Build your own dreams, or somebody else will hire you to build theirs.
—Farrah Gray
Business Is Life
Business is a bit like Russian nesting dolls: many worlds packed into one. Business is much more than just business. It’s an infinite universe made up of multiple galaxies. It requires a combination of technical skills, leadership, talent, inspiration, persuasion skills, drive, curiosity, competition, diplomacy, thick skin, adrenaline rushes, creative obsession with an idea or a product, resistance to pressure, tolerance for failure, love for risk, appetite for success, ambition, empathy, self-discipline, inflated egos put in good use, the art of transforming people’s desires into needs, and the list goes on. Business demands that you function in beast mode. You have to be a mental athlete and it goes beyond beating the competition. Above all, it’s about beating your own last record performance. In fact, it’s about an endless marathon, an operation that requires alertness of all five senses. Sometimes even a sixth sense is needed, as intuition is the human version of animal instinct and does play a big role in business.
There’s something else I love about business. Business is an act of optimism. You cannot embrace business and fully invest yourself into it without an optimistic outlook or at least without the willingness to overcome fears and self-doubt. Competing in the business arena has a cathartic effect. To enter this arena one must first purge oneself from a lot of their emotional bucket. There is no such thing as a pessimistic entrepreneur. It would be a contradiction in terms. Can you imagine a pessimist trying to start a business? It’s an oxymoron! He would see the potential for failure every step of the way. Business, by its very nature, is a risky place. True innovation requires doing something that has never been done before and for this a good amount of optimism is needed. To believe you can convince enough people to part with a good amount of their hard-earned cash to support your idea and create a business than can survive among five billion others is proof enough. There are millions of people who, out of convenience, choose to work nine-to-five jobs they feel completely unpassionate about. On the other hand, there is not a single entrepreneur out there who does believe in what they are doing.
It is precisely this enthusiasm that encourages entrepreneurs to take the risks others don’t. Where figures, statistics, and advisers suggest they will fail, entrepreneurs believe they can actually succeed. That’s what pushes them to look for opportunities where others dare not look. They seek sales in places where others don’t even bother pitching. They form partnerships and ventures with people others dismiss and get the deals and discounts others don’t bother asking for. The very act of doing business breeds confidence, whether through the natural hope of increasing one’s income, achieving a better standard of living or through one’s forced determination to prove wrong the people who doubt their business idea. When realism overrides optimism a business is left with an unhealthy culture of fear. Smart business owners understand the value and necessity of maintaining healthy amounts of both optimism and caution when it comes to decision-making. They’re neither hopelessly naïve in the pursuit of their goals nor reluctant to experiment with new concepts and products. Instead, they fight to keep creativity and innovation at the heart of the game.
Business is the most elemental form of exchange. It is about give and take. Some times more “giving” is involved, while at other times more “taking” takes place. In many ways, business is about maintaining a certain balance. A balance that is hard–almost impossible–to maintain at all times and on all levels. In both Life and Business everyone is competing for the same thing. Attention. Everyone is trying to rise above the crowd and get noticed, preferred over, chosen, hired, or purchased from… out of an infinite pool of similar-seeming options.
Business is Life!
In fact, I can’t conceive Life without Business. I have often come across people arguing that either you have a natural inclination, a talent for business, or you don’t. Whichever career path you choose to take in life, you will soon realize that business is an essential part of whatever it is you do daily, even if your job title suggests otherwise. It can be a product, a service, a particular skill, an idea or a point of view that you trade. A number of people set out in business quite early in life, through family tradition, genuine interest or personal inclination. Others through academic qualifications in economics, finance, and management, while a larger number set out through other routes, circumstances, financial needs or the pursuit of a hobby that ends up being a profession. Obviously, some are more successful than others. However, all of them have to follow similar paths when it comes to monetizing the product of their labor. In your social and professional life you have met people with hobbies and passions. Some make a living out of them, while others don’t seem to be very successful at reaping any financial benefits. Perhaps, the most challenging part when people are passionate about something is that it’s often difficult to make it a profession. Many people argue that it is best for you to follow your passion and everything else will follow… But, is it that simple?
Following one’s passion sounds good but it is far more complicated than this. It would be great if life was as easy as to deciding what it is we like to do, then simply start doing it and make a living out of it. What people miss when they encourage you to follow your passion is that–aside from your passion–there is a whole set of skills that is required to enable you to make a living–or a business!–out of that passion. Unless you master that set of skills, doing what you love for a living will remain mere wishful thinking. Each one of us lives in a real world with real obligations to be met and real expenses to be covered. Ignoring all these responsibilities and simply do what we love is unfortunately not realistic. People often say that money does not matter, but in our world it actually does. Money does not mean everything, but it does matter. Numerous studies have shown that past a certain point of financial security and living standards, money does not affect happiness. Before that level of financial security is achieved though, money does in fact have a massive impact on our mental health and happiness.
Lack of financial security makes people feel out of control. As a result, rather than looking forward to the future, they fear it. Even worse, anxiety coming from financial insecurity won’t let you enjoy life. It will, in fact, make you miserable. I have always been a supporter of the idea that a physically and mentally healthy life requires congruent living . By congruent living I mean that your skills, talents, belief system, physical, intellectual and spiritual needs and what you spend most of your waking time on must be aligned. For instance, being a personal trainer or musician and having to live in the shoes of an executive on a nine-to-five schedule is pure misery. The opposite also holds true. In the first chapter of this book we discussed how important meaning and a sense of purpose are in Life. If you decided that it is a meaningful life you want to live, then making a living out of something you are passionate about is the only way to go about in life. If, on the other hand, you are not able to make money out of your passion, it won’t be long till you stop enjoying it. Learning business skills in order to better enjoy your passion and make a living out of something you love is far more motivating than learning business skills just for the sake of it. The key question is: can you make your passion work for you? It is essential that you are passionate about the product or service you sell. The problem is that many people who are passionate about a product and great at making it are not equally passionate about selling it. Simply because they don’t see themselves as sales people.
The moment you start a business you are automatically required to be a sales person. This idea is hard for many people to reconcile with. Sales people are often looked down upon. Most professionals regard their job role as separate from sales. They tend to only see themselves as personal trainers, engineers, educators, lawyers and so on. There is not a single time in life when people are not selling though. I love the process of selling. I love the idea of selling. The reason you have to like sales is simple: you can’t afford to not like sales in Life. If you take a close look at your everyday life, you will notice that selling is what you do most of your time, even in moments where you are not at all aware of the fact. People sell their products, their ideas, and their labor on a daily basis, not necessarily to customers but to every single person they interact with in their personal, professional and social lives. You sell all the time. You sell when you walk into a networking event and want to impress potential business partners or prospective customers. You sell when you walk into a bar to attract someone you like. You sell when you tell a joke. You sell when you try to make a friend see your point of view or win an argument. Business is a game! An exciting life game most people refuse or fail to play because of misconceptions and fears they have toward certain aspects of Business.
Right now, I am selling you the idea that selling is a crucial skill to possess on all levels of life. People sell the entire time. You might not think of it this way, but all of us actually sell every single day. We sell ideas, points of view, hopes, favors, expectations, promises, in exchange of some form of reward. In a corporate setting, when on a job interview, you are selling yourself as the best candidate for a given position. Later, whether you work for a company, trying to walk your way up the ladder, you are still selling. You are selling people the idea that you deserve to be up there, instead of where you actually stand. When you want a pay rise, you are selling again! You are selling your boss the idea that, instead of your current salary you are worth X amount of money. These examples might sound commonplace but you spend your whole life selling, one way or another. In short, unless you learn and practice selling, you won’t get what you want in Life and Business.
