Cynthia Ozick

"We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude."

— Cynthia Ozick

American Novelist

1928 -

Are you thankful for the abilities, talents and gifts that you have?  The gift of sight is something that many of us take for granted on most days and yet without it our lives would be dramatically altered.  Our ability to see allows us to navigate the world in which we live and gives us the opportunity to go where we want without assistance.  Writing that novel or painting that canvas would be much more difficult if you could not see.  You would not be able to read a book unless you learned Braille or listened to books.  You would not be able to see the faces of those you love.  Give thanks for your ability to see every day.




Are you thankful for your ability to hear?  What would your life be like if you were deaf?  You would not be able to listen to music or hear the words, "I love you."  Yes, you still should be able to write that great novel or paint that masterpiece, but you would miss out on much that happens around you.  You wouldn't hear the birds singing in the morning or the wind in the trees or the rain falling.  Be thankful that you still have your ability to hear.




Life gives us so many challenges and difficulties that we often lose sight of what we have.  We become lost in all the things we don't have.  We are unhappy because we have not published a novel or sold a painting.  We wish we were rich and famous.  Life is so precious.  We should be happy that we awoke this morning and are still above ground.  We should be happy that people love us and care for us.




Learn to develop an attitude of gratitude.  Give thanks every day for the gifts you have been given.   I challenge you sit down right now and write down ten things that your are grateful for.  Post them to this blog if you would like to share.




Here is a video of Ozick discussing her life and writing.

Laura Kasischke

"Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better.  Sometimes people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed.  But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love."

— Laura Kasischke

American Novelist, Poet

1961 - 

If success comes too early, it can destroy an artist.  Early success can create writer's block.  Artists become overwhelmed by the success and stop painting.  People start enjoying their celebrity status and forget about what brought them there.  And sometimes they start believing their own press clippings.  Sometimes it is better to wait until you are emotionally ready and have the wisdom to handle it.  

If writing or painting comes too easy, people often lose interest and look for something more challenging.  If writing is a struggle, then success when it comes will be sweeter.  Have the faith to keep writing, to keep drawing or to keep painting even when there seems to be no hope of success.  

Ella Winter

"Choose well: your choice is brief and yet endless."

— Ella Winter

Australian Journalist, Author 

1898 - 1980

I believe everything we do in life is a choice and that we need to take responsibility for our actions and not blame others.  The challenge is to make the right choices or at least to make choices.  When I graduated from college I was afraid to choose a direction to my life.  I didn't know what I wanted to do.  If I went down the wrong path it would be a disaster.  What I have learned is that the choices I made have led me where I need to be.  The challenge is to choose.  If you keep choosing you will eventually end up where you are supposed to be.  If you don't choose and let life happen, you may end up where you don't want to be.

Many people blame others for the circumstances in which they find themselves.  They are what I call "IF ONLY THINKERS."  They preface everything with the phrase: if only.  If only I had more money.  If only I had a college education.  If only my boss liked me.  If only I had better parents.  If only....If only....If only....

Usually we only have a short time to make a decision before the door closes and the opportunity passes.  Sometimes the opportunity will come around again and other times it won't.  I once had an opportunity to work for a trade magazine but I turned it down because I was happy with the job I had.  And the opportunity to work for a trade journal never came around again.  I sent out resumes, but noone responded.  I don't know how my life would have been different if I had accepted the position, but I have no regrets.  I am satisfied with the life I have lived.

The choices we make often send us in directions we never imagined.  New opportunities arise for us to seize.  Each choice we make leads us closer to where we are supposed to be.  We make a life by making choices.  What choices are you making today that will open up new doors for you tomorrow?

Paula Rego

"To find one's way anywhere one has to find one's door, just like Alice, you see.  You take too much of one thing and you get too big, then you take too much of another and you get too small.  You've got to find your own doorway into things."

— Paula Rego

Portuguese Artist

1935 -

The doors we open and the doors we close hold the keys to our success.  What doors have you failed to open that would catapult you miles down the road?  What doors if you learned to shut them and throw away the key would prevent others from zapping your energy?




The door is an amazing invention.  It keeps out those people we don't want in our lives yet allows us to choose who can enter and keep us company.  The door serves a similar function for creative leaders.  We can keep out those elements of our lives that we don't want to appear in our art and we can invite in what we want to appear in our art.

