The Four C’s by Walt Disney
“Somehow I can’t believe that there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a 
man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C’s. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.”
- Walt Disney
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So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye
It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.
- Naomi Shihab Nye
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Dreams by Langston Hughes
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Langston Hughes
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Dream by Whoopi Goldberg
I CAN DO ANYTHING. I can be anything. No one ever told me I couldn’t. No one ever expressed this idea that I was limited to any one thing, and so i think in terms of what’s possible, not impossible.
They did sell me the notion of reality. That I got. I got the laws of physics and nature pretty much down and knew early on there were very specific things I couldn’t do. I knew I could never make anyone float, or turn water into wine, or make cats speak French.
I knew I couldn’t bring people back from the dead. I got that part of it. But I also knew that if I was with someone who had lost somebody I might be able to make them feel better. I couldn’t keep someone’s house from burning down, but I could help them sort through the rubble and get their shit together and start in on another one. So I realized I wasn’t God, which was a slight disappointment, you know. Just a slight disappointment–and a mild suprise.
Movies were my first window to the outside world, and they told me stuff. They told me I could go anywhere, be whatever I wanted, solve any damn puzzle. The right movie was my ticket to any place I wanted to go. But it had to be the right movie, and it had to come from the right place, ’cause I had to bank on it being historically accurate. See, in sch, nobody talked about black people unless they had us picking cotton. Who knew there were free blacks? Maybe you heard about Frederick Douglass, but you didn’t really knew about Frederick Douglass. You couldn’t always trust the history books. They told diluted truth, truth by committee. It was only later that I learned that there was something missing in what went down with the landed Americans and the indigenous people of this country. In movies too. They didn’t always get the story right, especially when it came to our nonwhite history. You knew the Indians didn’t look like Jeffery Hunter, but you didn’t know what they really looked like either. It was a great mystery. There weren’t too many Indians in my Catholic school in New York, so you had to use your imagination a bit.
In my head, Queen Elizabeth was just like Bette Davis. That’s how I saw her. She walked and talked and proofed–made grand statements in staccato sentences. Movies opened doors to a lot of things for me for every one they opened another one closed. The casting always messed with the way I saw it. It changed the terms. In this way, books were more liberating, more magical, and so I started to read. To really read. Books opened the mind to all kinds of possibilities. There was nothing on Dickens to leave you thinking there were no black people in England, or that Bob Cratchit didn’t pass you on the street every single day. But movies made you believe there were no black people, except the ones who were picking cotton, or tap-dancing up a flight of stairs, or birthin’ babies. When I was little this didn’t strike me as odd, but as I grew up, all during the 1960s, it bothered the *#@*! out of me. I knew there had to be more to us than that. Now I know there are all-black movies, but gumshoes and heroes, cowboys and harlots, but these were not shown on the Million Dollar Movie, and when I started to figure this out I realized life was what we put in and took out, and we were all in the same soup. Indians, blacks, Asians, women…It never even occurred to me that Emma wasn’t black. It wasn’t apart of the equation. Why shouldn’t we have been in a Jane Austen situation?
Why wouldn’t we have been in a manor house in a Dickens novel? Why couldn’t we have been the light in the forest? And don’t tell me Robert Louis Stevenson didn’t have me in mind when he wrote Treasure Island, because, you know, even the Muppets understand this notion.
Daydreaming, I used to think I was Sherlock Holmes; it’s a part I’ve always wanted to play. If you’re the most brilliant detective, the people will come to you. They won’t care if you’re black, or a woman. It might even give the story some new dimensions. The Speckled Band, staring Whoopi Goldberg. I like it!
This–the possibility–is why I took on acting as such a joyous thing. As I write this, I’m appearing eight times a week, on Broadway, in a part originally written for a man, but you’d never know, right? If you come to a thing with no preconceived notions of what that thing is, the whole world can be your canvas. Just dream it, and you can make it so. I believe I belong wherever I want to be, in whatever situation or context I place myself. I believed I could pass as an ancient Roman in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I believed a little girl could rise from a single-parent household in the Manhattan projects, start a single-parent household of her own, struggle through seven years of welfare and odd jobs, and still wind up making movies. You can go from anonymity to Planet Hollywood and never lose sight of where you’ve been.
So, yeah, I think anything is possible. I know it because I’ve lived it. I know it because I have seen it. I have witnessed things the ancients would have called miracles, but they are not miracles. They are the products of someone’s dream, and they happen as the result of hard work. Or they happen because, you know, [stuff] happens. As human beings, we are capable of creating a paradise, and making each others’ lives better by our own hands. Yes, yes, yes…this is possible.
