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by General Colin Luther Powell
The less you associate with some people, the more your life will improve. Any time you tolerate mediocrity in others, it increases your mediocrity. An import ant attribute in successful people is their impatience with negative thinking and negative acting people. As you grow, your associates will change. Some of your friends will not want you to go on. They will want you to stay where they are. Friends that don’t help you climb will want you to crawl. Your friends will stretch your vision or choke your dream. Those that don’t increase you will eventually decrease you.Consider this:
Never receive counsel from unproductive people. Never discuss your problems with someone incapable of contributing to the solution, because those who never succeed themselves are always first to tell you how. Not everyone has a right to speak into your life. You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person. Don’t follow anyone who’s not going anywhere.
Never receive counsel from unproductive people. Never discuss your problems with someone incapable of contributing to the solution, because those who never succeed themselves are always first to tell you how. Not everyone has a right to speak into your life. You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person. Don’t follow anyone who’s not going anywhere.
With some people you spend an evening: with others you invest it. Be careful where you stop to inquire for directions along the road of life. Wise is the person who fortifies his life with the right friendships. If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl. But, if you associate with eagles, you will learn how to soar to great heights.
“A mirror reflects a man’s face, but what he is really like is shown by the kind of friends he chooses.”
The simple but true fact of life is that you become like those with whom you closely associate – for the good and the bad.
Note: Be not mistaken. This is applicable to family as well as friends. Yes…do love, appreciate and be thankful for your family, for they will always be your family no matter what. Just know that they are human first and though they are family to you, they may be a friend to someone else and will fit somewhere in the criteria above.
“In Prosperity Our Friends Know Us. In Adversity We Know Our friends.”
Like this:
Tegen het eind van het jaar ben ik altijd benieuwd naar hoe mensen het afgelopen jaar hebben ervaren en of ze goede voornemens hebben. Maar enigszins in een tegendraadse bui, wil ik eigenlijk liever een oproep doen om eens stil te staan bij alle fouten die je ooit gemaakt hebt en deze onder een vergrootglas te zetten: de schoonheidsfoutjes, de genante maar nu wel lachwekkende blunders en de grootste missers in je leven.
Waarom deze ommekeer? Komen we tegen het eind van het jaar niet liever met positieve voornemens? Van waar deze zo “half-lege-glas” benadering? Gewoon omdat het ook weleens lekker is om niet perfect of sterk of mooi te willen zijn en om jezelf als ex- slachtoffer te zien van alles wat je hebt meegemaakt. We weten allemaal dat fouten maken bij het leven hoort en dat we van onze fouten leren. Soms (en vaker dan we willen…) gaan we herhaaldelijk de fout in en zijn we in bepaalde opzichten wat hardleers. Elke fout is echter een les die verhuld is in een persoon, situatie of interactie. Je staat er dus nooit alleen voor. Klinkt misschien raar, maar we hebben altijd in contact gestaan met mensen die ons ertoe hebben gezet. Of voor wie we het, al dan niet onbewust, doen. Bijvoorbeeld knap en slim zijn om in de smaak te vallen…herkenbaar? In de herhaling gaan is daarom niet wat je overkomt, maar wat je als herkansing kunt zien. Wie weet heeft het ook te maken met het doorboren van je eigen pantser? Als iets niet lijkt te werken zoals het vinden van de juiste partner, de juiste baan/studie of het juiste dieet dan zijn we blijkbaar nog niet klaar met het vinden van datgene wat echt past. Wellicht is het dan de hoogste tijd om heel eerlijk naar jezelf te kijken en jezelf af te vragen wat je echte beweegredenen zijn voor de keuzes die je maakt. De andere kant van de medaille is dat tegelijkertijd je doorzettingsvermogen en je wilskracht op de proef worden gesteld. Een test en de tijd om bij te stellen tot iets of iemand bij je past.
Om tot de essentie te komen doen we vaak ook best moeilijke dingen en neigen we ernaar om onszelf op de kop te geven. We vergeten echter dat we veel makkelijker tot onze essentie en daarmee dé essentie komen door onze zintuigen bewuster en intenser te gebruiken. Hoor wat je echt prettig vindt en zet je favoriete muziek op een disc, eet wat je lekker vindt en luister naar je lichaam zoals die reageert op wat je naar binnenwerkt, proef het goede van het leven, snuif de geuren van het leven en dus de natuur op, raak je dierbaren vaker aan, geef en voel de warmte die mensen naar je uitstralen…Essence en Senses vormen een ijzersterke combinatie!
En wat je foute keuzes betreft:
• Schrijf het op! In je dagboek of maak er desnoods een werkstukje van. • Schrijf het op alsof je leven er vanaf hangt en verbloem niks voor jezelf.
