Personal Renewal

f I may offer you a simple maxim, "Be interesting," Everyone wants to be interesting -- but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.

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.

When someone asked him how many people worked in the Vatican he said "Oh, about half."

"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

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

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

said in my book, "Self-Renewal," that we build our own prisons and serve as our own jail-keepers. I no longer completely agree with that. I still think we're our own jailkeepers, but I've concluded that our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us -- and self images -- that hold us cap

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

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.