When the Tokugawa regime crumbled in the first half of the 19th century, no group in the nation was in favor of tearing up the map. There was no French Revolution. There was not even an 1848. Yet the times were desperate. From the common people to the Shogunate, every class had fallen into debt to the money lenders and merchants. There mere numbers of the non-productive classes and the scale of customary official expenditures had proved insupportable. Japan was in dire domestic extremity by 1853 when Admiral Perry appeared with his men of war. His forced entry was followed in 1858 by a trade treaty with the US which Japan was in no position to refuse.
I particularly remember a moment from back then: the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My cofounder and I were at our wits’ end. The dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money. We tried desperately to raise more capital, and we could not. It was like a breakup scene from a Hollywood movie: it was raining, and we were arguing in the street. We couldn’t even agree on where to walk next, and so we parted in anger, heading in opposite directions. As a metaphor for our company’s failure, this image of the two of us, lost in the rain and drifting apart, is perfect.
It remains a painful memory. The company limped along for months afterward, but our situation was hopeless. At the time, it had seemed we were doing everything right: we had a great product, a brilliant team, amazing technology, and the right idea at the right time. And we really were on to something. But despite a promising idea, we were nonetheless doomed from day one, because we did not know the process we would need to use to turn our product insights into a great company.
It’s as if the world were falling out from under you. You realize you’ve been duped. The stories in the magazines are lies: hard work and perseverance don’t lead to success. Even worse, the many, many promises you’ve made to employees, friends, and family are not going to come true. Everyone who thought you were foolish for stepping out on your own will be proven right.
“All you have to do is listen to me,” he’d say. “People of royal descent will know your name. Do you hear what I’m saying to you, boy? The whole world will know your name. Your family name will reign. People will respect your mother, your family, your children. When you enter a room, people will stand up and give you an ovation.”
Cus wouldn’t let me fail. When I felt like quitting and I got discouraged, he just kept on inspiring me. Cus would always say, “My job is to peel off layers and layers of damages that are inhibiting your true ability to grow and fulfill your potential.” He was peeling me and it hurt! I was screaming, “Leave me alone. Aarrgghh!” He tortured my mind. He’d see me sparring with an older guy and it was in my mind that I was tired and I wasn’t punching back at the guy, the guy was just bullying me, and Cus would talk to me about that, make me confront my fears. He was such a perfectionist. I’d be hitting the heavy bag with combinations and Cus would be standing there, watching.
“It’s good. It’s good. But it’s not perfect,” he’d say in his thick Bronx accent.
Cus wanted the meanest fighter that God ever created, someone who scared the life out of people before they even entered the ring. He trained me to be totally ferocious, in the ring and out. At the time, I needed that. I was so insecure, so afraid. I was so traumatized from people picking on me when I was younger. I just hated the humiliation of being bullied. That feeling sticks with you for the rest of your life. It’s just such a bad, hopeless feeling. That’s why I always projected to the world that I was a mean, ferocious motherfucker. But Cus gave me the confidence so that I didn’t have to worry about being bullied ever again. I knew nobody was ever going to fuck with me physically.
We overcame one problem only to be faced with an even more daunting one. There were times when it looked hopeless.
Your real resume is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.
However, anything you’re given doesn’t matter. You have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life.
Tell everyone. Start now. It doesn’t have to be blunt. Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.
At an intellectual level, we can also appreciate the value of so-called negative emotions. I often hear people say that were it not for a particularly difficult period in their life, they would never have gone on and done the things they’ve done — and that even if they could go back and change it, they wouldn’t. With the passing of time and with increased perspective, the experience of emotion can look very different.
No tree becomes deep-rooted and sturdy unless strong winds blow against it. This shaking and pulling is what makes the tree tighten its grips and plant its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those grown in a sunny valley. Just like for the trees, heavy rain and strong winds are to the advantage of good people, it’s how they may grow calm, disciplined, humble, and strong.
When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we would not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.
The first point to make here is that models come and go. All 3 countries have at one time or another been considered by at least some people as the leading capitalist economy which others should emulate. Indeed, it was thought that their success would make it inevitable that others would have to follow the same path. Yet each national set of institutions generated its own problems and each economy ended up in crisis. Most recently, the free market and shareholder capitalism of the US seemed to be all-conquering but it was this capitalism that led to scandals galore and the long crisis that started in 2007.
