“experience, and most of those experiences are painful and costly. If you can learn from someone else’s pain and expense, you are a wise person, indeed. I would encourage you to read this book, cover-to-cover, but also keep it as a reference text using the sections and individual columns as a resource you can revisit as your life journey calls for specific wisdom. It is my hope that this is not a one-time encounter that you and I are having. My hope is, in the coming months and years as you travel toward your own personal”
―
Jim Stovall
“Our memories are not totally fact or completely fiction. They are a conglomeration of the thoughts that we put together to explain to ourselves who we are. Just like a beautiful flower garden will look totally different in daylight as opposed to dark, the memories of our past are held hostage by our perspective.”
―
Jim Stovall
“In order to be truly happy in the largest sense of that word, we must have something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to.”
―
Jim Stovall
“A journey may be long or short, but it must start at the very spot one finds oneself.”
―
Jim Stovall
“You don't begin to live, until you've lost everything... I've lost everything three or four times. A perfect place to start.”
―
Jim Stovall
“things in this life can be separated into two categories: Things that are valuable and things that matter.”
―
Jim Stovall
“I finally know that joy does not come from avoiding a problem or having someone else deal with it for you. Joy comes from overcoming a problem or simply learning to live with it while being joyful.”
―
Jim Stovall
“and better, makes us all proud. But let us never forget that, when you’ve lost everything that you own, but you still have your friends and family around you and the desire to go on, you still have everything.”
―
Jim Stovall
“Showing Respect Is not Slavery...and Must Be Taught”
―
Jim Stovall
“Tournament. For months, every team in the country has a goal of making it to the tournament. Then, at the end of the season, 64 teams are selected from various parts of the country. As the tournament progresses, teams are eliminated one-by-one until, at the end of the season, the team remaining is named the national champion. Among all of the participants who began at the beginning of the season, and among all the top 64 who actually made the tournament, only one team comes out on top. If this is our only goal, the majority of us are doomed”
―
Jim Stovall
“We have become a society of people that loves to blame someone else for our condition.”
―
Jim Stovall
“... sometimes in life, you either laugh or you cry. And I prefer to laugh.”
―
Jim Stovall
“In life’s journey, the things we keep we eventually lose, while the things we give away, we always have.”
―
Jim Stovall
“If we are not allowed to deal with small problems, we will be destroyed by slightly larger ones. When we come to understand this, we live our lives not avoiding problems, but welcoming them them as challenges that will strengthen us so that we can be victorious in the future.”
―
Jim Stovall
“You can often outperform what other people think of you, but you will never outperform what you think of yourself.”
―
Jim Stovall
