Always do what you are afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.
N. Eldon Tanner
The future depends on what we do in the present.
Gandhi
The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
Socrates
We are not retreating- we are advancing in another direction.
General Douglas MacArthur
If you are going through hell keep going.
Winston Churchill
Take away my people but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on factory floors. Take away my factories but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory.
Andrew Carnegie
You can accomplish just about anything if you put your mind to it, are willing to work hard, and refuse to give up no matter what adversity you encounter.
Joe Cirulli
Books can change your life. There is no limit to what you can learn or how much better you can become as long as you keep reading, listening, and searching for wisdom.
Joe Cirulli
Success is never final.
Winston Churchill
What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail.
Anne Sweeney
In order to grow you must accept the job that scares you.
Anne Sweeney
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Thomas Edison
Out of intense complexities emerge intense simplicities.
Albert Einstein
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
Rene Descartes
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
Vince Lombardi
In a high wind, even turkeys can fly.
Eugene Kleiner
The best purchases are made by those spending their own money.
Milton Freidman
Vision without execution is a hallucination.
Thomas Edison
Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.
Goethe
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
Sign in Einstein's Office
There are no obstacles, only opportunities
Albert Einstein
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
I think any company.. has got to find a way to engage the mind of every single employee.. If you're not thinking all the time about making every person more valuable, you don't have a chance. What is the alternative? Wasted minds? Uninvolved people? a labor force that's angry or bored? That doesn't make sense.
Jack Welch
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Abraham Lincoln
Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure.
Don Wilder and Bill Rechin
The most dangerous thing is to be successful. You then think every decision is the right one. That is why you have to review what you do.
Wwong Wai Ming. CFO of Lenovo
Confidence comes not from always being right but not fearing to be wrong
Wwong Wai Ming
Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
Jackson Brown
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Elliot
If you want to see innovation cut a zero from your budget
Unknown
I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde
The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.
Pascal
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
Chinese Proverb
The corruption of the best produces the worst.
Greek
Our greatest glory is not in never failing but in rising up every time we fail.
Confucius
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Thomas Jones
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
John F Kennedy
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King Jr
Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.
Picasso
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
Mark Twain
The person who says something is impossible should not interrupt the person who is doing it.
Anonymous
You have to know what all your people can do. The ones who need to be challenged, you give them challenges. The ones who need to be carried, you carry them. The ones you need to let go, you let them go. A leader has got to have a certain kindness but a certain meanness, too.
Wynton Marsalis
I am evaluating talent all the time.
Kevin Ryan, CEO of Gilt
The best use of a CEO's time is to bring in unbelievable people, manage them well, and make sure the company builds and maintains an A-caliber team.
Kevin Ryan
Know thy time.
Peter Drucker
People who question your ideas are worth their weight in gold
Vigo Mortenson
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity
Seneca
Failure is the mother of all successes
Fortune Cookie
If you have more than three priorities you have no priorities
Maggie Fox
Chance favors the prepared mind
Louis Pasteur
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.
Yogi Berra
Once an opportunity has passed, it cannot be caught.
Anonymous
The trouble with opportunity is that it always comes disguised as hard work.
Anonymous
You are younger today than you ever will be again. Make use of it.
Anonymous
A company cannot base its success on the competence of a few leaders. The system itself must generate success.
Jin Zhiguo. HBR April 2012
A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.
Bruce Lee
I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done.
Henry Ford
If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you will most certainly be right.
Steve Jobs
Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Steve Jobs
So little done. So much more to do.
Bugandan phrase
Once you conclude that person is not right for the long term, you have to move.
Bob Iger
You have to put your money where your mouth is. There isn't a year that's gone by where we haven't invested an enormous amount to make the service better.
Fred Smith CEO of Fedex
Great leaders in any generation have always helped people understand why. Mediocre leaders don't. We should be careful not to confuse what's rare with what's new. Greatness is rare. It's so rare that, when you come across it, it often feels like it's new.
