Don’t wait to be praised, anointed, or validated. Don’t wait for someone to give you permission to lead.
~ Tara Mohr
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Permission →
Paying attention →
I understand now that I’m not a mess, but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often: “For the same reason I laugh so often— because I’m paying attention.”
~ Glennon Doyle
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Kindness →
Storms make us stronger. If I had one message for young people embarking on life, it would be this. Don’t shy away from the hard times. Tackle them head-on, move toward the path less trodden, riddled with obstacles, because most other people run at the first sign of battle. The storms give us a chance to define ourselves, to distinguish ourselves, and we always emerge from them stronger. The other key is to be kind along the way. Kindness matters so much on that journey of endeavor. It is what separates the good from great.
~ Bear Grylls
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Not previously possible →
The idea that we should focus on disruption rather than the new value that we can create is at the heart of the current economic malaise, income inequality, and political upheaval. The secret to building a better future is to use technology to do things that were previously impossible. The point of technology isn’t to make money. It’s to solve problems!
~ Tim O’Reilly
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Easy versus hard →
Those things are easy now. They might cost more than we’d like, but you can put them on a check-list and they’ll get done. What’s hard now is breaking the rules. What’s hard is finding the faith to become a heretic, to seek out an innovation and then, in the face of huge amounts of resistance, to lead a team and to push the innovation out the door into the world. Successful people are the ones who are good at this.
~ Seth Godin
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Education →
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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In the end →
Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less and less of it is left, but this too: If we live longer, can we be sure our mind will still be up to understanding the world—to the contemplation that aims at divine and human knowledge? If our mind starts to wander, we’ll still go on breathing, go on eating, imagining things, feeling urges and so on. But getting the most out of ourselves, calculating where our duty lies, analyzing what we hear and see, deciding whether it’s time to call it quits—all the things you need a healthy mind for… all those are gone.
So we need to hurry.
Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding—our grasp of the world—may be gone before we get there.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Excellence →
Most see excellences as some grand aspiration. Wrong. Dead wrong. My two cents: Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. It’s the quality of your next five-minute conversation. It’s the quality of, yes, your next email. Forget the long term. Make the next five minutes rock!
~ Tom Peters
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Forethought →
Forethought is a virtue; remember that one day, that distant future will be now, and the choices you make today will have shaped the choices you are able to make then.
~ Tim O’Reilly
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Macro versus micro →
This is super important. Everybody’s impatient at a macro [level], and just so patient at a micro [level], wasting your days worrying about years. I’m not worried about my years, because I’m squeezing [everything] out of my seconds, let alone my days. It’s going to work out.
~ Gary Vaynerchuk
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