Focus on doing something you love.

When you’ve found what you’re passionate about, you get the motivation to keep you moving.

If people think their job will lead to success, they might spend too much time on it and neglect other areas of their life.

Keep a balance between work, rest, health and life. 

• Occupy your surroundings with desire superstars.
• Substitute the roots of pessimistic energy with affirmative and optimistic energy. 
• Take action upon well-researched and thought-out knowledge.
• Put yourself in positive places, and surround yourself with good people.
• Burn those bridges, such that you commit and leave yourself without any other choice but to push on.
• Use mediums such as positive music, videos, and images to reinforce your desires.

"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy."

"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do."

• Andrew Jackson won the popular vote by less than 39,000 ballots and took 99 Electoral College votes. John Quincy Adams secured 84, William Crawford won 41, and Henry Clay had 37.
• Clay, with the least votes, got the boot, and his supporters shifted their support to Adams, who would go on to win the majority of the House vote.

After his inauguration, Adams selected Clay as his secretary of state. Jackson accused Adams and Clay of a "corrupt bargain."

The 1860 election was notable because it ripped the long-dominant Party (and nation) in half.

• The Democrats were unable at their 1860 convention to establish an official party line on slavery.
• At a second convention that year, the Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas, but many Southerners in the party selected Breckinridge as their man. Both would claim to be the official Democratic candidate.
• Lincoln snared 40% of the popular vote but took most of the North in the Electoral College.
• Douglas was second in the popular vote but took only Missouri.
• Breckenridge took most of the South.
• Bell's middle of the road policies earned him the middle of the road.

In 1861, delegates from South Carolina, and six of the Southern states formed the Confederate States of America and selected Jefferson Davis as their president.

"I think I have learned that the best way to lift one's self up is to help someone else." - Booker T. Washington

"The greatest sign of a success for a teacher is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist." - Maria Montessori

• Failure Strengthens You. Failure can tear you down but it also builds you to be a stronger person.
• Failure Gives You a Sense of Direction. You get a sense of clarity on everywhere you have gone wrong and how to take a better path to reach where you want to be.
• Failure Teaches You to Value all the right things in order to succeed.
• Failure Gets Rid Of Fear. Once you are accustomed to failing you have nothing left to fear anymore.
• Failure is an Opportunity. It shows us everywhere we might have gone wrong and gives us the opportunity to correct it.
• Failure is an Experience and could give us a deeper understanding of life and alter the way we look at everything that happens around us.

Which of your projects, errands and general to-do items do you still have left from the previous year that you may be able to complete in less than 2 hours? Do them now to enable you to give yourself a fresh start.

Dreaming is great, but if you want to accomplish some improvements, you need to make your dream more realistic.

Break your dream down into milestones: if you want to work from home, what steps do you need to take? Break those steps down further into actionable steps and start working towards making your dream a reality.

Once you become clear about what you want to do, identify the tasks that help you make the most progress.

If you can discipline yourself to work on high-value tasks, your life will change for the better.

Goal setting gives your mind something to focus on. If you don’t give your mind something to go after, it won’t know what to do. Use the SMART criteria for setting goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

When learning is difficult, you're doing your best learning, in the same way that lifting a weight at the limit of your capacity makes you stronger. 

When you keep trying to remember a piece of information, you interrupt the forgetting process and help cement the memory of that information into your brain. 

It's a strategy of mixing up the type of problems you solve when you're testing yourself.

That way, the testing conditions are more similar to real life, where you first have to figure out what kind of problem you have on your hands and then solve it. 

We see mistakes and failure as shameful things. And we usually identify with them:

If I fail a test, then I am a failure. If I make a mistake then I am a mistake.

It requires three things:

• Putting yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes.
• Having the self-confidence to admit to them.
• Being courageous about making changes.