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Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, “Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.”
Engineer, educator, and author Roghu Korrapati, in his book 108 Pearls of Wisdom for Every College Student, writes, It is often said that your thoughts become your actions. But without taking responsibility for your life, those thoughts often just stay on that mental stage and aren’t translated into action. Taking responsibility for your life is that extra ingredient that makes taking action more of a natural thing. You don’t get stuck in just thinking and wishing so much. You become proactive instead of passive.4
“The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it.” —Lou Holtz
“At the root of resilience is the willingness to take responsibility for results.” —Eric Greitens
Eric Greitens, in his book Resilience, describes the bottom line on responsibility. He says, “The more responsibility people take, the more resilient they are likely to be. The less responsibility people take—for their actions, for their lives, for their happiness—the more likely it is that life will crush them. At the root of resilience is the willingness to take responsibility for results.”6
Stephen R. Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, said, “As you live your values, your sense of identity, integrity, control, and inner-directedness will infuse you with both exhilaration and peace. You will define yourself from within, rather than by people’s opinions or by comparisons to others.”
Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, used to say that your commitment to get better needs to be more important than your commitment to get bigger.
The choices you make every day make you.
John Wooden. He once said, “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
Abraham Lincoln said, “Character was like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree was the real thing.”
Recently I had dinner with my friend Linda Kaplan Thaler, the advertising executive who invented the AFLAC duck. Linda told me a story about her son, Michael, who is a highly skilled chess player. When he was six years old, he was competing in the finals of a national chess championship, and his opponent made the winning move, but he didn’t hit his clock, which was required for the move to count. Michael looked at his opponent, and said, “You didn’t hit your clock.” The opponent hit the clock, and Michael lost the match. Afterward, Linda said, “Michael, if you hadn’t told him to hit the clock,
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More than a decade ago, I went to dinner with Laurence J. Kirshbaum in New York City. At that time, he was the chairman and CEO of the Time Warner Book Group. During our conversation, he pitched an idea to me. “John, I’ve been wanting one of our authors to write a book on a particular subject, and I think you would be the perfect person to do it. What would you think about writing a book on business ethics?” “There’s no such thing,” I answered. “What?” he asked. I could tell that wasn’t the response he expected. “What do you mean?” I explained, “There’s no such thing as business ethics—there’s
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Good character uses the same standard in every situation. If something is right, it’s always right. If it’s wrong, it’s always wrong. People with good character are consistent. People who try to use multiple standards with different people and in different situations live fragmented lives.
I once read a story about two men in their seventies named John and George. They had been friends since their high school days, but they both held strong opinions and were stubborn. As a result, they argued all the time and often went for weeks without speaking to one another. One day after an especially heated argument over some trivial matter, they exchanged unkind words and went their separate ways. And they didn’t speak to each other for months. But then George became critically ill. He summoned John to his hospital bed, saying that he wanted to heal their relationship before he died. He
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As Gandhi said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
When you have good character, difficulty only makes you more determined. When your character is weak, difficulty makes you discouraged.
I learned this from my father, who modeled it every day. When he was the president of Ohio Christian University in the 1960s, I thought the university’s board didn’t treat him with the respect and consideration he had earned and deserved. But he never retaliated or said anything negative about them. I remember a time when someone interviewed Dad and asked his opinion about a man who had been particularly nasty to him. When Dad said only nice things about the man, the interviewer proceeded to recount all the terrible things the man had said about Dad. My dad’s reply? “You didn’t ask me what he
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Taking the low road is easy. It doesn’t take any character at all. Low-road people… • Seek revenge and retaliation when wronged, • Play the same game that others do, • Are guided by emotions that constantly go up and down, • Are reactive, and • Live no better than anyone else does. High-road people are totally different. They… • Extend unconditional love and forgiveness, • Refuse to play games with people, • Are guided by good character based on values, • Are proactive, and • Live exceptional lives.
I admit that I don’t always take the high road with everybody. But I try to. I work at it. When someone treats me poorly, I try to remember that it’s a reflection on them, not on me. When someone takes advantage of me, I try to remember that it’s the price one has to pay for letting others get close to the...
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Salesman and author Elmer G. Leterman said, “Personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open.”
Booker T. Washington said, “Character is power.”
Scientist Marie Curie observed, “You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity.”
Mark Twain said, “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”
My friend, don’t wait for someone else to pick you. Don’t wait for someone to give you permission. You don’t need anyone else to say you are qualified. Believe in yourself! Believe you can.
Dallas Willard defines blessing this way: “the projection of good toward someone.”
I’m getting older, but I refuse to become an old person. Have you noticed how old people think their generation is the last great one? They look at younger people and predict doom and gloom. That’s happened for a hundred generations. I’m not going to do that! Yes, tomorrow has its challenges. And all youth need to mature. But abundance thinking tells me that tomorrow can be better than today.
Our perspective is not determined by what we see. It’s determined by how we see, and that comes from who we are.
