Tag: entrepreneurship

3 creative ways to earn money as a poet

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Write, create, innovate!

 Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

               ~Federico Fellini

The truth is no matter how we are aware of the poetry artistic value, writing poetry and therefore reading and buying it, is not popular as reality shows for examples. For most of the publishers the profit they make from publishing poetry is minor or almost non-existent.

When we think of earning money from our writings, we first think of traditional ways, like submitting to literally journals, and different contests where acquired attention and popularity can ultimately lead to publishing offers. In nowadays digital world, the rules of games are changing on the behalf of indie and self-publishing opportunities.1a9af70f265d0cc691471e6b27d27e11

You can start a blog, publish your e-book or chapbook with very little investments but getting needed exposure might be hard. Today I want to share with you examples of successful poets who are doing things a little differently – and it actually pays off.

Explore the possibilities of Instagram

There are many young writers who are combining old typewriters, sentimental atmosphere and witty words to attract readers and viewers. Robert Macias, who goes by the name R.M. Drake, is one of them. He is a self-published writer, with over 1 million followers on Instagram, 16K on Twitter and over 20 000  likes on his Facebook page. His book Beautiful Chaos is one of the best-selling books in Amazon’s poetry category.

Robert was previously an art director, but now with his writing he is able to quit his job and only devote his time to writing. In an interview he gave, he is not very sure what pushed him forward in the poetry fame but he reckons that it might be related to his confessional writing.

The more I write things about myself the more that people relate to it..At least on social media, people want to expose how they’re feeling and things they’re going through and that’s what my writing does. It’s self-exploration and self-therapy.”

He likes his raw, uncensored approach and apparently his readership love that too!

Become next haiku guy/girl

This idea for poetry-writing business emerged when two college friends wanted to do an interview series about entrepreneurship. In Williamsburg they organized a little booth with aim to attract possible interviewers and in return they offered writing a short poem – haiku (since they both were quite artistic and eloquent). Very soon they got an assignment for yoga festival and that’s how haiku guys were born.

Charging between $200 and $250 per hour, The Haiku Guys are able to earn some dissent money by writing poems at events, especially since they sometimes attend up to six a week.

If you are a poet, maybe you can also offer custom-made poems for events, performances and ext.

Publish your poems beyond paper and digital world

This last example is about non-profit organization, but they are doing so diverse and inspirational projects that by far they are my favorite.

The Red Room Company is dedicated to creating unusual and useful poetry projects that positively transform expectations of, and experiences with poetry. Through imaginative projects and learning programs they aspire to make poetry accessible to all, especially those who face the greatest barriers to creative opportunities. Organization is located in Australia and is mostly directed on affirming Australian poets.

One of the projects I really liked is Dust Poems with unique aim to deliver 6  perspectives of the road, both from professional poets and professional truck drivers, exploring their experiences of driving across the country.

Original copies of poems were hidden in 5 locations throughout the Sydney Olympic Park  which the public could find through an interactive online map. An ongoing installation of the poems, as well as audio and visual material was displayed in Sydney Park between March and July 2009.

I think this is very creative, fun and imaginative way of using poetry while creating unique experiences for both the readers and poets. Now, what’s interesting is that in order to popularize poetry we can step out of conventional ways and publish poetry elsewhere. Like small company from the Netherlands, Plint: they print poetry on different objects like tea towels, mugs, boards and pillows. And with the possibilities of Internet you can publish your own poetry on the objects you choose, by using zazzle.com or cafepress.com services. Initial investment is small and you can outreach for more readership this way.

I hope you find this ideas interesting and that ultimately can help you, if you are a writer – to create a valid business model.

Rich or Poor by William  Henry  Davies

With thy true love I have more wealth
Than Charon’s piled-up bank doth hold;
Where he makes kings lay down their crowns
And life-long misers leave their gold.

Without thy love I’ve no more wealth
Than seen upon that other shore;
That cold, bare bank he rows them to –
Those kings and misers made so poor.

3 lessons that writing haiku taught me about business

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Write, create, innovate!

Clouds come from time to time-

and bring a men chance to rest

from looking at the moon.

~ Basho

Poetry is a mindfulness in its most exquisite form. It is integral part of human nature and therefore is a sort of celebration of life in all its manifestations. Especially haiku, an “instant” form of poetry, focusing on the world around us and fostering each moment of life.

As a form of poetry, haiku originated first in Japan and later became popular in other regions. Haiku poets write short poems, consisting of only 17 syllables. In Japan these poems are valued for their simplicity, openness, depth and lightness.

