As the world is buzzing about the keynote speech Steve Jobs gave yesterday at Macworld Expo, I want to draw your attention to another speech he gave: the commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005.

In this speech Steve Jobs tells three stories. They are stories with a message of the lessons life presents and about how your choices define the outcome of those lessons. The underlying message throughout the speech is a message of authenticity, about being true to your own values, needs and wants, about listening to your own inner voice.

Enjoy this 15 minute video:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. - Steve Jobs

Sometimes I turn to past and present teachers to learn and to be inspired. This time I’m talking with them about action. And boy, do they have a lot to say about it!

Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.

- Bryant H. McGill

Action is the secret ingredient of success. Or better, the silent ingredient of success, because it’s hardly a secret as many of the quotes in this article will show. Yet action most often is the difference between successful and unsuccessful people.

Successful people take action!

You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.

- Tony Robbins

Successful people take action, unsuccessful people don’t. It is by taking action that we change reality and it is by taking action that we get results. They may not always be the results we are looking for, but they are results nonetheless. They provide us with feedback we can use to take another action, that has a better chance of producing the results we desire.

But actions do even more than just produce results and feedback. Let’s take a second and listen to what Aristotle has to say to us: Click to continue »

Photo by Miss Karen

Whenever I’m in a dry spell of inspiration, also known as writer’s (blogger’s?) block, a bottle of red wine will re-ignite the spark of inspiration in me. As helpful as this may be, it also puzzles me. What is it about red wine that makes me creative, when without it creativity comes to a grinding halt?

Red wine, or more likely the alcohol that’s included in the package, has mysterious effects when it comes down to human behavior. It affects feelings, creativity, conscious thought, rationality and, when consumed in too large quantities, even motor skills and control of stomach and esophagus (don’t click!).

Back to the original question
What is the effect of red wine that makes me creative again? I think it comes down to two things:

1. It shuts down rationality
2. It takes away inhibitions

These effects make each other stronger. If rationality is not important, inhibitions have no (rational) basis anymore. And with the inhibitions gone, irrationality is not stupid anymore. Creativity is often a spark of the unexpected. And that, down to the core is irrational; otherwise it was to be expected (or not?).

I, for one, never thought I would ever write about red wine and the effects on human behavior (or my behavior anyway) on a blog about self improvement and achieving authentic success. But it makes sense anyway.

Why do we need inhibitions in the first place? They only make sure we are ‘normal’ and ‘fit in’. You are an original, no matter what you do. If it is what everyone else is doing, that fine! And if it’s ‘different’, that’s fine too!

I think I’m different…how different are you?

This post was written right at the end of a dry spell by the way…time for a refill.

TED has some great new additions to their collection of valuable videos. The TED collection of videos is a great source of inspiration for me. Today I’ve spent my early morning hours watching some great videos (I visited the moons of Saturn for instance, and got a glimpse of how the world feels today)

And there’s a video I want to share with you. I wrote before about how Richard Branson is a source of inspiration for me. If you haven’t read his autobiography (it’s a great read!), you can now watch a 30 minute video of Chris Anderson of TED interviewing him. I embedded it here for your convenience. Enjoy!

Yesterday I watched the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!? (aff). It’s out there for 2 years already, but this was the first time I watched it. It contains a lot of concepts to think about, and I will write about it in a couple of days (need to digest it some more).

This morning (at 5:45 am) I watched the extras on the DVD and several parts of the Q&A section struck me. In one of them someone in the audience asked Betsy Chasse the question: ‘Why are you so successful?’ and she answered almost instantly ‘Because I create my own reality.’ That’s powerful isn’t it?

This is usually said by people that actually are successful (or will be soon). Success doesn’t just happen, it’s a deliberate creation. But successful people haven’t always been successful; they have experienced setbacks and failure as well. But their mindset is a mindset of creation. They see failure as feedback and ask themselves ‘How did I create this?’. It’s this mindset of deliberate creation that propels them forward. They happen to reality.

On the other side are people that are not successful. Somehow reality happens to them, and they are not to blame for their current situation. When they experience setbacks or failure, they were just unlucky, and somehow that always happens to them. They try to succeed the next time they take up a venture, but they keep butting their head against the same wall again and again. Reality happens to them.

How do you create your own reality?