Tag Archives: Jules Verne

To Quench Your Thirst for Success : Stir

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to help you take more decisive action. Reading time: 1:46.

“Yucky,” the little girl said, after taking a sip of her iced tea at a restaurant. Her mother intervened: “You have to put sugar in that.”

The little girl tore two packets of sugar and poured them into the iced tea while her mother was busy taking care of her two other children. The little girl tasted the iced tea again. “Yucky!” The girl’s mother looked up and said matter-of-factly. “You have to stir it.”

How many leaders have the right ingredients but forget to stir it? Taking action is critical. As the wit said,”Indeed, God may have given us the ingredients for Our Daily Bread but He still expects us to do the baking.”

Just Do It

Turn up the temperature on your oven. And get started baking. Don’t worry about next steps. Focus on THE NEXT step.

Don’t worry about heading in the wrong direction. Just start out. You can made adjustments in your plan. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “The voyage of the best ship is a zig-zag line of a hundred tacks.”

Adapt and adjust but keep going. Like the Nike iconic ad said: Just do it. “Boldness has genius, power and magic in it,” said German philosopher and author Johann Wolfgang Goethe. “Only engage and the mind grows heated.”

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Reject Rejection and Eject Safely

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to motivate you to stay the course and achieve your goals.

Rejected again. You didn’t get that job or that promotion. Your last “great” idea bombed. Customers didn’t buy it. And right now your self-worth is so low you feel about as needed a pant presser in a nudist colony.

Sylvestor Stallone Fought Rejection In Becoming Rocky

When you’re feeling that low, that rejected, leaders re-frame the experience. They tell themselves they’re being EJECTED not Rejected. They think of themselves as if they were a computer disk ejected from the hard drive –not rejected.

Reject implies incompatibility to a given specific situation (i.e. the body rejects a heart). Eject implies versatility in finding a more supportive climate, much like a fighter pilot EJECTS when his plane is damaged.

Leaders facing rejection think of themselves as an ejected pilot. They know they will eventually land safely in an environment where they can thrive more than merely survive. The most effective leaders routinely reject rejection and eventually arrive at their Promised Land.

Here are a few examples of leaders who have turned a rejection storm of enormous discontent into an ejection norm of enormous content, brimming with opportunity and success.

Sylvestor Stallone was rejected more than 1,000 times by movie producers before Rocky became a multimillion dollar movie hit. Continue reading

Saluting the Flag of Your ImagiNATION

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to enhance your creativity. Reading time: 3:58

Have you ever felt like running away from it all? Oh, the freedom, the sense of wonder and opportunity over that next horizon!

running-at-the-beachLet’s run away just like that 11-year-old boy did so many years ago. He stowed away on a ship bound for India. But then his dad caught up with him just before the ship headed out to the open sea.

The boy was punished. His mom scolded him: “If you ever run away again, travel only in your imagination.”

Jules Verne listened, the same Jules Verne who would travel most famously ONLY IN HIS IMAGINATION as a renown science fiction author: Navigating 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Embarking on a Journey to the Center of the Earth. And rocketing From The Earth to The Moon for a manned landing on the moon 104 years before Neil Armstrong first took “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”

Ah, the power -the POWER-of your imagination. So powerful that Napoleon said imagination rules the world. So powerful that Albert Einstein said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Continue reading