In the world we live in something utterly unexpected always happens....you bet..!!

One day in 1996, a Wall Street trader named Nassim Nicholas Taleb went to see Victor Niederhoffer. Victor was one of the most successful money managers in the country. He lived and worked out of a thirteen-acre compound in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and when Nassim drove up that day from his home in Larchmont he had to give his name at the gate, and then make his way down a long, curving driveway.

Victor had a squash court and a tennis court and a swimming pool and a colossal, faux-alpine mansion in which virtually every square inch of space was covered with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American folk art. In those days, he played tennis regularly with the billionaire financier George Soros. He had just written a best-selling book, “The Education of a Speculator,” dedicated to his father, Artie Niederhoffer, a police officer from Coney Island. He had a huge and eclectic library and a seemingly insatiable desire for knowledge.

Don’t let any monkey pop into your head..

A young man was very much interested in the esoteric, in the mysterious. He found a saint who was known to have many secrets, but it was very difficult to get any secret from him. The young man said, “I will see. I will devote my whole life to his service, and I will get the secrets, the mysteries.”

So he remained with the old saint. The old saint told him, “You are unnecessarily wasting your time. I don’t have anything, I am just a poor old soul. Because I don’t speak, people think I am keeping some secret. But I don’t have anything to say, so I remain silent.”
But the man said, “I cannot be persuaded so easily. You will have to give me the secret which opens the door of all the mysteries.”

On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure.....and she stood by him..!!

Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job.

“I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff and I didn’t know if the parachute was going to open. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of law. I could have had a good career. And my parents were very proud of me—my dad was so proud of me. . . . It was crazy.”

Pausing to delight in the simple joys of everyday life is the only way to truly live

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. --Ralph Waldo Emerson.
When you’re living a distracted life, every minute must be accounted for. You feel like you must be checking something off the list, staring at a screen, or rushing off to the next destination. And no matter how many ways you divide your time and attention, no matter how many duties you try and multi-task, there’s never enough time in a day to ever catch up.

That was my life for two frantic years. My thoughts and actions were controlled by electronic notifications, ring tones, and jam-packed agendas. And although every fiber of my inner drill sergeant wanted to be on time to every activity on my overcommitted schedule, I wasn’t.
You see, six years ago I was blessed with a laid-back, carefree, stop-and-smell-the roses type of child. 

Have a Newly Rich Life With Yourself....

Do not despise your inner world.
Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself.
And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve.

As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament:

Share more of yourself by just "being yourself" in the "Stillness of mind"...

So many of us believe that we have to do something. We have to take action in order to make a difference in the world. We must have a higher purpose, a mission, a profound calling. And while action certainly has its place, it's really *how we are* in the world that makes the difference.
“When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.” ~ Peace Pilgrim.
Buddha was once travelling from one town to the other with some of his followers. While travelling, they happened to pass a lake.

They stopped a while and Buddha told one of his followers, “I am feeling thirsty. Please fetch me some water from that lake.”

God willing, tomorrow it is going to happen

When a great Sufi mystic, Hassan, was dying, somebody asked, ‘Hassan, who was your Master?’

He said, ‘Now it is too late to ask. Time is short, I am dying.’ But the inquirer asked, ‘You can simply say the name. You are still alive, you are still breathing and talking, you can simply tell me the name.’
He said, ‘It will be difficult because I had thousands of Masters. If I just relate their names it will take months and years. It is too late. But three Masters I will certainly tell you about.

In search of Holy Grail.... "Eid Mubarak".

There was once a woman who had heard of the Fruit of Heaven. She coveted it. She asked a certain dervish,Sabar:
‘How can I find this fruit, so that I may attain to immediate knowledge?’

‘You would best be advised to study with me’, said the dervish.

With self-confidence & Perseverance, you can never, never give up...!

