MOTIVATIONAL MOMENTS

These Motivational Moments & Jokes are brought to you by

ROLAND RHOADES
Gorham ME 04038

A Taste of my thoughts and warped sense of humor.

Subject:  ATTITUDE

(This story reminds me of my own grandmother who is still in her own house and even has a garden, at age 92 [2003].  She has always taught that you can do whatever you decide to do. - RR)

The 92-year-old, petite, well-poised and proud lady, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o'clock, with her hair fashionably coifed and makeup perfectly applied, even though she is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today. Her husband of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary. After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, she smiled sweetly when told her room was ready. As she maneuvered her walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of her tiny room, including the eyelet sheets that had been hung on her window.
 "I love it," she stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.
"Mrs. Jones, you haven't seen the room .... just wait."
 "That doesn't have anything to do with it," she replied. "Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn't depend on how the furniture is arranged...it's how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it.  It's a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice; I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open I'll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I've stored away ... just for this time in my life." 

Old age is like a bank account ... you withdraw from it what you've put in.
So, my advice to you would be to deposit a lot of happiness in your bank account of memories. Thank you Nana for your part in filling my Memory bank. I am still depositing. Remember the five simple rules to be happy:
1. Free your heart from hatred.
2. Free your mind from worries.
3. Live simply.
4. Give more.
5. Expect less.

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." - Mark Twain

See below for more great quotes.

1. I can see your point, but I still think you're full of cr@p.
2. I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.
3. How about never? Is never good for you?
4. I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.
5. It sounds like English, but I can't understand a word you're saying.
6. I like you. You remind me of when I was young and stupid.
7. I have plenty of talent and vision, I just don't give a dang.
8. Visualizing? I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.
9. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you being competent.
10. And your cry-baby-whiny-butt opinion would be...?
11. If I throw a stick, will you leave?
12. I'm trying to imagine you with a personality.

When we walk to the edge of the light we have

And take that step into the darkness of the unsure

We must believe that One of two things will happen...

There will be something solid for us to stand on

Or we will be taught HOW TO FLY!

Sincerely,  Tough Love Grandpa  

Who says men don't remember anniversaries?  We can be sentimental too.

  A woman awoke during the night to find that her husband was not in their bed.  She put on her robe and went downstairs to look for him.  She found him sitting at the kitchen table with a hot cup of coffee in front of him. He appeared to be in deep thought, just staring at the wall.  She watched as he wiped a tear from his eye and took a sip of his coffee.
"What's the matter, dear?" she whispered as she stepped into the room, "Why are you down here at this time of night?". 
  The husband looked up from his coffee, "Do you remember 20 years ago when we were dating, and you were only 16?" he asks solemnly.  The wife is touched to tears thinking that her husband is so caring and sensitive.  "Yes I do" she replies.  The husband paused.  The words were not coming easily.  "Do you remember when your father caught us in the back seat of my car making love?"
  "Yes, I remember" said the wife, lowering herself into a chair beside him.
  The husband continued... "Do you remember when he shoved the shotgun in my face and said, 'Either you marry my daughter, or I will send you to jail for 20 years?'"
  "I remember that too" she replied softly. 
  He wiped another tear from his cheek and said... "I would have gotten out today."

"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night, and in between does what he wants to do." - Bob Dylan

"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope for advance." - Orville Wright

"People try to rain on your parade, because they have no parade of their own." -- Jeffrey Gitomer.

"Procrastination is opportunity's assassin."  — Victor Kiam

“Don’t stress out over success. Aim for achievement, and success will naturally follow.” – Roland Rhoades

"It's not how good you are. It's how bad you want it."

"You can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed." - Napoleon Hill

“Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.” – Dr. Joyce Brothers

"Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." - Aldous Huxley

"There is always room at the top." - Daniel Webster

"All glory comes from daring to begin." - William Shakespeare

"The one without dreams is the one without wings." - Muhammad Ali

"The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed." - Lloyd Jones

"You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about." - William James

"Always bear in mind, that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other thing." - Abraham Lincoln

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." - Thomas Jefferson

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal. Nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude." - Thomas Jefferson

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain." - Maya Angelou

"There is no sense worrying about something you can't change, because if you can't change it, there's no sense worrying about it." - Roland Rhoades

"Plan for the future, because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life." - Mark Twain

"I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened." - Mark Twain

"Confidence doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a result of something…hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication." - Roger Staubach

"People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit. Most people succeed because they are determined to." - George E Allen