When I was a child my traditional idea of a sales person was that of an insurance agent, someone who knocks on people’s doors, selling something they don’t particularly fancy. Sales doesn’t have to be hard. Selling a product you gave birth to and are proud of can be, in fact, a very enjoyable experience. It is essential to learn to love that process. When I started my first business I was not the most gifted sales person. I was priding myself in marketing and business development but less so in sales. This experience made me realize that there is a conflict between the ability to develop a product and the ability to sell that product. What I have found problematic as a strategy is that when people start a business they tend to spend most of their time working on the product. Even though it is a perfectly legitimate and noble thing to try to build the best possible product before throwing it to the market, this often happens to the detriment of actually getting the thing out there. Also, what is generally a noble motive–wanting to offer the best possible product–is often avoidance activity. At some point you need to get out there. When this finally happens, instead of transforming themselves into sales beasts, especially when they first launch it, many entrepreneurs sit back and relax. You would think why would they sit back and relax? Well, because they actually believe that having worked so hard to develop that product, sales will magically happen. They are convinced that the product’s qualities are so obvious that it will become an instant best seller, with them having to make minimum efforts marketing and selling it.
My advice is this. Sell the product first. Yes. I am going to repeat this. Sell the product first. Sell the product before actually producing or marketing it. This is the best business advice I can offer to a startup. Like learning any new set of skills, developing and perfecting your sales skills requires a fair amount of practice and persistence. Before investing insane amounts of money to produce, market and advertise that phenomenal product, sell it first. As a new business, you have to prioritize product quality and brand identity. As a startup though, you cannot afford to do things the way big companies do. You simply cannot afford to come up with a great idea, design a product, develop it, then expect people to come and buy it. Don’t forget that customers are risk-averse and always want to be able to trust the company making the products they buy, which is why you can build a great product and never make a single sale if customers don’t trust your brand. If you wish to start your own business, become a professional coach, nutritionist, accountant, yoga instructor, mechanical engineer, high-tech innovator, or whatever it is you wish you do for a living, call somebody up and try to sell them something. That something doesn’t even have to exist. Try to sell them a time machine! It is all about testing the sales potential of your product. In fact, if the nature of the business does not require you to invest heavily, I suggest that you should not risk any funds. You can minimize the risk and still reap great benefits out of an investment. If the business does not require you having to buy warehouse space and invest in physical property, sell your product first, then deliver it. It is precisely the moment somebody is ready to write a check to buy your product that you know you can throw money into this idea. So, here’s my advice: don’t invest any money in the business, other than the money you make out of that business.
If your business is about selling a service, “sell first” is the strategy to follow as minimal investment is normally required. It was exactly what I had in mind when I started my first business, a boutique consultancy offering services to wealthy Chinese students pursuing their academic studies at top institutions in the United States and Europe. Right from the beginning, I set myself the goal to finance the business only using funds coming from my first customers and projects. This worked. After successfully completing my first two projects I started throwing money into the business, using nothing but the funds coming from my first customers. I started by setting up a legal entity and invested in a good website, word-to-mouth marketing and brand building.
I still can’t remember how many times I met admirably skillful, passion-driven people who were planning to set up a business. After listening to them carefully and being introduced to the specific qualities of the great service or product they would soon be throwing to the market I would ask them what their sales strategy was. Guess what. They didn’t have any. They were all planning to first set up a legal business entity, rent office space, invest in a great website, print fancy business cards hire staff, and do all those things that costed them tons of money, without having attempted a single sale! Even worse, the funds used in start-ups often come from bank loans or money that has been borrowed from friends and family. People lose their life savings, go out of business, and ruin their lives every day making this mistake. Risk is an essential component of the business game. Something that you must embrace and enjoy as an entrepreneur. It is unnecessary risk that is harmful to your business, bank account and health.
Business Is Magic at Work
I have mainly experienced the world of business through being an entrepreneur in the incredibly dynamic and multicultural place that is South East Asia in this beginning of the 21st century. A very dynamic market, full of contradictions, challenges and tremendous business opportunities. China is a country I fell in love with very early on. It became a real love affair when I started learning the language and getting familiar with Asian culture, philosophy and local business practices. In prehistoric times it made sense to be a good hunter-gatherer. In Antiquity being a renowned military leader was a prestigious thing. In the Middle Ages knights were well-regarded. In the Age of Discovery it was cool to be an explorer in search of wealth and adventure. In the Italian Renaissance artists and polymaths like Da Vinci were in great demand. During the Industrial Revolution it was cool to be an inventor, while in the past century with the dawn of the Information Age it was pretty rewarding to be a technology innovator. By the same token, the 21st century is the century of the Enterprise. It is the right time to be in history for creative, value-adding risk takers. It is an age of synthesis that we are approaching. It is now time to incorporate and put into smart use the knowledge that has been built up throughout centuries of human strife and creativity. We are equipped with tools and technology our ancestors could never have imagined. There is a lot of expectation on our shoulders. And rightly so! We are about to move away from standard employment. We are about to transition to a project-based economy where people are encouraged to live on the go. I’ve always regarded entrepreneurship as adults’ way to perpetuate teenage rebellion. Entrepreneurship is a revolutionary act in many ways. It’s the power to dare. The power to risk. The power to venture into uncharted territory. The courage to break the rules, face complete uncertainty while enjoying the whole process. Entrepreneurship is the unshakeable belief that you can prove authorities, critics, skeptics–sometimes even the entire world!–wrong. Perhaps, it is also the ability to know when to close your ears to people whose advice leads you to safe harbors and open them back when there is something really useful to hear, something that will trigger you to further your entrepreneurial journey. Entrepreneurship is not a job. It is a way of life. To some people it is almost a religion.
Entrepreneurship is, in fact, more than the courage to deal with uncertainty and risk; it is the ability to thrive in these conditions. As I’ve already mentioned in the Leadership section, people are pattern-based. They naturally form habits, routines, and behavior patterns that they have a hard time to break later. In the United States, entrepreneurship is a well-established cultural habit. In fact, it is regarded as the very essence of the American national identity, that goes hand in hand with the optimistic and adventurous spirit of the American psyche. In many cultures, however, the idea of rejecting security to embrace a lifestyle of adventure and risk is still quite uncommon. Following an independent path and standing out from the crowd can result in complete exclusion by the crowd, that is, the social group. I regard entrepreneurship as the very essence of business, a major driver of the world economy, and a great game where the sky is the only limit.
A game for grown-ups who never lost their inner child and whose playfulness and naughty creativity cannot be buried under the skin of an adult. Having experienced work in large companies for a certain period made me realize that taking a different route would be in my best interest. I remember walking through one of Shanghai’s largest business districts early in the morning, seeing hordes of people, much like an army of ants, walking their way to another office day and being prepared for an infinite number of such days to come. The sight of them made me panic and realize that this was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do in my life. It was back in my early days in China and at this point I was going through a very challenging period, facing lots of dilemmas and having to make firm life and career decisions. I cannot think of a life more miserable than spending endless days in a cubicle in exchange of safety and a monthly salary enough to cover your bills and afford annual summer holidays.
I preserve as vividly as I can in my memory the image of this crowd of people on their way to the cubicle and bring it to my mind every time I feel a bit tired or unmotivated. Being an entrepreneur is tough, but not quite so, especially if you think what the alternative is. Nobody has a monopoly on great ideas. Great ideas are countless. The same goes for great opportunities. They go hand in hand with great ideas and a bit of courage to follow uncharted routes. I believe that imagination and creativity are the natural condition, the default state of every healthy and alert mind. Ideas flow effortlessly every day in the minds of people brave enough to expose themselves to new challenges. It is through social interaction and exchange with other people that you will be able to receive those necessary stimuli that allow inspiration and creativity to take place. It is the way people drive their mind that makes all the difference. Do you let ideas fly away? Do you note them down and dedicate daily time to think them through and test their actual potential? Don’t let these initial thoughts fly away. They are your bread and butter. Feed and grow them properly.
Business is magic. It’s a tricky world. It requires the skills of a prestidigitator and the realism of a banker. It is the art of making people see things the way you see them. By extension, it is the art of making people buy your vision, products and services. It is also the art of creating impact, the ability to define trends and guide people’s beliefs and lifestyle habits. In short, business is the art of expansion. The skill of leading people to advertise your ideas, brand, and products–for free. In this respect, business is about generating networks of supporters. I am not referring solely to social media followers but groups of people whose mind and heart have been profoundly affected by your message.