If something hasn’t happened, it’s not because it can’t happen, or won’t; it just hasn’t happened yet. If I haven’t done something, I just haven’t gotten around to it. For a long time, I wanted to sit with Stephen Hawking and have him explain all of his theories to me so that I could understand them and build on them and find ways to adapt them to my own life. But I never got around to that. I would like to be a diplomat in some foreign country for a couple of months. I would like to play for the Knicks, and dance with Alvin Ailey, and ride a camel down Sunset Boulevard. I would like to find a way to stop famine, and to free the children from the orphanages in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Romania, and here at home. I would like to do a lot of things. All I need is Time.
- From Dream by Whoopi GoldbergRelated Posts:
The Story of Nick Vujicic will inspire you!
Look at yourself after watching this…
For more info on Nick, visit his Website at: http://www.lifewithoutlimbs.org/
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The Renaissance Minimalist from 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris
Timothy Ferris with his book in Hand
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I am continuing to learn amazing principles for finding financial/life freedom within the pages of 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris. In Chapter 9, Income Autopilot I: Finding the Muse, he shares the story of an entrepreneur he knows who created an online source of income…his business generates $10,000 with the click of a few buttons and creative thought. Read closely for inspiration:
Douglas Price was waking up to another beautiful summer morning in his Brooklyn brownstone. First things first: coffee. The jet lag was minor, considering he had just returned from a two-week jaunt through the islands of Croatia. It was just one of six countries he had visited in the last 12 months. Japan was next on his agenda….
Two years earlier in June of 2004, I was in Doug’s apartment checking e-mail…he was finally extricating himself from a venture-funded Internet start-up that had once been a cover story and his passion but now it was just a job…he made a decision — enough complicated stuff. It was time to return to the basics.
He then created Prosoundeffects.com, launched in January of 2005 after one week of sales testing on e-bay, was designed to do one thing: give Doug lots of cash with minimal time investment…
(Ferris writes that Doug has access to a huge collection of) sound libraries and CDs that film producers, musicians, video game designers , and other audio professionals use to add hard-to-find sounds–whether the purr of a lemur or an exotic instrument–to their own creations. These are Doug’s products, but he doesn’t own them, as that would require a physical inventory and upfront cash. His business model is more elegant than that. Here is just one revenue stream:
1. A prospective customer sees his Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising on Google or other search engines and clicks through to his site, www.prosoundeffects.com.
2. The prospect orders a product for $325 (the average purchasing price) on a Yahoo shopping cart, and a PDF with all their billing and shipping information is automatically e-mailed to Doug.
3. Three times a week, Doug presses a single button in the Yahoo management page to charge all his customers’ credit cards and put cash in his bank account. Then he saves the PDFs as Excel purchase orders and e-mails the purchase orders to the manufacturers of the CD libraries. Those companies mail the products to Doug’s customers–this is called drop-shipping–and Doug pays the manufacturers as little as 45% of the retail price of the products up to 90 days later (net-90 terms).
Let’s look at the mathematical beauty of his system for full effect.
For each $325 order at his cost of 55% off retail, Doug is entitled to $178.75. If we subtract 1% of the full retail price (1% of $325 = $3.25) for the Yahoo store transaction fee and 2.5% for the credit card processing fee (2.5$ of $325 = $8.13), Doug is left with a pretax profit of $167.38 for this one sale.
Multiply this by 10 (say he processes 10 orders at a time) and we have $1673 in profit for 30 minutes of work. Doug is making $3,347.60 per hour and purchases no products in advance. His initial start-up costs were $1,200 for the Webpage design, which he recouped in the first week. His Pay Per Click advertising costs approximately $700 per month and he pays Yahoo $99 per month for their hosting and shopping cart.
He works for less than two hours a week, often pulls in more than $10,000 per month, and there is no financial risk whatsoever. Now Doug spends his time making music, traveling and exploring new businesses for excitement. Prosoundeffects.com is not his end-all-be-all, but it has removed all financial concerns and freed his mind to focus on other things.
What would you do if you didn’t have to think about money? If you follow the advice in this chapter, you will soon have to answer this question.
It’s time to find your muse.
Another reason to buy this book!! If you are looking to stop being a slave to your heavy workload, there are ways to leap beyond it all. I shared the above story/scenario to get the wheels in your head churning.
I’m learning that one of the sure keys to bold living is automating our lives — using our creative minds to figure out a way to offer something to the world in a way that allows for us to breathe, laugh and enjoy our lives.
Thanks for reading!!
More to come on my search for boldness tomorrow :-D
- Jen Engevik of Project BE Bold
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Pure Inspiration!~~ Read the Desiderata by Max Ehrmann
Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,
even to the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
Max Ehrman
(c) Max Ehrman 1926