The Family
(1988)

To paraphrase the poet, Robert Frost, doors make good families.  Doors give us privacy and keep prying eyes from seeing what we don't want them to see.  Some doors are simple and others are complex.  Some doors have intricate designs and others are plain.  Doors help us to manage and control our lives.  Doors help us to hide things we don't want people to see and to reveal things we want people to see.




Can you identify the doors in your life?  Do these doors help you be more creative or do they restrict your creativity?  Do you need to replace some of the doors in your life?  Do you need to add doors to your life?
















Here is a video with more of Paula Rego's paintings.

Rita Coolidge

"Too often the opportunity knocks, but by the time you disengage the chain, push back the bolt, unhook the two locks and shut off the burglar alarms, it's too late."

— Rita Coolidge

American Musician

1945 - 

Has opportunity passed you by?  Are you so busy protecting yourself from the world that you have missed opportunities when they came calling?  Opportunity often requires that we move fast.  If we hesitate, we lose.  And sometimes we miss opportunities because we are waiting for the perfect opportunity to appear.  No opportunities are perfect.  They are all filled with risk.  And sometimes opportunity leads to failure.  But the bigger failure is to not to have tried at all.  And when we are open to opportunity knocking, we will be surprised by how one opportunity will open up other opportunities.  So get off your couch and open the door.  Opportunity is visiting and he doesn't like to be ignored.

Here is Rita Coolidge singing Superstar.  Enjoy as you contemplate your opportunities.

Salman Rushdie

"Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts."

— Salman Rushdie

Indian Novelist

1947 - 

Are you revisiting the stories that you tell about your life?  Are you able to change the stories that you tell about your life?  Are you able to think new thoughts about your talents and your capabilities?

We all face challenges in life -- challenges that impact the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of our lives.  How we tell the story either gives us power over the events or makes us powerless.

In 2006 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and had robotic surgery.  I chose not to be a cancer victim.  Within a month of the diagnosis, I decided that the cancer was a gift that would open up new worlds and give me opportunities to meet new people.  I do not see myself as a cancer survivor.  I am very lucky to have received such a gift for what it has taught me.  I am a life-long learner and the cancer was just another experience in my life.

What challenges in your life do you need to reframe -- to retell?  We are all here to learn lessons.  What lessons are you learning from the challenges you face.  How are you retelling your stories to give you more power over the challenges?

Sydney Smith

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals."

— Sydney Smith

English Writer, Anglican Clergy

1771 -1845

The reason many creative leaders don't reach their goals is that they are focused on the wrong thing.  People focus on all the reasons their feel they can't achieve their goals.  They need to focus instead on their goals. 

If you are focused on your goals, you will see over the obstacles, under the obstacles, around the obstacles and through the obstacles.  If you are focused on the obstacles, you will only see the obstacles and you will not achieve your goals.

What are your goals?  What are you focused on?  The obstacles?  Or the GOALS?  Banish the obstacles from your mind.  Focus on your goals.  Achieve your dreams.

Gloria Steinem

"Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.  Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."

— Gloria Steinem

American Journalist, Author

1934 - 

Most of us underestimate the power and importance of dreaming — whether we are talking about day dreaming or sleep dreaming.  Sleep dreaming is one of my favorite times, especially in the twilight world between being awake or being asleep.  Dreams can feel so real and meaningful.  Years ago I kept a dream journal where I would record my dreams.  I have documented proof that I dreamed of marrying my wife a month before I met her.  So I do believe that dreams can predict the future.  I have experienced the excitement of possibilities.  Dreams are small windows into our souls.  

Day dreaming is a way to explore your options and find the right path.  Day dreaming helps creative leaders make decisions and take action.  As Steinem says, day dreaming is a form of planning, a way of preparing for what is to come.  Our minds are very powerful and we can see things our mind's eye before they happen.

Have you ever gone to sleep thinking of some problem and wake up with the answer?  You need to learn to harness the power of your dreams to help you creatively solve problems.  You need to increase your involvement with dreams.  My wife at a very young age discovered that she had the ability to consciously change her dreams.  If she did not like where her dreams were going she would change them while dreaming.  Today we call it lucid dreaming. 

