Aristotle said, ‘Time does not exist except for change.’ The origin of the word change is the Old English cambium, which means “to become.” In other words, time does not exist except for becoming something new. What, exactly, are you choosing to become?

It’s easy to act as if you are a weathervane, always changing your beliefs and words, trying to please everyone around you. But we were born to be lighthouses, not weathervanes.

Say no to the drug of gradualness. It was Martin Luther King, Jr., who spoke out strongly against making slow changes. Either we risk or we don’t, he said. Either we change or we don’t. There’s no acceptable middle ground because it lulls us into complacency. Lasting changes rarely occur when we ease our way into the future. They come when we leap. The leap themselves can be small or large. Once we take action, we see things differently and for many of us there’s no going back.

Life is too short for theatrics, for face time, for jumping through hoops, for excuses, for blaming, for trying too hard to please others, or for chasing society’s illusion of distant riches or fame.

If his spirit is distorted he should simply fix it—purge it, make it perfect—because there is no other task in our entire lives which is more worthwhile…To seek the perfection of the warrior's spirit is the only task worthy of our temporariness, our manhood.

The origin of the word change is the Old English cambium, which means "to become."

Star performers start with a well-defined and concrete "impossible" goal they care deeply about and then they build a through-line that clearly connects here with there.

Every moment of our lives we are either growing or dying…

It takes great goals to lead us out of our everyday limits into accomplishing more than we ever thought we could or would.

Every moment of our lives we are either growing or dying—and it’s largely a choice, not fate. Throughout its life cycle, every one of the body’s trillions of cells is driven to grow and improve its ability to use more of its innate yet untapped capacity. Research biologist Albert Szent-Gyoergyi, who was twice awarded the Nobel Prize, called this syntropy, which he defined as the “innate drive in living matter to perfect itself.” It turns conventional thinking upside down…As living cells—or as people—there is no staying the same. If we aim for some middle ground or status quo, it’s an illusion—beneath the surface what’s actually happening is we’re dying, not growing. And the goal of a lifetime is continued growth, not adulthood. As Rene Dubos put it, “Genius is childhood recaptured.” For this to happen, studies show that we must recapture—or prevent the loss of—such child-like traits as the ability to learn, to love, to laugh about small things, to leap, to wonder, and to explore. It’s time to rescue ourselves from our grown-up ways before it’s too late.

It’s easy to act as if you are a weathervane, always changing your beliefs and words, trying to please everyone around you. But we were born to be lighthouses, not weathervanes. Imagine a vertical axis running through the center of your heart, from your deepest roots to your highest aspirations. That’s your lighthouse. It anchors you in the world and frees you from having to change directions every time the weather shifts. Inside this lighthouse there is a lens and a light. The light represents who you are when nobody else is looking. That light was meant to keep shining, no matter how dark or stormy it gets outside…when you find that light inside you, you will know it. Don’t let anyone else dim it…and one more thing: remember to look for the light inside others. If at first you can’t see it, look deeper. It’s there.

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