Story of Pablo and Bruno

Story of Pablo and Bruno

By   9:26 AM   No comments:

The Story Of Pablo and Bruno

 Once upon a time, there were two men named Pablo and Bruno who lived in a village on the bottom of a mountain. The village had a problem, the only way they were to receive water was from the top of the mountain.

Bruno had a business idea, every morning, he would walk up the mountain, fill buckets of water, carry them while walking all the way down to the village. He would sell the buckets of water to the village and he made lots of money.

Pablo had a different idea, he thought of building a pipeline that would connect the water at the top of the mountain to the village at the bottom. He would make money by earning a percentage of profits from the pipeline. However this would take time.

Bruno laughed at Pablo’s idea and continued to make lots of money carrying buckets of water. Pablo went away and started his idea.

2 years later, Pablo finished his project and finally built the pipeline. The pipeline was a huge success because it delivered fresh water faster, it was cleaner and it was cheaper than Bruno’s efforts.

However, Bruno’s efforts were lacking. Due to constant walking up and down the mountain, the quality of the water would be affected and sometimes was covered in dirt making the water unclean. Bruno’s strategy for beating Pablo was to work harder, he would carry more buckets of water up and down the mountain.

Bruno did this for many years and became weak until he could no longer carry buckets of water up and down the mountain. He could no longer earn any more money. However Pablo was sitting on a beach while earning money from the pipeline he created many years ago. He never worked again.

Bruno was focusing on Active Income while Pablo was focusing on Passive Income.

The moral of the story is, you can not work 40 hours per week for the rest of your life, there will be a time when you need to retire or unable to work due to unexpected circumstances such as medical bills, being fired from your job or injury.

Read More

An enlightment story by Ming Yue ...

An enlightment story by Ming Yue ...

By   11:06 AM   No comments:

Xiao Sheng is a drummer in the school band. At every flag-raising ceremony, all the teachers and students always listen intensively to his play. One day, he played some wrong notes and felt very discouraged. After that he thought of quitting the band. I (Ming Yue) told him the following story:

Once upon a time a father was very frustrated with his son because he did not seem very manly though he was already sixteen years old. The father went to see a Zen master and asked the master to help his son become a real man.

The master said: "I can help you; however, you will have to leave your son at my place for three months. For the whole period, you are not allowed to come to see him. I will assure your satisfaction after the three months."

As promised, the father did not come back until three month later. The master arranged a karate match to show the father the training result.

When the competition was starting, the father found out that the opponent was a karate trainer.

The trainer certainly made sure that he was fully prepared to win before he started to attack. On the other side, the son fell on the floor as soon as he was attacked without any resistance. However, the boy did not surrender and got up immediately after he fell. It went on like this for no fewer than twenty times. His father was embarrassed and felt pain but dared not say anything.

The boy lost badly when the match was over. The master asked the father: "Don't you think your son was showing manliness?"

"I felt ashamed of him! After three months' training, what kind of result is this?! He is so weak and falls to the floor as soon as he is attacked. I don't think he is manly at all." The father was very disappointed.

The master said: "I am sorry that you only look at the superficial forms of failure and success. Didn't you notice that your son had courage and bravery for standing up after his falls? It is a success if the standing-ups are more than falls, which is what a real man should possesses."

The father had a sudden enlightenment and thanked the master deeply, and then he took his son home.

After listening to the story, Xiao Sheng thought it over and told me that he will keep working hard and will practice all the notes to gain a new appraisal from others.

Enlightenment from the Story:

We should not just focus on instant results when we do something. The experiences gained and the effort given are the most precious. If one's life is always smooth, he/she will not taste the final sweetness of
success after many tries without giving up. The really important virtue is to remember experiences and lessons from failures and bravely move forward to the road of success after planning anew.

Author: Ming Yue 

Read More

Friends come in all sizes...

Friends come in all sizes...

By   10:11 AM   No comments:

Your friends will support you....



And respect your creativity for thinking outside the box...



They'll be there when you need a shoulder to lean on...



Or a great big hug...



They see beyond the black and white to discover your true colors...



And accept you as you are... Even when you just wake up in the morning



So make your own kind of music...



Follow your heart wherever it takes you...



And when someone reaches out to you, Don't be afraid to love them back...