In original Japanese form the structural rules are:

  • use exactly 17 syllables
  • syllables are arranged in three lines of 5-7-5
  • similes and metaphors are avoided
  • refers to a season of the year.

Haiku poems can describe anything, but mostly they are a result of the observation from the outer world, and have a major theme that appeals strongly to one of the five senses.

Writing and reading haiku is a wonderful way for us to stay connected to our true nature and recognize our role and position in the world. Further more, what we observe and conclude we can use for the purpose of our business practice and it taught me three valuable lessons:

  1. Observe on the outside, as well on the inside

When you want to start your own small business, one of the best strategies you can apply is to build a niche business, where customers are ready to pay more for specialized products/services. In order to determine your own little “gold mine” you have to carefully look around, listen, observe and sense what is that people need; where are neglected and overlooked markets that you perfectly fit in.

But that is only one side of the coin. When you identify those ignored markets, how that complies with what you like to do, with what you are good at; with your own talents, needs, goals and values; how do you actually want to contribute? For those answers wee need to look deep in ourselves and be honest, because anything that contradicts our passion and our own values – won’t produce results in the long run.

And while writing haiku, I learned to observe the world around me more carefully, to see beyond the ordinary. It also helps us learn more about ourselves, our deepest desires and what makes us tick.

2. Keep your business plan short, simple and well structured

Your business plan is a sort of your road map to success – the more simple – less chance you will get lost. That plan is for you, to help you navigate through certain milestones you want to achieve; how to utilize the resources you have; order of actions you need to take and ext. Preferably, it will lead you to do one thing at the time and leave you just enough room, for any adjustments according to the present conditions.

While writing haiku, one of the first things you learn is to live in the now, do things timely and in order. Haiku is a very short and simple poetic form, yet

business plan tree

very powerful. It has specific structure, and by following that structure while writing, you are able to capture and express the beauty of the moment in the most exhilarating way. As you go beyond that, you might get lost, distracted: just as with your business plan. The more simple and structured, the better chance is that your business plan is going to work out for you.

3. The kind of message is your business sending out to the world

Have you thought about what makes your business different form other similar businesses? What’s your uniqueness –if there is any?

The look, the sound, the feel of your business tells a lot about it and all that information people get from your business name, logo, colors, website design, marketing materials, packaging materials etc.; the written content on your site, product descriptions, newsletters; products you offer, your sales approach, and finally you – your customer service.

That everything put together forms a message about your brand and it should be clear and consistent: in every product you make, on every social media platform, in every single interaction with customers you have. The message should reflect what your business stands for and your values.

Just as haiku: it’s a clear vivid image of the world, reflected moment in our minds that is translated into the words.

Analyzing our business practice from all this corners will not only help us improve, but we will begin to appreciate the beauty of simplicity and how that is beneficial for our life in general.

Can poetry help you become a better strategist?

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Write, create, innovate!

You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.

               – Charles de Gaulle

Strategic thinking at its core is a careful planning process where project or business idea is directed in such a way that it has a greater chance for successful, desired outcome. It usually applies innovation, especially in the operational processes.

thinking

It’s true we can learn a lot from our past experiences, but we shouldn’t build our future strategic foundation merely on that, but rather considering how to create a value for customers, long-term contribution. And strategic planning helps us analyze and put in perspective the “how” and “when” in our business applications. It requires a dose of creativity and innovation where mixed with our current knowledge is a winning formula for successful strategy. It serves us as a framework for decision making – namely about direction of the business and resource utilization.

This is about strategic thinking seen form a managerial point of view. But what happens on the more subtle levels, when we try to conceive new strategy, innovative approach to an old problem?

C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel suggest in one of their papers that in order to be a successful strategic thinker, you must be aware of the competitive environment, have grasp of the future and be able to motivate others to practically do the same: share the view of the big picture.

In the article “How strategists really think” Giovanni Gavetti and Jan W. Rivkin argue that the reasoning by analogy plays a crucial role in the successful strategic thinking. In the example they’ve given in the paper, you will see how Intel chairman Andy Grove came up with an important business strategy:

In the 1970s, upstart minimills established themselves in the steel business by making cheap concrete-reinforcing bars known as rebar. Established players like U.S. Steel ceded the low end of the business to them, but deeply regretted that decision when the minimills crept into higher-end products. Andy Grove, seized on the steel analogy, referring to cheap PCs as “digital rebar.” The lesson was clear and Intel soon began to promote its low-end Celeron processor more aggressively to makers and buyers of inexpensive PCs.

