“Get back on board, dammit!”
Those were the words of Italian Coast Guard Gregorio de Falco to Captain Francesco Schettino while he was abandoning his ship, leaving 4,200 people on board to perish (at least 12 died).
When you “mess up” and difficulty strikes, how do you handle it?
Do you take responsibility, do whatever it takes to make it right, step up and take action (like the Coast Guard)… or do you shirk responsibility, leave the scene of the disaster you created and start looking for someone else to blame (like the Captain)?
The translated exchange between the Captain and Coast Guard is transcribed below. In parenthesis are examples of excuses we might use in our daily lives for not taking responsibility for common failures.
(This isn’t what I envisioned for my life. But I don’t really want to change, please…)
Captain: Please …
Coast Guard: There is no ‘please’ about it. Get back on board.
(But I send out résumés, I leave messages for my prospects, I mail letters…)

Captain: I am here to coordinate the rescue.
Coast Guard (interrupting): What are you coordinating there! Get on board! Coordinate the rescue from on board!
(It’s not my job, the president is supposed to fix it, when Monday comes…)
Captain: (inaudible)… there is another lifeboat…
Coast Guard (interrupting, yelling): You get back on board! That is an order! There is nothing else for you to consider. Now I am giving the orders. Get back on board, dammit! Is that clear? Don’t you hear me?
Captain: I am going aboard.

(The market is down, no one is hiring, our industry is in a recession…)
Captain: Look, chief, I want to go aboard but the other lifeboat here has stopped and is drifting. I have called …
Coast Guard (interrupting): You have been telling me this for an hour! Now, go aboard! Get on board!
The Captain never returned to the ship. According to the harbor master’s office, which notes the final exchange as occurring at 1:46 a.m., Capt. Schettino sought refuge on a rock at 12:30 a.m. Witnesses said he did not return to the ship to run the rescue operations, which went on until 6 a.m.
Tweet from an Italian boy named Salvatore Garzillo: “The next time someone asks me what I want to be when I grow up I am going to say: ‘a man like De Falco.’”
I’ve fallen off my diet. Get back on board!
I haven’t made my prospecting calls. Get back on board!
I haven’t been tracking my new success behaviors. Get back on board!
I stopped using the Living Your Best Year Ever Weekly Rhythm Register. Get back on board!
I’ve missed our weekly date night. Get back on board!
I haven’t been praising my team like I said I would. Get back on board!
I skipped a couple of workouts. Get back on board!
I’m off track on my goals. Get back on board!
Whatever mistakes you have made, how ever you have messed up, no matter what disaster your results might be right now, have Coast Guard Gregorio de Falco’s voice ring in your head, “Get back on board, dammit!”
Where have you abandoned ship in your life or on your goals? Tell us how you are going to “get back on board” in the comments below.
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Our Deepest Fear
By Marianne Williamson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.

We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.

It’s not just in some of us;
It’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we’re liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

Most people feel kinda odd about overtly striving for power because it has a bad reputation. Thanks to the abusers you sound like a James Bond villian just because you tryn come up! Sucks man. We even despise and reject the “selfish” motivations& methods of managers and leaders who manipulate and coerce people into reluctant compliance- instead of celebrating them& studying their methods!! SmH. Well for 2012 let’s remember excuses breed impotence.

Power is neither good nor bad. Everyone has it and everyone uses it. Power is the ability to get something done.

The more skillfully you use power the more power you’ll have.

Seven powerful tips that enhance your power:

1.The more power you give others the more power you have. Hoarding power eventually destroys it. Skillful leaders create environments where others feel powerful.
2.Don’t talk about your power. Powerful people don’t tell others they have power; they display it by doing things.
3.Quietly embrace your power to influence, lift, encourage, challenge, reward, be respected, and hold others accountable. Your discomfort with power is your problem; when you get over your discomfort, you’ll be more effective.

4.Achieve results through others. Doing things others should do demonstrates lack of leadership-power.
5.Speak and act humbly. Humility enhances effectiveness; arrogance hinders it. Powerful people don’t need to intimidate; they frequently lead from the back-seat.
6.Focus – your ability to get things done – on developing people. You can do all the things that great leaders do like building trust, inspiring shared vision, creating goals and plans, and rewarding high performance but if you don’t develop others you won’t reach extraordinary success. The only way to succeed without developing others is to hire people that are already developed. But you must immediately begin developing them.
7.Let others influence you. Leaders who aren’t influenced by others can’t influence others.
Bonus Tip: Leverage power by spending more time with people who respect you and less time with those who don’t.

-@HaZiQ

Rest well.You changed the world.

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

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.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Mile-High Club by HaZiQ aLi

If u cant laugh at ignorance... u just might be ignorant.

Ok soooo when i arrived to hartsfield terminal in ATL to start this tour couple days ago& was told my bags were 11 pounds overweight it disturbed me-i packed exceedingly light for such a long trip and didnt even have that big a bag. My awkward feelings only increased when i realized it was mostly all the (hardcover) books i’d brought. Yeah… ive heard of kindle. ive even bought them as gifts for people- but i still like physically turning the pages in a book. Even when its bulky.

