One day the Buddha found his heart in turmoil. So, he retreated to the forest, to the earth, to the base of a great tree. An elephant came up to him and tells Buddha he does not like seeing him discouraged. The Buddha had attained the sixth level of consciousness and could communicate with plants, trees and even rocks.

This way of thinking inspires innovation and creativity

Nobody knew who Elon Musk was before he started making millions. The world came to know him once he began winning. For example, did you know that PayPal, one of Elon Musk’s most successful companies, was voted as the worst business concept of the year?

Before spending money on your business, you will want to validate your products or services. You can do this in several ways including online and offline sampling and testing and through research. You can also validate your product/service by using Google Trends, Quora and Google Reader for example, to determine the popularity of the keywords associated with your business idea.

Steve Jobs once famously said, and I agree to an extent, that, “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Jobs continued that, “if you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” The part of Job’s quote that resonates with me the most is that I believe passion is what switches an individual from dormant and passive to activated. Critics of Job’s statement, get hung up on whether an individual can become great at something he or she does not necessarily love. To this argument, I have left mental space that if someone becomes great or is great at something, there is something they can love or do love about that task, be it direct or indirect. Instead of getting lost in the noise of the arguments surrounding the quote and the individual biases towards the man himself, I took the message to mean that when we show up, an entirely new world is made available to us.

In 2001, a skinny kid named Takeru Kobayashi devoured fifty hot dogs in 12 minutes — double the previous world record. The guy weighed a whopping 131 pounds. Yet he took down competitors three time his size and changed the sport forever.
How did he do it?
He did not just stuff hot dogs into his mouth faster than everyone else. Not even close. His massive success came from thinking strategically and going beyond the obvious. …

Unhealthy competition puts a disproportional amount of emphasis on the outcome, rather than valuing the process or the journey of success.
“Look to your left, look to your right: one of you won’t be here next year.” This intimidating line was immortalised as a greeting for incoming students at Harvard Law School in the classic movie, The Paper Chase. The message — hard work is needed to be here. The potential misinterpretation — your success occurs when others fail or that in a competition, others must lose if you are to win, and so it is natural to withhold…

At a recent Thinkers50 ceremony in London, Marshall Goldsmith, my Mentor and friend and the author of What Got You Here Won’t Get There and thirty-five other books, was recognised again as the world’s leadership thinker and number one executive coach. Goldsmith suggests in the book that the corporate world is filled with executives, men and women who have worked hard for years to reach the upper levels of management. …

Good communication skills are key to success in life, work, and relationships. Without effective communication, a message can turn into error, misunderstanding, frustration, or even disaster by being misinterpreted or poorly delivered.

In everything we do there is always a chance that we will fail. The late Stella Adler, a fantastic acting coach, said, “Grown-ups take the life out of things. It’s better to make things up, to use the imagination, than to kill them.” I couldn’t agree more.

What do Colonel Sanders and Babe Ruth have in common? They both have a passion and a clear vision for what they wanted to do and knew that the only way to get there was through failure.

After a 27th publisher rejected his first manuscript, Dr. Seuss walked dejectedly along the sidewalks of New York, planning to burn the book in his apartment incinerator. On Madison Avenue, however, he bumped into Dartmouth friend Mike McClintock, who that very morning had started a job as an editor in the Vanguard Press Children’s section. Within hours, the men signed a contract, and in 1937 Vanguard Press published “And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street,” which launched the extraordinary literary career of Dr. Seuss. …

Anyone who wants to take the next step in their personal development and transformational journey while creating their legacy for tomorrow needs to read this. Do you want to learn how to change your life around? Then learn how to change your story.

The journey of a lifestyle entrepreneur is a source of deep joy and purpose. Reflecting on the last seven years of being in business, I realised that it has been essential to success in every vertical of my life. Growing and contributing is, I feel, the very essence of a successful life.