I want to give you a statement of strength today on Minute with Maxwell from Corrie Ten Boom. Tremendous statement: “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.” Wow! Thank you for that statement, Corrie Ten Boom.

I often say to people: life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. Well, that’s my statement. I hope it’s a statement of strength to you. Welcome to minute with Maxwell. My name is John.

‘He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak. Strong convictions precede great actions.’ Louisa May Alcott said that. And that statement, ‘Strong convictions precede great action.’ There’s a sequence there that I don’t want us to miss. I have a teaching, I haven’t given it for a long time, but I have a teaching called Winning Is an Inside Job.

Bob Marley said this, ‘You never know how strong you are until strong is the only choice.’ You see, when we’re in a crisis, what happens is the deeper the crisis gets, the less options you and I have. Now, we love freedom and we love options. You don’t know anybody that loves options more than me. But for example, with the Coronavirus. As we have been trying to stop this virus, to contain it, we almost daily have less options and more options are taken from us. We have less options every day.

Hi, John here. I often teach people this statement: If you don’t try to create the future you want, you must endure the future you get. I either lead intentionally, or as my friend John Cotter so beautifully said to me one day in a conversation over lunch, ‘John, most people don’t lead their life, they accept their life.’ If I accept my life, I’m not creating my own future.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer gives us a tremendous statement of strength. I love this. He says, ‘There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.” Wow! I believe that to be very true. In fact, it’s a powerful statement. There is a meaning in every journey that’s unknown to the traveler. In other words, when we’re going through our journey, there are things that we are unaware of.

Gever Tulley just gave this incredible statement that will give you great strength. He said, ‘Persistence and resilience only come from having been given the chance to work through difficult problems.’ So, if I would ask you today, how many of you would like to have resilience in your life?

Here’s a terrific statement of strength: ‘Hard times don’t create heroes. It’s during hard times when the hero within us is revealed.’ Bob Riley said that. In other words, he said hard times don’t create heroes, but it’s during the hard times that we begin to see who the real heroes are. In other words, they show up in difficult times.

When I was young and I was just starting to read books that would help me to improve myself, one of my favorite authors was Og Mandino. He wrote a book called The Greatest Salesman in the World. It was a phenomenal book for me. But here’s a quote from Og Mandino. He says, ‘failure will never overtake me if’ (that’s the keyword)…’my determination to succeed is strong enough’.

Michael J. Fox has an incredible, what I call statement of strength, for you and me. He says, ‘One’s dignity may be assaulted, vandalized, and cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it’s surrendered.’ Now Michael J. Fox has Parkinson’s disease.