There are two kinds of change challenges: Technical and adaptive.

How to do open heart surgery is a technical challenge. The skills and training necessary to do this are well known, and there is a direct path of time and training required if you want to become an masterful heart surgeon.

An adaptive challenge would be teaching a doctor how to develop a beside manner or develop the skills of empathy and caring to be able to handle the human elements of illness or disease, and also handle their own ability to manage the stress and difficulties of the job.

There is no exact path for that, and it's a more subtle art. You might have had the experience of how few doctors have developed that particular skill set, which is clearly a very important and often neglected part of our health care system. That requires a mind set and a state of being that is capable of understanding the complexities of the human experience.

To accomplish great things, we must not only dream but act. Not only plan but believe in ourselves.

Is there a simple way to improve our happiness? Yes.

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly.

Never give up on yourself. When everything seems to oppose you as you are trying to create something new... please don’t give up because this is the exact time and place that the course will change.

Stop yelling at the movie, you ain’t never gonna change it like that. Go change the movie in the projector. You are the projector.

Contentment is possible right now. All we need to do is stop the unstoppable mind, the endless stream of thinking.

I don't need to teach mindfulness to my dog Biscuit, because he can't learn what he already is. He is the embodiment of mindfulness. He is in fact, my teacher.

Can we clean up our mess and make the earth happy again? Let us dedicate this new era to mothers around the world, and also to the mother of all mothers -- Mother Earth. It is up to us to keep building bridges to bring the world closer together, and not destroy them to divide us further apart.

We can pave new roads towards peace simply by understanding other cultures. This can be achieved through traveling, learning other languages, and interacting with others from outside our borders. Only then will one truly discover how we are more alike than different.