George Washington Carver

(early 1864 – January 5, 1943)

George Washington Carver was an African American botanist who worked in agricultural extension at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, and who taught former slaves farming techniques for self-sufficiency. He is also widely credited in American public schools and elsewhere for inventing hundreds of uses for the peanut and other plants, although this laudation amounts to an urban legend.

Early yearsHe was born into slavery in Newton County, Marion Township, near Diamond Grove, now known as Diamond, Missouri. The exact date of birth is unknown due to the haphazard record keeping by slave owners but "it seems likely that he was born in the spring of 1864" [1]. His owner, Moses Carver, was a German American immigrant who had purchased George's mother, Mary, from William P. McGinnis on October 9, 1855 for seven hundred dollars. The identity of Carver's father is unknown but he believed his father was from a neighboring farm and died "shortly after Carver's birth...in a log-hauling accident" [2]. George had three sisters and a brother, all of whom died prematurely.

When George was an infant, he, a sister, and his mother were kidnapped by Confederate night raiders and sold in Arkansas, a common practice. Moses Carver hired John Bentley to find them. Only Carver was found, orphaned and near death from whooping cough. Carver's mother and sister had already died, although some reports stated that his mother and sister had gone north with the soldiers. For returning George, Moses Carver rewarded Bentley with his best filly that would later produce winning race horses. This episode caused George a bout of respiratory disease that left him with a permanently weakened constitution. Because of this, he was unable to work as a hand and spent his time wandering the fields, drawn to the varieties of wild plants. He became so knowledgeable that he was known by Moses Carver's neighbors as the "Plant Doctor".One day he was called to a neighbor's house to help with a plant in need. When he had fixed the problem, he was told to go into the kitchen to collect his reward.

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When he entered the kitchen, he saw no one. He did, however, see something that changed his life: beautiful paintings of flowers on the walls of the room. From that moment on, he knew that he was going to be an artist as well as a botanist.After slavery was abolished, Moses and his wife Susan raised George and his brother Jim as their own. They encouraged Carver to continue his intellectual pursuits. "Aunt" Susan taught George the basics of reading and writing.Since blacks were not allowed at the school in Diamond Grove and he had received news that there was a school for blacks ten miles south in Neosho, he resolved to go there at once. To his dismay, when he reached the town, the school had been closed for the night. As he had nowhere to stay, he slept in a nearby barn. By his own account, the next morning he met a kind woman, Mariah Watkins, from whom he wished to rent a room.

When he identified himself "Carver's George," as he had done his whole life, she replied that from now on, his name was "George Carver." George liked this lady very much and her words "You must learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people," had a great impression on him.At the age of thirteen, due to his desire to attend high school, he relocated to the home of another foster family in Fort Scott, Kansas. After witnessing the beating to death of a black man at the hands of a group of white men, George left Fort Scott. He subsequently attended a series of schools before earning his diploma at Minneapolis High School in Minneapolis, Kansas.After high school, George started a laundry business in Olathe, Kansas.

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Recycling Pays Dividends

California was one of the first states to pass a redemption law. It added a few cents to each plastic bottle and can purchased on top of the actual price. At first every one was kind of upset, but it paid off. Parents started telling their kids to save cans and bottles to make extra money. Kids use to have their friends over for “smash the can” parties in the driveways. Even the homeless people started doing more dumpster diving and going around town and picking up the trash that people littered in the city and on the highways.
Each time people brought glad trash bags full of aluminum cans or plastic bottles they were paid by the weight. The extra tax upon purchase meant whomever turned in the can or bottle got an additional stipend, which added up pretty fast. Then some kids going to UCLA and UCSB started to do studies in Santa Barbara, San Francisco and Santa Monica and found that the average homeless person was making over $14,000 per year. Yah, that is right $14,000 plus; TAX FREE, the more savvy ones had special areas staked out where they knew every morning there would be trash to catch.