Pareto’s Principle Applied in Life, Leadership and Business
It was back in 1906 when Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist came up with a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in early 20th century Italy. He observed that 80 percent of the country’s wealth was owned by around 20 percent of its people. This is nowadays known as the 80/20 formula or Pareto’s Principle. In fact, it was in the late 1940s that Dr Joseph M. Juran, a quality management pioneer, attributed the 80/20 principle to Pareto, thus calling it “Pareto’s Principle” and defining it as the rule of the vital few and the trivial many. Basically, Pareto’s Principle is the observation that there is generally an uneven distribution in all things in life. The 80/20 formula describes the unbalanced distribution of benefit/loss and success/failure. To better illustrate this principle, here are a few areas of application:
• 20 percent of the input creates 80 percent of the result
• 20 percent of the customers create 80 percent of the company’s profit
• 20 percent of the employees produce 80 percent of the work
• 80 percent of wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people
• 80 percent of sales come from 20 percent of a company’s products
• 80 percent of value is achieved with 20 percent of effort
Studies in neuroscience are here to confirm Pareto’s Principle. An intelligent brain is not a brain that works more. On the contrary, an intelligent brain is a brain that works less. This is called neural efficiency, a scientific term used to describe brain function as a way to measure intelligence. In short, being intelligent is not about complex thinking patterns, rather, it is about solving a problem with minimal effort. The neural efficiency theory argues that brighter individuals show lower brain activation than less bright individuals when working on cognitive tasks. When one thinks of a process as complex as human intelligence is, they must imagine that the brain is like an orchestra that is composed of different sections. The challenge is to discover how these sections interact, because as far as we know, there is no conductor! If the brain is an orchestra, then intelligence is music.
The neural efficiency hypothesis is in line with the 80/20 principle. Efficient people are well aware how uncannily accurate this principle is. Pareto’s Principle is all about creating more with less. It is about creating the most value using the least resources. It is one of the greatest strategies used by the world’s most effective people and organizations. In other terms, more effort does not equal more results, more work does not equal more rewards. What this formula is telling is this: Focus only on what is crucial. Ignore the rest. It is about working smarter, selectively, and more efficiently to save yourself time, effort and resources. Taking Pareto’s Principle into the 21st century is the key to stand out of the crowd by creating a maximum of value using a minimum of resources. This principle alone, can offer uncontested advantages in the saturated, overworked era we live in.
What is exciting about this formula is that it is applicable in all areas of Life, Business and Leadership. It is a universal law that Pareto uncovered. The 80/20 formula is nothing but two parts of the same whole. It can either work 80/20 or 20/80. It’s up to you. You can choose to be on the right side and make the most of your tangible and intangible assets, be it financial resources, time, effort, learning capacity, or skills development. The 80/20 formula is a key strategy to developing your business, leadership, and life skills by focusing on real income-generating tasks or whatever it is that brings real value to your life.
In sum:
1. Identify and invest most energy and resources in the critical few: the 20 percent of tasks, projects, and efforts producing 80 percent of the results.
2. If you are a company—especially if you are a small business or a start-up—focus on those products, services, and customers that bring you the most profit while minimizing or even eliminating the rest.
3. Make sure that a minority of carefully selected inputs leads to a majority of outputs.
4. Focus on those key activities that produce the majority of life satisfaction.
5. A minority of smart decisions will produce the majority of results in your projects, investments, and relationships.
In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.
—Harold Geneen
Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence.
—Max Amsterdam
The secret of business is to know something nobody else knows.
—Aristotle Onassis
Business is a combination of war and sport.
—André Maurois
Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.
—Warren Buffett
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
—Ambrose Bierce
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
—Bill Gates
I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.
—Alan Greenspan
To succeed in business it is make others see things as you see them.
—Aristotle Onassis
I understand small business growth. I was one.
—George W. Bush
Successful enterprises are usually led by a proven chief executive who is a competent benevolent dictator.
—Richard Pratt
The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market reward for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
—J.K. Galbraith
I don’t pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages.
—Robert Bosch
Professionalism is a frame of mind, not a paycheck.
—Cecil Castle
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
—Edward R. Murrow
Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.
—Charles Caleb Colton
Let’s be honest. There’s not a business anywhere that is without problems. Business is complicated and imperfect. Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings.
—Bob Parsons
The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.
—Leo Tolstoy
Justice is the insurance which we have on our lives and property.
Obedience is the premium which we pay for it.
—William Penn
Action
You are only as beautiful as your last action.
—Stephen Richards
Never mistake motion for action.
—Ernest Hemingway
You are what you do when it counts.
—John Steakly
Talk doesn’t cook rice.
—Chinese Proverb
A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.
—Tony Robbins
Either do something worth reading or do something worth writing.
—Benjamin Franklin
Understate and over deliver.
—Toby Bloomberg
Happiness is a state of activity.
—Aristotle
The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.
—John Burroughs
The shortest answer is doing.
—Lord Herbert
The first step binds one to the second.
—French Proverb
Anyone can promise the stars. Only you can reach them.
—Dodinsky
Without consistent action, purpose and strategy are words of hope.
—Michael Kouly
Get involved. You don’t want to look back on your life and realize that you successfully managed to stay out of it.
—Robert Brault
An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.
—Arnold H. Glasgow
Strong reason make strong actions.
—William Shakespeare
All know the way; few actually walk it.
—Bodhidharma
Some people want it to happen, some wish it could happen, others make it happen.
—Michael Jordan
The six W’s: Work will win when wishing won’t.
—Todd Blackledge
People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do.
—Lewis Cass
A vision without action is an hallucination.
—Japanese Proverb
Well done is better than well said.
—Benjamin Franklin
A promise is a cloud; fulfillment is rain.
—Arabian Proverb
The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything.
—Albert Einstein
Think like a man of action. Act like a man of thought.
—Henri Bergson
Doing things is not the same as getting things done.
—Jared Silver
Do not be wise in words—be wise in deeds.
—Jewish Proverb
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on man unless they act.
—G.K. Chesterton
My personal philosophy is not to undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.
—Edwin Land, Inventor of the Polaroid camera in 1947.
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
—Frank Tibolt
I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
—John Locke
Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action.
—Walter Anderson, The Confidence Course, 1997
Action is the antidote to despair.
—Joan Baez
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
—Mark Twain
The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps—we must step up the stairs.
—Vance Havner
What we think or what we know or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
—John Ruskin
Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words.
—Alfred Adler
Action is eloquence.
—William Shakespeare
Success will never be a big step in the future, success is a small step taken just now.
—Jonatan Mårtensson
Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold—but so does a hard-boiled egg.
—Author Unknown
Note to self: finding a cool quote and writing it in your journal is not a substitute for Getting. It. Done.
—Betsy Cañas Garmon
Do it, and then you will feel motivated to do it.
—Zig Ziglar
As I grow older I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
—Andrew Carnegie
There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.
—Mignon McLaughlin
Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
—Nicolas de Chamfort
The best way out of a problem is through it.
—Author Unknown
Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
—Oscar Wilde
If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astonish ourselves.
—Thomas Edison
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three people, two of whom are absent.
—Robert Copeland
The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.
—Maria Montessori
What you allow, you encourage.
—Michael Josephson
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
God and the devil lose to a common enemy: inertia.
—Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
Career
People never realize how much work impacts their self-esteem and sense of purpose until they leave a job.
—Rob Payne
There are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.
—Nigel Marsh
If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
—Albert Einstein
Don’t just let your business or your job make something for you; let it make something of you.
—Jim Rohn
Passion is the difference between having a job and having a career.
—Anonymous Author
Not 16 percent of the human race is, or ever has been, engaged in any kinds of activity at which they excel.
—Philip Mairet
If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission.
I think the person who takes a job to in order to live – that is to say for the money – has turned himself into a slave.
—Joseph Campbell
If you want to be successful in this world you need to follow your passion, not a paycheck.
Be so good they can’t ignore you.
—Steve Martin
Doing what you like is freedom, liking what you do is happiness.
The best days of those who enjoy what they do are better than the best days of those who don’t.
—Jim Rohn
I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.
—Elvis Presley
My father taught me to always
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy…neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
—John W. Gardner
When I was four I told my mother I wanted to be a rock star when I grow up. She said: ‘You can’t do both’.
—Steven Tyler
It’s no good running a pig farm for thirty years while saying: ‘really I was meant to be a ballet dancer’. By that time pigs will be your style.
