Hope Floats

Hope Floats                                                                                                                            - John Maxwell

Writer Mark Twain said: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." How do most people feel when they're around you? Do they feel small and insignificant, or do they believe in themselves and have great hope about what they can become?

The key to how you treat people lies in how you think about them. It's a matter of attitude. What you believe is revealed by how you act. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: "Treat a man as he appears to be and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he already were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be."

Hope is perhaps the greatest gift you can give another person as the result of nurturing, because even if people fail to see their own significance, they still have a reason to keep trying and striving to reach their potential in the future.

Excerpt from Becoming a Person of Influence