"If you want the rainbow, you've got to put up with the rain." - Jimmy Durante

"The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen." - Lee Iacocca

"Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker." – John Maxwell

"To win…you’ve got to stay in the game…" - Claude M. Bristol

"I’ve never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation." - Mike Todd

"There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love to do, there is only scarcity of resolve to make it happen." - Wayne Dyer

"Control your destiny or somebody else will." - Jack Welch

"You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take." - Wayne Gretzky

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." - Chinese Proverb

"Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Our greatest glory consists not in never falling... but in rising every time we fall." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Our thoughts and imaginations are the only real limits to our possibilities." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"To stay young requires the ability to unlearn old falsehoods." - Robert Heinlein

"Freedom presents multiple choices for one's use of time. It is our responsibility to select a course of action and pursue it. To stand by, forever contemplating the choices, is self imposed slavery." - Maurice Cobb, Minister Emeritus Sanford Maine

"People with goals succeed because they know where they are going. It's as simple as that." - Earl Nightingale

"If you don’t set goals for yourself, you are doomed to work to achieve the goals of someone else." - Brian Tracy

"What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve." - Napoleon Hill

"Most misfortunes are the results of misused time." - Napoleon Hill

"There is one quality that one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it." - Napoleon Hill

"Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right’. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along." - Napoleon Hill

"It's always worthwhile to make others aware of their worth." - Malcolm Forbes

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure." - Colin Powell

"A true leader must set the example. You cannot ask of subordinates that which you do not demand of yourself. And one who does not set the example will never be respected." - James H Webb Jr, Secretary of the Navy  (I copied down this quote 30 years ago when I worked at the Naval Shipyard in Kittery ME, and have used it as a guiding force in building my business, and he became the new Democratic US Senator from VA. - R.)

"The secret to productive goal setting is in establishing clearly defined goals, writing them down and then focusing on them several times a day with words, pictures and emotions as if we've already achieved them." - Denis Waitley

"It’s not what you are that holds you back, it’s what you think you are not." - Denis Waitley

"The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed." - Lloyd Jones

"Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself." - Robert Collier

"Managers help people see themselves as they are; Leaders help people to see themselves better than they are." - Jim Rohn

"Big goals get big results. No goals get no results or somebody else's results." - Mark Victor Hansen

"To succeed simply means to follow through." - Roland Rhoades

"There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love to do, there is only scarcity of resolve to make it happen." - Wayne Dyer

"Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish." - John Quincy Adams

"Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.  Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before." - Jacob A. Riis

"High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation." - Jack and Garry Kinder

"We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal and then leap in the dark to our success." - Henry David Thoreau

"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein

"If you decide to go for it, do it with spirit: Sometimes success is due less to ability than to zeal." - Charles Buxton

"We tend to get what we expect." - Norman Vincent Peale

"You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down." - Mary Pickford

"It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up." - Vince Lombardi

"Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do." - John Wooden

"Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out." - John Wooden

"We should not let our fears hold us back from pursuing our hopes." - John F. Kennedy

"Do your work with your whole heart and you will succeed - there's so little competition." - Elbert Hubbard

"Each player must accept the cards that life deals him or her. But once in hand, one must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game." - Voltaire

"Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in playing a poor hand well." - Kenneth Hildebrand

"Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it, and spend it rather than invest it." - Jim Rohn

"A leader, once convinced that a particular course of action is the right one, must...be undaunted when the going gets tough." - Ronald Reagan

It is right to be contented with what you have, but never with what you are.

"The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don't like to do. They don't like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose." - E.M. Gray

"The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles... but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly." - Buddha

"Everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual.
Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time, but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person." - Rumer Godden

"Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." - William Faulkner

"Only those who risk going too far can possibly know how far one can go." - T.S. Elliot

"Great minds have purposes, others have wishes." - Washington Irving

"I began to understand that self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it." - Gloria Steinem

"What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage." - Bruce Barton

Money is only tainted if 'taint yours and 'taint mine.

We could learn a lot from crayons:
       some are sharp, some are pretty,
       some are dull, some have weird names,
       and all are different colors....but
       they all exist very nicely in the same box.