—Quentin Crisp
If in one hundred years I am only known as the man who invented Sherlock Holmes, then I will have considered my life a failure.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.
—Harry S. Truman
My mother has always been unhappy with what I do – she would rather I do something nice, like be a bricklayer.
—Mick Jagger
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.
—John Ruskin
We all live under the same sky but we do not all have the same horizon.
—Konrad Adenauer
The feeling of having taken a wrong turning in life was made worse by the fact that he could not, for the life of him, remember having taken any turnings at all.
—Charles Fernyhough
When a man is determined what can stop him? Cripple him and you have Sir Walter Scott. Put him in a prison cell and you have a John Bunyan. Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge and you have a George Washington. Have him born in abject poverty and you have a Lincoln. Put him in the grease pit of a locomotive roundhouse and you have a Walter P. Chrysler. Make him second fiddle in an obscure South African orchestra and you have a Toscanini. The hardships of life are sent not to be an unkind destiny to crush but to challenge.
—Sam E. Roberts
If you make a sale you can make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune.
—Jim Rohn
My father taught me to always do more than you get paid for as an investment in your future.
—Jim Rohn
It is never too late to be who you might have been.
—George Eliot
Make sure that the ladder you are climbing is not leaning against the wrong wall.
—Author Unknown
Taking jobs to build up your resume is the same thing as saving sex for old age.
—Warren Buffett
Competition
Your margin is my opportunity.
—Jeff Bezos
The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting above average effort.
—Colin Powell
You are not competition. You’re just in my way.
I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.
—Walt Disney
Being underestimated is one of the biggest competitive advantages you can have. Embrace it.
—Author Unknown
Number one; cash is king…number two; communicate…number three; buy or bury the competition.
—Jack Welch
When you compete with yourself you become better. When you compete with others you become bitter.
—Author Unknown
The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So, the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage. He has little competition.
—Dale Carnegie
Don’t compare yourself with anyone in the world…If you do so, you are insulting yourself.
—Bill Gates
The best way to help the poor is not to become one of them.
—Lang Hancock
Everybody loves you until you become competition.
—Author Unknown
A flower does not think about competing to the flower next to it. It just blooms.
—Author Unknown
The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.
—Jack Welch
They wanna see you do good but never better than them. Remember that.
—Author Unknown
Do your work with your whole heart, and you will succeed – there’s so little competition.
—Elbert Hubbard
Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.
—Faqimi Fauzi
Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
—Ayn Rand
Creativity
Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.
—Arthur Koestler
You are lost the instant you know what the result will be.
—Juan Gris
Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing.
—Henri Matisse
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
—George Bernard Shaw
Make it a practice to keep on the lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are working on.
—Thomas Edison
Creative spirits always anticipate the course of events. They do not wait for the dawn of a new era. They resolutely begin the new era at the moment when they see that the old era is ended.
—Samuel McChord Crothers, “On the Evening of the New Day,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1919
In a world of innovation and creativity, words like crazy, weird and eccentric are compliments.
—Michael Kouly
What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make things visible for them. Those with originality have for the most part also assign3ed names.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Debt
Today, there are three kinds of people: the have’s, the have-not’s, and the have-not-paid-for-what-they-have’s.
—Earl Wilson
Debt is the worst poverty.
—Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732
A man in debt is a man in chains.
—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), c.1882
When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage.
—Bill Balance
Promises make debts, and debts make promises.
—Dutch Proverb
Credit buying is much like being drunk. The buzz happens immediately and gives you a lift.... The hangover comes the day after.
—Joyce Brothers
The only man who sticks closer to you in adversity than a friend is a creditor.
—Author Unknown
Before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need most.
—American Proverb
Never spend your money before you have it.
—Thomas Jefferson
There are plenty of ways to get ahead. The first is so basic I’m almost embarrassed to say it: spend less than you earn.
—Paul Clitheroe
Enterprise
Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life doing what most people can’t.
—Author Unknown
Build your own dreams, or somebody else will hire you to build theirs.
—Farrah Gray
Be nice to geeks. You’ll probably end up working for one.
—Bill Gates
Entrepreneurship is not a part-time job. It’s not even a full-time job. It’s a lifestyle.
—Carrie Layne
No enterprise is more likely to succeed than the one that is concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
Everyone can tell you the risk. Only an entrepreneur can see the reward.
—Robert Kiyosaki
Excuses
No one ever excused his way to success.
—Dave Del Dotto
One of the most important tasks of a manager is to eliminate his people’s excuses for failure.
—Robert Townsend
Justifying a fault doubles it.
—French Proverb
Don’t do what you’ll have to find an excuse for.
—Proverb
The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.
—Jules Renard
Excuses are the tools with which persons with no purpose in view build for themselves great monuments of nothing.
—Steven Grayhm
Pessimism is an excuse for not trying and a guarantee to a personal failure.
—Bill Clinton
If you don’t want to do something, one excuse is as good as another.
—Yiddish Proverb
He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.
—Benjamin Franklin
Success is a tale of obstacles overcome, and for every obstacle overcome, an excuse not used.
—Robert Brault
Bad excuses are worse than none.
—Thomas Fuller
Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.
—Edward R. Murrow
Bad men excuse their faults; good men abandon them.
—Author Unknown
He who excuses himself accuses himself.
—Gabriel Meurier
Sometimes I wish I had a terrible childhood, so that at least I’d have an excuse.
—Jimmy Fallon
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
—Rudyard Kipling
Never ruin an apology with an excuse.
—Kimberly Johnson
Experience
Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.
—Aldous Leonard Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, 1932
Learn all you can from the mistakes of others. You won’t have the time to make4 them all yourself.
—Alfred Sheinwold
Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.
—David T. Wolf
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
—Franklin P. Jones
Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes.
—Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan, 1896
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
—Chinese Proverb
Experience is the worst teacher. It always gives the test first and the instruction afterward.
—Benjamin Franklin
Experience is what you got by not having it when you need it.
—Author Unknown
There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.
—John Stuart Mill
Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.
—Søren Kierkegaard
No physician is really good before he has killed one or two patients.
—Hindu Proverb
God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.
—Elbert Hubbard
A man begins cutting his wisdom teeth the first time he bites off more than he can chew.
—Herb Caen
If experience was so important, we’d never have had anyone walk on the moon.
—Doug Rader
Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t.
—Pete Seeger
Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones.
—Author Unknown
The experience I gained at age 21 would be useful if I were ever 21 again. But I’m 71 and new at it and keep making age 71 mistakes.
—Robert Brault
We have two lives—the one we learn with and the life we live after that.
—Bernard Malamud, The Natural
Information’s pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.
—Clarence Day, The Crow’s Nest
You must learn to make the whole world your school.
—Martin H. Fischer
If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we’d all be millionaires.
—Abigail Van Buren
Failure
Failure is an event, never a person.
—William D. Brown, Welcome Stress!
I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
—Bill Cosby
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nothing encourages creativity like the chance to fall flat on one’s face.
—James D. Finley
There is no failure except in no longer trying.
—Elbert Hubbard
I don’t believe in failure. It’s not failure if you enjoyed the process.
—Oprah Winfrey
There are defeats more triumphant than victories.
—Michel de Montaigne
Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
—Henry Ford
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
—Charles Horton Cooley
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
—Truman Capote
You always pass failure on your way to success.
—Mickey Rooney
There is no failure. Only feedback.
—Robert Allen
The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.
—Lloyd Jones
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
—Samuel Beckett
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: you’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
—Alan J. Perlis
Adversity and failure are woven into the fabric of existence; without them, there can be neither test of mettle nor triumph of success.
—Dr. Idel Dreimer
People are not afraid of failure. It is the embarrassment of not succeeding that scares them most.
—Michael Kouly
You can fail at something you don’t want, so might as well take a chance doing what you love.
—Jim Carrey
In victory, you deserve champagne, in defeat, you need it.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.
—Abraham Lincoln
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
—Bill Gates
Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.
—Samuel McChord Crothers
Goals
The goal is the same: life itself, and the price is the same; life itself.
—James Agee
Goals are dreams with deadlines.
—Diana Scharf Hunt
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Pick your impossibilities and accomplish them.
Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of.
—Charles Richards
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
—Zig Ziglar
If you’re bored with life, if you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things you don’t have enough goals.