This had always fascinated me. First off people who litter suck of course, if you litter then you suck too. I am sorry but everyone who litters sucks; so don’t do it. Okay, thanks. Now then, one of our clubs in high school use to collect the aluminum cans and bottles after every lunch period and turn them into the recycle center, it was easy since we had 36 kids in the club and two people would volunteer each day. No big deal, we made lots of money on that deal, about $2,000 per month, not bad at all, considering it was trash for cash? Sounds entrepreneurial and indeed they made me president of the club for thinking up this idea, although it was actually my sister’s idea. She got the idea from her friends mom who had them smash cans. To make a long story short I became the Future Business Leaders of America Club Prez at the local High School and later elected most likely to succeed my senior ye ar, little did they know how wrong they were, since I retired at age 40 now from my companies. I don’t even have job anymore? Maybe I should get back into the recycling business, a lot of cash can be made on America’s trash.
What I am trying to point out is there is really good money in recycling and it is a good way to make a few extra bucks for yourself, simply get your exercise in the park and collect bottles and cans in a couple of giant zip tie trash bags, you will make some serious money. Hey $14,000 extra per year is not bad, that is some good spending money I imagine for the middle-income family. First start by saving your own bottles and cans then go collect some more and then some more. Load the big bags in your SUV and once per month drop off all the bags of recyclables and collect your money. They may not make you president of the club, but you can certainly teach a good lesson to your kids and they can carry on the tradition of helping America clean up its act. Think about it.
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Now can you understand the power of a single word

How to Meditate With a Mantra
These days whenever a politician repeats a promise over and over again commentators say that this promise has become a “mantra” for that politician. For the journalists, the word “mantra” means a meaningless phrase that is repeated endlessly. For yogis however, a mantra is a word or collection of words, which has the power of liberating a human being from all limitations.
How can the repetition of a word or a few words have the capacity to bring about such miraculous results? It is all based on a simple psychological principle, “as you think, so you become.”
If you someone tells you “You’re stupid,” that’s of course a bad insult and will hurt you. However if you start to think “I am stupid,” and keep repeating this phrase over and over, then that is far worse. When someone tells you that you are stupid, then this is a negative outer-suggestion. When you start to think about it, then you are giving yourself, a negative auto-suggestion. If you keep thinking in a negative way, then your personal development will be harmed.
Meditation mantras have a positive meaning. They remind you that your true nature is something great: pure consciousness and boundless love. If you start to think about the best part of your being, you will begin to have more confidence in yourself and this will become apparent in your actions.
However, many people have read philosophical, spiritual or self-help books explaining these ideas, and yet they never realize these great truths in their everyday reality. It is not enough to just think about a good idea once, and then close the book. You need to think in a concentrated and systematic manner over a period of time in order to get results.
Meditation mantras have a special quality that helps in the task of concentrated, positive thinking: their very vibration has the capacity to concentrate and focus your mind. Some sounds, such as power drill breaking a pavement, can upset you greatly, while other sounds, like soothing music, can transport you to another world.
The syllables and words used in meditation mantras have been chosen according their sonic capacity, and they greatly aid the task of concentration and contemplation, as well as carrying a positive meaning.
In order to get the benefits from mantra meditation, you need to meditate regularly with a mantra that has a positive meaning and the capacity to help you concentrate. You need to do it on a regular basis, sitting silently two times a day for a period of 10 to 30 minutes.
It sounds easy, but the common experience of most people is that as you sit and try to think about one word or one phrase, your mind is quickly filled with many other thoughts; thoughts about work, financial problems, disputes with people and all kinds of other matters. When this happens, and it certainly will, then you have to bring your mind back to the mantra. Meditation is a process where you concentrate on the mantra and its meaning for as long as you can, and when you mind wanders, you bring it back.
Keep doing it, and you will attain an improved capacity to concentrate and deep inner peace.
It may still sound too good to be true, and some intellectuals scoff at the alleged power of a mantra. Once, a renowned Indian yogi came to America and delivered many lectures on this subject. In one of the lectures he was challenged by someone in the audience who said that it was not possible for a single word to deliver the results that the yogi promised. The yogi turned to the man, who was a distinguished professor and said “You fool!”
The professor turned red, and began to shout at the yogi, who calmly watched the professor unwind.
The yogi then addressed the professor and said: “Now can you understand the power of a single word? All I did was utter the word “fool” and your behavior was changed in an instant!
Dada Vedaprajinananda has been practicing and teaching yoga an d meditation for the past 35 years. He is the webmaster of the Ananda Marga meditation society’s website, and is the author of Start Meditation, Stop Smoking and Yoga Weight Loss Secrets
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.FOCUSING STRATEGY #1 Your Habits Will Determine Your Future ?It?s so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.? and we need to be specific when identifying those that affect what we achieve. We need to replace disempowering ones with empowering ones. Even if you were unfortunate enough to have a severely disadvantaged background, you can still make changes. And it may only take one person to help you make the transition. An excellent coach, teacher, therapist, mentor or positive role model can dramatically impact your future. The only prerequisite is that you must commit to change. When you are ready to do so, the right people will start showing up to help you. In our experience, that well-known saying, "When the pupil is ready the teacher appears," is true. Back To Top (c)1999. All rights reserved. Reprinted from The Power of Focus by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Les Hewitt. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc., 3201 SW 15th Street, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442.