We convince ourselves that life will be better after we get married, have a baby, then another. Then we are frustrated that the kids aren't old enough and we'll be more content when they are. After that, we're frustrated that we have teenagers to deal with. We will certainly be happy when they are out of that stage. We tell ourselves that our life will be complete when our spouse gets his or her act together, when we get a nicer car, when we are able to go on a nice vacation or when we retire. The truth is there's no better time to be happy than right now. If not now, when? Your life will always be filled with challenges.
It's best to admit this to yourself and decide to be happy anyway. Happiness is the way. So, treasure every moment that you have and treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time with ... and remember that time waits for no one.
So, stop waiting ...
Until your car or home is paid off.
Until you get a new car or home.
Until your kids leave the house.
Until you go back to school.
Until you finish school.
Until you lose 10 lbs.
Until you gain 10 lbs.
Until you get married.
Until you get a divorce.
Until you have kids.
Until you retire.
Until summer..
Until spring.
Until winter.
Until fall.
Until you die.

The man whispered, "God, speak to me," And a meadowlark sang; but, the Man did not hear.

So the man yelled, "God, speak to me!" And, the thunder rolled across the sky, but the man did not listen.

The man looked around and said, "God let me see you," and a star shone brightly. But, the man did not notice.

And the man shouted, "God show me a miracle!" and a life was born; but, the man did not know.

So, the man cried out in despair, "Touch me God, and let me know you are here!" 

Whereupon, God reached down and touched the man; but, the man brushed the butterfly away . . . and walked on.

Don't miss out on a blessing because it isn't packaged the way that you expect.

THE INCREDIBLE POWER WITHIN

A Story of Inspiration

None of us really knows how we will react in a crisis – until we are faced with a situation in which every single second counts. Some people panic. But many others find within themselves an inner strength that they never knew existed. History is replete with stories of ordinary people who performed extraordinary physical feats or found brilliant solutions when faced with life-threatening problems.

            For Valerie Shore of Reynoldsville, Mississippi, that crisis came on a hot Tuesday afternoon in 1992. It had been a routine day. She spent it as she did most days, washing clothes, cleaning the trailer, cooking, and doing whatever chores her husband Jethro ordered. After sixteen years of marriage, she had long since surrendered any hope of change in her life.

            It was just after two o’clock when she heard a terrible scream. She immediately recognized Jethro’s angry yelling, but it was different this time; this time it was not directed at her. She ran out of the trailer and instantly realized what had happened. Jethro had been working beneath an old car, trying to repair the brakes. Somehow, it had slipped off the cinder blocks and trapped him. His arm and one leg were being held down in the soft mud by the wheel.  “Damn it, Valerie,” he screamed at her, “I’m caught. Don’t just stand there like an idiot. Get some help.”

            Valerie looked at the car. She guessed it weighed more than a ton, more than any one person could ever move without help. “Can you move at all?” she asked.

            “What’s the matter with you? What does this look like? I’m trapped.”

            She looked around for help. There was no one else as far as she could see. She was his only hope. “You sure you can’t move?” She shouted.

            He snarled at her in pain. “If you don’t call for some help right now, when I get outta here, you’re gonna be real sorry.”

            The car shifted, pushing his arm down even farther into the mud. He screamed loudly in pain. Valerie knew she had little time to act. She knew if she didn’t take action right then and there, it would be too late. And at that moment, Valerie Shore found the strength she had never known existed. From where it came she would never know. Acting calmly, she raced back into the house. In seconds she’d found their bankbook and all her husband’s cash. Within minutes, she had packed up a few belongings and was speeding toward the bank, desperately trying to get there before it closed.

            For on that day, when faced with a crisis, Valerie Shore saved her own life. By the time the rescuers she had alerted got to their trailer to help Jethro, she had cleaned out their account, and Jethro never heard from her again.
- from a Chicken Soup type book someone lent me once.

"You can gather the inner strength to accomplish anything once you decide to do it." - Roland Rhoades. 

A MOTHER'S NIGHTMARE

A mother enters her daughter's bedroom & sees a letter on the bed.
With the worst premonition, she reads it, with trembling hands:

It is with great regret & sorrow that I'm telling you that I eloped with my new boyfriend. I found real passion & he is so nice, with all his piercings & tattoos & his big motorcycle.

But it's not only that mom, I'm pregnant & Ahmed said that we will be very happy in his trailer in the woods. He wants to have many more children with me & that's one of my dreams.

I've learned that marijuana doesn't hurt anyone & we'll be growing it for us & his friends, who are providing us with all the cocaine & ecstasy we may want.

In the meantime, we'll pray for the science to find the AIDS cure, for Ahmed to get better, he deserves it.

Don't worry Mom, I'm 15 years old now & I know how to take care of myself. Some day I'll visit for you to know your grandchildren.

  Your daughter, Judith

PS: Mom, it's not true. I'm at the neighbor's house. I just wanted to show you that there are worse things in life than the school's report card that's in my desk drawer...

I love you.