Abraham Lincoln was asked by an aide about the church service he had attended. Lincoln responded that the minister was inspired, interesting, well-prepared, eloquent and the topic relevant. The aide said, “Then it was a good service?”Lincoln responded, “No.” The aide protested,“But, Mr. President, you said that the minister was inspired, interesting, well-prepared, eloquent, and that the topic was relevant.”“Yes,” replied Lincoln, “but he didn’t challenge us to do any great thing.

“I remind them of a few games that got away from us and the mistakes we made in those games. I remind them of the three years we worked to get to this point and the sacrifices they made over the summers and everything the team and the community did for us and we don't want to have brain freezes once we get out there. They have never backed down from a challenge since I've been there.”

“We knew they would come at us aggressively in their full-court press if they got behind. We expected it from the beginning. We said, if we can hold fort at that time, we'd be all right. We didn't do a very good job of it, but what I was proud of my kids of doing, after I called a time out and challenged them a little bit ... they became more aggressive and less hesitant.”

Life will give you what you need once you will do something with it. It may not give you what you want so as to be as comfortable as you want, as Nature’s concern is need as it relates to evolution. In my humble opinion, Nature is too kind, but, as I say, the game is big, and the challenges and temptations absolute. And this is a fascinating aspect of the totality of beauty; it gives more than is only necessary. The generosity is mind- and heart boggling.

She had told Kazan that she was bored with the roles she was playing because so many of them had been basically the same kind of empty-headed characterization. She wanted nothing ore than to challenge herself with more complex parts--and also wanted others to think of her as being more than a caricature....Anytime she had an opportunity to broaden her mind, she wanted to take advantage of it.

People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge.

We wrote Shift Ahead to document how the smartest companies and organizations shift their strategiesin order to stay relevant in the face of swift and exponential changes in everything from technology tothe forces of globalization, from politics and culture, from consumer tastes to human behavior. Wewanted to find out how they shift ahead – how they stayed ahead of the curve, the competition, and theevolving requirements of their customers – given the barrage of evolving challenges.

How did you act when all was not good? Did you rise to the challenge? Did you display grit, resilience, and integrity in your response? Character isn't about being perfect or always doing the right thing. Character is how you respond to your own failures. It’s when you screw up and life hits you in the mouth that you have an opportunity to reveal your inner strength.

Sorrow is specific. Sorrow is vibrational. Sorrow is the state of depressed dimensional fields in and around the heart region. So actually, what is being said here is that there comes a time when an individual cannot love enough to transmute certain experience. Certain experiences are so challenging that the individual’s heart region depresses. If one can transmute shocks to the heart, and regain or hold heart balance, then one understands the “mathematics of sorrow” at that dimensional spectrum.

There exist words of mediocrity, songs of mediocrity, and life lessons of mediocrity. Advice of mediocrity, books of mediocrity and companions of mediocrity also are available.One may also meet songs of purpose that make us ponder to wonder, advice filled with authority to dare. We may also hear life lessons that can challenge and change us. What do you listen to? If what you listen to will not make you, it will mar you.