Personally I am a lover of inspirational quotes. Some people may think they are trite, or simply use them as throw away comments. I believe that they can actually help us a lot when it comes to positive thinking, building self esteem or just viewing the world in a more healthy way. Sure, there are plenty of cliches and lazy quotes out there, but a good inspirational quote will be like excellent poetry. It will dispense with all the wasted words, I sum up a true and profound point in as few words as possible.

For this reason on this site I will, from time to time, dwell on a good positive thinking quote to see how it can help us raise our confidence and self esteem. First up, ‘Improvement begins with I’.

These four words sum up the essence of building self esteem, and also of making any improvement in your life. Too many of use get used as children to our mother or father doing things for us, looking out for us and helping us to accomplish difficult tasks. This is the natural way of things, because parents generally love there children and will do anything to help them grow and achieve.

However, as we grow to be adults we need to learn how to take control of our own actions. If we don’t, and continue to hope for other people to help us out, we will become increasingly disappointed. On one level this quote reminds me of this fact.

On another level, this quote reminds me of another important aspect of what it takes to be a success and achieve, namely that if you want to achieve in an endeavor, you really need to want to do that. One of my heroes, Napoleon Hill, talks about the need for a ‘burning desire’ for something if you are going to achieve. Only if you really want to achieve at something, or improve in a certain area will you stick with that through thick and thin. For this reason, if you are not achieving what you want in a certain area of your life, it might just be because your heart is not really in it. For example you may be in a job you hate and therefore repeatedly getting into trouble with the bosses. However you could bet your bottom dollar that if your job involved doing something your loved, you would be doing really well and be on best friend terms with your boss.

Improvement begins with I. So take responsibility for what you need to do to achieve what you want in life, and make sure you spend your time doing things that facsinate and that you love doing.