• Erken dat je 50% aandeel hebt in wat je fout hebt gedaan maar geef ook toe dat je 100% verantwoordelijk bent voor hoe je je nu, vandaag, voelt!
• Beloof jezelf dat je niet weer dezelfde fouten gaat maken, maar geef jezelf de ruimte en toestemming om wel fouten te blijven maken.
• Doe er tenslotte een grote strik omheen en stuur het met de koerier mee naar het U.P.S.: Universum van Persoonlijke Stommiteiten.
Laat los en kom tot de essentie. Wat bij jou hoort blijft of komt terug. De rest valt af. #Afval.
About the film (film description copied from PBS)
Off and Running is an American coming-of-age story. But it is one shaped by the new realities of an increasingly diverse American population, especially as those realities affect family life. Brooklyn teen Avery Klein-Cloud is the African-American adoptive daughter of white Jewish lesbians. Her siblings, also adopted, are an older black and Puerto Rican boy and a young Korean-American boy. Avery has grown up loved, supported and happy. Off and Running opens with the popular high school track star in her junior year, looking forward to college and a successful life.
The Klein-Cloud family. Photo courtesy of Off and Running
But the outside world, with its deep concerns about race and identity, begins to intrude upon this happy family. Avery’s upbringing in a Jewish household and her distance from black culture were not issues for her during childhood, but as she approaches adulthood, she grows more troubled by her ignorance of her own roots. With the support of her parents, she decides to learn about her past by writing to her birth mother. The result is a crisis whose depth takes Avery, her parents and the filmmakers by surprise — a crisis that threatens to sweep away the teen’s promising future.
As a little girl, Avery was the only black child in Hebrew school. In high school, her black friends, including her boyfriend, also a track star, often tease her about how little she knows about African- American culture. It’s all in good fun and Avery, in turn, likes to tell her friends about Jewish culture and her family’s diversity. But at some point during her junior year, Avery’s distance from black life begins to eat at her. Her parents, Tova and Travis, support her efforts to contact her birth mother through the agency that handled her adoption, though they caution her that she may not get the answer she wants — or any answer at all. After three anxious months, a reply comes from Avery’s birth mother, Kay, in Austin, Texas. It’s a kind enough letter that asks for Avery’s forgiveness for giving her up and informs her that she has three brothers, a sister and a nephew. There is no indication, however, that Kay wants a relationship with Avery.
The effect on Avery is intense. The lack of connection she has always felt around other African-American culture becomes an issue of paramount importance. The question “Who am I and where did I come from?” obsesses her. Avery has numerous conversations with Tova and Travis about her doubts and questions. But no amount of love and understanding seems to help Avery or ease her turmoil. In fact, tensions in the household, and Avery’s anger, only increase. For Avery, “growing into my own person” means creating a complementary black identity. She begins to remodel herself with a new hairstyle, interests and circle of friends, but she sees no role for Tova and Travis in this effort.
Avery Klein-Cloud. Photo courtesy of Off and Running.
The family member she remains closest to is her older brother, Rafi. As a mixed-race adoptee, he can understand and sympathize with Avery’s dilemmas and questions. Yet Rafi provides a dramatic counterpoint to Avery’s turmoil — and disproves the idea that cross-racial adoptees inevitably face identity crises. Rafi doesn’t share Avery’s angst. His birth mother, a crack addict, left his biological younger brother brain-damaged, and Rafi feels unambiguously lucky and grateful for the life he has been given by Tova and Travis. In fact, he wants to become a neurosurgeon so he can put his good fortune to work helping people like his brain-damaged brother.
Despite these differences, Rafi is Avery’s chief — and sometimes only — emotional support in the family. And when he leaves for college, Avery feels more alienated and confused than ever, and Off and Running takes a drastic turn. To the distress of Tova and Travis, Avery stops coming home. She stays at friends’ houses, begins skipping school and track practice and even misses her parents’ wedding in Massachusetts. In a very short time, this highly promising teenager has entered a downward spiral that seems poised to take away her future.
Only Avery’s boyfriend, Prince, is confident that she will regain her balance and the disciplined sports focus they previously shared. As dramatically chronicled in Off and Running, a changed and wiser Avery does ultimately rally to graduate, win a bronze medal at the state track championships and earn a scholarship to college in Delaware. She also realizes, in a roundabout way that no one could have predicted, that Tova and Travis — for all that they could not tell her about her African-American roots — nonetheless have given her the strength, determination and independence to meet her identity crisis and become, indeed, her own person.
“I wasn’t prepared for the complete meltdown that Avery had halfway through our filming together,” says director Opper. “But we made a pact. We had started this project together and we would finish it together. I began inviting her over to watch and respond to the scenes as we were cutting them. This was her story, and it was important that she feel ownership of the process.”