Our brain frequently uses metaphors in order to compare experiences, make choices, decisions, exclude or include certain things from desired experience –  somehow it guides our conclusive thinking. In our minds we form one set of conditions analogous to another from which we derive great idea for action.

The mind of a good strategist needs to have an intellectual flexibility, a sort of adaptation mode which enables him to come up with the best possible solutions to challenging situations. It’s interesting that by reading poetic metaphors, using them for better understanding of the world around us we enhance our own capabilities of envisioning possible scenarios in every given situation; it helps us train our thinking in a way that from the given conditioning we can set the course of future development in the most favorable direction for us.

And as Emily Dickinson pointed in her poem Life:

 The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

 

What poetry can teach us about business ethics?

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Read, write, lead!, Write, create, innovate!

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay. 

These verses are from R. Frost’s poem “Nothing gold can stay”.  At first Business-Ethicssight it might has nothing to do with the world of business – hence, even when I first read it, it made me think in what kind of business world we live in. Most people see the connection between business and poetry in the realm of advertising, and are very skeptical to notions that there might be something deeper. In my opinion, if we just let ourselves go beyond superficial view of poetry – it can actually motivate us to find the meaning in ambiguity.

Poet is not trying to explain or justify anything. He offers you to see the world with his eyes, but the experience and the understanding is only yours. He takes you on the journey of self-exploration. Just as with the poem written above. Reading the poem, reminded me of the transitory quality of life: sometimes we are so allured to run after wrong values; all our activities mainly oriented towards making more profit that we literally forget that the gold is not everything that shines: quite the opposite “nature’s first green is gold”. And nature’s real green is very hard to recognize as due to pollution, smog, too much concrete in our immediate environment, busy lives we don’t have time to see and enjoy real treasures in life.

Or “The moment” by Margaret Atwood:

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

She is not here dealing with any facts. She doesn’t tell you how many acres of rainforests have been devastated. She doesn’t argue about the amount of plastic bags found in the oceans that are killing our marine wild life. But focusing only on business and material gain, pretending that we are the governors of the nature around us and that we need to subjugate other beings are not the values we should emphasize.  We are integral part of nature. And nature should be integral part of our business endeavors: not by killing and polluting but rather working in accordance with natural laws, fostering any life – no matter how minuscule. The awareness we have is our advantage and we could use it in a way that we can contribute beyond ourselves, beyond profit, beyond corporate expansion. After all, we are just visitors and we can choose what is going to be our legacy that we leave behind.

Reading poetry stimulates specific way of thinking which is vitally important to addressing world’s economic, political and social issues. It can broaden our views, help us recognize wider societal needs and gaps where our qualities can be fully utilized. Especially in entrepreneurship, when difficult and unpleasant decisions needs to be made – is it going to be mainly about the profit or entrepreneurial contribution is going beyond that?

Poetry and Creativity: crucial blocks in building leadership qualities

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Read, write, lead!, Write, create, innovate!

Hand holding two matching white paper jigsaw puzzles which written leadership word

To lead people, walk behind them.

– Lao Tzu

Success and power can easily hinder our good intentions, making our egos rise like skyscrapers and constantly generate that insatiable need for more. Many of those who fall into this trap, simply never look back, who they are leaving behind, creating unbridgeable gap between themselves as a “leader” and their peers.

But it has never become more clearly as in nowadays modern organizational structures that a good leader cannot be someone who imposes false authority: leader needs to inspire, guide, set an example for other coworkers. A good leader needs to have and foster a dynamic personality, be able to seize the opportunity, recognize talent and bring the best out of people.

I usually think of good leaders as magnificent puzzle solvers: they have that ability to utilize available human resources and reorganize their team in such way that each problem/situation can be managed – like solving the puzzle.

Now, how that relates to poetry?

Poetry can awaken those subtle human qualities that we need to develop in order to become good leaders. It helps us live and understand human experience which is a crucial part of creative process: taste of life and our perspective of the world motivate us  to generate more ideas and innovative solutions.

Organizational life can be draining and sometimes makes us hardly cope with everyday activities. Poetry reconnects us with those forgotten parts – instead of just surviving the working week, it can help us remember who we are and how to thrive, focusing on our best qualities.

In my opinion there is a quite similarity between leaders and poets. Leaders just as poets initiate thoughts and conversation about ideas, causes, motivation and engagement. Both poets and leaders have that ability to touch our souls, minds and connect us on the most intricate levels.

Our world is too complex with overlapping issues and processes: poetry has that magical ability to simplify things and life in general. In other words, reading and writing poetry can support any leader to better conceptualize the world and communicate it.