Jim Collins
It's easy to spend a lot of energy on things that really don't make a difference.
Jim Collins
The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear
Ghandi
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
Dwight D Eisenhower
We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.
Winston Churchill
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
Warren Buffet
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.
Michael Porter
Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
Peter Drucker
The details are not the details. They make the product. It will in the end be the details that bring the product life.
Charles Eames
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Peter Drucker
Company culture is what you all agree to hold each other accountable for
Reid Hoffman
Anxiety is caused by a lack of control, organization, preparation, and action.
David Kekich
The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.
Anonymous
Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.
David Allen
If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open for everything.
Shunryu Suzukia
Anything that causes you to overact or under react can control you, and often does.
David Allen
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Henry Bergson
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Rule your mind or it will rule you.
Horace
The beginning is half of every action.
Greek Proverb
Things rarely get stuck because of lack of time. They get stuck because the doing of them has not been defined.
David Allen
There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.
David Allen
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Will Rogers
Often the only way to make a hard decision is to come back to purpose.
David Allen
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.
Linus Pauling
Only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them.
Lin Yutang
What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do.
Aristotle
The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.
David Allen
Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.
Winston Churchill
To make knowledge productive, we will have to learn to see both forest and tree. We will have to learn to connect.
Peter Drucker
Luck affects everything. Let your hook always be cast; in the stream where you least expect it there will be a fish.
Ovid
Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
Jean de La Bruysre
Your best thoughts about work won't happen while you're at work.
David Allen
We all have times when we think more effectively, and times when we should not be thinking at all.
Daniel Cohen
Bailing water in a leaky boat diverts energy from rowing the boat.
David Allen
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
Mark Twain
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
Mark Twain
Ceasing negative imaging will always cause your energy to increase.
David Allen
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
There are only two problems in life: You know what you want and you don't know how to get it and/or you don't know what you want
Steven Snyder
An idealist believes that the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left undone in the short run determines the long run.
Sidney J Harris
A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is drudgery, a vision and a task is the hope of the world.
Anonymous
I drink to make other people more interesting.
Ernest Hemingway
Always do what you are afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Take away my people but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on factory floors. Take away my factories but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory.
Andrew Carnegie
Train hard, fight easy
Alexander Suvorov
Win with ability, not with numbers.
Alexander Suvorov
What is difficult in training will become easy in battle
Alexander Suvorov
Lead me, follow me, or get the fuck outta my way
General George S. Patton
The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.
Vince Lombardi
For many people twenty years of experience is really one year of experience repeated twenty times.
Andy Hargadon
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Archilocus, Greek poet
Hope is the raw material of losers.
Fernando Flores
Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.
Goethe
You must feed opportunities and starve problems.
Peter Drucker
Today is always the result of actions and decisions taken yesterday.
Peter Drucker
Act or do not act; but do not "hedge" or compromise.
Peter Drucker
The needs of large-scale organizations have to be satisfied by common people achieving uncommon performance.
Peter Drucker
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
Harry Truman
The aim is useless without the way.
Albanian Proverb
Man's mind is not a container to be filled but rather a fire to be kindled.
Dorthea Brande
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle... when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.
Christopher McDougall
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
J.R.R. Tolkein
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.
Mulla Nasrudin
Leadership is about taking people to where they have not been.
Henry Kissinger
I have never believed I was the smartest person in the room.
William H. Gates
It is the duty of the executive to remove ruthlessly anyone - and especially any manager - who consistently fails to perform with high distinction. To let such a man stay on corrupts the others. It is grossly unfair to the whole organization.
Peter Drucker
Things may come to those who wait ... but only the things left by those who hustle.
Abraham Lincoln
Failure is just your judgment on an experience, because there are no failures, just learning opportunities.
Aaron Ross
I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.
John Peel
Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.
Thomas J. Watson
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
James M. Barrie
There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.
Gandhi
Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds.
SEAL team saying
Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.