—Lou Holtz
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
—Japanese Proverb
One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.
—Sidney Howard
If your dreams are not scaring you, you are not dreaming big enough.
—Author Unknown
You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures.
—Charles C. Noble
I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.
—Henry Ford
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
—Elbert Hubbard
Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.
—Jack Dixon
Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes.
—Author Unknown
We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.
—Robert Brault
Visualize your long-term goals to paint your short-term action on the canvas of now.
—Terri Guillemets
A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.
—Andre Gide
Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn’t look up. Well, maybe once.
—Isaac Asimov
There is one quality more important than “know-how” and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is “know-what” by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.
—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1954
Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Drift-Wood
Know your limits, but never stop trying to exceed them.
—Author Unknown
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
—George Bernard Shaw
If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
—John Dewey
This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anyone could have.
—Author Unknown
One may miss the mark by aiming too high as too low.
—Thomas Fuller
When people say to me: “How do you do so many things?” I often answer them, without meaning to be cruel: “How do you do so little?” It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don’t. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.
—Philip Adams
Habits
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
—Aristotle
The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
—Samuel Johnson
You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.
—John C. Maxwell
Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.
—Jim Ryun
I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the years’.
—Henry Moore
Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.
—Confucius, Analects
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
—Marcel Proust
Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.
—Marcel Proust
We are sinners by nature, but much more so by practice.
—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), “Human Life,” Sparks from the Philosopher’s Stone, 1882
To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
—Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life
Habits are safer than rules; you don’t have to watch them. And you don’t have to keep them, either. They keep you.
—Frank Crane
To change one’s habits has a smell of death about it.
—Portuguese Proverb
Bad habits are easier to abandon today than tomorrow.
—Yiddish Proverb
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
—Virginia Woolf
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
—James Baldwin
The best way to break a bad habit is to drop it.
—Leo Aikman
Habit is overcome by habit.
—Thomas Kempis
The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.
—Feodor Dostoevski
A bad habit never disappears miraculously. It’s an undo-it-yourself project.
—Abigail Van Buren (1918–2013)
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.
—Oscar Wilde
The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones.
—Somerset Maugham
The easier it is to do, the harder it is to change.
—Eng’s Principle
Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.
—St. Augustine
Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all.
—Georges Gurdjieff
No monarch is so well obeyed as that whose name is Habit.
—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher’s Stone, 1882
Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
—Mark Twain
In most cases, misfortune is an acquired habit.
—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
If you don’t watch out, putting on your unhappiness in the morning can become as instinctive as putting on your clothes.
—Robert Brault
Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.
—William James, The Principles of Psychology
The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.
—Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670
Investment
If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.
—Warren Buffett
Do not save what is left after spending, but spend what is left after saving.
—Warren Buffett
Never depend on single income. Make investment to create a second source.
—Warren Buffett
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
—Bill Gates
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
It is unfortunate we can’t buy many business executives for what they are worth and sell them for what they think they are worth.
—Malcolm Forbes
To add value to others, one must first value others.
—John C. Maxwell
Don’t educate your children to be rich. Educate them to be happy, so they know the value of things not their price.
—Author Unknown
There are so many men who can figure costs, and so few who can measure values.
—Author Unknown
You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.
—Joseph E. Levine
Labor
Dreams don’t work, unless you do.
Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence.
—Ted Key
If you want an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
—Carl Sagan
Work as if you own the company and soon you just might.
—Mike Dolan
If things seem under your control, you are not going fast enough.
—Mario Andretti
What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
—Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.
—Indira Gandhi
Too much attention to others’ business often directs their attention to yours.
—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher’s Stone, 1882
The trick to getting things done is to list things to do in doable order.
—Robert Brault
The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea.
—Isaac Dinesen
God sells us all things at the price of labor.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.
—Adam Smith
Without labor nothing prospers.
—Sophocles
Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
—Joseph Joubert
Work isn’t to make money; you work to justify life.
—Marc Chagall
Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.
—Old New England Saying
What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.
—Will Rogers
A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.
—Thomas Jefferson
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
—Anatole France
We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.
—Gerald Brenan
Employment is nature’s physician, and is essential to human happiness.
—Galen
When everything is finished, the mornings are sad.
—Antonio Porchia
Hard work, worry and whiskey are the friends of man.
—Martin H. Fischer
Learning
Be a student not a follower. Don’t just go do what someone says. Take interest in what someone says, then debate it, ponder it, and consider it from all angles.
—Jim Rohn
I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.
—Eartha Kitt
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
—Mahatma Gandhi
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
—Winston Churchill
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
—T.H. Huxley
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.
—Socrates
We need to focus more on learning with technology, not learning technology.
—George Couros
Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
—William Hazlitt
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.
—Henry Ford
There is in Euripides some kind of learning that is always at the boiling point.
—Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, 2006
Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.
—Chinese Proverb
It’s a mistake, when life hands you a tough lesson, to think that you can get back at life by not learning it.
—Robert Brault
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.
—Thomas Szasz
When the student is ready, the master appears.
—Buddhist Proverb
If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.
—Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
Learning without thought is labor lost.
—Confucius
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
—Aristotle
Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears and never regrets.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
No matter how one may think himself accomplished, when he sets out to learn a new language, science, or the bicycle, he has entered a new realm as truly as if he were a child newly born into the world.
—Frances Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
—Albert Camus
People learn something every day, and a lot of times it’s that what they learned the day before was wrong.
—Bill Vaughan
Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.
—Chinese Proverb
You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
—Marvin Minsky
Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.
—Chinese Proverb
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.
—Galileo Galilei
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
—George Bernard Shaw
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
—Jacob Bronowski
Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.
—Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.
—Attributed to Harry S Truman
You learn something every day if you pay attention.
—Ray LeBlond
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
—Willa Cather
Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will.
—Vernon Howard
Education is indoctrination if you’re white—subjugation if you’re black.
—James Baldwin
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.
—Henry S. Haskins
There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.
—Michel de Montaigne
We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.
—Lloyd Alexander
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.
—Doris Lessing
I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
—Bernard Keble Sandwell
Learning is a lifetime process, but there comes a time when we must stop adding and start updating.
—Robert Brault
The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book. You don’t need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library.
—Lesley Conger
I will swear by a thing today, but I will have the courage to denounce it tomorrow, if needs be. The vows of ignorance are not binding upon enlightenment.
—Muriel Strode-Lieberman (1875–1964), My Little Book of Life, 1912
The lucky person passes for a genius.
—Euripides
Ability is of little account without opportunity.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
Those who have succeeded at anything and don’t mention luck are kidding themselves.
—Larry King
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
—Mark Twain
It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.
—Joseph Conrad
Better an ounce of luck than a pound of gold.
—Yiddish Proverb
Luck is infatuated with the efficient.
—Persian Proverb
The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.
—Harry Golden
There is a very easy way to return from a casino with a small fortune: go there with a large one.
—Jack Yelton
Luck is what you have left over after you give 100 percent.
—Langston Coleman
Whatever great advantages nature may give, it is not she alone, but fortune also that makes the hero.
—Francois de la Rochefoucauld
Luck never gives; it only lends.
—Swedish Proverb
Depend on the rabbit’s foot if you will, but remember it didn’t work for the rabbit.
—R.E. Shay
He that waits upon fortune is never sure of a dinner.
—Benjamin Franklin
It’s hard to detect good luck – it looks so much like something you’ve earned.
—Frank A. Clark
The day you decide to do it is your lucky day.
—Japanese Proverb
Luck is when opportunity knocks and you answer.
—Author Unknown
Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.
—William Shakespeare
Luck is being in the right place at the right time, but location and timing are top some extent under our control.
—Natasha Josefowitz
We must believe in luck. How else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
—Jean Cocteau
The only good luck many great men had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck.
—Channing Pollock
It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck even while waiting for it.
—Baltasar Gracian
—George Lucas
Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.
—Dalai Lama
Luck visits a fool, but it never sits down with him.
—German Proverb
Some folk want their luck buttered.
—Thomas Hardy
Luck seeks those who flee and flees those who seek it.
—German Proverb
May your pockets be heavy and your heart be light. May good luck pursue you each morning and night.
—Irish Blessing
I’ve done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.