Few of us move seamlessly through life skipping along the top of the waves from one success to another. Making mistakes is human. Having the courage to try and to risk mistakes distinguishes a leader from the rest. It’s easy to look back on things in life that did not work out the way you had hoped and become paralyzed by second-guessing yourself.
Like anyone I’ve had my share of failures and disappointments over the years. At the time some of them seemed monumental. In the Navy, for example, I was not assigned to single-engine aircraft in 1956 despite my every effort. That major disappointment contributed to my decision to give up a career as a Navy pilot. At the age of 28, I managed a congressional campaign in Ohio for a man I greatly admired, and was heartbroken for him when he lost by less than one switch vote per precinct. In 1965 in the Congress I lost an election for a leadership position as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, by one vote. I tried to run for the 1988 Republican nomination for President of the United States, but failed to raise the money needed to be competitive. Each of those setbacks and disappointments changed my trajectory, as they tend to do for anyone. I tried to learn from them, avoid wallowing in regret, and then get on with life.
Then there were the mistakes, miscalculations, and disappointments of more recent vintage, some of which occurred during the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the fog of war, miscalculations are of course inevitable. So is the grim reality that in any military conflict a number of Americans in uniform will not survive it.
It is difficulties that show what men are.
I cannot properly describe the depth of emotional difficulty I experienced during these moments. I experienced the deepest parts of the human soul, psyche, or mind: existential meaninglessness and hopelessness, unrelieved terror, ultimate entrapment, complete paranoia, infinite despair, grotesque and twisted visions, some somatic discomfort, in communicable levels of fear, dread, grief and at some points, total loss of self-identity, or self-knowledge.
Rene often went to bed hungry having dined only on toast. People in Denmark called him a “Balkan dog.” He’s expelled from school at 15, and with no idea what to do next, he follows his best friend and signs up for cooking school.
I learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured.
Năm 40 tuổi, khi không đạt được gì, Khổng Tử đã than rằng, “Ta cùng đường rồi. Chẳng chỗ nào trong thiên hạ dung được ta.”
Khi vợ con bị kẻ khác chém giết rồi ném xuống dưới thành, Mã Siêu rơi vào cảnh tan cửa nát nhà, không còn lối thoát, hoàn toàn mất đi chí tiến thủ.
Đến khi gặp được Trương Phi và Quan Vũ, Lưu Bị vẫn là một người bán hàng rong, không có gì trong tay, ba huynh đệ cùng nhau hội ngộ, cùng với nghĩa quân bị đàn áp, bắt đầu con đường khởi nghĩa.
Khi mới bắt đầu khởi nghĩa gặp nhiều khó khăn, thập tử nhất sinh, đặc biệt đối với những người tự tay gây dựng cơ đồ lại càng khó khăn hơn. Trong đầu Lưu Bị lúc đó chỉ xuất hiện duy nhất một từ: tuyệt vọng. Trong nghĩa quân có không ít người đã có thành tựu như: Tào Tháo, Công Tôn Toản, Đổng Trác…
Kể từ khi bắt đầu xây dựng sự nghiệp, Lưu Bị gần như luôn tuyệt vọng, bị truy đuổi, phải ăn nhờ ở đậu, đầu đường xó chợ.
Khó có thể đến được chỗ Lưu Biểu ở Kinh Châu, cuối cùng cũng quyết định dừng lại, khi đó đã là người trung niên 40 tuổi, sự nghiệp gặp nhiều vướng mắc, hoang mang lo âu. Mặc dù nửa cuộc đời đã bị số phận xô đẩy, cuộc sống cũng không hề dễ dàng, cũng có những lúc phải khóc than, nhưng ông chưa bao giờ nghĩ tới việc từ bỏ ngọn lửa trong tim mình mà vẫn luôn nỗ lực.
The movie is about a man who finds himself living the same day over and over again. He is the only person in this world who knows this is happening, and after going through periods of dismay and bitterness, revolt and despair, suicidal self-destruction and cynical recklessness, he begins to do something that is alien to his nature. He begins to learn.
My father stressed the importance of humility and hard work. When I arrived in Wichita, his first words to me were: “I hope your first deal is a loser, otherwise you will think you’re a lot smarter than you are.”
