Tomorrow is Another Day!

How was your day so far? Did you seize it, did you enjoy it...or was it not a good day at all? Although I intend to give you all momentum and a tonic so you can live your life to the fullest, so you can master every day, so you can be cluttered with ambition, heart, and perseverance, I devote and dedicate this discourse to people who had a rough day, a bad day, maybe a day perceived as the "worst day ever."

Sometimes we wake up, everything seems to be fine, and then all of a sudden: boom; things start going wrong, and before you can turn around the downward spiral has already begun. How frustrating, you start your day—ambitious from head to toe—but for some reason nothing is working out the way it is supposed to. No matter what you do, one concept, one term is overshadowing all your actions, all your deeds, all your ambitions: failure. In a particular situation like that we just want to give up on everything, we lose grip, and all of a sudden all our hard work seems in vain, our goals, our dreams seem out of our grasp, all of a sudden we feel like our entire world comes tumbling down, our dreams collapse...system overload, our life that day...withering.

On a day like that it is vastly hard, of tremendous difficulty, maybe even nearly impossible to keep one’s head up, to hold fast to the ambitious drive one had the days prior to this d-day. It may also be a poor consolation, cold comfort to merely classify this day as "just not my day." But there is something we should always keep in mind, even though it is hard to in a day like this: noone made it to the top without failure, failure is, so to speak, part of our lives, and further part of success. Name one happy and successful person who made it to the top without failure, who achieved formidable things, who has done incredible things without bad days on the road to success? There is none, failure needs to be part of our path, failure paves the way to success. Obstacles, bumps on the road, deferral, decay, destruction, desolation—they will always be there, they will always have to be overcome; and let me tell you one thing: successful is not the one to reach a high achievement, successful is the one to withstand all of hell, the one to fight against the odds, the one to not give up and as a result of this perseverance achieves his or her goal. If everyone could accomplish high objectives without failing on its way, everyone would be successful.

Charles Franklin Kettering, a great innovator back in the nineteenth century said wisely: "Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement";—failures are part of the accomplishment of objectives, so do not let a bad day filled straight to the top with failure drag you down that you decline everything, learn from it, be happy that it was only a day (or two), but do one thing after being struck down: get back up and continue what you came to do, because one bad day does not mean that your entire world is collapsing, it merely means that external (for some it may also be internal ones) forces are shaking it...and it furthermore is a challenge wether we have the heart and the tenacity to regardlessly execute, no questions asked...because that is what successful people among us have done, and that is the only feature to distinguish the failing from the successful...GETTING BACK UP!

*If you intend to let the music speak to you, have a little less Daniel Powter and a little more T.I.*

...so if your day was whacky, frustrating, coined by failure, just "not your day," there is no need to despair, get back up and keep going, because it is on the dice: tomorrow is another day.

Success Begins with a Dream

Good morning, day, and evening folks, on this one I intend to conduct an inductive approach having this discourse sucking you in:

Even I, sometimes, have my days, days to make me feel lost in time, especially when I look at fellow people, their accomplishments, their lives. And sometimes I wonder what it would have been like having a normal life – like everyone else. But whenever I wonder, there is one thing that never changes: I always come to the same conclusion – these lives ain’t my life, these accomplishments are not my accomplishments. And as here I stand, why would I desire other people’s accomplishments? I do not look forward to have accomplishments of others, to living lives of others, because there is one mere and genuine truth about me, and yes, I am going to share it with you all: I am me, I got my own life to live, my own accomplishments. And if I do not have all the accomplishments to present as my fellow people do, there is definitely one thing I have they lack, one thing I still have they already gave up on, something that is so powerful that it can make the incredible happen, something that can change the world, that can change lives, steer them, something that is always understated, and not least something that I consider the one and only foundation of success: dreams.

Do you (still) have your dreams? Do you still hold fast to your dreams like Langston Hughes told us all to a long time ago? Do you still jam on that old guitar of yours believing in becoming the big rockstar you always wanted to be? Do you still scribble notes on the big novel you intend to write?

The only words of wisdom regarding that are the ones by former athlete Gail Devers: "Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination, and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe."

