The Best Minute: On goals, critics, and standards

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I. Greg McKeown on how to not achieve your goals:

“If you want to make something hard, indeed truly impossible, to complete, all you have to do is make the end goal as vague as possible.”

II. Theodore Roosevelt on critics:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

2 IDEAS FROM ME

I. You will never exceed the standards you set for yourself, so set high standards. No one accidentally becomes a person of great integrity. We don’t accidentally grow in wisdom or knowledge. We don’t become a great leader or parent by accident.

What standard do you want to achieve? In any area of life, we don’t get there unless we know what we want to become.

II. Your priorities are set by what you do, not what you say.

If health is important to you, you’ll have healthy habits.

If God is important to you, you’ll desire to honor and obey him.

If your spouse or kids are important to you, you’ll adjust your schedule accordingly.

Words are cheap, actions are rich.

1 RANDOM FACT

At least one of the colors of the Olympic flag appears on all the national flags.

Baron de Coubertin designed the Olympic flag in the early 1900s, and he was very intentional with his creation. At least one of the colors on the Olympic flag appears on the flags of every nation that competed in the games at the time (but only if you count the white background of the flag itself). "A white background, with five interlaced rings in the center: blue, yellow, black, green, and red … is symbolic," Coubertin said in 1931. "It represents the five inhabited continents of the world [counting the Americas as one], united by Olympism, while the six colors are those that appear on all the national flags of the world at the present time."

Source: Best Life