Human Spirit - Always looking for a way (transcribed)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgYZ32_5iOQ

http://www.lesbrown.com/

Les Brown
One of the things that we know about life

  is that it is always changing. 

Sometimes you’re up,

  sometimes you’re down.

Sometimes things go real well, 

  and sometimes they don’t. 

Sometimes you’re happy, 

  and sometimes you’re sad. 

Now that's that thing called... life. 

And when we begin to understand and know that, accepting that reality, that... 

that we will never ever have things just on an even keel all the time. 

That you are going to have some ups and you’re going to have some downs.

But during those down moments, 

  that's where the growth takes place… 

  that's where the work is. 

Anybody can feel good when they have their health, their bills are paid. 

Anybody can be positive then, 

  anybody can have a larger vision then, 

  anybody can have faith under those kinds of circumstances. 

See... but the real challenge... 

The real challenge of growth, 

  mentally, emotionally, spiritually, 

  comes when you get knocked down.

It takes courage to act. 

Part of being hungry when you have been defeated. 

It takes courage...

  to start over again. 

The power... to hold on in spite of everything, 

  the power to endure. 

This is the winners' quality. 

This is an opportunity for you to grow. 

You’ve got to be so relentless, 

regardless of what comes down the path, 

that you are always looking for a way to get over, 

Always looking for a way... that you can break through. 

Always looking for a way... that you can win.

Always looking for a way... that you can strike a telling blow. 

Decide that you are going to push yourself.

Most people won’t do that. 

Most people give up on themselves easily. 

You know the human spirit is powerful? 

There is nothing as powerful, 

it's hard to kill the human spirit. 

You have got to be willing to go against the tide, 

you’ve got to be willing to harness your will, and say 

“In spite of this, I’m in control here, 

I’m coming back, 

and I’ll be stronger 

and better because of it.”

Guy Kawasaki Keynote - It's about meaning, not money - Business Innovation

Guy Kawasaki gives an interesting talk about business innovation.

Reference

http://www.tianow.org/videos/keynote-its-about-meaning-not-money-says-guy-kawasaki/13824

Life: Grammatical Errors in Posts and Speech

To start, I'd like to apologize in advance for any grammatical errors in this post. They are not intentional.

I have gone back to look at some posts because I am thinking about creating a wiki of things that I have posted. While in that process, I have found that I have several grammatical errors. Particularly, the errors are repeating a word or a broken thought process.

I have been somewhat aware of this in the past, but recently I have been catching a lot more (maybe because I have gotten better at catching them). But what is more interesting is that I have also picked up some of my habits, so some red flags pop up when I correct myself on a regular basis.

I have a tendency to type 'though' when I meant to type 'thought'. This happens often enough that I found that it was not because I do not hit the second 't' hard enough. Even when I put an extra mental thought into it, my fingers just type 'though' from (I'm assuming) due to muscle memory. Why I also think this is because when I want to type 'engine', I type 'engineer' or even 'engineering'. This comes from me having to type engineer a lot due to my profession and my degree.

Another tendency is when I edit my sentences, I sometimes miss the changes to my subject and verbs particularly with words that can be used as nouns or verbs, or words converted from nouns to/from verbs. So, I'll commonly find 'is [noun] is [noun]' where you see that I repeated 'is' twice. For example, "...uneasy feeling there is something is amiss" instead of "...uneasy feeling there is something amiss".

Before I continue, I realize that I put the punctuations after the quotation marks. I did do that intentionally because it has always bugged me that I do not want to include the punctuation in my quote. Of course, I do not do this in professional writing. To me, including the punctuation always irked me because 'though' vs 'thought.' is not the same as 'though' vs 'thought'. Ellipses seem ok because you typically have to include them in both comparisons.

I have found that my speech has also been impacted by the increased use of emails and instant messaging. Both mediums allow me time to reconsider what I am thinking or reword the way I want to present the information.

While speaking, I have found that I have longer pauses between sentence parts. I think part of the reason is because I wanted to retract what I just said. Not because the information was incorrect but because I want to change the structure of my sentence.

Life: Malala Yousafzai - Pro-Education

I just watched Malala Yousafzai on The Daily Show and was very inspired not only by her vision, conviction, and courage, but also how articulate she was in presenting her beliefs. Her articulation greatly pronounced what she wanted to share.

I have read many articles on speech improvements. One of the items was eliminating silence fillers like 'um', 'ah', etc. I do understand how fillers can be detrimental to your communication even when there is good intentions and good wisdom. But the way Malala answered each question, her idea was even more persuasive.

Of course, I am a bit biased in that I also believe education is the best answer to all the violence. I am awed that someone as young as her already has that comprehension. At the same time, I am slightly saddened that it took a rather poor environment to inspire her to be so great. I wasn't even aware of the world till after college and even then it was very limited.

Reference:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-october-8-2013-malala-yousafzai
http://www.debramoorhead.com/blog/index.php/eliminating-uhs-ums-and-ahs-from-your-speech