The stench. The filth. The total confusion. The sense of despair and hopelessness. What did it? Human rights? Are they bankable?
The loneliness was much worse when we played away games because I had no office to use as a refuge. Then, I would often find myself sitting alone in the dressing room. I don’t think this feeling, certainly in my later years as a manager, was caused by worrying about failing. Rather it was prompted by the apprehension, anxiety and uncertainty that always surrounds a big occasion, which might be exacerbated when you depend on others to implement your wishes. I’m sure other leaders experience similar feelings, no matter how worldly and important they may seem to others.
Even now, when I’m watching United from the directors’ box or at home on the television, I feel twinges in the pit of my stomach. I never tried to get rid of this feeling. Maybe some people, before a big performance or important encounter, try to calm their nerves with breathing exercises or a dram of whisky, but I never did so. I just accepted that nagging anxiety as part of my job. It accompanied me through life and it would have been a big warning sign that I was no longer up to the task had that anxiety - which really was a sign of how badly I wanted to win - ever disappeared.
I’ve seen lots of people crack from the emotional pressure of playing or managing. Obviously I might not have been privy to their personal problems, but there are tremendous pressures.
When things were at their darkest for met at United, I remember my wife Cathy asking me what I’d do if I was sacked, and I told her that we would just have to go back to Scotland. I’m sure I would have been crushed if I had been fired, but I always knew I’d be able to support my family and it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.
Thiết Mộc Chân nhớ lại năm xưa bị bộ lạc Tần Diệc Xích Ngột cầm tù, cổ đeo gông lớn, chịu đủ sỉ nhục, mối thù lớn ấy hôm nay mới rửa sạch, vết thương trên cổ không ngừng chảy máu nhưng trong lòng vui vẻ, không kìm được ngẩn đầu lên trời cười lớn.
Té ra ân sư ngày xưa làm nô lệ, về sau lại luyện thành võ công cái thế. Mình hôm nay ẩn nhẫn một lúc, chẳng lẽ lại không thể nhịn nhục sao?
Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.
Sid Meier likes to talk about the “valley of despair” - the moment in which a game designer, crushed by the weight of failed ideas and discarded prototypes, just feels like giving up. Playing games is a series of interesting decisions, but making games is a series of heartbreaking disappointments.
From Panama, Grant was transferred to the Pacific Northwest, where he lived a life of dullness and despair. The hollow solace of drink and longing for his family, left him in deep melancholy. Unwilling or perhaps unable to continue with such a disheartening existence, the young captain resigned his commission in 1854 to seek a better life with his family. Rather than finding comfort and prosperity, however, Grant experienced continuing failure. His financial investments soured, his business ventures lost money, and his farming produced mostly heartbreak.
Many leaders, among them de Gaulle, Churchill, and Adenauer, have been impelled to come to terms with the loneliness inherent in the journey toward greatness by a period of withdrawal from public life. Roosevelt’s was imposed on him when he was struck down by polio in 1921.
As political attacks on him multiplied and became increasingly shrill and unfair, Hoover experienced loneliness and a fear that his life’s work was being destroyed.
Yes, I told her, I’m afraid of something every day, and I fail at something every day. Fear and failure are always present. Accept them as a part of life and learn how to manage these realities. Be scared, but keep going. Being scared is usually transient. It will pass. If you fail, fix the causes and keep going.
The room was deadly silent. Every one of the young high achievers had the same question before their mind, even if they were too scared to put voice to it.
Failure is often solitary. Not so success. I am reminded of Michael Phelps, the swimmer who won a record eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. His physical ability and determination in the loneliness of a swimming lane are legendary. Yet he never fails to give credit to his parents, his coaches, his trainer, his team members, and all the others who helped him overcome attention deficit disorder and many other obstacles.
First, understand that there’s nothing unusual about feeling alone and confused. Entrepreneurs are always alone, and we all do a lot of groping in the dark. In fact, loneliness is the biggest challenge we all face. Fortunately, there are many places you can go to get unbiased advice, including industry conferences, business seminars, and networking groups.
