Your Motivation Today

“You are the owner of your mind, feeling the fear or brave it is depending how we deal with it. The more you balance your feeling and mind, the closer you are as self mastery.”

Ainy Fauziyah

How To Be A Good Public Speaker

There are many people that get up front of audiences from the richest CEOs to the classroom teacher. There are definitely characteristics that make each stand out or not.

Genuine Passion. Passion is like laughter, it’s contagious. Having someone in front of an audience giving a speech in a monotone voice isn’t going to really engage people. It’s the people that have passion. The audience can feel this passion in the diction, the tonality, the body language of the speaker. Are these speakers genuinely passionate about the topic they’re talking about? Maybe, maybe not. The point is that they can make it look passionate. They make it look like they care about the topic.

Element of Fun. Being able to add an element of fun can really make all the difference. The more emotional levels a speech hits the audience, more rapport is built. It’s really an amazing thing. If you shock them, if you make them laugh, if you make it fun, you will be able to powerfully persuade them. The element of fun, doesn’t mean a joke. Fun is engaging the audience differently.To figure out what kind of fun you would like to make, it is really dependent on your audience.

Use Visuals. This is a great way to impact the audience with more than just what you say. This could be a power point presentation on a screen or it could be as simple as an object in your hands. You can use something visual to really push a point across.

Interactive. This is what makes a good public speaker. Becoming an interactive and moving speaker is in the grasp of all people. You need to asking the interesting questions to your audience related to the subject that you have discussed. By that you could see either your audience has listened and followed you or not. If you’re looking to learn to transform yourself from an ordinary speaker to extraordinary speaker.

Your Motivation Today

“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”

– Peter Ustinov

Who is Peter Ustinov? British actor Peter Ustinov is best known for his Oscar-winning roles in Topkapi and Spartacus. He was born in London in 1921 to parents of blended pan-European extraction. He wrote several plays as well as a well-received autobiography, Dear Me. From 1969 until his death in 2004, he took on the role of goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, visiting disadvantaged children all over the world. He said his multicultural background gave him automatic loyalty to the UN.

How To Enjoy Your Work

Imagine choosing to spend one third of your life unhappy. Work is where we spend a great deal of our time, and many people are dissatisfied with their career situation. Why? Often times, it’s our own limiting beliefs that keep us from enjoying our work. We may make it worse by saying things like, “The money’s terrible.” “My co-workers are unreliable.” “I don’t have the skills to get that promotion I really want.” “It’s too tough to keep my business afloat, especially in this economy.”

These limiting beliefs may have kernels of truth, but none of these reasons need hold you back from not only finding enjoyment in what you do right now, but also taking your career and your business to the next level.

The truth is your unhappiness in this area we call work is not coming from a lack of anything. You have the ultimate resource within you to either change how you feel about your life’s work, or change it from a job to a passionate mission. The difference between someone thrilled about what they do, versus someone “getting by” at work, is emotional fitness—the capacity to find a deeper, more empowering meaning that keeps you going. You build emotional fitness by arming yourself with the tools necessary for peak work performance and fulfillment. These tools can be as simple as improving your state, or your physiology in any moment, or simply the language you use. But first take a deeper look into what’s really troubling you at work. Once you start replacing disempowering beliefs with empowering questions, you give yourself support toward enjoying your work instead of enduring it. “A happy employee needs to feel that work is important,” says Jane Boucher, author of How to Love the Job You Hate: Job Satisfaction for the 21st Century. “There has to be a sense of empowerment and independence.”

Exercise: Improve Your Work-Life Now! Complete the exercise below to determine what could be holding you back from improving your work situation now. (Note: these same questions could apply to any area of your life).

1. Write down one challenge happening within your work or business right now. Do you like your work but feel overwhelmed? Are you experiencing conflict with a boss or co-worker? Do you want to ask for a raise yet are afraid to? Do you want to completely change what you do?

2. How could you use this challenge as an opportunity for growth? For example, a consistent argument with a co-worker could open the door for stronger communication, learning how to empathize with others by stepping into their shoes, and improving your overall ability to influence others positively.

3. What one or two small actions could you take? Could you take that co-worker out to lunch; or commit to doing one small thing a day to strengthen your relationship; take interest in a project they’re working on, or praise great effort?

