Personal Renewal
"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the thi
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A famous paragraph from John Gardner that was back to him in a rather heartbreaking way.
"A man wrote to me from Colorado saying that his 20 year-old daughter had been killed in an auto accident some weeks before and that she was carrying in her billfold a paragraph from a speech of mine. He said he was grateful because the paragraph -- and the fact that she kept it close to her -- told him something he might not otherwise have known about her values and concerns. I can't imagine where or how she came across the paragraph, but here it is:"
"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser."
John Gardner • Personal Renewal
You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.
You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don't even know about? It's tru
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The more I see of human lives, the more I believe the business of growing up is much longer drawn out than we pretend. If we achieve it in our 30's, even our 40s, we're doing well.
John Gardner • Personal Renewal
I love that he uses the word pretend here.
Is he referring to how children pretend to be adults?
That we all don’t really know what we are doing
One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel that we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we've piled up enough points to count ourselves s
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We can't write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well -- people even younger than yourselves --are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits.
John Gardner • Personal Renewal
"The barnacle" the author explained "is confronted with an existential decision about where it's going to live. Once it decides.. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.." End of quote. For a good many of us, it comes to that.
We've all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with respo
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The things you learn in maturity aren't simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You leant not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find
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Many of them are just going through the motions. I don't deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry about men and women functioning far below the level of their potential.