't expect life to be fair.

7. Never give up on anybody. Miracles happen everyday.

8. Always accept an outstretched hand.

9. Be brave. Even if you're not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference.

10. Whistle.

11. Avoid sarcastic remarks.

12. Choose your life's mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 per cent of all your happiness or misery ABSOLUTELY!.

13. Make it a habit to do nice things for people who will never find out.

14. Lend only those books you never care to see again.

15. Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all that he has.

16. When playing games with children, let them win.

17. Give people a second chance, but NOT a third.

18. Be romantic.

19. Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.

20. Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life-and-death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems.

21. Don't allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It's there for our convenience, not the caller's.

22. Be a good loser.

23. Be a good winner.

24. Think twice before burdening a friend with a secret.

25. When someone hugs you, let him be the first to let go.

26. Be modest. A lot was accomplished before you were born.

27. Keep it simple at everytime.

28. Beware of the person who has nothing to lose.

29. Don't burn bridges. You'll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river.

30. Live your life so that your epitaph could read, NO REGRETS. 

31. Be bold and courageous. When you look back on life, you'll regret the things you didn't do more than the ones you did.

32. Never waste an opportunity to tell people you love them.

33. Remember no one makes it alone. Have a grateful heart and be quick to acknowledge those who helped and loved you.

34. Take charge of your attitude. Don't let someone else choose it for you.

35. Visit friends and relatives when they are in hospital; you need only stay a few minutes.

36. Begin each day with some of your favourite prayer

37. Once in a while, take the scenic route.

38. Send a lot of greeting cards. Sign them, 'Someone who thinks you're terrific.'

39. Answer the phone with enthusiasm and energy in your voice.

40. Keep a note pad and pencil on your bed-side table. Million-dollar ideas sometimes strike at 3 a.m.

41. Show respect for everyone who works for a living, regardless of how trivial their job.

42. Send your loved ones flowers. Think of a reason later.

43. Make someone's day by paying the toll for the person in the car behind you.

44. Become someone's hero.

45. Marry only for love, it is key to your happiness if every other thing fails.

46. Count your blessings.

47. Compliment the meal when you're a guest in someone's home.

48. Wave at the children on a school bus/house/street/
49. Remember that 80 per cent of the success in any job is based on your ability to deal with PEOPLE. That is emotional intelligence.
50. Make sure someone says  THANK-YOU to you every day...
Good luck!

How meditation helps you become aware of not just yourself but of others as well!

Paradoxically, if we wish to become more aware of others and their concerns, there is perhaps no better work we can do than developing selfawareness. Consider the findings of a team of psychologists led by Professor David DeSteno, who recruited thirty-nine people from the Boston area for an unusual experiment. Twenty people were assigned to take a weekly meditation class for eight weeks and then to practice at home, while the remaining nineteen were informed that they were on a waiting list.

At the end of the eight-week period, the participants were invited, one by one, to come to the lab for an experiment. As each participant entered the waiting area, he or she found three chairs, two of them already occupied. As the participant took a seat and waited, a fourth person entered the room on crutches, wearing a boot for a broken foot, sighing audibly in pain as she leaned uncomfortably against the wall. Neither of the other two sitting people, who worked for the experimenters, gave up their seats. Researchers wanted to find out whether the participants in the experiment would give up their chair to the injured patient or not.

The results: 50 percent of those who had practiced meditation gave up their chair, compared to 16 percent of those who hadn’t meditated—a threefold difference! DeSteno explains this dramatic difference by pointing to the documented ability of meditation to enhance attention—our ability to see others—as well as to foster a view that all beings are connected. “The increased compassion of meditators, then, might stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the artificial social distinctions—ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like—that divide us,” DeSteno writes. It all comes down then to elementary respect—the ability to see another human being.

Having given ourselves a “second look” through meditation, we are better able to give others a second look too.

The paradox reflected in this research is striking. By paying attention inside themselves through the practice of meditation, people were better able to pay attention outside themselves by showing kindness. The deeper we go inside ourselves, the farther we can go outside.

Source: Getting to Yes with Yourself (William Ury)