With his hopes of foreign assistance once again dashed, Phan Boi Chau appeared to lose his bearings. In despair, he even offered to cooperate with the French, provided that they lived up to their promises to carry out political and economic reforms in Indochina. By the early 1920s, his revolutionary apparatus in Vietnam had virtually disintegrate. He remained in exile in China, surrounded by a small coterie of loyal followers, a figure of increasing irrelevance. The era of Phan Boi Chau had clearly come to an end.
Although NAQ was not visibly ill, he was worn out and emaciated. In his memoirs, he complained that in HK he was housed in a virtual dungeon, where he was regularly maltreated and was fed meals of bad rice, rotten fish, and a little beef. Sometimes he fell momentarily into despair when it appeared that he would not be released. Hunting for bugs, he related, was his only amusement. To pass the time he also sang songs or wrote poetry and letters to friends on scraps of paper that he managed to find in prison.
As a cook’s help he had to work daily as follows: From 4 o’clock in the morning he cleaned the big kitchen, then lit the boilers in the hold, brought the coal in, fetched vegetables, meat, fish, ice, etc., from the hold. The work was pretty heavy because it was very hot in the kitchen and very cold in the hold. It was particularly arduous when the ship was tossing in a rough sea and he had to climb up the gangway with a heavy bag on his shoulders.
Yet Thanh seemed to bear it all with good humor and enthusiasm. In a letter written to one of his acquaintances in Saigon, he joked: “The hero goes joyfully through his day doing what he pleases, polishing the brass and the washroom and emptying the buckets of human waste.”
The arduous trip took 15 days, including 10-day trek along jungle paths. The travelers in the small group carried their own provisions, as well as their luggage. At first, Father Chin had difficulties and lagged behind the others, his feet raw and his breath short. But through sheer willpower he persisted; by the end of the trip he showed his mettle, managing on occasion to walk as far as 70km in a single day.
We are still 99.7% dependent on imports for oil, 100% dependent for aluminum, iron ore, and nickel, over 95% dependent for copper, and over 92% dependent for natural gas. We cannot get away from our worry about being cut off, and we attempt to keep at least 100-day supply of oil in storage tanks and parked supertankers, just in case something should happen.
I washed up in New York a couple of decades ago, making twenty bucks a night driving a cab and running away full-time from doing my work. One night, alone in my $110-a-month sublet, I hit bottom in terms of having diverted myself into so many phony channels so many times that I couldn’t rationalize it for one more evening. I dragged out my ancient Smith Corona, dreading the experience as pointless, fruitless, meaningless, not to say the most painful exercise I could think of. For two hours I made myself sit there, torturing out some trash that I chucked immediately into the shitcan. That was enough. I put the machine away. I went back to the kitchen. In the sink sat ten days of dishes. For some reason I had enough excess energy that I decided to wash them. The warm water felt pretty good. The soap and sponge were doing their thing. A pile of clean plates began rising in the drying rack. To my amazement I realized I was whistling.
I am okay now, but before it was really hard. Whether I performed well or not, I was scared to leave the gaming booth once our team lost. I was afraid of meeting anyone that was present at the stadium. It was hard to meet anyone’s eyes since it felt like everyone was mocking me.
It is only natural that a pro player gets criticized/flamed for playing bad, and I’ve consoled myself using this logic as well. But it is still lonely coming back from the stadium. I couldn’t even tell my parents since it would worry them. They used to always read articles about me, but at one point they said they stopped doing so.
One time, my parents told me that I could give up if it’s too hard on me. They told me not to get too stressed about it. They advised me that life is long, and pro play is not everything in my life. Of course they said I should still work my hardest at what I am doing presently.
You will be tempted by avoidance, anger, and tears, or enticed to employ the trapdoor of divorce so that you will not have to face what must be faced. But your failure will haunt you while you are enraged, weeping, or in the process of separating, as it will in the next relationship you stumble into, with all your unsolved problems intact and your negotiating skills not improved a whit.
But for the moment, I was grateful and relieved that we had got through the day without disturbances. I went to bed well past midnight, weary but not sleepy. It was not until two or three in the morning that I finally dropped off exhausted, still disturbed from to time as my subconscious wrestled with our problems. How could I overcome them? Why had we come to this sorry pass? Was this to be the end result after 40 years of study, work and struggle? What did the future hold for Singapore? I would spend the next 40 years finding answers to these difficult questions.
