Suggestion: Print This Page
IDEA STARTERS
These ideas may help you find a starting (or ending) place for your own story. This section is divided into two parts: Situations and Principles.
The lists here are tools that may stimulate your memory and imagination. Take advantage of what you find useful here, or move off in your own direction. It’s your life, your lesson and your story; so make use of whatever works for you.Part I
SITUATIONS
Situations are crossroads in life where people often seek advice from those they respect in order to find direction. (In fact, these topics represent hundreds of real issues where young people have turned to their elders for advice.)
Read over the entire list. We’re sure that something here might prod your memory. If it helps, imagine that you are writing a letter to a grown child or grandchild, where you tell a story about how you dealt with any one of these situations, and what general lesson you learned.Friendship & Acquaintances
• Difficulties finding friends or relating to other people.
• Knowing who your true friends are.
• Friends who take advantage of you.
• Balancing kindness and honesty.
• Being a good friend.
• Dealing with enemies.
• When a friendship ends.
School
• Deciding whether to go to college or enter the job market.
• Finding the right college.
• Choosing—or changing—a major.
• Making study effective.
• Dealing with difficult teachers or school officials.
• Balancing school and social life.
Work
• Finding your true calling.
• Working for love or money?
• How work and the rest of life can be balanced.
• Getting a job or starting your own business.
• Hard times in job or career.
• How much money is enough?
• Dealing with difficult boss or co-workers.
• Handling job-related stress.
• Getting ahead/being appreciated.
• Becoming a better leader.
• Changing careers.
• Preparing for retirement.
Spirituality
• Finding meaning and passion in life.
• Imparting spiritual/religious ideas to your children.
• Losing faith.
• Disappointment in your place of worship.
• Difficulty tolerating the beliefs of others.
Love and Intimacy
• Making sense of the opposite sex.
• Friendship and sex.
• Unrequited love.
• Finding true love (and how you know you have).
• Infidelity or trouble with commitment.
• Issues related to virginity/celibacy.
• Dealing with jealousy (from either side).
• Getting dumped.
• Loving someone who is hurting himself/herself.
Marriage and Family
• Keeping the fire of romance burning.
• Making the leap to marriage.
• The importance of sex in marriage, and what makes it good.
• Dealing with changes in your mate’s beliefs or life direction.
• Temptations and romantic feelings toward others.
• Money/debt/use of credit in marriage.
• Deciding whether or not to have children.
• Fighting: healthy or harmful?
• When to stay, when to go, and how to do it.
• Divorce, and starting again.
• Family feuds.
• Difficult relations with a parent.
• Difficult relations with a sibling.
• Keeping a family together in tough times.
• Aging parents with special care needs.
• Step-children/parents.
• Toxic parents.
• Family members and money issues.
• Family and holidays.Parenting
• Being a good parent.
• First pregnancy/child.
• Difficult relations with a child.
• Teaching values to your children.
• Children and substance abuse.
• Cutting your children loose.
• Single parenting.
• Teenagers.
Health
• Growing old gracefully.
• Coping with chronic illness.
• Dealing with depression.
• Managing medical professionals.
• Healthy lifestyle habits (diet and exercise).
• Your secret for a long and healthy life.
Personal Growth
• Overcoming fear.
• Anger management.
• Problems with motivation and attitude.
• Procrastination.
• Making difficult choices.
• Dealing with change.
• Keeping things in perspective.
• Handling mistakes.
• Complacency.
• Self-esteem issues.
• Taking risks.
• Trouble getting organized/time management.
• People pleasing.
• Comparing yourself to others.
• Living in the moment.
• Hitting a milestone age, without feeling a sense of achievement.
Death
• Losing a friend.
• Losing a parent.
• Losing a child.
• Fear of death.
• Friend/family member is terminally ill.
• Handling things after death, practically and emotionally.
Part II
PRINCIPLES
Principles are pieces of wisdom—some simple, some profound—from a variety of sources that have proven their usefulness down through the ages. In reading this list, you may be reminded of an axiom or parable that was passed along to you, which you found to be meaningful.
Tell us a true, first-person story from your life that helps illustrate any of these guiding principles, or one of your own.
• It’s not what happens to you, it’s what you do about it that matters.
• Fortune favors the bold.
• When one door closes, another opens.
• Strive to take only actions that require no explanations.
• Everybody wants to be somebody. Nobody wants to grow.
• To the man who is afraid, everything rustles.
