# How does one become a butterfly? You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar. -– Trina Paulus
# In times like these it helps to recall there have always been times like these. -- Paul Harvey
# Say what you want to say when you have the feeling and the chance. My greatest regrets are the things I did not do, the opportunities missed and the things unsaid. -- Jim Keller
# We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us. --Rabindranth Tagore
# You can have anything you want if you are willing to give up the belief that you can't have it. --Robert Anthony
# If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be too cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down. --Annie Dillard
# The true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good. -- Ann Landers
# Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional. We cannot avoid pain, but we can avoid joy. -- Tim Hansel
Kahlil Gibran Work is love made visible. And if you can't work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy.
Johnny Carson Never continue in a job you don't enjoy. If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined.
Bobby Unser Desire! That's the one secret of every man's career. Not education. Not being born with hidden talents. Desire.
Pope John XXIII Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.
Brian Tracy If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development.
Lou Holtz I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.
Teach love to those who hate, and let that love embrace you as you go out into the world. May the teachings of those you admire become part of you, so that you may call upon them. Remember, those whose lives you have touched and whose have touched yours are always a part of you, even if the encounters were less than you would have wished. It is the content of the encounter that is more important than the form.
We truly hope that at the very least you enjoy reading these quotes. If just one person is inspired by them to a positive change in their life it will naturally follow that they will share their own revelation with those near and dear, creating a chain effect with Love at its core.
"Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are." ~ John Wooden
"What most people need to learn in life is how to love people and use things instead of using people and loving things." ~ Author Unknown
"You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing." ~ Michael Pritchard
"Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward." ~ Author Unknown
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. ~ Albert Einstein
Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them. ~ Paul Hawken
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love. ~ Stendhal
Cancer is one of the most painful/deadliest disease one can come across and it takes a lot of courage to fight it day in and out without losing hope. Following is a true story of a man who lost his father due to cancer and was extremely devastated after the loss of his mentor, friend, everything.
In his quest to do something meaningful in memory of his father and for so many people out there going through the same trauma and struggle that his family had to go through, this gutsy individual decided to swim Atlantic Ocean to raise funds and awareness for the cancer research. On September 25th 1998, Ben Lecomte became the first man to swim across the Atlantic Ocean. He dedicated this feat to his father who had taught him how to swim.
Ben faced lot of difficulties in conquering his mission. He could have saved himself the pain of swimming every day for 8 hours day for 73 days and just resorted to normal life. But he didn't.
"My battle was very different from the one faced by cancer patients, it was my decision and I could give up at any time. But during my swim I better understood their suffering and the feeling of not knowing the outcome,"
"I found it very difficult to do the same thing over and over: looking at the same blue background, hearing the same noise, tasting the same strong salty water." Whenever he thought about giving up, Ben would concentrate on why he began the adventure in the first place, and he would remember those happy times spent with his family in France.”
How strange because 90% of the people in this world tend to become demotivated when faced with hard situations in their lives. Giving up is the easiest option that we are so accustomed to? Otherwise how do you explain the alarming rates of suicide, drug addictions, smoking, and so on? But not Ben Lecomte.
And that is why in order to motivate people who are struggling with any challenge in their life (be it a disease, unemployment, addiction or anything), Ben has decided to swim Pacific Ocean again to provide inspiration and courage to people to not give up. He wants to convey the message that we all share a common bond by which we all can conquer any challenge or problem in our lives.
No one has ever dared to swim Pacific Ocean until now. He has been training hard daily to get ready for this extremely tough challenge. His regimen includes three to five hours, six-days-a-week swimming and cardiovascular cross-training (including bicycling and calisthenics).
The one learning that he learnt from his Atlantic Ocean swim was : “When you finish something big like that, you can feel the pain and strain. But when you look at it with a more objective view, it makes you want to do something bigger.
Isn’t the above true for us too? If we achieve our goals easily, we don’t cherish them as much as those goals which have come after hours of pain and struggle and they serve as the golden pillar in our lives. It motivates you to do even more and bigger than before.
Ben Lecomte is ready for this tough journey ready to inspire people in the world who quit in times of hardships and lose hope. He will not abandon his goal even if it means to face 12 feet high waves, white sharks, salty water and not to mention the physical/mental pain that will come along doing the same thing over and over again for months.
One thing which we can easily learn from his example: Pain is temporary, Quitting lasts forever!
So never ever quit because if you will, so will the enduring spirit of Ben Lecomte who will be out there swimming for all of us to give us most beautiful and precious thing in life: Hope.
So let’s join hands together to share this inspiring story of Ben Lecomte with more and more people out there to spread his wonderful message and journey; to be with him during his time of struggle, to make him feel motivated during this extremely tough journey which no man has ever done before.
