Social and sustainable business as competitive advantage

60 Quotes that Will Change the Way You Think

In your quiet moments, what do you think about?  How far you’ve come, or how far you have to go?  Your strengths, or your weaknesses?  The best that might happen, or the worst that might come to be?  In your quiet moments, pay attention to your thoughts.  Because maybe, just maybe, the only thing that needs to shift in order for you to experience more happiness, more love, and more vitality, is your way of thinking.

Photo by: Andrew Evans

Here are 60 thought-provoking quotes gathered from our sister site, Everyday Life Lessons, and from our blog archive that will help you adjust your way of thinking.

1. You cannot change what you refuse to confront.
2. Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.
3. Don’t think of cost.  Think of value.
4. Sometimes you need to distance yourself to see things clearly.
5. Too many people buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress people they don’t know.  Read Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
6. No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you are still way ahead of everyone who isn’t trying.
7. If a person wants to be a part of your life, they will make an obvious effort to do so.  Think twice before reserving a space in your heart for people who do not make an effort to stay.
8. Making one person smile can change the world – maybe not the whole world, but their world.
9. Saying someone is ugly doesn’t make you any prettier.
10. The only normal people you know are the ones you don’t know very well.
11. Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it.
12. The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
13. It’s better to be alone than to be in bad company.
14. As we grow up, we realize it becomes less important to have more friends and more important to have real ones.
15. Making a hundred friends is not a miracle.  The miracle is to make a single friend who will stand by your side even when hundreds are against you.
16. Giving up doesn’t always mean you’re weak, sometimes it means you are strong enough andsmart enough to let go and move on.
17. Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresea, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, etc…
18. If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.
19. Don’t choose the one who is beautiful to the world; choose the one who makes your world beautiful.
20. Falling in love is not a choice.  To stay in love is.
21. True love isn’t about being inseparable; it’s about two people being true to each other even when they are separated.
22. While you’re busy looking for the perfect person, you’ll probably miss the imperfect person who could make you perfectly happy.
23. Never do something permanently foolish just because you are temporarily upset.
24. You can learn great things from your mistakes when you aren’t busy denying them.  Read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
25. In life, if you don’t risk anything, you risk everything.
26. When you stop chasing the wrong things you give the right things a chance to catch you.
27. Every single thing that has ever happened in your life is preparing you for a moment that is yet to come.
28. There isn’t anything noble about being superior to another person.  True nobility is in being superior to the person you once were.
29. Trying to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.
30. You will never become who you want to be if you keep blaming everyone else for who you are now.
31. People are more what they hide than what they show.
32. Sometimes people don’t notice the things others do for them until they stop doing them.
33. Don’t listen to what people say, watch what they do.
34. Being alone does not mean you are lonely, and being lonely does not mean you are alone.
35. Love is not about sex, going on fancy dates, or showing off.  It’s about being with a person who makes you happy in a way nobody else can.
36. Anyone can come into your life and say how much they love you.  It takes someone really special to stay in your life and show how much they love you.
37. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie.  Don’t save it for a special occasion; today is special.
38. Love and appreciate your parents.  We are often so busy growing up, we forget they are also growing old.
39. When you have to start compromising yourself and your morals for the people around you, it’s probably time to change the people around you.
40. Learn to love yourself first, instead of loving the idea of other people loving you.
41. When someone tells you, “You’ve changed,” it might simply be because you’ve stopped living your life their way.
42. Someone else doesn’t have to be wrong for you to be right.
43. Be happy.  Be yourself.  If others don’t like it, then let them be.  Happiness is a choice.  Life isn’t about pleasing everybody.
44. When you’re up, your friends know who you are.  When you’re down, you know who your friends are.
45. Don’t look for someone who will solve all your problems; look for someone who will face them with you.
46. If you expect the world to be fair with you because you are fair, you’re fooling yourself. That’s like expecting the lion not to eat you because you didn’t eat him.
47. No matter how good or bad you have it, wake up each day thankful for your life.  Someone somewhere else is desperately fighting for theirs.
48. The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.
49. Many people are so poor because the only thing they have is money.
50. Learn to appreciate the things you have before time forces you appreciate the things you once had.
51. When you choose to see the good in others, you end up finding the good in yourself.
52. You don’t drown by falling in the water.  You drown by staying there.
53. It’s better to know and be disappointed than to never know and always wonder.
54. There are things that we don’t want to happen but have to accept, things we don’t want to know but have to learn, and people we can’t live without but have to let go.
55. Happiness is not determined by what’s happening around you, but rather what’s happening inside you.  Most people depend on others to gain happiness, but the truth is, it always comes from within.
56. If you tell the truth, it becomes a part of your past.  If you lie, it becomes a part of your future.
57. What you do every day matters more than what you do every once in a while.  Read The Power of Habit.
58. You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading your last one.
59. Things turn out best for people who make the best out of the way things turn out.
60. If you don’t like something, change it.  If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.