Your Inspiration Today

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”

Theodor Seuss Geisel

 Who is Theodor Seuss Geisel? Theodor Seuss Geisel, the beloved Dr. Seuss, is renowned to generations of children as the author of Green Eggs and Ham and other deliciously absurd picture books. He was born in 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts. His first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected 27 times. He wrote The Cat in the Hat after Houghton Mifflin asked him to write a children’s primer using fewer than 250 easy-reader words. He died in 1991.

 

The Man Behind Honda Company

“I’ve failed 99% of my trials, in order to succeed in the remaining 1%”

“I’ve never refused competitors’ visits to our factory. I’ve welcomed them at any time. Because I am willing to jump to new innovations when they try to follow us.”

 

Soichiro Honda never forgot the day he became a small figure who ran hopelessly after the first motor car he ever saw. Long before it actually reached Yamahigashi, a small village in Japan’s Shizuoka prefecture (now called Tenryu-shi), its own extraordinary noise heralded its imminent arrival. The small boy who heard the rumble was at first astonished, then excited, and finally enthralled, by it.

Later he would describe that moment as one of those life-changing experiences. He was seeing his first car, and as he began to tremble the closer it drew, and the dust cloud of its passage engulfed him, something inside him was triggered off.

“I turned and chased after that car for all I was worth,” he said later. “I could not understand how it could move under its own power. And when it had driven past me, without even thinking why I found myself chasing it down the road, as hard as I could run.”

He had no chance of catching it, and the experience became a symbol for his life: always he was chasing something that was just beyond his reach. By the time the road was empty and the car long departed, the young boy continued to stand there breathing in its gasoline stench. When he came upon a drop of its precious lifeblood spilled on the dusty track, he dropped to his knees and sniffed the oily stain like a man in a desert smelling water.

Soichiro Honda was born in Yamahigashi on November 17 1906. His father, Gihei Honda, was the local blacksmith but could turn his hands to most things, including dentistry when the need arose. His mother, Mika, was a weaver.

Honda’s subsequent spirit of adventure and determination to explore the development of new technology had its roots in his childhood. The family was not wealthy, but Gihei Honda instilled into his children the ethic of hard work, and a love of mechanical things. Soichiro soon learned how to whet the blades of farm machinery, and how to make his own toys. A nearby rice mill was powered by a small engine, and the noise fascinated him. He would demand daily that his grandfather take him to watch it in action. At school he got the nickname ‘black nose weasel’, which is less derogatory in Japanese than it sounds in English, because his face was always dirty from helping his father in the forge.

Soichiro Honda’s childhood days are full of examples of technical ingenuity, including using a bicycle pedal rubber to forge his family’s seal on school reports that were less than promising. The bicycles had another use: those that his father sold from the shop he subsequently opened helped Honda to hone his engineering skills. As he grew, the dream of the car on the country road acted like a magnetic force, drawing him ever closer towards things mechanical. In 1917 a pilot called Art Smith flew into the Wachiyama military airfield to demonstrate his biplane’s aerobatic capabilities. Honda raided the family’s petty cash box, ‘borrowed’ one of his father’s bicycles and rode the 20 kilometers to a place he had never before visited. When he got there he soon realized that the price of admission, let alone a flight, was far beyond his meager means, but after climbing a tree he watched the plane in motion, and that was enough. When Gihei Honda learned what his son had done to get to the airfield, he was more impressed with his initiative, determination and resilience than he was angry with him for taking the money and the bike.

As customers brought in Mercedes, Lincolns and Daimlers for attention, Honda’s experience grew in proportion with his ambition. Four years after that first race he started his own Art Shokai auto shop in Hamamatsu. It opened its doors for business on the day that, thousands of miles away on Daytona Beach, Frank Lockhart crashed to his death trying to break the land speed record. April 25, 1928. The American track star and the Japanese kid lived in different worlds but had much in common besides their willingness to take a risk. Lockhart’s mechanical genius had set new standards for record car design, and in the years that followed Soichiro Honda’s own technological ideas would similarly revolutionize Japan’s motorcycle and automobile industries.

