How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

by John C. Maxwell

Good thinkers are always in demand. A person who knows how may always have a job, but the person who knows why will always be his boss.

you can feel your way into action. If you wait until you feel like doing something, you will likely never accomplish it.

Big-picture thinkers recognize that they don’t know lots of things. They frequently ask penetrating questions to enlarge their understanding and thinking. If you want to become a better big-picture thinker, then become a good listener.

Winston Churchill said, “There comes a special moment in everyone’s life, a moment for which that person was born.… When he seizes it… it is his finest hour.”

Switching from task to task can cost you up to 40 percent efficiency. According to researchers, “If you’re trying to accomplish many things at the same time, you’ll get more done by focusing on one task at a time, not by switching constantly from one task to another.”

the purpose of goals is to focus your attention and give you direction, not to identify a final destination.

“The joy is in creating, not maintaining.” —VINCE LOMBARDI,

Creativity is about having ideas—lots of them. You will have ideas only if you value ideas.

H. L. Mencken said, “It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.”

Creativity demands the ability to be unafraid of failure because creativity equals failure.

Creativity requires a willingness to look stupid.

Maya Angelou observed, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. Sadly, too often creativity is smothered rather than nurtured. There has to be a climate in which new ways of thinking, perceiving, questioning are encouraged.”

Creativity is intelligence having fun.

Management trainer Sir Antony Jay said, “The uncreative mind can spot wrong

answers, but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions.”

Physicist Tom Hirschfield observed, “If you don’t ask, ‘Why this?’ often enough, somebody will ask, ‘Why you?’”

Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak with passion and declare to millions, “I have a dream,” not “I have a goal.” Goals may give focus, but dreams give power.

you want to break out of your own box, get into somebody’s else’s. Read broadly.

hope is not a strategy.

James Allen was right when he wrote, “Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment.”

Change alone doesn’t bring growth but you cannot have growth without change.

President Harry S. Truman said, “I never give ’em hell. I just tell the truth and they think it is hell.” That’s the way many people react to truth.

Thane Yost said is really true: “The will to win is worthless if you do not have the will to prepare.”

Denis Waitley, author of The

Psychology of Winning, says, “The winners in life think constantly in terms of ‘I can, I will and I am.’

George Bernard Shaw’s stirring statement: “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”

George BernardShaw quote

“The problem with popular thinking is that it doesn’t require you to think at all.”

progress must be preceded by change, and he pointed out many of the dynamics involved in questioning popular thinking. In an organization, he said, we should remember that every tradition was originally a good idea—and perhaps even revolutionary. But every tradition may not be a good idea for the future.

most people are more satisfied with old problems than committed to finding new solutions.

“Hurting people hurt people.”

You won’t value the ideas of a person if you don’t value and respect the person himself or herself.

Good leadership helps to put together the right people at the right time for the right purpose so that everybody wins.

“People with humility don’t think less of themselves; they just think of themselves less.”

Once you have learned to give of yourself, then the next step is to learn to give when you cannot receive anything in return.