Sau đó, họ đã quyết định thành lập công ty Technocom, chuyên chế biến mì ăn liền thương hiệu Mivina. “Lúc đầu, hàng bán cũng trầy trật, có khi cả tháng không hết một công, tưởng “sập tiệm” tới nơi. Sau chúng tôi đổi chiến lược kinh doanh, tiếp thị, tuyên truyền quảng cáo mới cải thiện được tình hình…”, vị tỷ phú nhớ lại.
If the Crimean War had shocked the British, that was nothing compared to the blow which had been delivered to Russia’s power and self-esteem. “We cannot deceive ourselves any longer. We are both weaker and poorer than the 1st class powers, and furthermore poorer not only in material but also in mental resources, especially in matters of administration.”
In three years every product my company makes will be out of date. The only question is whether we will replace them or someone else will. In the next ten years, if Microsoft remains a leader, we’ll have to cop with at least three major crises. That’s why we’ve always got to do better. I insist that we keep up with events, as well as pursue longer-term projects, and that we use “bad news” to drive us to put new features into our products. One day, somebody will catch us asleep. One day, a new firm will put Microsoft out of business. I just hope it’s fifty years from now, not two or five.
Of course it’s difficult. That’s precisely why it’s valuable. Sometimes, knowing that it’s our job - the way we create value - helps us pause a second and decide to do the difficult work. Almost no one gets hired to eat a slice of chocolate cake.
Who are we seeking to become? We get what we invest in. The time we spend comes back, with interest. If you practice five minutes of new, difficult banjo music every day, you’ll become a better banjo player. If you spend a little bit more time each day whining or feeling ashamed, that behavior will become part of you. The words you type, the people you hang with, the media you consume…
And so, less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my bones that I was going to lose. Each morning from that point forward I awoke with a vague sense of dread, realizing that I would have to spend the days smiling and shaking hands and pretending that everything was going according to plan. In the few weeks before the primary, my campaign recovered a bit: I did well in the sparsely covered debates, received some positive coverage for proposals on health care and education, and even received the Tribune endorsement. But it was too little too late. I arrived at my victory party to discover that the race had already been called and that I lost by 31 points.
I’m not suggesting that politicians are unique in suffering such disappointments. It’s that unlike most people, who have the luxury of licking their wounds privately, the politician’s loss is on public display. There’s the cheerful concession speech you have to make to a half-empty ballroom, the brave face you put on as you comfort staff and supporters, the thank-you call s to those who helped, and the awkward requests for further help in retiring debt. You perform these tasks as best you can, and yet no matter how much you tell yourself differently — no matter how convincingly you attribute the loss to bad timing or bad luck or lack of money — it’s impossible not to feel at some level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community, that you don’t quite have what it takes, and that everywhere you go the word “loser” is flashing through people’s minds. They’re the sorts of feelings that most people haven’t experienced since high school, when the girl you’d been pining over dismissed you with a joke in front of her friends, or you missed a pair of free throws with the big game on the line — the kind of feelings that most adults wisely organize their lives to avoid.
Imagine then the impact of these same emotions on the average big-time politician, who (unlike me) has rarely failed at anything in his life — who was the high school quarterback or the class valedictorian and whose father was a senator or admiral and who has been told since he was a child that he was destined for great things.
It was strange. Here he was, a former VP, a man who just a few months earlier had been on the verge of being the most powerful man on the planet. During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day, would rearrange my schedule whenever he wanted to meet. But suddenly, after the election, I hate to admit it, because I really like the guy. But at some level he wasn’t Al Gore, former VP. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking for money. It made me realize what a big steep cliff you guys are on.
It was not fun. Sometimes people would hang up on me. More often their secretary would take a message and I wouldn’t get a return call, and I would call back 2 or 3 times until I either gave up or the person I was calling finally answered and gave me the courtesy of a person-to-person rejection. I started engaging in elaborate games of avoidance during call time — frequent bathroom breaks, extended coffee runs, suggestions to my policy staff that we fine-tune that education speech for the 3rd or 4th time.
China, having barely overcome a vast famine, how had declared adversaries on all frontiers.
He had survived because he was indispensable and, in an ultimate sense, loyal — too loyal, his critics argued. Now he was removed from authority when the storms seemed to be subsiding and with the reassuring shore within sight.
