Caleb Ross > Caleb's Quotes

“Maybe universal nostalgia doesn't exist. Maybe each of us carries our own personal version of the better times. It's at about twnety-two years that we all begin to think of our childhood as the good ol' days and everything afterwards exists as a slow-motion face plant. The fall continues, through marriage, through career building, through parenthood, through old age, until we finally touch nose to ground. At twenty-two years old, I've just started, but I think I can already smell my own grave.”
― Caleb J. Ross, I Didn't Mean to Be Kevin

“I started the first drafts of the book during my sophomore year of college. I wasn’t thinking at all about kids at the time. But I was thinking. A lot. About everything. I wish I could capture that head-space again; everything meant something to me in college. Every leaf, every sound, every lecture, every textbook. It’s like I was on drugs, 24/7. I am glad I was able to pair that ceaseless pondering with plenty of time to write. What came of that time was the first draft of the novel, a lengthy, unnecessarily angst-driven pile of crap. Years later, with Zoloft, I approached the novel with a more level head, and came away with a much, much better novel. My advice to writers, I suppose, is write your novel when you feel like shit; edit when you feel great.”
― Caleb J. Ross, Stranger Will

“Apeshit has rarely enjoyed so literal a denotation.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“it is often more fun to want something than to have it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“God—unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“he takes pleasure in the sorting, and even more, perhaps, in the new knowledge that he is a person who can sort.”
― Kyle Minor, In the Devil's Territory

“Your shoes, mother,” he said. He had never called her mother, not in his whole life.”
― Kyle Minor, In the Devil's Territory

“I don’t want to sell the audience on the limitations of my own existence when that’s not the point, that’s not what I’m interested in.”
― Kathy Reichs, Crimespree Magazine #55

“Sometimes,” Gerald pushes his glasses up with a dirty finger and pulls the spade from the ground, nodding a little sadly. “You treat the real world like a theme park.”
― Anonymous

