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" My encouragement is: Don’t settle where you are. You have seeds of greatness on the inside. Put these principles into action each day. Get up in the morning expecting good things, go through the day positive, focused on your vision, running your race, knowing that you are well able. Winning is in your DNA. The most high God breathed His life into you. You’ve got what it takes. This is your time. This is your moment. Shake off doubts, shake off fear and insecurity, and get ready for favor, get ready for increase, get ready for the fullness of your destiny. You can, you will! "
― Joel Osteen , You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner
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" Every morning when you get up, you should search your heart. Know deep down that you’re being true to who God called you to be. Then you won’t have to look to the left or to the right. Just stay focused on your goals.
If people don’t understand you, that is okay. If some get upset because you don’t fit into their mold, don’t worry about it. If you lose a friend because you won’t let that person control you, then you didn’t need them anyway, because that person was not a true friend.
If people talk about you, being jealous, critical, and trying to make you look bad, don’t let that change you. You don’t need their approval when you have God’s approval.
If you will get free from what everyone else thinks and start being who you were created to be, you will rise to a new level. We spend too much time trying to impress people, trying to gain their approval, wondering what they’re going to think if we take this job or wear a new outfit or move into a new neighborhood.
Instead of running our races, we often make decisions based on superficial things. I heard somebody say, at twenty years old we wonder what everybody thinks about us, and at forty years old we don’t care what anybody thinks about us. Then, at sixty, we realize nobody was thinking about us. "
― Joel Osteen , You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner
9
" Look ahead
It’s tempting to go through life looking in the rearview mirror. When you are always looking back, you become focused on what didn’t work out, on who hurt you, and on the mistakes you’ve made, such as:
“If only I would have finished college.”
“If only I’d spent more time with my children.”
“If only I’d been raised in a better environment.”
As long as you’re living in regret, focused on the negative things of the past, you won’t move ahead to the bright future God has in store. You need to let go of what didn’t work out. Let go of your hurts and pains. Let go of your mistakes and failures.
You can’t do anything about the past, but you can do something about right now. Whether it happened twenty minutes ago or twenty years ago, let go of the hurts and failures and move forward. If you keep bringing the negative baggage from yesterday into today, your future will be poisoned.
You can’t change what’s happened to you. You may have had an unfair past, but you don’t have to have an unfair future. You may have had a rough start, but it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.
Don’t let a hurtful relationship sour your life. Don’t let a bad break, a betrayal, a divorce, or a bad childhood cause you to settle for less in life. Move forward and God will pay you back.
Move forward and God will vindicate you. Move forward and you’ll come into a new beginning. Nothing that’s happened to you is a surprise to God. The loss of a loved one didn’t catch God off guard. God’s plan for your life did not end just because your business didn’t make it, or a relationship failed, or you had a difficult child.
Here’s the question: Will you become stuck and bitter, fall into self-pity, blame others, and let the past poison your future? Or will you shake it off and move forward, knowing your best days are still ahead?
The next time you are in your car, notice that there’s a big windshield in the front and a very small rearview mirror. The reason the front windshield is so big and the rearview mirror is so small is that what’s happened in the past is not nearly as important as what is in your future. Where you’re going is a lot more important than where you’ve been. "
― Joel Osteen , You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner
12
" Fly with those who lift you up and thrust you forward
A pilot friend of mine told me there are four main principles to master when flying airplanes: lift, thrust, weight, and drag. You have to take all these into account to make sure the plane will fly.
It struck me that these same principles apply to specific types of people. There are some who lift you, brighten your day, cheer you up, and make you feel better about yourself. You meet them and you have a spring in your step. They’re a lift. Then there are people who thrust you. They inspire you, motivate you, challenge you to move forward and pursue your dreams. The third group are weights. They pull you down, dump their problems on you, so that you leave feeling heavier, negative, discouraged, and worse than you did before.
Finally, there are those who are a drag. They’ve always got a sad song. The dishwasher broke. The goldfish died. They didn’t get invited to a party. They’re stuck in a pit. They expect you to cheer them up, fix their problems, and carry their loads.
We all encounter people from each of these four groups. You have to make sure you’re spending the majority of your time with lifters and thrusters. If you’re only hanging out with weights and drags, it will keep you from becoming everything you were created to be. "
― Joel Osteen , You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner
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" A young man dreamed of being an actor, but in the early 1980s, he wasn’t getting the big parts he wanted. Broke and discouraged, he drove his beat-up old car to the top of a hill overlooking the city of Los Angeles and did something unusual. He wrote himself a check for ten million dollars for “Acting services rendered.”
This young man had grown up so poor his family lived in a Volkswagen van at one time. He put that check in his wallet and kept it there. When things got tough, he’d pull it out and look at it to remind himself of his dream.
A dozen years later, that same young man, the comedian Jim Carrey, was making fifteen million to twenty-five million a movie.
Studies tell us that we move toward what we consistently see. You should keep something in front of you, even if it’s symbolic, to remind you of what you are believing for. "
― Joel Osteen , You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner
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" God will supersize your vision
I’ve found that whatever your vision is, God will supersize it. He will do more than you can ask or think. My vision was that my book would be so well received it would be translated into Spanish. But it was also translated into French, German, Russian, Swahili, Portuguese, and more than forty other languages.
If you keep the vision in front of you and don’t get talked out of it, but just keep honoring God, being your best, thanking Him that it’s on the way, God will supersize whatever you’re believing for. He’ll do exceedingly abundantly above and beyond. "
― Joel Osteen , You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner
