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VOTT IF ... 
you could get a short, humorous, informative e-mail each week that was insightful and meaningful to your life?
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Valuing Ourselves  
The following gem is from an address given in 1928 by Dr. Haven Emerson, Columbia University:  
 
Youth is not a time of life. It is a state of mind. It is not a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips and supple knees. It is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the motions. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of 50 more than in a youth of 20. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.  
 
Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair - these are the long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. You are as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.  
 
In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage and power from the earth, from man and from the infinite, so long are you young. When the wires are all down and all the central place of your heart is covered with the snow of pessisism and the ice of cynicism, then you are grown old indeed and may God have mercy on your soul.


Time Tippies
Got a practical problem? Here is a sequence to follow.

1) Clearly identify what the problem is.
2) Decide on the general nature of the solution. 
3) Sleep on it for one night. 
4) Then get started solving it.

Step 1 not only collects your facts, but also helps you to understand the problem. Step 2 is often a flash of inspiration which shouldn't be over-analyzed. Step 3 helps to clarify the solution. Step 4 is what you need to do without procrastination - as you get to work, the solution replaces the problem!


Inspiration   
In this issue we honor Nellie McLung [1873-1951] an idealist who believed "nothing was too good to be true", and who had the courage to hold unyielding views of right and wrong. She started school at the age of 10, trained as a teacher at sixteen and went on to include being a social worker, a best selling author at age 38 and a member of the Manitoba legislature at age 48. As an MLA she persuaded Manitoba to be the first province in Canada to give women the right to vote. In later life she is to have said that she should have written 5 books and had 15 children!


Funecdotes
George Polya likes to tell stories about the absentmindedness of the German mathematician David Hilbert. At a party at the great mathematician's house, his wife noticed that her husband had neglected to put on a clean shirt. She ordered him to do so. He went upstairs; 10 minutes passed; Hilbert did not return. Mrs. Hilbert went up to the bedroom to find Hilbert lying peacefully in bed. As Polya puts it, "You see, it was the natural sequence of things. He took off his coat, then his tie, then his shirt, and so on, and went to sleep."