Quite apart from anything else, my experience is trying to change things for the better makes you feel better, healthier. Humans are communicative animals: when you do good in a community, the benefits eventually get back to you.
Interpretation
Making positive changes benefits both the individual and the community.
This quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals within a community and the positive effects of contributing to the betterment of society. By taking action to improve one's surroundings, not only does it enhance the community, but it also leads to personal well-being and fulfillment, illustrating that altruism can create a cycle of benefits that return to the giver.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about community service programs.
I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.
I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon's advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.
If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.
But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.
First, you have to have fun. Second, you have to put love where your labour is. Third, you have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else.
It is a critical job of any entrepreneur to maximize creativity, and to build the kind of atmosphere around you that encourages people to have ideas. That means open structures, so that accepted thinking can be challenged.
You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.
There will be days when I walk in an arena and people will cheer and then there might be days when I walk in an arena and people might boo, but it all sounds the same to me because it's all just noise that lets me know that I'm relevant.
I learned early in sports that to be effective - for a player to play the best he can play - is a matter of concentration and being unaware of distractions, positive or negative.
Being confident and believing in your own self-worth is necessary to achieving your potential.
I don't think the ebbs and flows - get in great shape and then get out of shape and then see if you can get back into shape - is a good thing. So I prefer to keep my arm always ready to go.
Less gossiping, more learning. Less complaining, more excelling. Less walls, more bridges. Less fear, more courage
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.