Random Books from the Library

Many of us got books out of the Library on ‘Love St Just Library Friday’ that we would not normally have taken into our homes. Chatting to many of you, this has been a new experience that may be worth repeating! No no, I’m not suggesting we make a habit of making the Library shelves bare BUT if we all took out 6 fairly random books, once a month, who knows what we might discover! We will also continue to support St Just Library.

I will share with you here, some excellent tips I found in one of my random books to help me in being your Cornwall Councillor! They are from “The 10 Keys to Success” by John Bird (the Founder of the Big Issue).

“Be the Best You Can

• You can’t be anything you want. But you can be something.
• Take an honest look at your strengths and weak points.
• Decide the best way to use your strengths and how to make them even stronger.
• Decide which weak points you can turn into strengths and which ones you can do nothing about.
• Work with what you have instead of wishing for what you can’t have or what someone else has got.
• We can all do something but we have to find it. You will know when you find it because it will feel right.

Fight for your Optimism Every Day

• Get a clear idea of what matters to you. Ignore the negative voices.
• Stop looking for approval from others, even those close to you.
• Live in the real world – be practical about what you can do.
• Don’t confuse daydreams with optimism – they are not the same thing.
• Fight and keep fighting for your optimism every day. Never give up.

Don’t Wait for the Perfect Time to Start

• There is often no right time to start something but you need to start anyway.
• As long as you are aware there are good and bad sides to everything, it is not foolish to jump into something. Just be prepared.
• Don’t aim to be perfect straight away. Start, and improve as you go along.
• Be prepared to trust your own judgement because that is all you have.
• It’s all right to feel scared, as long as that doesn’t stop you acting.
• Accept that sometimes you will have to change the way you have always done things.

Make Sure Your Passion is Practical

• It’s great to have big visions but they have to be workable and real.
• Just because you think it’s great, doesn’t mean everyone else will.
• The more different or unusual your ideas are, the harder you will have to work to sell them.
• The more you believe in your idea and have thought about it, the better you can sell it to others.
• If you are confident, people will be more likely to believe in you.
• Learn how to ask for things in a way that is most likely to achieve the best results.

Start with the Small Steps

• Go for the easy wins first.
• Get the basics right and you can build on them.
• Put perfection to one side. Just think about improving bit by bit.
• Work on today and leave tomorrow until it comes.
• Even big business is built on small details.
• Doing the easy stuff first doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you smart and builds confidence for the harder stuff later on.

Be Prepared to Go the Distance

• Believe in yourself and your ideas. Are you in or out?
• Make sure you’re in the right race and that you’re equipped for it. If you’re not, get out of it and into the right one.
• Don’t turn and run at the first sign of problems. This is when winners show what they’re made of.
• If it’s not working, accept that you need to change something. Stick with what you’re doing until you have done everything you can to make it work.
• Get out of the mindset that you are not ‘naturally’ made to do what you are doing.
• Everything you are doing will add up and one day it will add up to success.

Take Your Failure Personally

• Accept that you are going to make mistakes.
• Accept that you are going to learn from your mistakes.
• To be afraid of failure is to only half live your life.
• The more failures you have, the quicker you will learn!
• Overcome your fear of failure by focusing on your goals instead of your fears.
• If you try to do something and it doesn’t work out, you’ve still succeeded. You’ve learned that what you did was not the way to get what it was you were after.

Look Outside Yourself

• Don’t be afraid to compare yourself to others and learn from them.
• Make it a habit to ask questions of yourself.
• Be humble enough to ask questions of others.
• Learn the art of being an observer and you will be surprised how much you see that you didn’t see before.
• Let someone else do the talking and listen to them.
• Don’t make the mistake of thinking you know everything. Then you stop learning.

Recognise that Success is Always Shifting

• You may feel low and let down after reaching certain goals. Be prepared.
• Success may not feel like a big deal when you get there because you have adjusted to what you are doing.
• Success does not stand still. Be aware that, as you move forward, it also keeps shifting.
• Success in one area often opens doors in another.
• Success helps to develop you as a person and makes you more confident about trying new things in other areas of your life.
• Money is a by-product of success. It is not the success itself.

No-one Can Unlock the Door Except You

• Think
• Act
• Work
• Succeed.”

I now need your feedback to put all this into practice to learn how to be a good Councillor!

Perhaps an event the ‘Friends’ could organise could be: be inspired by random books! That will encourage people to use our local more.

In my next few blog posts I will give much shorter snippets from Apocalypse Dreckly, by N R Phillips; Stone Soup, by Martha Street; Attention Seekers by Amanda Mansell; Magical Places by Sarah Foot and Michael Williams; and Old Age and How to Survive it, by Edward Enfield.