Off and Running is a co-production of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) association with American Documentary | POV and the Diverse Voices Project, with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It is a selected project of Tribeca All Access, with support from the Foundation for Jewish Culture and the National Black Programming Consortium.
Film Description (copied from: PBS)
In 1966, Cha Jung Hee was an 8-year-old girl at Sun Duck Orphanage who became one of the thousands of Korean orphans adopted by Americans in the years following the Korean War. U.S. military presence, Cold War politics and the realities of a war-torn society still struggling to climb out of the ruins made Korea the primary source for international adoptions by Americans, and it would remain so for many years. All such adoptions can present daunting challenges to adoptees as they come of age and try to understand their split heritage. But this story had a further twist.
For Cha Jung Hee, the good fortune of being whisked away to an affluent country by loving new parents masked even more troubling questions. For one thing, Deann Borshay, as little Cha Jung Hee became known in America, wasn’t an orphan. As related in Liem’s earlier documentary First Person Plural (POV 2000; encore presentation Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2010), lingering memories led the filmmaker to discover that her birth family was still alive. And there was another buried memory. Liem wasn’t Cha Jung Hee at all. She was Kang Ok Jin, another 8-year-old girl at Sun Duck Orphanage. Her identity had been switched with Cha Jung Hee’s just before the latter was to be adopted by the Borshay family in California. She’d been instructed to keep that secret even from her adoptive parents. But why was the switch made? And what became of the real Cha Jung Hee?
Liem’s quest to understand the act that determined the course of her life impels her to find the real Cha Jung Hee. Armed with a tattered black and white photo of Cha Jung Hee and the shoes her mother-to-be sent more than 40 years earlier for her journey to America, Liem returns to a bustling, modern Seoul and a Korea vastly different from the devastated country she left in 1966. As In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee shows through old photos and newsreels, endemic poverty, lingering destruction from the war and a huge population of orphaned, lost and abandoned children set off humanitarian campaigns in a dozen Western countries to encourage adoption of Korean children. During Liem’s visit, she attends the annual gathering of the International Korean Adoptee Associations and meditates on the randomness of fate that turned her into an American rather than one of the Swedes or Danes she meets. She also learns that the tide of Korean adoptees — some 200,000 — peaked as recently as 1985, well after the country had become developed, democratic and prosperous. In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee raises a troubling question: How and why did a humanitarian effort become an industry worth millions of dollars?
But Liem’s first stop is the Sun Duck Orphanage. She reviews the orphanage’s files with current director Kim Dae Jin and discovers another photo of the real Cha Jung Hee. A switch certainly was made, and the social worker who cared for the children reveals the reason: Cha Jung Hee was not an orphan. On a night shortly before she was due to leave for the United States, her father showed up and took her away. Rather than disappoint the Borshays, the orphanage substituted one 8-year-old girl for another, complete with a forged passport and brand new American shoes. Was this a purely humane decision or was there some financial motivation as well? In any case, the real Cha Jung Hee had disappeared with her father, and no one knew what had become of her.
Liem’s quest leads her and her interpreter to make calls to more than 100 Cha Jung Hees in the phone book, and she meets several women named Cha Jung Hee who turn out not to be the one she seeks, but who give her a glimpse of who she might have become. Then Liem visits the Police Separated Families Bureau and encounters a policeman who specializes in reuniting families. The stories of Koreans who lived through the dark past, begin to accumulate, offering a rare and intimate recollection of a shared time of violence, social disintegration and difficult choices. But the Cha Jung Hee who haunts Liem’s dreams remains elusive.
Ultimately, she does meet a woman who may be the Cha Jung Hee she is seeking. The photographic evidence is striking and the outlines of the two women’s stories intersect. The little girl’s shoes that Liem has saved even spark memories and tears in this Cha Jung Hee. But there is no way to be certain. In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee still manages to get inside the stories that determined the fate of so many Korean children and changed the lives of many American families.
Both a meditative quest and an historical whodunit, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee reveals that in today’s world the search for identity — by Korean adoptees of the 1960s and ’70s, or by any child displaced by history — may yield more questions than answers.
“For years, Cha Jung Hee was, paradoxically, both a stranger and also my official identity — someone unknown but always present, defining my life,” says director Liem. “I felt I had to search for Cha Jung Hee finally to put my questions to rest by meeting her and finding out how she has fared. In the course of my journey, I met many women named Cha Jung Hee and through their stories imagine what my life would have been like had I stayed in Korea.
“Although I arrived in America walking in Cha Jung Hee’s shoes, I can see now the path I’ve taken has always been my own. And if I look closely, I can see a glimpse of the girl I used to be and I can picture her stepping out of the past and into the present.”
In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee is a co-production of Mu Films and the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in association with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), Katahdin Productions and American Documentary | POV.
The Directors View