—Fran Lebowitz
What we call luck is inner man internalized. We make things happen to us.
—Robertson Davies
Luck was a joke. Even good luck was bad luck with its hair combed.
—Stephen King
I am so unlucky that if I was to fall into a barrel of nipples I’d come out sucking my thumb.
—Freddie Star
Every dog has his day in luck.
—Japanese Proverb
Go and wake up your luck.
—Persian Saying
Mistakes
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
—John Powell
Even if you fall on your face, you’re still moving forward.
—Victor Kiam
While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.
—Henry C. Link
Remember, if you’re headed in the wrong direction, God allows U-turns!
—Allison Gappa Bottke
Making a different mistake every day is not only acceptable, it is the definition of progress.
—Robert Brault
The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes.
—Aubrey Menen
Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.
—Sophia Loren
If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake.
—Eli Siegel
Making mistakes simply means you are learning faster.
—Weston H. Agor
From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.
—Syrus
You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.
—Sam Levenson
Our blunders mostly come from letting our wishes interpret our duties.
—Author Unknown
If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.
—Rabindranath Tagore
It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
—Jessamyn West
Truth will sooner come out of error than from confusion.
—Francis Bacon
Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.
—Phyllis Theroux
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.
—Niels Bohr
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
—James Joyce
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
—Edward Phelps
You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
—Colette
I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.
—John Peel
To go wrong is sometimes the surest way to go right. It is not always down to depths: it is down, sometimes, to heights. I got my first perspective of heaven from hell.
—Muriel Strode-Lieberman (1875–1964), My Little Book of Life, 1912
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
—Scott Adams
Do not fear mistakes. There are none.
—Miles Davis
Money
He who has money can eat sherbet in hell.
—Lebanese Proverb
I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.
—Pablo Picasso
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
—George Bernard Shaw
There are people who have money and people who are rich.
—Coco Chanel
Money is neither my god nor my devil. It is a form of energy that tends to make us more of who we already are, whether it’s greedy or loving.
—Dan Millman
After a certain point money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts.
—Aristotle Onassis
I don’t need the money dear. I work for art.
—Maria Callas
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
—Oscar Wilde
To suppose as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
He that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends.
—William Shakespeare
Money is flat because it’s meant to be piled up.
—Proverb
Money won’t create success. The freedom to make it will.
—Nelson Mandela
If you have a gun you can rob a bank. If you have a bank you can rob everybody.
—Bill Maher
Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851
Your friend lends and your enemy asks payment.
—Dutch Proverb
To get rich you have to be making money while you are asleep.
—David Bailey
It’s a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
—Albert Camus
Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the “gotta have it” scale.
—Zig Ziglar
You must spend money to make money.
—Plautus
Do not value money for any more nor any less than its worth; it is a good servant but a bad master.
—Alexandre Dumas Jr., Camille, 1852
I wish I’d said it first, and I don’t even know who did: The only problems that money can solve are money problems.
—Mignon McLaughlin
The little money I have—that is my wealth, but the things I have for which I would not take money, that is my treasure.
—Robert Brault
Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won’t buy the wag of his tail.
—Henry Wheeler Shaw
The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
—Jean-Paul Kauffmann
Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.
—Norman Vincent Peale
People are living longer than ever before, a phenomenon undoubtedly made necessary by the 30-year mortgage.
—Doug Larson
We live by the Golden Rule. Those who have the gold make the rules.
—Buzzie Bavasi
Always live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so.
—Josh Billings
Money is much more exciting than anything it buys.
—Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966
If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.
—Aristotle Onassis
Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair.
—Sam Ewing
It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.
—Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
Money and women. They’re two of the strongest things in the world. The things you do for a woman you wouldn’t do for anything else. Same with money.
—Satchel Paige
By the time I have money to burn, my fire will have burnt out.
—Author Unknown
A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.
—Bob Hope
They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.
—Khalil Gibran
If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
—Earl Wilson
Always borrow money from a pessimist, he doesn’t expect to be paid back.
—Author Unknown
Money is nothing more than arrogance on paper.
—Hunter Brinkmeier
Never spend your money before you have it.
—Thomas Jefferson
Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions.
—A.A. Latimer
They who are of the opinion that money will do everything, may very well be suspected to do everything for money.
—George Savile, Complete Works, 1912
My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.
—Errol Flynn
Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy you the kind of misery you prefer.
—Author Unknown
A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety and nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stocks snuggles into your heart in the same way.
—Mark Twain
If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
—Henry Ford
A little satisfies the poor, while the rich never cease their longings.
—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher’s Stone, 1882
The “line of beauty” is a curve something like the letter S, but it attracts more attention when it has a parallel line drawn through it, thus—$.
—Mary Wilson Little, Reveries of a Paragrapher, 1897
Life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.
—Clifford Odets
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
—Robert Graves
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.
—Franklin Roosevelt
Whoever said money cannot buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping.
—Bo Derek
It frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.
—Groucho Marx
In the old days a man who saved money was a miser; nowadays he’s a wonder.
—Author Unknown
One may see the small value God has for riches by the people He gives them to.
—Alexander Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1727
When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
—Voltaire
Money is like water: in sufficient volume, it erodes the bedrock of principle, and cuts its own channel.
—Dr. Idel Dreimer
The waste of money cures itself, for soon there is no more to waste.
—M.W. Harrison
When your outgo exceeds your income your upkeep is your downfall.
—Author unknown, c.1945
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., speech, Boston, 1897 January 8th
You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy, because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.
—Jean Kerr
If inflation continues to soar, you’re going to have to work like a dog just to live like one.
—George Gobel
Never call an accountant a credit to his profession; a good accountant is a debit to his profession.
—Charles J.C. Lyall
The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.
—Author Unknown
The difference between necessities and luxuries is generally measured by the pocketbook.
—Mary Wilson Little, Reveries of a Paragrapher, 1897
To be clever enough to get a great deal of money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
—George Bernard Shaw
It is said that for money you can have everything, but you cannot. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine but not health; knowledge but not wisdom; glitter but not beauty; fun but not joy; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; leisure but not peace. You can have the husk of everything for money, but not the kernel.
—Arne Garborg
At the back of every great fortune lies a great crime.
—Honoré de Balzac
The only thing money gives is the freedom of not worrying about money.
—Johnny Carson
I have enough money to last me the rest of my life unless I buy something.
—Jackie Mason
There are no pockets in a shroud.
—Author Unknown
I’m so poor I can’t even pay attention.
—Ron Kittle, 1987
A full purse makes disagreeable men, and even knaves, tolerable in society.
—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher’s Stone, 1882
Sometimes I think that all mankind
exist but to be bought and sold:
The rich man’s paramour is gold,
the poor man’s goddess, gold, gold, gold.
—Frederic Ridgely Torrence, The House of a Hundred Lights: A Psalm of Experience After Reading a Couplet of Bidpai, 1899
Opportunities
Jumping at several small opportunities may get us there more quickly than waiting for one big one to come along.
—Hugh Allen
I think I don’t regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.
—Henry James
Opportunity is as scarce as oxygen; men fairly breathe it and do not know it.
—Doc Sane
Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending.
—Author Unknown
While the optimist and pessimist argue whether the glass is half full or half empty the opportunist walks in and drinks it.
—Author Unknown
It is often hard to distinguish between the hard knocks in life and those of opportunity.
—Frederick Phillips
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
—Mark Twain
If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.
—Milton Barle
A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.
—Harry Truman
What I do know is that if one wants to get a boat ride, one must be near the river.
—Anchee Min, Becoming Madame Mao
Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them.
—Maltbie Babcock
Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great.
—Orison Swett Marden
Opportunities fly by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.
—Jerome K. Jerome, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1889
As you seek new opportunity, keep in mind that the sun does not usually reappear on the horizon where last seen.
—Robert Brault
Grasp your opportunities, no matter how poor your health; nothing is worse for your health than boredom.
—Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966
Nothing is so often irretrievably missed as a daily opportunity.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser—in case you thought optimism was dead.
—Robert Brault
I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like.
—Coco Chanel
The usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness.
—Chinese Proverb
Of course I look at the glass half full. The only time I would look at it half empty is when I think about how good the first half tasted.