They may just be a friend for life...



Practice patience and tolerance....











Good friends are hard to find,harder to leave, And impossible to forget!

Composed by Radka Kozielova

Read More

Vilvamangal Vs Chintamani

Vilvamangal Vs Chintamani

By   6:46 AM   No comments:

Chintamani, the dancing girl advised Vilvamangal, who was later known as Surdas:

"O Vilvamangal! You are mad after this nasty body of mine full of all sorts of impurities. This is the day o your father's death. You have come to me at dead of night by crossing the river. Your whole body is stinking now. You have crossed the river by taking hold of a female corpse. The dead body that was floating in the river would have attracted several young men an hour ago when there was a little gloss in the skin and a little puffing in the cheeks. It is all flesh, bone and fat. Had you directed your mind Godwards - the fountain source of this beauty, the beauty of beauties, the embodiment of undecaying beauty - You would have become a great saint and attained everlasting peace and bliss. What a fool you are!"

This chiding and admonition opened the eyes of Vilvamangal. The illusion set up by ignorance immediately vanished. He directed his mind towards Sri Krishna and later became a great saint 'Surdas'.

If you always remember the dead body of a woman, her skeleton, and the parts it is composed of blood, flesh, bone, ... - if you place before your mind the image of an old woman with wrinkled skin and rotten teeth or the image of a sickly woman who has mere skin and bone with a ghastly look; you would never run behind them. you can also become a great Saint.

Read More

The Secret of Jimmy Yen

The Secret of Jimmy Yen

By   6:38 AM   No comments:

A JURY OF DISTINGUISHED scholars and scientists, including Albert Einstein and Orville Wright thought enough of Jimmy Yen to vote him one of the top ten Modern Revolutionaries of the Twentieth Century. Yet all he did was teach Chinese peasants to read. 

What made that so amazing was that for four thousand years reading and writing in China was only done by the Scholars. "Everybody" knew, including the peasants themselves, that peasants were incapable of learning.

That thoroughly ingrained cultural belief was Jimmy Yen's first "impossible" barrier. The second barrier was the Chinese language itself, consisting of 40,000 characters, each character signifying a different word! The third barrier was the lack of technology and good roads. How could Jimmy Yen reach the 350 million peasants in China?

Impossible odds, an impossibly huge goal-and yet he had almost attained it when he was forced (by Communism) to leave his country.

Did he give up? No. He learned from defeat and expanded his goal: Teach the rest of the Third World to read. Practical reading programs, like the ones he invented in China, started pumping out literate people like a gushing oil well in the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Kenya, Columbia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Ghana, India â€" people became literate. For the first time in their entire genetic history, they had access to the accumulated knowledge of the human race.

For those of us who take literacy for granted, I'd like you to consider for a moment how narrow your world would be if you'd never learned how to read and there was no access to radios or TVs.

180,000 Chinese peasants were hired by the Allied Forces in WW1 as laborers in the war effort. Most of them had no idea- not a clue-where England, Germany or France was, they didn't know what they were being hired to do, and didn't even know what a war was!

Jimmy Yen was a savior to them.

What was the secret of Jimmy Yen's success? He found a real need, and found in himself a strong desire to answer that need. And he took some action: He tried to do something about it even though it seemed impossible. He worked long hours. And he started with what he had in front of him and gradually took on more and more, a little upon a little.

The English author Thomas Carlyle said, "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand." And that's what Jimmy Yen did. He started out teaching a few peasants to read, with no desks, no pens, no money, no overhead projectors. He started from where he found himself and did what was clearly at hand.

And that's all you need to do. Start now. Start here. And do what lies clearly at hand.

Read More

How poor we are ...

How poor we are ...

By   9:47 PM   No comments:

One day, the father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the express purpose of showing him how poor people live.

They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.

On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, "How was the trip?"

"It was great, Dad."

"Did you see how poor people live?" the father asked.

"Oh yeah," said the son.

"So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?" asked the father.

The son answered: "I saw that we have one dog and they had four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night. Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.

"We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.

"We have servants who serve us, but they serve others. We buy our food, but they grow theirs.

"We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them."

The boy's father was speechless.

Then his son added, "Thanks Dad for showing me how poor we are."

Read More