I had an opportunity to interact with the readers of a famous Magazine. It was a two-day program. At the end of the program, a young man asked me:
'Swamiji! I am a postgraduate. It is more than ten years since I completed my studies. So far, I have not received even a single interview card from the employment exchange. So, I am working as a cashier in a restaurant.

This job has no connection whatsoever with my educational qualifications. Last month, there was a shortage of cash at the counter. I do not know how it happened. The shame of being accused loomed large in my mind.

Deliberate practice & 10 Years of Silence will set you "apart"...!!

Out of a list of 500 pieces that were played frequently by symphonies around the world and were considered to be the “masterworks” in the field, virtually every single “masterwork” was written after year ten of the composer’s career. Not a single person produced incredible work without putting in a decade of practice first. Even a genius like Mozart had to work for at least ten years before he produced something that became popular.

This period, which was filled with hard work and little recognition, as the “ten years of silence.” Similar patterns were found among famous painters like Picasso and popular poets. Further research revealed that you needed to put in “10,000 hours” to become an expert in your field. (This idea was later popularized by Malcolm Gladwell.)

Become resourceful with what you have and Let simplicity guide all your affairs...

You can't change the cards life has dealt you, but you can determine the way you'll play them. That's the philosophy Wendy Stoeker decided to live by.
When she was a freshman at the University of Florida, Wendy was placed third in the girl's state diving championship. At that point, she was swimming number two spot on the highly competitive Florida swim team and carrying a full academic load.

Wendy Stoeker certainly sounds like an accomplished, happy, positive, well-balanced coed, capable of making life whatever she wishes it to be, doesn't she?.
Well, you're right when you say that's what she was and is. The fact is, she already made life what she wants it to be, even though she was born without arms.

Compete or create..?

We come with empty hands and we will go with empty hands, so what is the point of claiming so much in the meantime? But this is what we know, what the world tells us: Possess, dominate, have more than others have. It may be money or it may be virtue; it does not matter in what kind of coins you deal– they may be worldly, they may be otherworldly. But be very clever, otherwise you will be exploited. Exploit and don’t be exploited– that is the subtle message given to you with your mother’s milk. And every school, college, university, is rooted in the idea of competition.

A real education will not teach you to compete; it will teach you to cooperate. It will not teach you to fight and come first. It will teach you to be creative, to be loving, to be blissful, without comparing yourself to others. It will not teach you that you can be happy only when you are the first– that is sheer nonsense. You can’t be happy just by being first, and in trying to be first you go through such misery that by the time you become the first you are habituated to misery.

The little woman who inspired the cable TV Moghul to give away a Billion $....

Oseola McCarty spent a lifetime making other people look nice. Day after day, for most of her 87 years, she took in bundles of dirty clothes and made them clean and neat for parties she never attended, weddings to which she was never invited, graduations she never saw.

She had quit school in the sixth grade to go to work, never married, never had children and never learned to drive because there was never any place in particular she wanted to go. All she ever had was the work, which she saw as a blessing. Too many other black people in rural Mississippi did not have even that.
She spent almost nothing, living in her old family home, cutting the toes out of shoes if they did not fit right and binding her ragged Bible with Scotch tape to keep Corinthians from falling out. Over the decades, her pay -- mostly dollar bills and change -- grew to more than $150,000.

It is grace and poise that give us the opportunity to deploy our skills reliably...

War and combat is filled with stories of men (and women) snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Impossible circumstances, unfavorable odds, somehow they still lead to almost miraculous triumphs. The trait that make this possible and how it can be applied to life, across disciplines is one philosophy—battle tested at the front—that shows us the way-Stoicism. Best articulated by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (who spent 17 years of a 19-year reign at war) with the simple line:
 “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” 
A parade of military legends followed his example. They all figured out how to turn obstacles upside down—how to turn what was in the path, into the path.