Tired and stressed, we had little time for conversation, much less romance. When I launched my ill-fated congressional run, Michelle put up no pretense of being happy with the decision. My failure to clean up the kitchen suddenly became less endearing. Leaning down to kiss Michelle goodbye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on the cheek. By the time Sasha was born, my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained. “You only think about yourself. I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.”
Sometimes, working in Washington, I feel I am meeting that goal. At other times, it seems as if the goal recedes from me, and all the activity I engage in — the hearings and speeches and press conferences and position papers — are an exercise in vanity, useful to no one.
If the Crimean War had shocked the British, that was nothing compared to the blow which had been delivered to Russia’s power and self-esteem. “We cannot deceive ourselves any longer. We are both weaker and poorer than the 1st class powers, and furthermore poorer not only in material but also in mental resources, especially in matters of administration.”
Most important of all, it had found the immense costs of the war impossible to finance from its own resources and yet had been able to rely upon loans floated in the US and Britain. As it turned out, Japan was close to bankruptcy by the end of 1905, when the peace negotiations with Russia got under way.
Toyota, for example, was in danger of foundering when it was rescued by the first of the US Defense Department’s orders for its trucks; and much the same happened to many other companies.
In each case, the declining number-one power faced threats, not so much to the security of its own homeland, but to the nation’s interests abroad — interests so widespread that it would be difficult to defend them all at once, and yet almost equally difficult to abandon any of them without running further risks.
Each of those interests abroad, it is fair to remark, was undertaken by the US for what seemed very plausible (often very pressing) reasons at the time, and in most instances the reason for the American presence has not diminished; in certain parts of the globe, US interests may now appear larger to decision-makers in Washington than they were a few decades ago.
And after I have done it [agreed to pull Singapore out of Malaysia], depression sets in, you know. I’d let a lot of people down and the anxiety of how do I get this place going. I brought this about. So, I used to wake up in the middle of the night and make notes. Some of my late-night jottings made no sense in the light of the morning, but some made sense. I pursued it, asked my secretary to chase this one out and in the end, we made it. That’s all. I mean, it was the pressure of having to do it. I mean, if I had taken some sedative, oh, I just carry on, don’t worry about it. I won’t.
Sihanouk returned to Cambodia but only to face humiliation, house arrest, and the murder of several of his children. He had no independent forces left to balance, no chance at a pivotal role as head of state.
But I was filled with foreboding. The country seemed in a “suicidal mood,” and it was bound to erode our world position. Four or five years of amassing capital in nickels and dimes is being squandered in thousand dollar bills. At no crisis in the last 15 years did I think the country was in danger. But I genuinely now believe that we could suffer irreparable damage.
Ngoài ra, Lê Lợi còn hạ lệnh cho quân sĩ giết cả voi và ngựa của mình để làm thức ăn. Đó là những cố gắng cuối cùng. Tinh thần của quân sĩ bắt đầu lộ vẻ mệt mỏi. Đói khát và bệnh tật hoành hành đã khiến một số người hoang mang dao động, thậm chí tìm cách bỏ trốn khỏi đội ngũ chiến đấu để tìm đường trở về quê hương. Tình hình nghĩa quân có lúc vô cùng căng thẳng.
That night, when I got into bed and closed my eyes, I had this image of all 60K Blockbuster employees erupting in laughter at the ridiculousness of our proposal. Of course, Antioco wasn’t interested. Why would a powerhouse like Blockbuster, with millions of customers, massive revenues, a talented CEO, and a brand synonymous with home movies, be interested in a failing wannabe like Netflix? What did we possibly have to offer that they couldn’t do more effectively themselves?
Soviet-line Communist parties around the world occasionally differ with their senior partner in Moscow on questions of internal Communist policy — as one would expect from strong-willed, power-oriented men who have reached eminence by a ruthless political competition.
You can’t win if you don’t play. What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.
After our just-completed marathon, having averaged about 3 hours sleep a night for 4 days, they were to spend 10 straight hours the following afternoon and evening on painstaking, nitpicking technical and linguistic issues. The rest of us on the return journey were suspended between euphoria and exhaustion.
But they weren’t there in 2009 when you were up late nights shitting yourself whether you really were smart for pursuing this idea.