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This is called the partial reinforcement effect

In keeping with the Latin etymology of the word, religious believers have often seen other religions as superstition. Likewise, atheists, agnostics, deists, and skeptics regard religious belief as superstition. Edmund Burke, the Irish orator, once said, "Superstition is the religion of feeble minds. From the broadest perspective, all religion is a form of superstition.
Religious practices are most likely to be labeled "superstitious" by outsiders when they include belief in extraordinary events , an afterlife, supernatural interventions, apparitions or the efficacy of prayer, charms, incantations, the meaningfulness of omens, and prognostications.
Greek and Roman pagans, who modeled their relations with the gods on political and social terms scorned the man who constantly trembled with fear at the thought of the gods, as a slave feared a cruel and capricious master. Such fear of the gods was what the Romans meant by 'superstition. For Christians just such fears might be worn proudly as a name: Desdemona.
The Roman Catholic Church considers superstition to be sinful in the sense that it denotes a lack of trust in the divine providence of God and, as such, is a violation of the first of the Ten Commandments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states superstition "in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion.

Superstition and Psychology
In 1948, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, in which he describes his pigeons exhibiting what appeared to be superstitious behavior. One pigeon was making turns in its cage, another would swing its head in a pendulum motion, while others also displayed a variety of other behaviors. Because these behaviors were all done ritualistically in an attempt to receive food from a dispenser, even though the dispenser had already been programmed to release food at set time intervals regardless of the pigeons' actions, Skinner believed that the pigeons were trying to influence their feeding schedule by performing these actions. He then extended this as a proposition regarding the nature of superstitious behavior in humans.
Skinner's theory regarding superstition being the nature of the pigeons' behavior has been challenged by other psychologists such as Staddon and Simmelhag, who theorized an alternative explanation for the pigeons' behavior.

Despite challenges to Skinner's interpretation of the root of his pigeons' superstitious behavior, his conception of the reinforcement schedule has been used to explain superstitious behavior in humans. Originally, in Skinner's animal research, "some pigeons responded up to 10,000 times without reinforcement when they had originally been conditioned on an intermittent reinforcement basis. Compared to the other reinforcement schedules, these behaviors were also the most resistant to extinction.

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This is called the partial reinforcement effect, and this has been used to explain superstitious behavior in humans. To be more precise, this effect means that, whenever an individual performs an action expecting a reinforcement, and none seems forthcoming, it actually creates a sense of persistence within the individual. This strongly parallels superstitious behavior in humans because the individual feels that, by continuing this action, reinforcement will happen; or that reinforcement has come at certain times in the past as a result of this action, although not all the time, but this may be one of those times.