Generosity is a word that comes out of the Latin word generosus, meaning of noble birth. It was associated with members of the aristocracy who, by virtue of their privileges and inherited wealth, were expected to give to others of lesser standing than themselves. All of us are in better places than someone else in life. To those people, we should be generous. And if you’re a leader, you need to understand that by virtue of your position and the privileges it brings, you should be generous toward the people you lead. I wish all leaders held themselves to this high standard, though not all do.
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Kevin Myers, who says, “We should want more for people than we want from people.”
Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction becomes the biggest step in your life.
“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.” —Gandhi
People look at athletes and artists and think, I wish I had their luck, when they should be saying, I wish I had their discipline.
Tyrrell says that too many people see life as a waiting room. I think that’s true. People sit and wait for their names to be called. But success does not come looking for us. We won’t achieve great things accidentally. Never forget: everything worthwhile is uphill. Achieving what you want takes time, effort, consistency, energy, and commitment. Self-discipline is what makes those things possible and puts success within reach. And here’s the good news. Self-discipline is something you can develop. You don’t need to be born with it. It’s a choice you make and keep on making.
Stephen R. Covey made an interesting observation about discipline. He wrote, Many people simply conclude that they are not disciplined enough. My response to that idea is that it’s usually not a discipline problem at all. The problem is more often that the person has not yet sufficiently paid the price to get very clear about what matters most to them. Once you have a burning yes inside you about what’s truly important, it’s very easy to say no to the unimportant.
If discipline is the highway that takes us where we want to go in life, then excuses are exits off that highway. And believe me—there are lots of exits.
Brian Tracy observed, “Successful men and women are those who work almost all the time on high value tasks. Unsuccessful men and women are those who waste their time by wasting the minutes and hours of each day on low value activities.”
Stephen R. Covey called this doing first things first. Brian Tracy calls it the Crowding Out Principle. It goes like this: “If you spend all of your time on highly productive tasks, by the end of the day, you will have ‘crowded out’ all the unproductive activities that might have distracted you from your real work. On the other hand, if you spend your time on low value activities, those low value activities will crowd out the time that you need to complete the tasks that can make all the difference in your life. And the key to this attitude toward time and personal management is always
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The Crowding Out Principle: “If you spend all of your time on highly productive tasks, by the end of the day, you will have ‘crowded out’ all the unproductive activities that might have distracted you from your real work.” —Brian Tracy
Business coach and author Dan S. Kennedy says, If you become aware of the importance of time, you’ll have a different concept of time, valuing of time, and how you must exercise control over your use and others’ consumption of your time in order to have a reasonable chance of achieving your goals and tapping your full potential. You’ll have new awareness of how your time is used or abused, invested or squandered, organized and controlled or let flow about at random.
Discipline is like a muscle. The more we train it, the better we become in developing it.
You cannot manage your life if you do not manage yourself.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to finish life with a bunch of regrets. I’d like to live in such a way that I create a list of hundreds of failed attempts rather than a list of regrets for things I’d failed to attempt. I am determined to make a difference in the time I have on earth.
When I was a kid, one of my dad’s favorite riddles was this: “Five frogs are sitting on a log. Four decide to jump into the water. How many are left?” What do you think the answer is? If you said one, you missed the point. There are still five. Deciding isn’t doing. You need to act—deliberately—to accomplish anything.
The Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “It’s so simple really: If you say you’re going to do something, do it. If you start something, finish it.”
Significance is all about adding value to others. That’s an uphill journey. Why? Because we are naturally selfish. We automatically think of ourselves first. If you don’t believe that, let me ask you a question. When someone takes a photo of a group that you’re in, and then shows it to you, who is the first person you look for? Case dismissed! You look for yourself. That’s not an accusation. I look for myself, too. It’s proof that we’re all selfish. But selfishness is a downhill habit. Significance is an uphill trait. But it is achievable for you and for me.
Here’s what I know about me—and about you. We are not as good as our best moments and we are not as bad as our worst moments. I’d like to have others give me the benefit of the doubt and see me at my best. So my decision is to value others based on their best moments. When others have done that for me, I’ve always been grateful. It’s the least I can do for somebody else.
“To reach maximum capacity, you have to serve others and add value to them.” —Alan Mulally
Although I believe in attitude, I don’t believe it is everything. I never have, and I never will. Attitude cannot make up for incompetence. Attitude cannot give you a skill that you don’t possess. Attitude doesn’t make all your dreams come true. It isn’t everything you need in life, but it sets the tone for your life. If all things are equal between two people except for their attitudes, the person with the better attitude will usually be more successful in life—and enjoy life more.
The greatest separator between successful and unsuccessful people is how they deal with and explain their failures, problems, and difficulties.
Davies Guttmann, the author of The Power of Positivity, explains how people can be in the exact same circumstances and react totally differently. He writes, Imagine two students who receive the same poor grade on an exam. The first student thinks, “I’m such a failure! I always do poorly in this subject. I can’t do anything right!” The second student thinks, “This test was difficult! Oh well, it’s just one test in one class. I tend to do well in other subjects.” These students are exhibiting two types of what psychologists call “explanatory styles.” Explanatory styles reflect three attributions
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