This post is inspired by Dr. Holly Lucille's Facebook post today  www.DrHollyLucille.com 

Written by Marc at Marc and Angel blog 

AdWeek: Profile - Steven Addis - The Brand Recharger

June 14th, 2009 by - Eleftheria Parpis

Steven Addis, CEO of Addis Creson, doesn't put much stock in titles or disciplinary designations. "Are we an agency or a branding firm? I don't really care," he says.

What the UC Berkeley business graduate does care about is the marriage of strategic thinking and design, as well as the collaborative nature of the enterprise. When it comes to problem solving at the 30-person Berkeley, Calif.-based branding firm, "there is no division of labor," he says. While his primary role is business development, Addis says he gets to be "a utility player."

Over the years, Addis's company has evolved from being solely a package-design firm to one that also acts as a full-service agency, one dedicated to positive change. It divides its clients into four categories: Healthy Lifestyle (e.g., the Kashi brand of foods); Social Change (including Better Place, an electric car services provider, and the Green Employer Council, part of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights); Sense of Place, for "unique immersive experiences," per its Web site (e.g., the Qua Baths & Spa at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas); and Future Tense, for brands that define "what's possible" (e.g., UC Berkeley).

Addis, who grew up in San Diego, says his creativity was encouraged by his father, whose day job was real estate, but whose hobby was photography. "He would buy a camera, hand it to me, tell me to learn it and then [to] teach him" how to use it, he remembers. Addis's photography is often used in the company's collateral materials.

"What I was really interested in was the idea of creative persuasion," adds the 48-year-old. And while he loves art and to write, he says, he studied business and marketing at UC Berkeley to be "more well-rounded."

After graduation in 1983, The Clorox Company hired him as a brand assistant. It was there he became schooled in marketing. "Clorox is not just a manufacturer, it's a marketing company," he says. "The hub of the wheel is the marketing department.

"Within a few years, he was named brand manager on new laundry products and tested new brands such as Act and Clorox Super Detergent. But Addis says he grew tired of the corporate environment. In 1987 he joined Monnens & Associates, a promotion and packaging firm he once hired to do package design for Clorox. The company was renamed Monnens-Addis Design and, in 1996, became Addis Group after Addis bought out his partner Ken Monnens. John Creson, who became the ecd, joined in 1999. The name morphed into Addis Creson in 2006.

The firm has worked on assignments ranging from the redesign of Pepsi packaging in 1997 and identity work for Intel to agency of record for Ariat, an equestrian footwear and apparel company recently added to the roster.

For Better Place, which offers an automated battery switch system designed for electric vehicles, Addis Creson has created a brand platform and identity program. "It's time to switch from the pump to the plug," says the voiceover to an animated online video the shop created to explain Better Place's mission.

"We have to sell a very complex story in a very simple way," says Addis, whose team is currently working on naming the interface and creating a brand identity for the company's technology system.

Better Place's logo, explains Addis, is designed to express a "blue" planet as well as optimism: "If you flip one component down [as if it were a switch], it creates the teardrop shape. That's the switch from the pump to the plug."

"The success of business and the planet are interlocked," says Addis. "We're simply acknowledging that fact and want to help companies think of ways to market their products in the most sustainable way they can."

http://www.addiscreson.com/

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/creative/features/e3idff59d66183db8681904fb7dafda199d