Quite apart from anything else, my experience is trying to change things for the better makes you feel better, healthier. Humans are communicative animals: when you do good in a community, the benefits eventually get back to you.
Interpretation
Making positive changes benefits both the individual and the community.
This quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals within a community and the positive effects of contributing to the betterment of society. By taking action to improve one's surroundings, not only does it enhance the community, but it also leads to personal well-being and fulfillment, illustrating that altruism can create a cycle of benefits that return to the giver.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about community service programs.
I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.
I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon's advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.
If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.
But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.
First, you have to have fun. Second, you have to put love where your labour is. Third, you have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else.
It is a critical job of any entrepreneur to maximize creativity, and to build the kind of atmosphere around you that encourages people to have ideas. That means open structures, so that accepted thinking can be challenged.
I do not believe that every person, in every walk of life, can succeed in spite of any handicap. That would be perfection. But I do believe that what I was able to attain came to be because we put behind us (no matter how slowly) the dogmas of the past: to discover the truth of today; and perhaps the greatness of tomorrow.
The number one cause of failure in this country is the fear of failure.
When you raise your opinion of yourself and what you are capable of it has a decided influence on what you do.
One must dare to show what he wants. You have to go and ask for things rather than wait for them to happen.
There is no shortcut to anyplace worth going.
Please go for your dreams. Whatever your ideals, you can become whatever you want to become.
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