Gian khó tạo anh hùng, an nhàn sinh hèn kém.
Lô hàng mì ăn liền bán lay lắt mấy tháng trời. Đích thân mình phải đi chào từng cửa hàng nấu thử, cho cửa hàng trưởng ăn, sau đó mới ký gửi. Số lượng các cửa hàng lấy cũng chưa nhiều. Cuối cùng sau 6 tháng cũng đẩy hết gần 1/2 container (trong đó có một phần chuột trong kho tiêu thụ).
Hồi làm xuất khẩu phần mềm, tôi gặp khó khăn và thất bại liên tục, nhưng tôi không từ bỏ, cứ lầm lũi tiến lên cho đến khi cơ hội thành công đến. Không biết chị có hiểu được cảm giác của tôi không, nhưng sau một chuỗi hết thất bại này đến thất bại khác, từ năm này qua năm khác, cuối cùng cũng nhìn thấy thành công le lói ở phía trước… đó là một cảm giác sướng run rẩy cả người. Nó sung sướng hơn cả việc tôi kiếm được bao nhiêu tiền trong đời mình.
When Son was young, Son was so poor that he lived with pigs and sheep.
His new enterprise, based in the southern Korean mountain city of Daegu, quickly found success as both an exporter and an importer. However, his newfound wealth was completely wiped out by the end of WW2 and the chaos that followed the end of the Japanese occupation. But Lee rebuilt his company, this time headquartered in Seoul. The Korean War then reduced the company to scratch once more, leaving Lee penniless. But again he reformed his company amidst the rubble of postwar Seoul.
We want things and we strive to get them. When unexpected change strikes we don’t just climb back into bed and hope it all goes away. Well, we might for a while. But at some point we stand up. We face it. We fight. This was one inviolable rule of drama: What we ask of the theater is the spectacle of a will striving towards a goal. Fundamental to successful stories and successful lives is the fact that we don’t passively endure the chaos that erupt around us. These events challenge us. They generate a desire. This desire makes us act.
Con người khi rơi vào cảnh khốn cùng thường hay nói những lời tuyệt vọng như “không còn con đường nào khác” hoặc “không còn cách nào khác.” Nhưng thật ra không phải vậy. Vì không tìm kiếm nên mới không thấy có đường khác mà thôi. Vì không nỗ lực tối đa nhưng những con rệp nên không thể tìm thấy phương pháp nào khác.
Tôi còn nhớ khi nhà máy đóng tàu Hyundai đang ra sức khắc phục những khó khăn thì 1 vị phó thủ tướng phụ trách kinh tể HQ thời đó, đồng thời là 1 nhà kinh tế học khả kính, đã gọi tôi tới. Ông ta khẳng định chắc chắn rằng đây là việc không có khả năng thực hiện được và nói nếu ngành đóng tàu của Hyundai thành công thì ông ấy sẽ đốt 10 ngón tay và lên thiên đường. Vậy mà hôm nay Hyundai đã trở thành nhà máy đóng tàu số 1 thế giới, còn ông ấy vẫn sống trên trái đất này.
They must believe that no matter how bad things look, you can make them better.
McIlroy’s father held down several jobs to earn additional income for his son’s golf development. His mother worked extra shifts at the local 3M plant.
But those years of consolidation and integration, of unexpected political and press attacks, were also years of great strain and tension. “All the fortune that I have made has not served to compensate me for the anxiety of that period,” Rockefeller once said. His wife, too, would remember that time as “days of worry,” and he himself would recall that he seldom got “an unbroken night’s sleep.”
In the 2017 season, Homa made only 2 cuts in 17 events and lost his card. That year he made just $18k.
There is hardly the space to list all the successful people who have hit rock bottom.
I needed to learn everything from scratch. How tall should the warehouses be? What is the ideal distance between columns to allow a forklift to maneuver? What’s the height of a loading dock? The width of the roads? I had a huge dream in front of me, but in the winter of 2004, a whole year after we’d come up with the scheme, we still hadn’t broken ground. And building wouldn’t even be the hardest part. Far more torturous was getting the approvals.