Henry Ford

"Failure is the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently."

— Henry Ford

American Businessman

1863 - 1947

Creativity is not a talent that is limited to artists and writers.  There many business leaders who have the gift of creativity.  Henry Ford was a creative genius who revolutionized the world of business and the American culture.  Ford built his first car inside a rented building.  When the car was finished, he realized that the door was not big enough for the car to go through so he destroyed an entire wall.  He did not let the wall stand in the way of test driving his first car.  Do you learn from your mistakes?  In every failure is an opportunity to grow and change.  When something knocks you off your feet, pick yourself up and begin again. 

Bernie Siegel

"In the face of uncertainty, there is nothing wrong with hope."

Bernie Siegel

American Author / Physician

As a young writer hope is one of the few things that kept me going.  I would read a story about someone who was 50 or 60 or 7o and he had just published his first novel.  After years of toiling in the salt mines of writing, he found success.  These stories inspired me to keep writing.  I had hope that one day I would be discovered and become successful.  Even today I have that sense of hope, that belief that one day I will be proved right.  Yes, I am a writer.

When we lose hope, we give up on life.  We quit.  Some days all we have is hope.  As the old saying goes: every dark cloud as a silver lining.  We just have to find it — to look at the world with new eyes.  No matter how dark the night, there is always a sunrise.  Everyone faces challenges and difficulties.  The sad thing for me is people who see no way out of a problem but to take their own lives.  Never give up hope for a better tomorrow.

As creative thinkers, we need hope.  We need to believe in ourselves, our ideas, our art.  Have faith that you have been given a gift.  Have faith in your dreams.  Have faith that the sun will rise again.

Benjamin Mays

"The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal.  The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach."

Dr. Benjamin Mays

American Author / Educator / Minister

1894 - 1984

Some creative leaders don't want to set goals because they are afraid they will not reach them.  But the truth is that people achieve more when they have goals then when they don't.  You may not reach the goal you set but you will come closer than if you had no goal.  And as many people learn, the joy is in working to achieve the goal, not in actually achieving it.  And when goal-setters reach their goal, they quickly set a new goal.  

I once met a 101 year old man who was writing his first book using a laptop computer in a nursing home.  I visited that nursing home a couple of years later and the man, then 103, was writing his second book.  What goals have you set for yourself?  Your work?  Your life?

Childhood home

of Benjamin Mays

Dr. Benjamin Mays must have been a master goal-setter for all that he accomplished.  Mays was the youngest of eight children born to tenant farmers and former slaves in South Carolina.  He earned a B.A. from Bates College in Maine, a Masters and a Ph.d in religion from the University of Chicago.  He received almost 30 honorary doctorates in his lifetime.  He was an ordained Baptist minister and an educator.  He became President of Morehouse College in 1940, a post he held for 27 years.  Mays wrote nearly 2,000 articles and nine books including The Negro's Church, the first sociological study of African-American religion.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who graduated from Morehouse in 1948, called Mays his "spiritual mentor" and "intellectual father."

Milton Berle

"If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door."

—  Milton Berle

American Comedian & Actor

1908 - 2002

Many times we have to make our own opportunities.  People often complain that they were not given a chance.  They fall into "If Only" thinking: "If only I could have gone to school."  "If only my boss would have promoted me."  "If only my parents loved me."  If only. . . . If only. . . .  If only. . . .  If you are going to achieve your dreams and accomplish your goals, you must move beyond "If Only" thinking to "Opportunity" thinking.  You must build your own doors and knock on them.

What doors can you build today that you can knock on tomorrow?  Building the door to opportunity does not just happen by accident.  It takes hard work, belief in oneself and persistence.

J. C. Penny

James Cash Penny

founder of J. C. Penny

"I am grateful for all of my problems.  After each one was overcome, I became stronger and more able to meet those that were still to come.  I grew in all my difficulties."

— James Cash Penny

American Businessman 

1875 - 1971

What problems are you grateful for?  We all face challenges in our lives and we sometimes let these challenges affect us emotionally and psychologically.  We need to learn to be thankful for the gifts hidden within the problems.  Every problem we face has something to teach us, something to give us.  Creative leaders face problems and challenges in their personal and financial lives like everyone else.  The difference is that we have been given the gift of creativity.  Don't just use your gift for your art.  Use it to solve the problems in your life.