Are You Learning From The Past

If you are not learning your lessons from the past you are doomed to continue repeating the same mistakes. Consider yourself warned.
Each of us has a unique life history. We have learned different lessons, have had special circumstances, and have had some similar, as well as unique, experiences. This past – mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally – has contributed today to:
- who we are- how we react- how we feel- what we believe- what we want- what we know- what we don’t know- our perceptions- our expectations.
Our past can be a tyrant that haunts every waking moment of our life with:
- past mistakes- past failures- unrealized dreams- lost hopes- disappointment- frustration- stress and anxiety.
OR, it can be a wonderful and loving teacher that guides our present and helps us in our future with:
- lessons learned- faith and hope- belief and confidence- challenges met- failures and problems overcome.
How is your past influencing your life? No one gets all positives or negatives in his life. We all have our share of blessings and frustrations, hope and despair, opportunities and problems, and disappointments and surprises.
What are you taking from your past into your future? Motivation quote for the week: Rather than cursing the past, bless it. Wayne Dyer
Tim Connor, CSP is an internationally renowned sales, management and leadership speaker, trainer and best selling author. Since 1981 he has given over 3500 presentations in 21 countries on a variety of sales, management, leadership and relationship topics. He is the best selling author of over 60 books including; Soft Sell, That’s Life, Peace Of Mind, 91 Challenges Managers Face Today and Your First Year In Sales. He can be reached at tim@timconnor.com, 704-895-1230 or visit his website at http://www.timconnor.com.Your Focus

Affirmations are positive statements that you speak out loud

How To Overcome Limiting Beliefs
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”-- Dr. Wayne Dyer
We are what we believe we are, and we can do what we believe we can do. Yes, I know that sounds all touchy-feely and new age, but you don’t have to be a metrosexual to climb onboard the belief bandwagon.
There is an interesting connection between our conscious mind and our subconscious. Our subconscious is tasked with the responsibility of making what we consciously believe is true, actually come true; at least to the best of our subconscious mind’s ability to make it true.
So, if you think you can do something, you can. And, if you think you can’t, you can’t. It sounds simple, right? Well – it is simple, sort of.
Back up at the top of this article is a quote from motivational and self-help author Dr. Wayne Dyer. I picked the quote because it embodies the entire concept of overcoming self-limiting beliefs. Think about it. When you CHANGE the way you look at things, the things you look at CHANGE. Let’s examine that statement.
Prior to that fateful day, on May 6t h, 1954, everyone in the sports world believed it was impossible to run a mile in under 4 minutes. And because everyone believed it, it became true. But there was one athlete who didn’t believe it. Roger Bannister believed that he COULD break the 4 minute mile. And, when he changed the way he looked at that barrier, the barrier changed. Even more amazing is that after Bannister crossed the 1 mile finish line in 3:59, nearly every professional runner had broken the 4 minute mile within the following year. Why? Because they believed it was possible once Bannister proved it to them.
But you don’t need a Roger Bannister to overcome your own self-limiting beliefs. All you need to do is believe in yourself and the goals that you want to accomplish. Believe it or not, it’s as simple as turning a “can’t” into a “can” and then visualizing your success.
If you want something, start acting as if you already have it. This programs your subconscious to go about the task of making whatever it is actually come true. The best way to accomplish this is through the use of affirmations.
Affirmations are positive statements that you speak out loud when you need encouragement. They are always formatted to accentuate the positive as if the desired results have already been achieved.
So, if you are being held back by the self-limiting belief that you’ll never be successful, for example, you could start saying these affirmations:
“I deserve the success that has come into my life.”“Every day I achieve more and more success.”“It is my right to enjoy the success I am achieving”.
If you repeat your affirmations several times in the morning, whenever you have spare time during the day, and again before you go to bed, you will be conditioning your self-conscious mind to start the process of making you successful by removing the mental barriers that are holding you back. Before you know it, your personal “4 minute mile” barrier, whatever that may be, will disappear.
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