“The leader acts as though everyone is watching even when no one is watching.”
—Brian Tracy
The filing system proposed and used by Noguchi Yukio is worth a look. To employ the system, you'll need to discard many conventional notions about how to store paper documents. Here's how it works:
You need a set of A4 (letter)-sized envelopes and some way to mark the outside of the envelopes. If you want, you can color-code them with markers.
Take every document and store it in an A4-sized envelope with the flaps cut off, as shown here.
Mark the title and date of the document on the side of the envelope, as shown, and the envelopes are stored vertically on a bookshelf.
Don't attempt to classify documents. The color coding is optional, and only there to help you find documents more quickly.
Add any new document to the left end of the "envelope buffer." Whenever a document is used (i.e., the envelope removed from the shelf), return it to the left end of the bookshelf. The result of this system is that the most recent and frequently used documents move to the left, while documents that are rarely or never used migrate to the right.
Over time, some of the files on the right side of the shelf will be classified as "holy files" which you will retain indefinitely. Remove these from the shelf and store them in boxes. If a "holy file" is in use, it is part of the working file group at the left. Thus, holy files are really dead files which you cannot part with. Get them out of sight into a box.
When you need more space, throw away any documents that you consider "unnecessary."
Read more on Noguchi's system in this article by William Lise, or on Noguchi's website.
There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
~Marina Tsvetaeva
“The leader acts as though everyone is watching even when no one is watching.”
—Brian Tracy
by Paul Harding
An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.
A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost seven decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring.
Heartbreaking and life affirming, TINKERS is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature. => http://bit.ly/Ttofnk
Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.
~Isaac Bashevis Singer
The idea of Utopia is mischievous as well as unrealistic. And dull, to boot. Man is born pushing and shoving as the sparks fly upward.
D. Lilienthal
There's no doubt about it now. The holidays are in full swing and it's easy to get caught up in the trappings of the season—the decorations, the shopping, the parties, the endless to-do lists. Your refrigerator is filled with leftovers and the mall beckons with the promise of great bargains.
But, I invite you to take just a moment in all the hustle and bustle to be kind to others this season and to share with those who may be less fortunate. Sometimes, just a simple act of kindness can change a life forever.
That's what The Simple Blessings of Christmas by Mark Gilroy is all about. This book provides 30 reasons to celebrate the season. Here's a sample that'll make you think about kindness—the most important gift of all:
An excerpt from
The Simple Blessings of Christmas
by Mark Gilroy
Norman Vincent Peale, noted minister and author from the previous century, tells the story of a young girl from Sweden spending Christmas in big, bustling New York City. She was living with an American family and helping them around the house, and she didn't have much money. So she knew she couldn't get them a very nice Christmas present—besides, they already had so much, with new gifts arriving every day.
With just a little money in her pocket, she went out and bought an outfit for a small baby, and then she set out on a journey to find the poorest part of town and the poorest baby she could find. At first, she received only strange looks from passersby when she asked them for help. But then a kind stranger, a Salvation Army bell-ringer, guided her to a poor part of town and helped her deliver her gift. On Christmas morning, instead of giving them a wrapped present, she told the family she served what she had done in their name. Everyone was speechless, and everyone was blessed—the girl for giving, the wealthy family for seeing others with new eyes, and the poor family for receiving an unexpected gift.
All of us have opportunities both large and small to show kindness, especially at Christmastime. We can help strangers by delivering gifts to needy kids or serving homeless families at a soup kitchen. Or we can simply look for everyday ways to be kind, like allowing someone to go ahead of us in a lengthy line at the department store, or giving that bell-ringer a little change and a few encouraging words.
Maybe it's because we're in gift-giving mode anyway that giving to others becomes so important at Christmas. Or because we're more aware of our families and friends and communities. Or maybe it's because two thousand years ago, the earth received the most perfect, most loving gift of all, helping us to understand true kindness.
Whatever the reason, don't let Christmas pass you by without showing kindness to someone. Because it is truly more blessed to give than to receive.
Make kindness a habit during the holidays and you'll double your joy as you start 2013. I guarantee that reading The Simple Blessings of Christmas will be one gift you'll want to unwrap again and again.
For more information, to look inside this great book, or to view the 3-minute inspirational movie, just click here.
Enjoy every moment of the holidays!
“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed in grasp, or what's a heaven for?”
—Robert Browning
When most self-employed professionals think of marketing, they think of "hype." And they believe that it's impossible to market themselves without some kind of hype. They think they must stretch the truth or exaggerate the results they produce for their clients. And this is simply distasteful, if not unethical.
No wonder most self-employed professionals avoid marketing!
But here's the good news: You CAN attract clients without hype. You can market yourself with both dignity and integrity. And the even better news is that this kind of marketing is more effective in attracting the kind of clients you want to work with. It results in less resistance, better client relationships, and more enthusiastic word-of-mouth.
Robert Middleton will show you how you can attract more of your ideal clients in this webinar.
You will learn:
How to turn marketing into a step-by-step game that you can win by learning the rules and implementing commonsense actions.
How to develop the right marketing mindset that will help you attract the ideal clients who pay you well and who are great to work with.
How to develp marketing messages and materials that get the immediate attention and response from your ideal clients.How to package your services with extra value so that your prospects will instantly see how your services will benefit them.How to implement the most effective marketing strategy to attract your ideal clients. No other strategy works more effectively.In 90 minutes he will outline these essential parts of his Action Plan Marketing system for attracting more of your ideal clients that will give you a solid foundation for learning, and ultimately mastering, your marketing.
Learn more about this free teleclass here => http://bit.ly/Ym2zxb