Charles Swindoll
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes
Oscar Wilde
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living.
David Starr Jordan
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
Albert Einstein
Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Henry David Thoreau
Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.
Viktor Frankl
It's not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us.
Stephen Covey
It's so much safer to say, 'I am not responsible.' if I say 'I am responsible,' I might have to say, 'I am irresponsible.'
Stephen Covey
Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual has phrased it, 'like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.'
Stephen Covey
He that is good with a hammer tends to think everything is a nail.
Abraham Maslow
Without involvement, there is no commitment.
Stephen Covey
If two people have the same opinion, one is unnecessary.
Stephen Covey
We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
Ralph Nader
The past no longer exists and the future is not here yet
The Buddha
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth
Mike Tyson
Existing companies execute a business model, startups look for one
Steve Blank
Perfection is achieved, not when you have nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
In God we trust. All others bring data.
W. Edwards Demming
Along the journey we commonly forget its goal.
Nietzsche
If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.
W. Edwards Deming
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Winston Churchill
There is only one way to avoid criticism; do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing
Aristotle
You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore
Christopher Columbus
The best revenge is massive success
Frank Sinatra
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Chinese Proverb
It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
Confucius
I will not be concerned at other men's not knowing me; I will be concerned at my own want of ability.
Confucius
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
Japanese proverb
You go war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
Donald Rumsfeld
... every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.
Peter Drucker
Without an action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of events. And without check-ins to reexamine the plan as events unfold, the executive has no way of knowing which events really matter and which are only noise.
Peter Drucker
The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it and no marginal utility curve for it. Moreover, time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever and will never come back. Time is, therefore, always in exceedingly short supply.
Peter Drucker
People are always "almost fits" at best. To get the work done with people (and no other resource is available) therefore requires lots of time, thought, and judgment.
Peter Drucker
My first grade arithmetic primer asked "If it takes two ditch-diggers two days to dig a ditch, how long would it take four ditch-diggers?" In first grade, the correct answer is, of course, "one day." In the kind of work, however, with which executives are concerned, the right answer is probably "four days" if not "forever."
Peter Drucker
Here lies a man who knew how to bring into his service men better than he was himself.
Andrew Carnegie's tombstone
Human excellence can only be achieved in one area, or at the most in very few.
Peter Drucker
General Marshall during World War II insisted that a general officer be immediately relieved if found less than outstanding. To keep him in command, he reasoned, was incompatible with the responsibility the army and the nation owed the men under an officer's command. Marshall flatly refused to listen to the argument "but we have no replacement." "All that matters," he pointed out, "is that you know that this man is not equal to the task. Where his replacement comes from is the next question."
Peter Drucker
The assertion that "someone else will not let me do anything" should always be suspected as a cover-up for inertia.
Peter Drucker
In every area of effectiveness within an organization, one feeds the opportunities and starves the problems. Nowhere is this more important than in respect to people. The effective executive looks upon people including himself as an opportunity. He knows that only strength produces results. Weakness only produces headaches - and the absence of weakness produces nothing.
Peter Drucker
In human affairs, the distance between the leaders and the average is a constant. If leadership performance is high, the average will go up. The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. He therefore makes sure that he puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position, the man who has the strength to do the outstanding, the pace-setting job.
Peter Drucker
If there is any one "secret" of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
Peter Drucker
There are always more important contributions to be made than there is time available to make them.
Peter Drucker
Today is always the result of actions and decision taken yesterday.
Peter Drucker
Another predictable result of leaving control of priorities to the pressures is that the work of top management does not get done at all.
Peter Drucker
... Executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions. These are, of course, nothing but untested hypotheses and, as such, worthless unless tested against reality.
Peter Drucker
The averages serve the purpose of the insurance company, but they are meaningless, indeed misleading, for personnel management decisions.
Peter Drucker
Act or do not act; but do not "hedge" or compromise.
Peter Drucker
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
Chinese Proverb