—Drew Deyoung
In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.
—Daniel L. Reardon
The man who is not dead still has a chance.
—Lebanese Proverb
I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.
—Walt Disney
A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is a man who hopes they are.
—Chauncey Mitchell Depew
The best way to dispel negative thoughts is to require that they have a purpose.
—Robert Brault
When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That’s when you can get more creative in solving problems.
—Stephen Covey
Being an optimist after you’ve got everything you want doesn’t count.
—Kin Hubbard
An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day.
—Irv Kupcinet
Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
—Oscar Wilde
An optimist is the human personification of spring.
—Susan J. Bissonette
After 5000 years of recorded human history, you wonder ‘What part of 2,000,000 sunrises doesn’t a pessimist understand’ ?
—Robert Brault
A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.
—Harry Truman
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
—James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion, 1926
Optimists are nostalgic about the future.
—Chicago Tribune
Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.
—Gil Stern
Most people plan by disaster. They think of what can go wrong and then they master it.
—Richard Bandler
In optimism there is magic. In pessimism there is nothing.
—Abraham–Hicks
An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
—Bill Vaughan
A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides, and shrugs; an optimist doesn’t see the clouds at all—he’s walking on them.
—Leonard Louis Levinson
Optimism is the foundation of courage.
—Nicholas Murray Butler
The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
—George F. Will, The Leveling Wind
People
Whenever two people meet there are six present. There is the man as he sees himself, each as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
—William James
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
—Jim Rohn
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intent to reply.
—Stephen R. Covey
Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
—Benjamin Franklin
Every man is as Nature made him and sometimes a great deal worse.
—Miguel de Cervantes
It’s a desperately vexatious thing that, after all one’s reflections and quiet determinations, we should be ruled by moods that one can’t calculate on beforehand.
—George Eliot
The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him.
—Joseph Heller
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
—Winston Churchill
We don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around – and why the parents will always wave back.
—Bill Tammeus
Men can bear all things except good days.
—Dutch Proverb
People are like holidays. Do others see you as Christmas, or more like Tax Day?
—Terri Guillemets
If it has anything to do with honesty, compassion, appreciating the silence of a winter morning, remembering to listen when the leaves fall and believing in magic, then my parents were, and still are, hippies.
—Cecily Schmidt, “Common Threads,” in Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture edited by Chelsea Cain, 1999
Strong people have strong weaknesses.
—Peter Drucker
Men would not live long in society, were they not the mutual dupes of each other.
—François VI de la Rochefoucault
Skill is fine and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.
—Author Unknown
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one rifling exception, is composed of others.
—John Andrew Holmes
Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
Stay away from ‘’still’’ people. Still broke, still complaining, still hating and still nowhere.
—Author Unknown
Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.
—Martin Luther King
When I’m out and about, people are annoying idiots. When I’m home alone, all mankind is loving and good.
—Terri Guillemets
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
—Margaret Mead
Eventually you come to realize that most people aren’t looking for a fight but for someone to surrender to.
—Robert Brault
A hundred men together are the hundredth part of a man.
—Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone.
—Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.
—G.I. Gurdjieff
If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.
—François VI de la Rochefoucault
A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.
—Arthur Miller
The real problem is in the hearts of and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than denature the evil from the spirit of man.
—Albert Einstein
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
—Abba Eban
Bad friends will prevent you from having good friends.
—Author Unknown
Any business with customers is in the “people” business.
—Help Scout
Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because anyone can see but only a few can text by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are, and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
It is just as difficult to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
Planning
Make no small plans for they have no power to stir the soul.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
Action without planning is a nightmare.
—Japanese Proverb
If you don’t design your own life plan, chance are you will fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
—Jim Rohn
I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change.
—Jim Rohn
The reason why most people face the future with apprehension instead of anticipation is because they don’t have it well designed.
—Jim Rohn
Philosophy
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize until you have tried to make it precise.
—Bertrand Russell
If the complexity of the universe demands, as explanation, an intelligent creator—then, by the same reasoning—so does the intelligent creator.
—Dr. Idel Dreimer
Procrastination is opportunity’s assassin.
—Victor Kiam
What may be done at any time will be done at no time.
—Scottish Proverb
Procrastination is the thief of time.
—Edward Young
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
—Pablo Picasso
There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.
—Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
Putting off an easy thing makes it hard. Putting off a hard thing makes it impossible.
—George Claude Lorimer
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
—Mark Twain
Tomorrow is the only day in the year that appeals to a lazy man.
—Jimmy Lyons
One of the greatest labor-saving inventions of today is tomorrow.
—Vincent T. Foss
The two rules of procrastination: 1) Do it today. 2) Tomorrow will be today tomorrow.
—Author unknown
To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.
—Eva Young
Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.
—Spanish Proverb
Know the true value of time. Snatch, seize and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
—Lord Chesterfield
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
—Don Marquis
You may delay, but time will not.
—Benjamin Franklin
Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Delay may give clearer light as to what is best to be done.
—Aaron Burr
If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.
—Larry McMurtry
Procrastination is something best put off until tomorrow.
—Gerald Vaughan
A year from now you may wish you had started today.
—Karen Lamb
The best way to get something done is to begin.
—Author Unknown
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
—William James, letter to Carl Stumpf, 1886
To always be intending to live a new life, but never find time to set about it—this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking from one day to another till he be starved and destroyed.
—Walter Scott
Procrastination is like masturbation. At first it feels good, but in the end you’re only screwing yourself.
—Author unknown
If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.
—Olin Miller
It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in.
—Earl of Chesterfield
You know you are getting old when it takes too much effort to procrastinate.
—Author Unknown
Things dreaded require double time to accomplish them.
—James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Sparks from the Philosopher’s Stone, 1882
There’s nothing to match curling up with a good book when there’s a repair job to be done around the house.
—Joe Ryan
I do my work at the same time each day—the last minute.
—Author Unknown
The problem with putting off things you’ve always wanted to do is that eventually you run out of always.
—Robert Brault
Expect an early death—it will keep you busier.
—Martin H.
The time to begin most things is ten years ago.
—Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, 1966 Fischer
It is a job that has never started that takes the longest to finish.
—J.R. Tolkien
If it weren’t for the last minute, I wouldn’t get anything done.
—Author Unknown
Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
—Robert Benchley
Progress
Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds they cannot change anything.
—George Bernard Shaw
Make the workmanship surpass the materials.
—Ovid
Progress far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.
—George Santayana
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
—Aldous Huxley
Progress is not created by contended people.
—Frank Tyger
If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.
—Albert Einstein
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950
Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress.
—Milan Kundera
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lam. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to show us the value of a job.
—Victor Hugo
Belief in progress is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians. It is the individual relying upon his neighbors to do his work.
—Charles Baudelaire
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
—Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
—Frank Lloyd Wright
Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.
—John Clapham, 1920s
All of the biggest technological inventions created by man – the airplane, the automobile, the computer – says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.
—Mark Kennedy
Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.
—Lewis Mumford
Results
Always look at the solution, not the problem. Learn to focus on what will bring results.
—Author Unknown
People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.
—Attributed to Albert Einstein
Success is a result, not a goal.
—Author Unknown
Results come over time not overnight.
—Author Unknown
It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises but only performance is reality.
—Harold Geneen
If you want to have something you never had, then you have to do something you never done.
In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result.
—James Allen
However beautiful the strategy you should occasionally look at the results.
—Winston Churchill
You can have results. You can have excuses. However, you cannot have both.
—Stephen Luke
There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you are interested in doing something you do it only when it’s convenient. When you are committed to something you accept no excuses. Only results.
—Kenneth Blanchard
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
—Kierkegaard
Forget about style. Worry about results.
Everything in your life is a reflection of the result of a choice you have made. If you want a different result, make a different choice.
—Nisan Panwar
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
—Albert Einstein
Don’t upset by the results you didn’t from the work you didn’t do.
—Author Unknown
Big results require big ambitions.
—James Champy
I’ve always believed that if you put in the work, the results will come.
—Michael Jordan
If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.
—Jack Dixon
You may never know what results come from your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.
—Mahatma Ghandi
Once you see results, it becomes an addiction.
—Author Unknown
Risk
What you risk reveals what you value.