James Cash Penny, age 27

In 1898 at the age of 23 James Cash Penny went to work for a small chain of retail stores.  Four years later, he was offered a third ownership in one store for which he paid $2,000 dollars.  In 1907, he bought and owned three stores.  By 1912 he owned 34 stores.  In 1913 at the age of 38, he incorporated his business under the name of J. C. Penny.  By 1929 the company had 1,400 stores.  The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression left James Cash Penny in financial ruin.  He borrowed against the cash value of his life insurance policies to pay the payroll in his stores.  The financial setbacks took a toll on his health and he checked himself into a sanitarium.  He later recovered emotionally and financially and spent the rest of his life involved in charitable works.

What challenges are you facing today?  What changes can you make in your life that will help you solve these problems?  The problems we face are gifts that can make us stronger and better artists and writers.  Be thankful that you have an opportunity to learn and grow into a better person.

Peter Ustinov

"The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come."

– Peter Ustinov

British actor/novelist

1921 - 2004

No matter what age you are, the best is yet to come.  No matter where you are in your career, the best is yet to come.  Each day we live provides us with new opportunities, new ways to grow and new things to learn.  Colonel Harlan Sanders was sixty-five when he opened his first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.  Thomas Edison was sixty-seven when he reinvented the phonograph.  At seventy-seven, Grandma Moses began painting.  At eighty, Jessica Tandy won an Oscar for the film, Driving Miss Daisy.  Winston Churchill wrote A History of the English-Speaking Peoples at age 82.  Peter Ustinov acted in the movie, Luther, at age 83.  At ninety, Picasso was still producing drawings and engravings.  At age 93, P. G. Wodehouse was working on his 97th novel when he died.  Remember the best is yet to come.  

Jack Penn

"One of the secrets of life is to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks."

— Jack Penn

South African 

Surgeon, Sculptor, Author

1909 - 1996

To be human and to live with other humans is to face challenges and difficulties.  We experience death, love and heartache, not necessarily in that order.  How we respond to the challenges that life deals us is a measure of the type of person we are.  Do we pick ourselves up and make something of what has happened or do we remain in the mud, wishing to die?  As creative leaders, we have the gift of creativity which can help us turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones.  So get out your chisel and chisel away at that stumbling block in your way.  

Martha Stewart

"I love the challenge of starting at zero every day and seeing how much I can accomplish."

— Martha Stewart

1941 -

In many respects, each day is an opportunity to begin again.  Yesterday is gone and we can not change what we did.  Tomorrow is not here yet.  So we need to focus on what we can do to day to become the person we were meant to be.  It does not matter that we did not paint or write yesterday.  Don't beat yourself up over what is past.  Begin each day anew.  

Joseph Campbell

"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek."

— Joseph Campbell

1904 - 1987

Sometimes that which we fear the most is what is best for us in our personal and spiritual growth.  Inside the darkness is the opportunity if we have the courage to enter.  What fears haunt you?  Do you have the courage to confront these fears and find the treasure hidden there?

Dale Carnegie

"Take a chance!  All life is a chance.  The man who goes the furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare."

— Dale Carnegie

1888 - 1955

Many of us are afraid to take a risk, to try something new.  We keep waiting for the right time.  Unfortunately, there is never going to be a right time.  When we stop risking, we start dying one day at a time.  The more safe we feel the less risk we take.  Security and safety are illusions of the mind.  We are never 100% safe.  Is there a risk that you should be taking but are not?  Take the risk.  

Bernie Siegel

"If you watch how nature deals with adversity, continually renewing itself, you can't help but learn."

— Bernie Siegel

Nature has a way of renewing itself quickly and swiftly.  In the 1970's Lake Erie, which is up the road from where I live, was declared dead.  Today it is alive.  If you ever watch how quickly a forest renews itself after a fire, you will understand the meaning of this quote.  In fact, I believe nature uses adversity has a way of cleansing itself from the rot and finding new opportunity.  One simply has to observe the seasons to understand how nature renews itself.  And since we are a part of nature, we also have this gift.  We can renew and reinvent ourselves as needed.  Let go of your old tired habits and plant new habits.

Opportunity

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Opportunity

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