Furthermore, poem can provide wisdom and insight in the most difficult times. I hope that poem below will inspire your work, persistence and help you seize your value in every team, every relationship, every situation:

Focused Effort Prevails by Henry W. Longfellow

The heights by great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night.

 

We have not wings, we cannot soar;

But we have feet to scale and climb,

By slow degrees, by more and more,

The cloudy summit of our time.

A Poem by Rudyard Kipling

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Read, write, lead!, Write, create, innovate!

doubt4For all those days when your feel insecure, discouraged or even lost;

For all those days when disbelief starts to bite you inside and every idea, every step you take seems pointless – read the verses below:

 

If

…you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a [Founder], my son!

-Rudyard Kipling, 1895

Poetry and storytelling: part I

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Read, write, lead!, Write, create, innovate!

No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.

-Lewis Carroll

onceuponatim

In these series of posts “Poetry and Storytelling” I will try to explore possibilities of using poetry as a tool for effective way of storytelling, especially for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

On the one hand entrepreneur as a storyteller and entrepreneur story as a cultural phenomena is already intrinsically established in the group consciousness (especially within the emerging social media networks), yet poetry as a narrative technique and genre is rarely considered as a mean of explaining entrepreneurial journey.

Through literature we can find a lot of evidence where entrepreneurial skills, behavior and entrepreneur’s relationship with the world comes in the form of narrative fables like picaresque tales  which McKenzie, B (2002) in “Understanding Entrepreneurship: A Definition and Model Based on Economic Activity and the Pursuit of Self-Identity”, so beautifully demonstrated. The study describes the use of oral narrative by entrepreneurs to exchange important information and induces a new definition of entrepreneurship: an economic activity undertaken by social individuals in their pursuit of self-identity.

O’Connor, E., in the paper “Storied Business: Typology, intertextuality, and traffic in entrepreneurial narrative”, states that “entrepreneur needs to be a storyteller”, an ‘epic hero’, capable of offering emotional connection to his audience, a character with whom audience can identify with, rejoice, suffer, celebrate, fail – simply experience everything. In other words, successful entrepreneur is giving tangible experience through his business story and that’s what makes his story and business alive. Use of mythology, eulogy, metaphor, epic and fairytales, permeated with humor and sudden twists is a winning recipe for a business story that captures attention.

Rationalists, wearing square hats by Wallace Stevens

Rationalists, wearing square hats,

Think, in square rooms,

Looking at the floor,

Looking at the ceiling.

They confine themselves

To right-angled triangles.

If they tried rhomboids,

Cones, waving lines, ellipses—

As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon-

Rationalists would wear sombreros.

These verses clearly signify the importance of creativity as an entrepreneurial skill. Words are empowering and encourage us to think “outside the box”, outside our limited senses and borders given by societal norms.

This poem in particular was used by Price Waterhouse Management Consultants in an advertisement (Sunday Times, 22.10. ’95) to attract open-minded (entrepreneurial) individuals with creative abilities, ready to question and challenge everything that is predefined and ordinary.

Poetry evokes emotions, stimulates thinking and inspiration. In the posts to come, I will further research how successful entrepreneurs have used poetry to communicate their business ideas.

Organize your own creativity workshop!

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Write, create, innovate!, Write, create, innovate: exercises

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

– Edward de Bono

Creativity-2There are few simple, yet effective exercises that we can apply and practice in our daily routine which will help us to cultivate that creativity spark and productive flow.

But first do some preparations:

Make time

One of the first key things to do is to make time for creative practice/exercise. In my own experience, when ever I feel constrained by time or my tight schedule – it’s simply additional pressure that kills every motivation for creative work. Your mind drifts away thinking about the errands and home chores you need to do…so it’s not going to work. Making time, being able to do things at your own pace is of vital importance.

De-stress

Once you make enough time, it’s very important to set the right “mood” in our mind, simply to get relaxed enough before thinking or brainstorming about new idea.Deep rhythmical breathing for a few minutes, visualization, light yoga or any type of meditation can do a wonder!

These steps allow us to be more gentle with ourselves – meaning that we don’t push ourselves too much if work/idea development doesn’t go the way we want. It can bring additional emotional burden that doesn’t help and doesn’t serve us.

Now, the real fun comes in:

1. Make your own inspiration box or board

One of the things I like to do is to create an inspiration box or an inspiration board: just the process of crafting and creating something you believe will get you closer to your goal is already a step forward. When you collect pleasant items that inspire you (quotes, pictures, poems – anything symbolic to you), that represent who you are, who you want to be, things you enjoy and you find uplifting – whenever you return to your box or board it will refresh your mind and new ideas will start to pop up!