“Inside-out” means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self—with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. It says if you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it. If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, a more helpful, a more contributing employee. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character. The”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“When people fail to respect the P/PC Balance in their use of physical assets in organizations, they decrease organizational effectiveness and often leave others with dying geese. For example, a person in charge of a physical asset, such as a machine, may be eager to make a good impression on his superiors. Perhaps the company is in a rapid growth stage and promotions are coming fast. So he produces at optimum levels—no downtime, no maintenance. He runs the machine day and night. The production is phenomenal, costs are down, and profits skyrocket. Within a short time, he’s promoted. Golden eggs! But suppose you are his successor on the job. You inherit a very sick goose, a machine that, by this time, is rusted and starts to break down. You have to invest heavily in downtime and maintenance. Costs skyrocket; profits nose-dive. And who gets blamed for the loss of golden eggs? You do. Your predecessor liquidated the asset, but the accounting system only reported unit production, costs, and profit. The P/PC Balance is particularly important as it applies to the human assets of an organization—the customers and the employees. I”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“In my new business, this is one of the things we work actively with CEOs to see: how one idea from the top can spiral into 100 projects for the team and overwhelm them in ways the CEOs can’t even imagine. But”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“And she had discovered the best reason, the one that trumps all others: She did it because she liked the way it made her feel. Is”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“The dangling of promotions, the promise of raises and bonuses, chair massages, and yoga classes, all can elicit a general sense of compliance, more or less. We still reach goals. We get hard work—which is not the same as great work. But these tactics don’t give you what you really want. What you want is a feeling—the same feeling that every leader who has ever lived craves: “They’ve got this. I can relax.” Why don’t any of these tactics get us to that place? It’s because they all have something in common. Can you see it? It’s that they all start with the needs of the business, and put the needs of the individuals second, usually a distant second. This”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“People who have a choice will no longer work to serve your reasons, your goals. They will not work to serve your authority, they will only work to serve their own.”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“I can’t find good people” becomes “I can’t know who my A players are until I challenge them to find out.” “Nobody cares as much as I do” becomes “I haven’t figured out how they care in their own way that can harmonize with the way that I do.” “I can’t afford to invest time in someone who is just going to leave anyway” becomes “I don’t have time to do anything else.” “I’m not a therapist, I don’t have the skills to help them with their personal problems” becomes “I’m not a therapist, but I am two steps ahead of this person as a professional and can help them grow by sharing the things I’ve learned along the way.” “We just need better systems and more communication” becomes “We don’t need more communication. We need to start speaking a different language.” Imagine”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“Most managers make the innocent mistake of starting at the opposite end. They try to address individual performance and cultural issues through group announcements: generic statements about the need to own your work, care more about the customer, be a better communicator, etc. Managers hope that these messages will reach their intended audience, that they will move people to take action and change unproductive behaviors. But they mostly don’t. It’s not because people don’t care or don’t want to grow. It’s because that’s not how growth happens, especially the personal kind. Those group announcements, at best, point to something that needs to change. But they do nothing to show people how to make the changes themselves. Great”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“We could say that the health of a culture is equal to the collective ability of the people who work there to feel the impacts of their actions on others. Now if you’re an app developer and want to help me build a tool that tracks that, please give a call. What I’ve seen over and over again in my career as a business leader and leadership mentor is that this one thing—the inability of people to feel their impact on others—is the cause of cultural dysfunction. And the higher up you are on the org chart, the more problematic that weakness is in terms of what it does to the culture at large. Which is why, as a manager, the most important thing you can do—after recognizing your own impact on your team—is to help people see their impacts on each other, and to help them let go of the emotional story they’re telling themselves that’s keeping the pattern going. In”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“All forms of poor communication have one thing in common: They ask the person on the other end of the line to do more work than they should have to.”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“We rolled back the clock in a full company meeting and shared each of the steps that came together to help us arrive at this decision that was going to impact everyone on the team. We wanted to show people what “risk being right” looked like to us. How”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“Why, with all this good intention, does it still feel so muddy when we talk about culture, what it is, and how to make it better? It’s because we’re trying to bring personal growth and spiritual ideas into the workplace without first changing the underlying agreement that governs it. The”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“Step one: The CEO or owner has to open the door. The only way to do that is to admit that they don’t know how. It’s a moment of vulnerability. It’s only one moment, but I’ve seen CEOs put it off for decades. All it is is this: “Hey guys, I really want to make this a great place to work. And, as you know, I’ve tried a lot of things over the years. But the truth is, even though the business has gotten better in some ways, when it comes to the culture—how people feel about coming to work here—I know it hasn’t changed in the ways you need it to. I don’t know how to change it but I want to start a new conversation with you about it. Okay?”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“Cultural listening is the skill of being able to see beyond the symptom to the underlying dynamic. It’s an extremely powerful tool to develop as a leader, whether you’re the CEO, a team leader, or a solopreneur just starting out.”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“To be a manager is to be part detective. The clues are everywhere, the skill is in reading them. When”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“Great accountability is nothing more and nothing less than having the courage to demand that the people who work for you use their strengths in a responsible way. Learning”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“Here are a few patterns you may have seen that indicate the person you’re managing is avoiding their next step of growth: covering up or attempting to brush off the severity of a mistake; hoarding data; embedding themselves as a go-to person (aka: bottleneck) by creating a system or process that only they know how to use; resorting to quick fixes instead of asking questions and looking for root causes; asking for more time or resources beyond what was agreed on in order to complete a project, instead of coming to you to talk about what went wrong so you can work together to improve it; letting tension build with a teammate or between departments instead of coming to you for advice on how to handle it. When”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“Great employee development is focused far more on who people are and how they relate to others, and far less on overseeing projects, tasks, and deadlines. It’s a conversation that can’t wait for quarterly reviews—and oftentimes even weekly reviews are too far past the moment when things are ripe and ready for change. Ideally it starts in a person’s first week on the job, and it doesn’t end for as long as they’re on your team. Your goal is to create a world where mentoring, accountability, and support are the norm.”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“As a manager, the more you talk about something without following up with action, the less those words will matter.”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

“The earlier you intervene, the less likely that people will get defensive. The more real-time and specific your feedback is, the easier it is for people to receive it and learn from it. The”
― Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For