—Jeannette Winterson
Nothing risqué, nothing gained.
—Alexander Woollcott
There is the risk you cannot afford to take; there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.
—Peter Drucker
The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided. It is sometimes better to abandon one’s self to destiny.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.
—Søren Kierkegaard
It’s a shallow life that doesn’t give a person a few scars.
—Garrison Keillor
A moderate adventure is no adventure.
—Terri Guillemets
This nation was built by men who took risks—pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, business men who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress and dreamers who were not afraid of action.
—Brooks Atkinson
Take risks: if you win, you will be happy; if you lose, you will be wise.
—Author Unknown
You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
—Wayne Gretzky
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
—Robert F. Kennedy
A general is a man who takes chances. Mostly he takes a fifty-fifty chance; if he happens to win three times in succession he is considered a great general.
—Enrico Fermi
One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.
—Chinese Proverb
Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.
—Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, 1759
Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are.
—Don Miguel Ruiz
The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
—Lord Chesterfield
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
—James Bryant Conant
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
—Helen Keller
Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.
—T.S. Eliot
He that leaves nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things.
—George Savile
The healthy being craves an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality, a sharpening of the edge of appetite, his own little festival of the Saturnalia, a brief excursion from his way of life.
—Robert MacIver
Prudence keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.
—Samuel Johnson
If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.
—Jim Rohn
Never test the depth of a river with both feet.
—Warren Buffett
Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Yes, risk taking is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing-taking.
—Tim McMahon
Life’s greatest dangers are often found in apparently small risks.
—James Lendall Basford
What great thing would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?
—Robert H. Schuller
Skills
You must either modify your dreams or magnify your skills.
—Jim Rohn
Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is skill.
—Shinichi Suzuki
Learn to hide your need and show your skill.
—Jim Rohn
Success is a learnable skill.
—T. Harv Ekker
When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
—John Ruskin
Don’t wish it was easier; wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems; wish for more skills. Don’t wish for fewer challenges; wish for more wisdom.
—Jim Rohn
Learning how to learn is one of the most important skills in life.
—Nourma F. Fauziyah
Repetition is the mother of skill.
—Anthony Robbins
Technical skills may teach you the job but soft skills can make you or break you as a manager.
—Author Unknown
Practice is just as valuable as a sale. The sale will make you a living; the skill will make you a fortune.
—Jim Rohn
Success
Follow your passion, and success will follow you.
—Terri Guillemets
Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.
—Dale Carnegie
The toughest thing about success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success.
—Irving Berlin
Success is 99 percent failure.
—Soichiro Honda
Success and failure. We think of them as opposites, but they’re really not. They’re companions—the hero and the sidekick.
—Laurence Shames
Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
—Albert Einstein
Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it.... Success is shy—it won’t come out while you’re watching.
—Tennessee Williams
I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
—George Bernard Shaw
Pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it.
—Elbert Hubbard
The closer one gets to the top, the more one finds there is no “top.”
—Nancy Barcus
Success does not lie in results but in efforts. Being the best is not so important. Doing the best is all that matters.
—Author Unknown
Something in human nature causes us to start slacking off at our moment of greatest accomplishment. As you become successful, you will need a great deal of self-discipline not to lose your sense of balance, humility, and commitment.
—Ross Perot
Some people succeed because they are destined to, but most people succeed because they are determined to.
—Author Unknown
Winning is overrated. The only time it is really important is in surgery and war.
—Al McGuire
Unless a man undertakes more than he possibly can do, he will never all that he can. Henry Drummon Strength, will power, determination and a pinch of you. That’s the cocktail for success.
—Adarshd
Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
—Author Unknown
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
—Logan Smith
Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.
—Al Bernstein
Work hard in silence, success will make the noise.
—Author Unknown
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
—Woody Allen
Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
—Lily Tomlin
I couldn’t wait for success... so I went ahead without it.
—Jonathan Winters
Destiny has two ways of crushing us—by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Time
One can make a day of any size.
—John Muir
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
—L.P. Hartley
Each day is an opportunity to travel back into tomorrow’s past and change it.
—Robert Brault
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
—Hector Berlioz
Leave your past behind you. It’s history. It’s not reality.
—Author Unknown
The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
Waste your money and you’re only out of money, but waste your time and you’ve lost a part of your life.
—Michael Leboeuf
You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.
—Charles Buxton
What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.
—Voltaire
There must be a tomorrow, because my life overflows today.
—Lois Chartrand
Begin doing what you want to do now. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand, and melting like a snowflake.
—Marie Ray
When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.
—Lord Byron
I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
—Bernard Berenson
I try to treat each evening and weekend as little slices of retirement because no one is guaranteed a lengthy one at the end of their career.
—Mike Hammar
Lost time is never found again.
—Benjamin Franklin
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
—Oscar Wilde
The time you think you’re missing misses you too.
—Terri Guillemets
Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.
—Dion Boucicault
The more side roads you stop to explore, the less likely that life will pass you by.
—Robert Brault
There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.
—Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
—Jean de La Bruyère
Regret for wasted time is more wasted time.
—Mason Cooley
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
—Rabindranath Tagore
If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?
—Stephen Levine
No man is quick enough to enjoy life to the full.
—Spanish Proverb
Who knows whether the gods will add tomorrow to the present hour?
—Horace
The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.
—John Sladek
Later never exists.
—Author Unknown
The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
—George F. Will
There’s time enough, but none to spare.
—Charles W. Chesnutt
Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.
—Marcel Proust
Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day.
—Albert Camus
Years, following years, steal something every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away.
—Horace
The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now.
—James Baldwin
The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
—Simone Weil
I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
—Albert Einstein
I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
—Arthur Wing Pinero
Tomorrow is fresh, with no mistakes in it.
—L.M. Montgomery
We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.
—Charles F. Kettering
A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.
—Eric Hoffer
He who seeks to know the future is out of harmony with the present.
—James Lendall Basford
An aging man cannot rewrite his youth but a youth may rewrite his own future.
—Terri Guillemets
The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.
—Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
Trust
Love is giving someone the ability to destroy you—but trusting them not to.
—Author unknown
A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity. The order varies for any given year.
—Paul Sweeney
You can only trust yourself... and barely that.
—Paige Wilson
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
I trust everyone. I just don’t trust the devil inside them.
—Troy Kennedy-Martin
You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment unless you trust enough.
—Frank Crane
Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.
—George MacDonald
A skeptic is a person who would ask God for his ID card.
—Edgar A. Shoaff
Ultimately, there can be no complete healing until we have restored our primal trust in life.
—Georg Feuerstein
Never trust a man who speaks well of everybody.
—John Churton Collins
Unemployment
It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.
—Harry S Truman
The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you’re on the job.
—Slappy White
We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.
—John F. Kennedy
Unemployment diminishes people. Leisure enlarges them.
—Mason Cooley
You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live.
—William Shakespeare
Cessation of work is not accompanied by cessation of expenses.
—Cato the Elder
The hardest work in the world is being out of work.
—Whitney Young
Unemployment is like a headache or a high temperature – unpleasant and exhausting but not carrying in itself any explanation of its cause.
—William Henry Beveridge
When we’re unemployed, we’re called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it’s called a depression.
—Jesse Jackson
Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.
—William E. Barrett
Wealth
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine were taken away.
—Anaxagoras
It isn’t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It’s only necessary to be rich.
—Alan Alda
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
—Frederic Bastiat
Luxury... corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.
—Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762
Human prosperity never rests but always craves more, till blown up with pride it totters and falls. From the opulent mansions pointed at by all passers-by none warns it away, none cries, “Let no more riches enter!”
—Aeschylus
Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That’s how rich I want to be.
—Rita Rudner
It is generally agreed, that few men are made better by affluence or exaltation.
—Samuel Johnson
I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.
—Norman Brown
Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail.
—Abraham Lincoln
The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.
—Author Unknown
When prosperity comes, do not use all of it.
—Confucius
We’ve got the most prosperous culture in human history and we’ve also got the biggest spiritual hole in human history.
—Mark Victor Hansen
As prosperity is promoted, thinking is demoted.
—Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
Few rich men own their property; the property owns them.
—Robert Ingersoll
By abolishing private property one takes away the human love of aggression.
—Sigmund Freud