• The world you see around you everyday is the world you chose to be in.
• Adversity introduces a man to himself.
• When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.
• Everyone is exactly clever enough to fool himself.
• You can only coast down hill.
• Only in uncertainty are we naked and alive.
• He who can lick, can bite.
• In considering the obstacle, we sometimes forget the goal.
• It is easier to resist at the beginning that at the end.
• If you can’t bite, don’t show your teeth.
• The greatest mistake you can make in life is to continually fear you will make one.
• The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit.
• Ask first, “Is this within my control?” And if the answer is no, say, “It is none of my business.”
• To be infatuated with desire is to wish always to be hungry.
• Fear not death. Fear that you have not lived.
• It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.
• It’s not the years in your life, but the life in your years.
• No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
• Cultivate only the habits that you are willing should master you.
• What you think, you become.
• Unhappiness is the difference between our talents and our expectations.
• Riches do not consist in the possession of treasures, but in the use made of them.
• The will to believe precedes belief.
• It is better to do than to do perfectly.
• Life is too short to waste it in deciding how it should be spent.
• You can be a loving presence or a judging presence, but not both.
• Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.
• Never mistake motion for action.
• The road up and the road down are one and the same.
• Well begun is half done.
• Death twitches in my ear. “Live,” he says, “I am coming.”
• The self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.
• Don’t waste fresh tears over old grief.
• In the long run, the hard way is the easy way.
• A man of fifty is responsible for his face.
• Once men are caught up in an event they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.
• Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this: that you are dreadfully like other people.
• You can never plan the future by the past.
• If I try to be like him, who will be like me?
• Life is like playing a violin solo in public, and learning the instrument as one goes along.
• The friendship that can cease has never been real.
• You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.
• If you can’t find a way, make one.
• Life happens at the level of events, not words.
• No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
• It is not impossibilities that fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize.
• There is one sure-fire formula for failure: try to please everybody.
• In the dictionary, as in life, failure always comes before success.
• The shortest and best way to make your fortune is to let people see clearly that it is in their interest to promote yours.
• You don’t hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.
• Stop asking what tomorrow will bring, and set down as gain each day that Fortune grants.
• Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
• If we suspect a man is lying to us, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.
• A man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.
• Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we employ to hide them.
• That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
• Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.
• The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself.
• God gave you two ears and one mouth, and there’s a reason for that ratio.
• Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
• If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues?
• Great ideas have a very short shelf life.
• Luck is when opportunity meets preparation.
• Don’t ask if you really want to do something. Ask if you really want to have done it.
• Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
• Beware permanent solutions to temporary problems.
• A thousand shallow holes do not make a well.
• Nothing’s more dangerous than an idea when it’s the only one you have.
• Good is often the enemy of great.
• Nothing hides an answer better than the assumption that it doesn’t exist.
• Sometimes you just have to take the leap, and build your wings on the way down.
• This time (like all times) is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
• Quarrels would not last long if the fault were only on one side.
• It takes a loose reign to keep a marriage tight.
• Holding a resentment is like trying to kill an enemy by drinking the poison yourself.
• Prayer does not change God, but it changes the one who prays.
• A ship in harbor is safe––but that is not what ships are for.
• Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.
• The fear of death is more dreadful than death itself.
• The wise man questions himself, the fool questions others.
• Problems are messages.
• You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
• Sometimes the best way to convince someone he is wrong is to let him have his way.
• Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what needs doing, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
• Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.
• There is no more fatal blunder than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
• Half the troubles of life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.
• There is a time for departure even when there is no certain place to go.
• Your life is in the hands of any fool who can make you lose your temper.
• Deadlines are the mother of invention.
• Courage is resistance to fear or mastery of fear. It is not absence of fear.
• The time is always right to do what is right.
• “Why not?” is a slogan for an interesting life.
• Opportunity’s favorite disguise is trouble.
• Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.
• Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
• He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
• Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.
• The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.
• You can’t wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club.
• What does not destroy me makes me stronger.
• Nothing is so good as it seemed beforehand.
• Necessity never made a good bargain.
• It is a sad thing to be ignorant. It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance.
• The limits of my language mark the limits of my world.
• All rising to great places is by a winding stair.
• We wouldn’t worry what others think of us if we knew how seldom they do.
• The first draft of anything is crap.
• Tact is the art of convincing people that they know more than you do.
• A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it.
• To escape criticism––do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
• If you want something you’ve never had, you must do something you’ve never done.