2. Jot things down

Whenever you have an idea – write it down. No matter how silly, impossible, distant from the solution you’ve been contemplating, write it down. This unconstrained writing, where you simply don’t censure your thoughts is a technique called free-writing” or “free association”. You can go even step further and write it in the form of a poem. Surrealist poets were using similar techniques which Andre Breton described in the Surrealist manifesto published in 1924 as a

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express…the actual functioning of thought…in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

This process can speed up our solution thinking abilities and help us focus on the task at hand.

3. Be curios about your immediate environment

When I was very little having dolls to play with was not simply enough. I was so curios that almost each toy I had to break into parts to see what’s inside and how it works. Of course I’m not suggesting you take first object in front of you and break it into pieces 🙂 but on the paper or in your mind you can think of its constituent parts and how the object in front of you is interdepended of its generic parts and where do they come from.

For example a window: It consists of frame (wooden, aluminum, ext.) and glass. It might have a blind as well. Glass is made from molten silica at very high temperatures.. and ext. It’s called the “generic-parts technique” and usually people with this habitual way of thinking are better at solving problems through creative insight.

I hope you find these exercises fun and that you might apply them next time you need some inspiration for your work.

And for the end:

An Excerpt form Choose life by Andre Breton

Choose life choose life venerable Childhood

The ribbon coming out of a fakir

Resembles the playground slide of the world

Though Sun is only a shipwreck

Insofar as a woman’s body resembles it

You dream contemplating the whole length of its trajectory

Or only while closing your eyes on the adorable storm named your hand

                                 Choose life

How poetry can stimulate creativity?

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Read, write, lead!, Write, create, innovate!

1c48070

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

– Robert Frost

Some interesting results of recent researches, like at the University of Liverpool  – scientists have found that reading poetry and prose can actually stimulate our thinking and creative cognitive abilities much more than for example self-help books, which are nowadays popular way of finding solutions when we are in some sort of crisis or challenging situation. It turns out the more complicated poetry and prose were, the reader’s attention time span was longer and deeper, and it also stimulated their moments of self-reflection.

brain-poetry

Researches in the aforementioned research used a group of volunteers, where with scanners, they have monitored the brain activity as the volunteers read works by William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, T.S Eliot and others.

After the reading, the volunteers were asked to “retell” the texts using their own words. Scans showed that the more “challenging” prose and poetry set off far more electrical activity: especially the activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with “autobiographical memory” and emotion, helping the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they have read.

Poetry is not just a matter of style. It is a matter of deep versions of experience that add the emotional and biographical to the cognitive.

-Proff. Davis from Liverpool University

Some earlier scholar works also attribute poetry to development of cognitive, learning and memory skills. In particular, McGovern and Hogshead in their paper “Learning about writing, thinking about teaching”, describe how poetry can promote writing skills, learning, fosters analytic and creative thinking and problem solving.

Csikszentmihalyi in his paper “Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention”, published in 1996, proves that discussing a poem is an exercise in problem finding, a skill essential to creative work in both the arts and the sciences.

Halonen in his paper “Demystifying critical thinking”, (1995) states that poetry often contains unconventional language or unusual treatment of a topic. Surprise becomes a catalyst for critical thinking as the audience works to resolve subsequent feelings of disequilibrium.

So, when I feel stuck, uninspired I just play with words, rearrange them or observe the environment and describe it in more lyrical way. I have noticed that my attention and emotion shifts – it’s like working on the puzzle: thoughts of possibilities are coming – poetry simply jump-starts our brain’s synapses.

Next time when you need a creativity spark, try to write a poem. Something different, something that you are not accustomed to. In this case there is no bad or good poetry. The aim is to start moving creative juices in our minds and poetry is a great tool for that. Even science agrees 🙂

Achievements by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Trust in thine own untried capacity
As thou wouldst trust in God Himself. Thy soul
Is but an emanation from the whole.
Thou dost not dream what forces lie in thee,
Vast and unfathomed as the grandest sea.
Thy silent mind o’er diamond caves may roll,
Go seek them – but let pilot will control
Those passions which thy favouring winds can be.

No man shall place a limit in thy strength;
Such triumphs as no mortal ever gained
May yet be thine if thou wilt but believe
In thy Creator and thyself. At length
Some feet will tread all heights now unattained —
Why not thine own? Press on; achieve! achieve!