During the American Civil War, Union troops were unloading a steamboat near Union headquarters outside Richmond when it suddenly exploded. Everyone hit the dirt as debris and shells and even bodies rained down—everyone but Ulysses S. Grant who, as the leader of the Union forces, was seen running toward the scene of the explosion.

"Doing"... beats "talking" every time...

Chances are good you read the story, then probably gave it little, if any, additional thought. It was interesting, fascinating, unbelievable, and inspiring. At the time, you were probably thinking, May be I should attempt a little more in my own life.

Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager in 1986 flew non-stop around the world - all 24,987 miles of it - in a specially built airplane with an unusually small engine and extremely large wings.The plane that Rutan designed, the Voyager I, made its historic flight in December of 1986. It carried 7,011 pounds of fuel in tanks that looked similar to a pair of outriggers on a canoe. Its cabin, with room for his co-pilot, Jeana Yeager, was the size of a small closet. They had to be in a reclining position to fly the plane, which was as loud as a lawn mower. The flight took nine days.

Travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes but as you do, err in the direction of kindness...

Down through the ages, a traditional form has evolved for this type of speech, which is: Some old man, his best years behind him, who, over the course of his life, has made a series of dreadful mistakes (that would be me), gives heartfelt advice to a group of shining, energetic young people, with all of their best years ahead of them (that would be you).

And I intend to respect that tradition.
Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back, what do you regret?” And they’ll tell you. Sometimes, as you know, they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked. Sometimes, even when you’ve specifically requested they not tell you, they’ll tell you.
So: What do I regret?

Daring greatly requires worthiness.

There is a cultural messaging everywhere that says that an ordinary life is a meaningless life. New generation is growing up on a steady diet of reality television, celebrity culture, and unsupervised social media. I am only as good as the number of "likes" I get on Facebook...

Why are so many of us struggling with shame and feelings of worthlessness? We are living in a "culture of scarcity."
"What do you hear or see in the phrase: Never ________ enough."

Today...Now is everything!!

The chances are you've probably spent 7 of those 10 minutes replaying moments/conversations from the past and spend the other 2 minutes thinking/worrying/stressing about the future.
Research shows humans waste 97% of their focus living in the past and the future.

Both of these time zones don't exist. They are both illusions of your mind.
Your past doesn't exist - what exists is your perception of the past events.
In your future exists thousands of possible choices/outcomes/possibilities.
But - the future is only real in your mind. It does not exist.
So.. Why is living in a video tape such a bad thing?

Remove the veil of ignorance with continuous introspection after consistent application to see the divinity within you...

In a land where spiritual knowledge was celebrated and even revered, lived a scholar of brilliance that few could match. He had committed to memory a wide number of esoteric texts and could speak on any profound topic impromptu.
He gave the glimpse of the supreme peace to many who heard him talk, but alas, his was a heart that still sought that supreme peace itself. He successfully hid this failing under the cloak of scholarship, but how could he turn away from this restlessness? He was even surprised, that all the knowledge-gathering had left him wanting and un-satiated. He could not tolerate the paucity of inner peace any further. The pain was even deeper for him because he had no one else to share this secret failing.

So one day he set out. He told his followers and admirers that he was going on a pilgrimage all by himself. But it was not to any temple, church or synagogue he went. He walked deep into the forest where lived a Master in his humble monastery. His heart told him, there he will find the peace and understanding he yearned for; there he will get that wisdom which he did not find in books.

where learning ends, beginning of practice happens...and that is transformation !!

A young martial artist kneeling before the Master Sensei in a ceremony to receive a hard-earned black belt. After years of relentless training, the student has finally reached a pinnacle of achievement in the discipline. "Before granting the belt, you must pass one more test," says the Sensei.

"I am ready," responds the student, expecting perhaps one final round of sparring.
"You must answer the essential question: What is the true meaning of the black belt?"
"The end of my journey," says the student. "A well-deserved reward for all my hard work."
The Sensei waits for more. Clearly, he is not satisfied. Finally, the Sensei speaks.