To construct Beijing’s Airport City, we needed 7 seven ministries to sign off on almost anything we planned. And within these ministries there were layers upon layers of authorizations. In all, we needed 150 different chops, and every one was a story. It took 3 years just to start construction and even after that there were roadblocks aplenty. I stationed people outside the offices of officials from whom we needed a stamp. I sent people to hospitals to get chops form bedridden bureaucrats. My employees waited for months trying to curry favor with officials, bringing them fine teas, doing their errands, taking them to saunas, looking after their wives and kids.
Crowded into a narrow waist between the coast and the mountains, the Vietnamese who lived in this land, over 90% of whom were peasants scratching out their living from the soil, found life, at best, a struggle. The soil is thin in depth and weak in nutrients, and frequently the land is flooded by seawater. The threat of disaster is never far away, and when it occurs, it sometimes drives the farmer to desperate measures.
Perhaps that explains why the inhabitants of Nghe An have historically been known as the most obdurate and rebellious of Vietnamese, richly earning their traditional sobriquet among their compatriots as “the buffalos of Nghe An.”
His new enterprise, based in the southern Korean mountain city of Daegu, quickly found success as both an exporter and an importer. However, his newfound wealth was completely wiped out by the end of WW2 and the chaos that followed the end of the Japanese occupation. But Lee rebuilt his company, this time headquartered in Seoul. The Korean War then reduced the company to scratch once more, leaving Lee penniless. But again he reformed his company amidst the rubble of postwar Seoul.
When I hit rock bottom, I found a shovel and kept digging. I want to some low, low places and there would be times when I’d wallow and honestly just hate my golf game, dislike what I was out there and what’s supposed to be my favorite place in the world is a golf course. And all of a sudden I started to hate it.
I remember thinking to myself: “I with someone could come down and tell me that this is how good I am, and I will never be better than this. So I’d just stop.”
I find that companies are inclined to be at their most interesting when they are undergoing a little misfortune, and therefore I chose the fall of 1966 as the time to have a look at Xerox and its people.
I would have been discouraged if I had known in advance just how much infrastructure would be in place to make Linux as successful as it has been. It’s not only that you have to be good. You have to be good, sure, but everything has to turn out the right way, too.
Any sane person would have gazed up at the rugged mountain-face that needed to be scaled, and would have been absolutely daunted. Just think about the technical problems of supporting PCs, which are about the most varied hardware out there. You have to support people who have bugs that you can’t reproduce on applications that you don’t even care about. But you care about Linux, so you care about helping to fix them.
Difficult problems don’t yield to an ‘aha!’ moment. Instead, there is the sandpaper, sandpaper, sandpaper theory of progress. We helped them come up with new way of evaluating and rewarding performance, but it took us 18 months of hard work.
I, like many of you artist out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white-hot, ‘in the zone’ seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice! This happens about 3% of the time. The other 97% of the time I am in the frustrated, struggling, office-corner-full-of-crumpled-up-paper-mode. The important thing is to slog diligently through this quagmire of discouragement and despair. Put on some audio commentary and listen to the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades going through the same slings and arrows of outrages production problems. In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision…
Recognize that everyone in the world goes through hard times, and give yourself permission to worry. Don’t pay the double tax on your mental load. I’ve found two tactics that help: the first is to conjuring up a public figure you admire, and realize that they struggled too. It’s a good reminder that being in the Pit is universal.
The second is to admit that you’re feeling bad. I’ll take out a Postit note and write, “I’m super stressed out about X.” That little act shifts my mindset from worrying about my worries to simply declaring them. Once I do that, I can start to make progress on addressing the root cause.
I have always felt that the mettle of a player is not how well he plays when he’s playing well, but how well he scores and plays when he’s playing poorly.
Tom understood — and I think I understood this too — that the worse the conditions, the more golfers you could cross off the list as contenders. I think Tom loved playing in the rain and wind because he knew he would handle it better than anyone.
People who want to resist and avoid adversity are cheating themselves. It is how you handle adversity that defines you as a person, as a golfer, and as a champion. I see guys out here all the time who let the littlest things undo them, undo their confidence, undo their motivation. I say, “Get in there and play the game with some courage, man! It is part of the game to have bad times. It is built into it, I think, to weed the weak people out. Nobody has good times all the time, so get up and fight! Show me some courage! Show me some patience. Show me some determination, for goodness sake!
Adversity is the very ingredient necessary to cultivate mental toughness.