“You ain’t going nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.” What if Elvis believed this Grand Ole Opry manager’s critique after his 1954 performance? Or if the Beatles listened in 1962 when Decca Recording Company responded, “We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.” What if Rudyard Kipling...

Can you remember the last time you had nothing to do but relax? Take the following quiz and find out just how busy you are. Read each of the following 25 statements and decide how much each one pertains to you. Use the following scale to answer each question and keep track of your score. The statement is true of me 1 = Never 2 = Sometimes 3...

I am 42 and have always wanted to own my own small business. However, my husband has discouraged me from doing so. I work a boring job, wondering if my life will ever be exciting again. What do you think? Advice: Have you researched what it would take to begin a business? What experience do you have with running a business? Will you need a loan...

For years, I lived on autopilot. I ate, breathed, shopped, studied--and generally went through life--without knowing why. I made decisions based on how I felt at the time. Still, the deeper questions of life haunted me. "Why am I here?" I wondered. "Who am I? Where do I want to go? And how can I get there?" I sat in coffee shops, perused bookstores,...

If you're not accustomed to public speaking or you need to help someone, improve his or her speaking efforts, these observations and suggestions might help: Most people should speak a bit louder than normal and use larger gestures than they feel originally comfortable with, according to Ted Fuller of Communispond. Invest quite a bit of...

When doctors told Nancy Boltz at 19 that she wouldn’t be able to have children, she was nonplussed, “Oh, well, I didn’t want to have kids anyway,” she said, taking it in stride. “I used to role play with Barbies and I was always the career woman who had no children and sometimes was not even married.” In real life, Nancy did marry....

Change is an inevitable part of life. We cannot stop change but we can decide how we will react to it. And how we react can make or break us. There is a race held each year in Australia that is 600 miles long. The runners run for 18 hours, sleep for 6 hours and then get up and run for another 18 hours. Several years ago, one of the competitors...