Here is the very heart and soul of the matter. If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself — your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers. Use the remainder to induce those you “work for” to understand and practice the theory. I use the terms “work for” advisedly, for if you don’t understand that you should be working for your mislabeled “subordinates,” you haven’t understood anything. Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.

~ Dee Hock

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture. You must get the old furniture of what you know, think, and believe out before anything new can get in. Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.

~ Dee Hock

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral. Failure to distinguish clearly between the two is ruinous. Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future. Preserve substance; modify form; know the difference. The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinity for expense, while substance has an affinity for income.

~ Dee Hock

Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality. As Napoleon observed, “No amount of money will induce someone to lay down their life, but they will gladly do so for a bit of yellow ribbon.”

~ Dee Hock

Make a careful list of all things done to you that you abhorred. Don’t do them to others, ever. Make another list of things done for you that you loved. Do them for others, always.

~ Dee Hock

Your big opportunity may be right where you are now.

~ Napoleon Hill

I now believe this without question: Income, position, the opinions of one’s friends, the judgments of one’s peers, and all the other traditional criteria by which human beings are judged are for the birds. The only question is — can you hang on through the crap they throw at you and not lose your freedom or your good sense.

~ James Michener

I have recently decided that the constructive work of the world is done by an appallingly small percentage of the population. The rest simply don’t give a damn, or they grow tired, or they fail to acquire when young the ideas that would vitalize them for the long decades.

I am not saying that such people don’t matter; they are among the most precious items on the earth. But they cannot be depended upon to either generate necessary new ideas or to put them into operation if someone else generates them.

Therefore, those men and women who do have the energy to form new constructs and new ways to implement them must do the work of many. I believe it to be an honorable aspiration to want to be among the creators.

~ James Michener

We all worry about wasting time, about the years sliding past, about what we intend to do with our lives. We shouldn’t — for there there is a divine irrelevance in the universe that defies calculation. Many men and women win through to a sense of greatness in their lives only by first stumbling and fumbling their way into patterns that gratify them and allow them to utilize their endowments to the maximum.

~ James Michener

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Socialist. 

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Trade Unionist. 

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. 

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

~ Martin Niemoller (1892-1984)
Protestant pastor who opposed the Nazi regime
and spent the last 7 years of Nazi rule in concentration camps

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.

~ Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world. 

~ Jane Addams

No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helps you.

~ Althea Gibson

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

~ Hugh Miller

Go as far as the eye can see, and when you get there, look farther. 

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Time is the most valuable thing a person can spend. 

~ Diogenes

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

~ William Shakespeare

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

~ Cicero 

It is impossible to feel grateful and depressed in the same moment. 

~ Naomi Williams