Something good to read

Who Packed Your Parachute
An excerpt from Aim For The Heart by Tom Mathews

As a leader, do you honor and appreciate the power of WE? Do you stop to thank and recognize the members of your team? Do you consistently show an attitude of gratitude?

I recently read a great story about Captain Charles Plumb, a graduate from the Naval Academy, whose plane, after 74 successful combat missions over North Vietnam, was shot down. He parachuted to safety, but was captured, tortured and spent 2,103 days in a small box-like cell.

After surviving the ordeal, Captain Plumb received the Silver Star, Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit and two Purple Hearts, and returned to America and spoke to many groups about his experience and how it compared to the challenges of every day life.

Shortly after coming home, Charlie and his wife were sitting in a restaurant. A man rose from a nearby table, walked over and said, "You're Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!"

Surprised that he was recognized, Charlie responded, "How in the world did you know that?" The man replied, "I packed your parachute." Charlie looked up with surprise. The man pumped his hand, gave a thumbs-up, and said, "I guess it worked!"

Charlie stood to shake the man's hand, and assured him, "It most certainly did work. If it had not worked, I would not be here today."

Charlie could not sleep that night, thinking about the man. He wondered if he might have seen him and not even said, "Good morning, how are you?" He thought of the many hours the sailor had spent bending over a long wooden table in the bottom of the ship, carefully folding the silks and weaving the shrouds of each chute, each time holding in his hands the fate of someone he didn't know.

Plumb then began to realize that along with the physical parachute, he needed mental, emotional and spiritual parachutes. He had called on all these supports during his long and painful ordeal.

As a leader, how many times a day, a week, a month, do we pass up the opportunity to thank those people in our organization who are "packing our parachutes?"

 

 

 

FW: Moral of the story is too Good

Moral of the story is too Good...................................

 A giant ship engine failed. The ship's owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine.
Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.
Two of the ship's owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!
A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.
"What?!" the owners exclaimed. "He hardly did anything!"
So they wrote the old man a note saying, "Please send us an itemized bill."
The man sent a bill that read:
Tapping with a hammer...... ......... ........ $ 2.00
Knowing where to tap.......... ......... ...... $ 9,998.00
Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference

 

- 4 years of focused ASP.NET/C# development experience.

- 4 years SQL coding experience: Stored procedures, Tables, etc

- Strong communications

- Full SDLC experience

 

George Burns  - "Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed."

 

FW: Stress/Hope Teeter Totter by Wayne Perkins (Hynotist)

Stress/Hope Teeter Totter

Subtitle: Achieving Goals and Building Hope Requires Stress Annihilation


Why do you want to annihilate stress? The best reason for annihilating stress is because when you are in a stressful situation, you lose hope.

You lose focus on your goals. If you are a business professional responsible for bringing in new business, you may feel you want to give up.

Stress and hope sit at opposite ends of a teeter totter.

Do you remember when you where a small child playing on a playground at school. Many schools provided equipment for exercise. One of these pieces of equipment was a teeter totter. A teeter totter or seesaw as it is known in some places is simply a board balancing on a fulcrum with a place to sit at each end.

Two children sit on a teeter totter with the heaviest child sitting first in order for the lighter child to take a seat on the other end to balance out the load. They alternatively shift their weight to cause their seat on the teeter totter to go up and down.

Stress and hope work the same way as the two children conducting the balancing act on the teeter totter. Stress or fear as it is more accurately defined, and hope, or goals as it is more accurately portrayed, sit at opposite ends of the teeter totter.

As one end goes up the other end goes down. As stress increases its end goes higher in the air and hope goes down. As hope climbs higher in the air, stress goes down. Stress and fear are always opposing hope and goals.

It seems accurate that we need to annihilate stress and fear in order to elevate our hope and our goals.

I remember the movie the "Shawshank Redemption" where the wrongly imprisoned character, Andy, told the other inmates that hope was something no one could take away from you. He said "hope is a good thing, maybe the only thing."

We begin our lives here on earth, knowing that we could die or be incapacitated at any moment. This is why stress or fear is always near the surface of our thoughts.  The major thing that keeps us going is "hope;" hope for good health, hope for enjoyable relationships, hope for positive achievements and hope for enough money to pay for all of our desires.

To the degree that we can diminish stress and fear, we can elevate our goals and elevate hope. Is it difficult to keep hope alive while eliminating stress and fear? Yes it is difficult.

Fear is always appealing to our senses. Advertisers for example focus on our fears.

I remember an automobile commercial that started out by two guys arguing in the car and then an accident ensued. The two men were okay but shaken up visibly by the accident. Anyone watching the commercial can identify with the fear and stress associated with the accident.

Television newscasts focus on several fearful, stress causing events before they get to the sports news, business news or weather. Viewers become hooked on these stressful situations as they arrive home from work and while watching television.

Through all of our entertainment options we observe stress and fear. Words to incite fear are abundant in our spectator sports.

Think about the words and phrases you hear by sports commentators. Think about words and phrases like, "sudden death," "elimination round," "Yankees murder Red Sox," "Spurs defeat Suns."

The overwhelming majority of sports fans are affected by these terms because they are supporting "losing teams." There is usually only one world champion in any given sport, meaning all of the rest of the sports fans "feel stress and the agony of defeat." We experience the other end of the teeter totter as we lose hope.

Do you think we may carry some of this loss of hope into our jobs and our personal lives?

We are so used to being motivated by fear and stress that even our leisure time activities reflect it. Isn't that a shame?

Always remember these statements: "When we are playing on the teeter totter, stress is at one end and hope is at the other end." "We need to develop a quiet confidence to move our minds and bodies in the direction of hope."

What is your ultimate goal? Where do you want to be in five years? If you could time travel to a place in your life five years from now and look back at today, what would you tell yourself about today. How important are the stressful situations you face right now in your life? Would today even be that important in your overall success? Five years into the future, would you still be thinking about your favorite sports teams' loss of five years ago, or the price of gasoline?

Think about what life will be like five years into the future. Think about your victories, your goals and your hope.

The Teeter Totter Exercise:

Take three slow deep breaths. As you inhale slowly, breathe deeply from the bottom of your lungs. Before you exhale, hold your breath for a few moments and then exhale very slowly. Push all of the tension out of your lungs.

See yourself on the teeter totter flying higher in the air. Think about hope. Think about your specific goals and feel in your mind, your heart and your body that you have already achieved your goals.

 

Summary:

Stress and hope are constantly competing on your teeter totter of life. Stress always equals fear and hope always equals your goals. Use the teeter totter exercise daily and you will take a huge step to annihilate stress and propagate hope.

 

FW: Good Initiative taken by IIT's & IISc FREE LINK for all books !

Dear All,

The IITs have taken up an initiative of starting online teaching and thus have started offering course materials online for every engineering stream.

Many professors from all the IITs have provided course materials for each chapter and each subject.

One has to register at the link provided below and can access the course material free of cost.

Every Chapter has been described with diagrams and charts. Please spread this message to everyone, as many can benefit from this program taken up by the government and IIT.

This is just a trial period going on and hence i request everyone to register at the link given.

1] Type the following address on internet explorer http://www.nptel.iitm.ac.in

2] Click on Courses

3] sign up as a NEW USER

4] And one can access any course material.

Please spread the word, so that this initiative benefits as many students as possible.

In life there are two kinds of people a gogetter and everyone else.