I talked to a woman yesterday and she told me about her dream. I asked her, why she was not 100% sure about chasing it in order to make it become reality. She said she did not know really. I told her there were three things to keep her from making these dreams come true: other people being in the way, oneself being in the way, and the lack of true will. Making dreams come true is dedicated to those who are willing to. If you buried your dreams already, dig deep and rediscover them. What was it, that gave us the car as a medium of transportation? What made the human being being able to fly? I tell you: a dream! What has put a man on the moon? A dream – and the everlasting faith and belief in making it happen.

If you are the dreaming kind of person, if you got that dreamer’s disease, let me tell you that you still got a little flame inside that can do tremendous things. Chase your dreams, do not give up on your dreams. Does it matter that your fellow people consider you obsolete, or your episteme surreal? Did it matter to Neil Alden Armstrong, what his fellow people, his friends said when he placed his footprint in the moon's dust? Did it matter to Christopher Columbus what others said when he sailed westwards (do not feel offended by this whiff of Eurocentrism) in the late fifteenth century? It were dreams that changed this world, that gave opportunities, that made things happen. The biggest things, the biggest accomplishments all started with a little spark of hope, with a little dream. It is merely up to us and our limited imagination wether we make that little thought, that little spark of hope, that little surreal dream develope into something of tremendous relevance, into something big...or if we do not hold fast to it and let life and rush extinguish our little flame inside. If you are a dreamer, you will not need to compare yourself to your fellow people and their accomplishments, because if you are a "true" dreamer, you know you are capable of much more than your fellows could ever achieve. Let that little dream develope, let it blossom, and create something big, make things happen, leave your marks, change this world...and people who tell you it’s not going anywhere? Ignore them, because they don’t know about heart and dedication – and furthermore they obviously never heard about this:

If you can dream it you can do it!

Rewards and Retrospect

One of my old football coaches once told us two things we have to do in oder to be successful: polish and shine! Ever since these two content words were said I started thinking about it. Is that really all we have to do – work hard and once we get rewarded look good, shine?

This one is on intrinsic motivation. In 1987 MIT professor Thomas Malone and Mark Lepper of Stanford University have defined intrinsic motivation as “what people will do without external inducement.” Most of us human beings, however, are extrinsically motivated and seek to be rewarded and credited by others, by friends, by their families, by colleagues, et cetera. Once these rewards and credits are absent, though, our motivational basis starts to collapse, we lose our momentum, and do not do our deeds with devotion, with love, with heart anymore. Would it not be great to keep that drive alive, though? Would it not be amazing to have an untouchable motivation that perseveres, regardless of other people’s impact on us; an independent motivational relentless momentum? It is amazing, and it is possible, and it is said to be the secret ingredient of infinite success: intrinsic motivation.

Our motivation has to come from within, not from our surroundings. The things we work on can be a long process, there is a briefing, competing, and after a long while of hard work there is a completion, but only, if we are devoted and dedicated to polish in order to shine. We have to stay motivated all the time, in good days, in bad days, relentlessly, we cannot let our vague motivation let us down. We have to polish steadily, we have to go hard, we have to be prepared, when opportunity is knocking at our door, and there is only one way to keep that motivation at a sublime sacrosanct level: it has to come from within.

If you remember the last thing you gave your everything for, was it not great once you achieved it, once you got rewarded for your hard work? It is great to be rewarded for your work, your deeds, your opus, but if you want to keep the train rolling, that also has to come from within. Reward yourself! Do not wait on being credited by others, credit yourself, reward yourself. Is it not incredibly satisfying to see the result of hard work? There is no reward by others that can come anywhere near the feeling of satisfaction you have once you see your work complete, no money, no award, no nothing can replace inner freedom, inner satisfaction – retrospect, and see. Let this internal enrichment be your motor, your engine, your motivation, motivate yourself! Soon you will be able to see how your life of calm changes to a life with tailwinds.

Don’t make your success, your motivation, and everything related to it a matter depending on others, be your own fountain of motivational drive, of relentless momentum. Credits and rewards by others? – They will come, but by the time they come you will not need them anymore, because you already got rewarded more intense than your fellows can ever reward you: in your heart! Once you are a person of intrinsic motivation, you do not need the rewards by others, but believe me, you will get them, because an inner motivation leads to an inner confidence and satisfaction, and that reverberates, and wether you want it or not, that radiates. If you know how to polish, if you’re willing to work and go hard, you know how to shine, and once you shine be true and happy shining, for it feels great...