Yet Honda himself never sought dominance in his homeland. At a time when nationalism was at its peak, he always saw the bigger picture. “I knew that if I could succeed in the world market,” he said, “then automatically it would follow that we led in the Japanese market.” Soichiro Honda was the prototypical F1 engineer. He was always probing new limits of technology, always seeking better and greater feedback from the men who rode or drove the machines that bore his name. He preached the gospel that ambition was no sin, and that success was the reward for hard work and investment. Honda was the first major manufacturer to understand that motorsport was the perfect crucible in which to develop not just superior machines, but superior engineers, and today every global player in the F1 game rotates its engineers through its motorsport programs.

Yet there was more than even that to Honda. He and his wife Sachi both held private pilot’s licenses, he was still skiing, hang-gliding and ballooning at 77, and he was a highly accomplished artist. And he was a man of rare understanding. He had never wanted to follow his father in the smithy or the bicycle shop, and he and Fujisawa made a pact never to force their own sons to join the company.

Today Honda continues to leave honorable footprints in the motorsport sand, for it has been racing ever since that day in 1917 when Soichiro Honda left his own footprints chasing an automobile – and a dream – down a dusty road that had no end.

 

 

 

Your Motivation Today

“When you encounter difficulties and contradictions, do not try to break them, but bend them with gentleness and time.”

–        St. Francis de Sales

Your Motivation Today

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”

– Milan Kundera

About Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera, the modernist Czech novelist best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, laces politics and philosophical digressions into his complex narrative structure. He was born in 1929 on April Fool’s Day, and his first novel was, appropriately enough, The Joke. An ardent reformist, he was ejected from the Communist party twice for speaking out against repression. In 1975, he fled to France, where he still teaches.

The God Of Management

Konosuke Matsushita (1894-1989) started with nothing but an idea for an electric plug, and createda vast business empire that spread around the world. As the owner of Panasonic Corporation and other profitable business ventures, he amassed a personal fortune valued at more than three billion dollars.

Since his name has never been prominently displayed, Konosuke Matsushita is not as well known as Sam Walton or Henry Ford or Honda or any of the other business giants who used their names on their products. But his company, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., generated more revenue during his lifetime than any of the others. Although he was generally unknown outside his native land of Japan, his company’s sales eventually exceeded sixty three billion dollars every year.

Humble Beginnings. Matsushita was born into humble circumstances in the Japanese village of Wasa, on November 27, 1894. He grew into a nervous, rather sickly young adult with an un-promising future. At a time when you had to be well educated, charismatic, even rich, to succeed, he seemed destined for a life of struggle. The youngest of eight children, Matsushita had a father who gambled away the family’s money. At the age of nine, he took a job as an apprentice in a bicycle shop to help the family survive.  

One of the traits that followed Matsushita throughout his career was a willingness to take risks. He did that when he quit his bicycle shop job to accept employment at Osaka Light, an electric utility company. Matsushita was quickly promoted and eventually became an inspector, a respectable job at which many might have stayed until retirement. Perhaps Matsushita even considered that. However, while working at Osaka Light, he had managed to create a new type of light socket, one that was better than anything available at the time. Matsushita showed the invention to his boss, who was unimpressed.

Matsushita had no money and no real business experience, but he did have drive and ambition. So, in 1917, he decided to manufacture the device himself. With the help of his wife and three eager assistants, Matsushita began his business. The combined education of the five amounted to less than a high school education, and none had any experience in manufacturing an electric plug. But they had ambition. In a cramped two-room tenement house, they worked long hours, seven days a week. After several very lean months, they had completed a few samples of the new product.

Wholesalers generally rejected his new style electric plug. They told him it was acceptable, even innovative, but that he needed far more than one single item for the large wholesalers and retailers to be interested in his company. He persevered, and gradually people began to buy the plug, when they saw that it was better in quality and almost 50% lower in price. Matsushita kept his business afloat by taking on contracts for other items, such as insulator plates. By 1922, his firm was introducing new items every month. He was also developing business strategies that made him stand out from his competitors. He learned that a new product had to be 30% better and 30% less expensive, than one already on the market. By giving his products away, he could eventually sell many more of them. He also pioneered an effective after sale service program.

