Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.
Maxwell MaltzRead
What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live - with your self-respect alive and growing.
Interpretation
Opportunity does not come to those who wait; it needs to be actively pursued and created.
This quote emphasizes that opportunity is not a passive event that simply happens; rather, it requires active engagement and preparation from individuals. Maxwell Maltz encourages us to recognize that we are the creators of our own opportunities, and by developing our abilities and self-image, we can effectively pursue our destinies with confidence and self-respect.
In practice
In a motivational speech about entrepreneurship, to inspire students to create their own paths towards success.
Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.
Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome: for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, 'It's no use - I can't do it.'
Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information which you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you THINK or IMAGINE to be 'true.
The 'self-image' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.
Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.
Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible.
He who can listen to the music in the midst of noise can achieve great things.
The idea that only the swaggering, all-knowing, and ruthlessly ambitious succeed is a lie. One that has discouraged so many people with so much potential - and worse, encouraged many more to crash and burn.
If you don’t find the time, if you don’t do the work, you don’t get the results.
You have to really believe not only in yourself; you have to believe that the world is actually worth your sacrifices.
This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.
If people are kicking you in the behind, at least you're in front of them.
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