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Debbie Ellis calls such people porcupines in her book How to Hug a Porcupine.
A friend once told me, “My family is a circus, and every day there is a different clown.”
In the end, our goal should be to treat others better than they treat us, to add value to them in a greater capacity than maybe they expect.
It has been my observation that most people do not maximize the experiences they have in life. To do so, two things are essential: intentionality on the front end of the experience and reflection on the back end. So anytime you can help another person to do those things, it becomes special for them, and it often creates a positive memory for them.
Use the Power of Proximity Principle: “Get next to ten people who can take you to the next level.”
I always want to spend time with people who know more than I do, and whenever I’m with someone I respect and have gotten to know, I ask them, “Who do you know that I should know?”
‘What have you learned about yourself and life that I need to know?’”
Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie declared, “It marks a big step in your development when you come to realize that other people can help you do a better job than you could do alone.”
The words reactive and creative are made up of exactly the same letters. The only difference between the two is where we place the c. The first decision I made on my journey toward greater creativity was to change my c—that is, how I see challenges.
Creativity is changing the question from “Is there an answer?” to “What is the answer?”
Each door you open leads to another door. One of those doors will eventually lead to an answer.
Creativity is a mind-set. You have to believe that answers and solutions are out there if you’re willing to keep fighting to find them.
“Don’t cap your expectations!” —Monte Haymon
The greatest detriment to continual success is relying on past success.
My biggest creative breakthrough occurred when I discovered that creativity is about connecting things.
Dan Ariely, Duke University professor and author of Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pick-up Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles, says that if you try thirty new things this year, you might find that you racked up fifteen good experiences. But if you wait to try things only when you’re sure of success, you might experience only three good things.
Author and creativity expert Roger von Oech said, “It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of the things you have loved and that worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.”
When was the last time you said good-bye to something that was special that no longer works today?
If we’re satisfied, we don’t try to get better. At the other extreme, if we embrace dissatisfaction but without a desire for excellence, we just become miserable or depressed. However, when you couple dissatisfaction with the desire for improvement, you become innovative.
I love the way Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, puts this: “People often remark to me that it’s great how Virgin thinks outside the box. They are genuinely surprised when I tell them, ‘Actually we don’t! We just never let the box get built in the first place.’” You can’t love both boxes and creativity.
When you ask creative people to help you, your goal isn’t just to have people come together for a creative think session. Your goal is to have the right people in the meeting. What are the qualities of the right people? Here is what I look for: • Fluency—the ability to generate a number of ideas so that there is an abundance of possible solutions • Flexibility—the ability to produce many different kinds of ideas in varied categories for any given problem • Elaboration—the ability to add to, embellish, or build from an idea • Originality—the ability to create fresh, unique, unusual, or
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Years ago I discovered that if I do the right thing regardless of whether I feel any inspiration, then I will become inspired because I did the right thing. The key to increasing your creative capacity is to schedule time for it, and then expect to be more creative during that time. The discipline of developing the habit gives you the results you desire. Perhaps that’s why many authors including William Faulkner have been quoted as saying things like this: “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine a.m. sharp.”
everything worthwhile in life—everything you want, everything you desire to achieve, everything you want to receive—is uphill.
The problem is that most of us have uphill dreams but downhill habits.
The right thing to do and the hard thing to do are usually the same thing.
Civil rights activist Benjamin E. Mays observed, “The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.”
To increase production capacity, initiate many tries at one thing, not one try at many things.
“If you are not growing,” Paul says, “you are not living at your full capacity. If you are not fully expressing your full capacity, it registers in your spirit as stuck and it stinks. The reason why it stinks is because it’s so contrary to who we are as human beings.”
The question I ask is ‘Does it move us closer in the direction of perfection?’ All I am worried about is trajectory. I’m not worried about hitting the mark. I am a futurist. I don’t care about the now; the now is going to change. I want to make sure that I am getting the trajectory right. I want to get us moving the right way.
Professor Edward Banfield of Harvard University confirmed the importance of a future focus in his book The Unheavenly City.
The importance of a future focus or “long-term perspective” is the most accurate single predictor of upward social and economic mobility in America.
In the 1970s, I heard Earl Nightingale say, “If a person spends one hour a day, five days a week for five years studying a single subject, he or she will become an expert on that subject.”
The 2015 edition was held in San Francisco, and one of the keynote speakers was Liz Wiseman, former Oracle executive and current president of the Wiseman Group in Silicon Valley. Liz is also the author of several books, including Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.
“The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it.” —William H. Whyte
Before we attempt to set things right as leaders, we need to see things right.
You can push team members in areas of choice, but you need to be patient with them in areas related to their background, experience, and skill.
Value assessment determines investment.
As a leader setting expectations for people, you must be ready to answer two questions: What do you want them to know, and what do you want them to do?
“We adopted the philosophy that we wouldn’t hide anything, not any of our problems, from the employees.” —Rollin King
The weight of the vision prompts two indispensable qualities in a leader: consistency and intensity.
I define maturity as unselfishness.
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Many years ago, I came across an article about a man who wanted seemingly everyone else in the world to take responsibility for him, including God! Here’s the article: SYRACUSE, New York (AP)—A Pennsylvania man’s lawsuit naming God as a defendant has been thrown out by a court in Syracuse. Donald Drusky, 63, of East McKeesport, [Pennsylvania,] blames God for not bringing him justice in a 30-year battle against his former employer, the steelmaker now called USX Corp. The company fired him in 1968, when it was called U.S. Steel. “Defendant God is the sovereign ruler of the universe and took no
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Novelist and editor Michael Korda observed, “Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility.… In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have… is the ability to take on responsibility.”
Winston Churchill, one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century, expressed that same sentiment this way: “The price of greatness is responsibility.”
“Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility.… In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have… is the ability to take on responsibility.” —Michael Korda
Roshan D. Bhondekar, and thought, I wish I could have shared his thought in that book. Here’s what he wrote: Many people think about their lives as something that just happens to them instead of something that they can control themselves. They drift through life reacting to the actions of others instead of taking steps on their own behalf. Such people are like rudderless boats on the ocean, completely at the mercy of the tides to take them wherever they will. People who don’t know where they are going usually end up where they don’t want to be. In the case of a boat on the sea, sooner or later
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As former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt said, “In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”
Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.”
Novelist Joan Didion asserted, “The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.”
