Rooted in traditional Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements as taught by Don Miguel Ruiz offer steps toward personal freedom and a life of peace, grace, and unconditional love. The Toltec strived for mastery of awareness through personal discipline. The agreements are simple but profound; here is the essence of each of them:
It’s common for corporate executives who are retiring to say they’ll be spending more time with their family. But Google’s chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, appears to really mean it.
In an unusually reflective and candid letter posted Tuesday afternoon to Google Plus, Pichette wrote that “after nearly 7 years as CFO, I will be retiring from Google to spend more time with my family. Yeah, I know you’ve heard that line before. We give a lot to our jobs. I certainly did.” He said he wrote the letter because “I want to share my thought process because so many people struggle to strike the right balance between work and personal life.”
Unfortunately, just before you take your first step on the righteous journey to pursue your dreams, people around you, even the ones who deeply care for you, will give you awful advice. It’s not because they have evil intentions. It’s because they don’t understand the big picture – what your dreams, passions, and life goals mean to you. They don’t understand that, to you, the reward is worth the risk.
So they try to protect you by shielding you from the possibility of failure, which, in effect, also shields you from the possibility of making your dreams a reality.
As our friend Steve Jobs says:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Here are 10 ill-advised tips (lies) people will likely tell you when you decide to pursue your dreams, and why they are dreadfully mistaken.
“I hire people brighter than me and I get out of their way.”
– Lee Iacocca
“The competition to hire the best will increase in the years ahead. Companies that give extra flexibility to their employees will have the edge in this area.”
– Bill Gates
“Some people can do one thing magnificently, like Michelangelo, and others make things like semiconductors or build 747 airplanes — that type of work requires legions of people. In order to do things well, that can’t be done by one person, you must find extraordinary people.”
– Steve Jobs
“Care without candor creates dysfunctional relationships.
Candor without care creates distant relationships.
But care balanced with candor creates developing relationships.”
– James Maxwell
Life is more than “what you do” We live in a society that likes to define us by our job titles, how much money we make, who we know, and how cool our business card looks.
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