Designed Bicycle Lamps. Bicycle lamps, a very necessary item in Japan, had bad reputations. They seemed to constantly fail. Matsushita realized that an efficient lamp for the millions of bicycles in his country could become a popular item. So he designed one. Although it wasn’t an immediate success, his “bullet lamp” eventually became the standard by which the entire industry was judged. Matsushita’s battery powered lamp became so successful that many people bought them for use in their homes to replace the traditional kerosene lamps. Matsushita Electric was on the way to becoming a giant in the industry.

The 1923 bullet-lamp was followed by an electric space heater, an electrically heated table, and a new type of thermostat. The first Matsushita radio, a 3 vacuum tube model, was introduced in 1931. It won first prize in the Tokyo Broadcasting Station radio contest. Other inventions followed, including electric motors and electric fans.

Hard Times. Times were not entirely smooth along the way. Although refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, color television sets, and stereo equipment would eventually be produced, there were some setbacks. With the Great Depression of the 1930s, Matsushita saw sales fall dramatically. But unlike other companies, he didn’t lay off his growing number of employees, people he considered a part of his family. Instead, he shifted them about, moving factory workers to sales positions. At the same time he cut production schedules. Still, his warehouses were full of unsold merchandise.

Matsushita would not change his mind when managers insisted that the company must lay off employees and shut down facilities in order to survive. He cut work hours by half, but continued to pay his employees full wages. He also asked his workers to help sell the  backlog of stock, and they responded. As other companies were failing, Matsushita Electric held on.

World War Two. Matsushita’s company was beginning to recover, when the Second World War brought devastation to his country. It is difficult to say how Matsushita felt about the war since he was a very private man, but his company did manufacture materials for the Japanese war machine. When Japan was defeated and the Allied powers took control, Matsushita was ordered to cease all production. Since his company had manufactured products to help Japan in the war effort, Matsushita Electric was burdened with severe restrictions. It appeared to be the end of his company, as it was with many other Japanese companies who never recovered after the war. Matsushita, himself, was nearly removed from the leadership of the company he created. His employees petitioned the military government to allow him to stay.

Matsushita convinced General Douglas MacArthur and other military governors that his company should be allowed to resume production of peacetime products. He promised that Japan would once again be a world power, but this time by peaceful means. He believed that his country could lead the world in electronics. The military governors, realizing that such a strategy would help Japan recover from the devastation of war, permitted Matsushita’s company to reopen. Matsushita and his management team began to rebuild. Soon Matsushita Electric was back in production and making a profit. Morale among employees was strong.

Matsushita Electric continued to expand, acquiring many other companies. In 1952, it offered consumers the first black and white television sets. By 1959, Matsushita had established not only the Kyushu Matsushita Electric Company, the Osaka Precision Machinery Company (later renamed Matsushita Seiko), and the Matsushita Communication Industrial group (which manufactured the first tape recorder), but also Matsushita Electric Corporation of America. The company’s first color television sets was marketed in 1960, as it continued to spread around the world with brand names like “National” and “Panasonic.”

Paternal Management Philosophy. When Matsushita began his company with a handful of nondescript electric plugs, few could have predicted the phenomenal success that lay ahead. He believed that a company should create wealth for society as well as for shareholders, and should always work to alleviate poverty. Matsushita’s business philosophy led to the Japanese “paternal management” tradition, whereby employees are viewed as being part of a “family” within the company, and are assured of lifetime employment, without fear of layoffs.

Outside the office of the Matsushita company, engraved in stone, is the creed and basic management objective of its creator and long-time president. The plaque says, “Recognizing our responsibilities as industrialists, we will devote ourselves to the progress and development of society and the well-being of people through our business activities, thereby enhancing the quality of life throughout the world.”

One of the most lasting of Matsushita’s business sayings was, “If we cannot make a profit, that means we are committing a sort of crime against society. We take society’s capital, we take their people, we take their materials, yet without a good profit, we are using precious resources that could be better used elsewhere.” His companies always made a profit. At one point, an American shopping for a video cassette recorder might look at GE, RCA, Sylvania, Magnavox, Montgomery Ward, Quasar and Panasonic without the knowledge that every one of these models was made by Matsushita.

Konosuke Matsushita was 94 years old when he died in Tokyo on April 27, 1989, leaving behind a vast manufacturing empire.

 

Your Motivation Today

“Enthusiasm without knowledge is not good; a person who moves too quickly may go the wrong way.”