Recently a new reason to keep the books here in the physical realm came to me though- consider that if the gov’t decides to ban a book or a movie today- all theyd have to do is remove it from your ebook menu… #ThinkAboutIt

At any rate, here are 5 books they decided in the past you werent able to handle for yaself…All 5 have been condemned, banned or even burned. What do u think?

1.Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Way before he got name dropped by Jay Electronica, Vonnegut was expanding minds. This masterpiece in nonlinear story structure that moves forward and backwards in time, Vonnegut’s book centers around possibly delusional solder Billy Pilgrim, who is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. While detained in a slaughterhouse, Billy experiences past and future events out of order, including being kidnapped by aliens and the moment of his murder. Exploring the concept of fatalism over free will, Vonnegut’s book is as much of a trip as Billy’s journey to the planet Tralfamadore.

2.Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Often banned for sexual content and adult themes, Huxley’s book is eerily prescient, with fetuses being genetically manipulated and divided into different castes, and citizens conditioned to value consumption and to loathe being alone. With reproduction taken off the table, sex is encouraged as recreation, and marriage, parenthood, and pregnancy are never mentioned or pursued. Published in 1932(!!), Brave New World was and is a brave new book.

3.Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume
There is a rite of passage which every prepubescent girl must undergo before she can call herself a woman. That, dear readers, is plowing through Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Born to a Christian mother and Jewish father, sixth-grader Margaret sets out on a quest to find a religion. Meanwhile, she’s dealing with the usual pre-teen issues, including wishing for bigger breasts (doing exercises while memorably chanting, “I must, I must, I must increase my bust!”) and her period. Blume captures the familiar angst and confusion of an adolescent seeking her identity.

4.The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Perhaps the most controversial book of our generation, Rushdie’s book focuses on the struggles of two Indian expatriates in England who are transformed in a plane crash into an archangel and devil. But it’s the dream sequences — one about a fanatic religious leader that is a thinly veiled allusion to the Ayatollah Khomeini — that have resulted in an ongoing fatwa against Rushdie and his publishers. Individual purchasers of the book have not been harmed.

5.Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Banned for its sexual content, Miller’s 1934 book is a frank, semi-autobiographical novel about an expatriate American in Paris. A meditation on the human condition in all its squalid, lonely, and rollicking glory, the work opened the literary door for other writers to write more candidly about sex. Perhaps knowing the book would be controversial, Miller felt compelled to write as honestly as possible, writing “There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books.”

To me, if you cant explore the other side of your belief, the other guys position- you dont know your own well enough. If thats the case, you should be SEARCHING for more information and perspective- not blindly accepting what you’re “taught” (told). READ!!!

-@HaZiQ

September thru October Dates... The Movement Is Movin...

November Dates...

So who tops the list of 11 men named to Forbes’ annual list of the highest-paid men in entertainment?

But there can only be one...

Coming in at No. 1 was multihyphenate Tyler Perry, who grossed a whopping $130 million between May 2010 and May 2011, the period when this survey was taken, not only from five movies he wrote, directed, produced and occasionally acted in as his alter ego Madea (see Madea Goes to Jail), but also from two television series he has on the air, Tyler Perry’s House of Payne and Meet the Browns.

He returns to the big screen next in a rare appearance in a film not of his own making—playing fictional detective Alex Cross in an adaptation of James Patterson’s I, Alex Cross.

For his part, actor Leonardo DiCaprio nabbed eighth place after raking in a cool $77 million from 2010′s Shutter Island and Inception, both of which tallied a combined $1.1 billion in worldwide ticket sales.

Forbes mainstay Steven Spielberg meanwhile took the third spot with $107 million despite not having directed a movie since 2008′s disappointing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Coming in at No. 2 behind Perry is Jerry, as in megaproducer Jerry Bruckheimer. His $113 million is largely the result of last May’s stellar performance of On Stranger Tides, the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean installment, which plundered its way to $1 billion at the global box office. Add to that the hit TV shows he oversees, including the CSI franchise and The Amazing Race, and he’s sitting pretty.

The famed filmmaker has two flicks in the pipeline this holiday season, the motion-capture family adventure The Adventures of Tintin and the drama War Horse, about a boy who goes searching for his horse after the latter’s been pressed into the cavalry during World War I.

Elton John meanwhile rocketed to fourth place with $100 million on the strength of his latest world tour, while former American Idol judge Simon Cowell smirked his way to fifth with $90 million. After leaving Idol last year, the TV producer and judger of talent will return to the tube with a new singing competition, The X Factor, which will reunite him with fellow Idol partner Paula Abdul.

Rounding out the Forbes list was best-selling author James Patterson with $84 million; Oprah’s protégé, Dr. Phil McGraw, with $80 million from his syndicated gab-fest; shock jock Howard Stern with $76 million from his current SiriusXM radio deal; and golfer Tiger Woods, who putted his way to $75 million despite his personal travails.

thanks to Josh Grossberg

This new season still has the hero (villain) Eazy searching for his sisters’ killer…