Quotes To Think Aloud; Realizing Your Potential

Ten Nice one's to reflect on....  This is a collection of  quotes that you will find are related to concept of "Realizing Your Potential".


"POTENTIAL" means nothing if you don't do anything with it.


“It’s hard to soar with eagles when you hang out with turkeys”


"The obsession with instant gratification blinds us from our long term potential" - Michael Dooley.


"You are only confined by the walls you Build Yourself"


"The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives"  - Albert Schweitzer


"If we did all the things that we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves. - Thomas A Edison


"There is no man living who isn't capable of doing more than he thinks he can do" - Henry Ford.


Potential has a shelf life - Margaret Atwood


With realization of one's potential and self-confidence on one's ability one can build a better world.  Dalai Lama


If you limit your choice only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.  - Robert Fritz

Lessons from Stories: The Wise Man's Pot

One day a wise man came to Emperor Akbar's court and he said he wanted to challenge his courtiers by testing how intelligent they were.    Akbar readily agreed. The wise man kept a pot covered by a cloth and asked them to tell him what it contained.   Every one was dumb founded and kept starting silently at each other.     

Then Birbal came forward, he opened the cloth and said there was nothing in the pot. It was empty. 

"But you opened it."  said the wise man. 

"You did not tell us that it can't be opened"  shot back Birbal the clever minister.

The wise man was cornered.  He quietly left. 

What can we learn:   Often the barriers, the inhibitions about things around us are in our minds.  We set limits and boundaries,  even those that never existed in the first place.   

Just because someone thought it so... it became the accepted norm.   How often we face this in our organizations.   Soon someone questions and then all assumptions seem to no longer hold good.  

In hind sight it seems so simple.   But the creative view or creative solutions needs to be different from what is normally understood or expected. 

We can also realize that there are others around us who can be more intelligent than we are.  Those that outsmart you, those you never expected to.   The world is full of people who are operating at a fraction of their potential when it comes to achievement or even thinking. 

Other posts on learning from stories

Power of Patience

Egotism: Lessons from Stories

Zen Story: What can you infer from this.

Learning from Stories : Power of Patience, Experience

Most readers would have heard this story which is a popular zen story on the internet. The story goes thus...

A Martial Arts Student went to his teacher and said earnestly, "I am devoted to studying your martial system. How long will it ake me to master it". The teachers reply was casual, "Ten Years".. Impatiently the student answered, "But I want to master it faster than that. I will work hard, very hard,  I will practice every day, ten or more hours a day if I have to do it. How long will it take then?" 

The teacher thought for a moment and said... "20 Years"

The teacher was emphasizing the virtue and value of being patient.  You really need some time to master a given task, job or capability.  For those who learnt car driving .....Imagine putting 12 hours of lessons in one day to learn to drive. It never happens that way.  The reason is that our brain takes time to go through the experience and slot the same into relevant repositories.  So although 20 years might seem exaggerated it is the message about being patient in accomplishment.   Some may do it faster and some slower but one needs to pace it as per his or her capabilities.  

When you try to deliver too much too soon there are bound to be mistakes, slip ups, and costly consequences but there could always be exceptions.  Either the work would get compromised or the individual would get burnt out.   Think of dieting all at once in a week rather than six months to shed a few kilos.  Consequences would be anyone's guess.

Many things that we do in life go un-enjoyed and un-cherished because we rush through it and don't really soak into the process of doing so.  Remember the last walk you had to a store or a friends place.... Did you take time to enjoy the nature, beauty of things on the way, the birds, the trees, the clouds or the starry night.    All that was probably at the back of your mind and out of focus.  (Read my blog on Focus bringing attention)

We will enjoy things more if we LIVE through the experience and savor it rather than trying to rush.  

However the message should not be confused with complacency or delayed fulfillment. It is about setting a right pace and optimal time for things.  

Attitude Makes the Difference

Not Intelligence, Not Chance, Not  Hard work.  It is Attitude that finally makes somebody a great performer, it is attitude that defines success and it is attitude that takes you a long way.

Who cannot forget Zig Ziglar quote:  "You cannot tailor-make the situations in life, but you can tailor make the attitudes to fit those situations"

It is easy to say -  have a positive attitude,  your attitude decides your altitude and so on but the question I have is what really determines your attitude.  If having a positive attitude alone made you a winner everyone would have been there and done that.   Why is it only some maintain a positive attitude and rest of them do not.  That's the question I want to explore in this piece and the next.

Is attitude determined by behaviors exhibited or is it vice-versa? 

To understand better:  An attitude is a learned tendency to exhibit behavior in a certain way.  The way I think,  feel or display behavior on / to an  issue, a person, a group, a subject, a trend are all examples of  attitude.   

We can be conscious of our attitudes or - they can be sub-conscious (blind spots about the attitudes)

Attitudes can be influenced in either positive or negative direction and it is here that role of managers  leaders and other key influencers in organizations is very important.  A person can develop a very positive attitude towards work and at the same time a very negative depending on the experience.    It is the experiences we have or the conditions we are exposed to that determine our attitude towards a phenomenon, place, person,  event etc.

So behavior changes according to the attitude toward something.  However remember that it is the behaviors itself that influence attitude.  If you want a person to change from a extremely negative attitude towards say "gender diversity"  it cannot happen just by feeling it.  He / she has to actually start being more accepting of the other gender being equally contributing in team work or other gender being as competitive, or the other gender being as hard working or whatever the negative bias he or she has about "gender diversity"

So next time you find you are carrying your problems in your mind and it is affecting you negatively you need to check whether it can be attributed to attitude you have about something.  Can you change the way you are affected by just changing your attitude? As a manager you need to see what behaviors the person needs to change if the attitude has to change.   Well more about how managers can work on attitudes with examples in a coming post.  

Meanwhile if you have something to share, your experiences, your observations, your thoughts are welcome.

Hello ! Holla ! Blogging World

Finally the Day I decide to start a blog ...whether it ends up surviving is the big question.  Rather to restart a aborted attempt on HR Vitamins that I started in 2009.  However post about a dozen posts I did not get further. So now I have archived the earlier posts of HR Vitamins.  And to relaunch it in a new form barely couple of days after we celebrated the Birth Anniversary of  Mahatma Gandhi means it is just the right thing to remember couple of his quotes that is relevant to us in organizations.

"The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problem.”

how true?  They say that we use very little of our potential and it would take some serious to do much more than we think we can.

Maybe Calvin Coolidge was probably right when he said many decades ago...that... unrealized potential is the most common commodity found in his country. (USA)

In 2009 Tata Consultancy Services drew up a very popular quest for it's associates when the CEO brought these three words as matter of focus for every one in the company "Realize Your Potential".If one need is not met the operant behavior would be manifest to satisfy that need.  This is similar to the Need Hierarchy of Maslow.

The second quote of Mahatma Gandhi that I would like to draw upon is

"Action Expresses Priorities"

People act on things that mean most to them.  They need therefore they do... It is like the proverbial Maslows' hierarchy.  You tend to go after things or prioritize based on what level of needs have been satisfied.

Then the question arises to your mind?....

Why do some people spend so much time finding fault with everything around?  Have you come across this proverbial cribber... They made it their life motto to criticize to curse and to find fault with anything and everything from how the buses run in the city, to how the company conducts its business to how their better halves cook food etc.