Die Empty Quotes

“you must approach your relationships with the attitude of “What can I offer?” rather than “What can I receive?”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Control is all about my needs, my ego, and my desire to feel like the center of my environment. I wish to impose my will on everyone around me, and expect them to fall in line with how I believe things should be. It’s not just a dynamic applicable to those in managerial positions, however. The attempt to control can happen anytime there is an exchange of value. If I want to feel like I have ownership of a situation, I can do so by choosing how I will or will not engage.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“We need to rekindle our ability to emulate the positive attributes of those we admire in others, and apply those same attributes to our life and work.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“My life’s work certainly is not encapsulated by the work I do building a business. It’s much more than that. It’s more permanent. It’s the space I occupy in the lives of others I live to serve, including family and friends. It’s my discovery of my own self. All of this work in private then feeds the work I do in every corner of my life, like a tributary flowing into a raging river.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“The appearance of wisdom is not the same thing as possessing it, and people who seek wisdom are not threatened by new or disconfirming information.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“The key to long-term success is a willingness to disrupt your own comfort for the sake of continued growth.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Never”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“A friend once shared with me that his son was experiencing some paralysis about what to do with his life. He said that he sensed an intense pressure to try to do something great, and to really make a mark on the world. My friend paused for a moment, then turned to his son and asked, “How many great people can you name? Let’s start with U.S. presidents. That’s easy; there are less than fifty of them.” His son was able to name several, but nowhere near all of them. After that, my friend asked him to list all the other great people he could recall. Finally, he had to jump in and help his son with the list. In all, my friend guessed, they could probably name close to a hundred people before it started getting really difficult. “OK, so let’s think about this for a minute,” he told his son. “You can name about a hundred people throughout all history who meet your criteria of being great. Do you mean to tell me that you’re making it your ambition in life to try to be number one hundred and one? Is that what you’re going for?” He encouraged his son to focus less on the perceptions of others and instead on finding an interesting field to work in, and to spend his energy trying to make a difference in the world around him. Don’t worry about being great in the eyes of others; focus on excelling at your work.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“You have to do the absolute best job you can, even when nobody’s watching you. That’s the best way to make yourself invaluable to your team and to ensure that you continue to grow.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“way.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Brilliant work is forged by those who consistently approach their days with urgency and diligence. Urgency means leveraging your finite resources (focus, assets, time, energy) in a meaningful and productive way. Diligence means sharpening your skills and conducting your work in a manner that you won’t regret later.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Opportunity is always accompanied by its twin sibling: responsibility.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Any value we create that requires us to spend our time, focus, and energy—whether in the context of occupation, relationships, or parenting—is work.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Unleash your best work, and refuse to take it to the grave with you.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“person who intentionally structures work and life around what matters most to them will find a greater degree of gratification and will ultimately produce better results than those who don’t.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“It’s composed of activities that stretch and grow you, such as acquiring and developing new skills, reinforcing or enhancing your knowledge, cultivating your curiosity, or generating a better understanding of the context for your work. It’s also composed of critical disciplines such as paying attention to the adjacent spaces in your industry and engaging in activities that may not have an immediate payoff, but position you to be more effective in the coming days.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“This is the inherent problem with trying to imitate someone else’s success. The steps they took to get to where they are, while perhaps instructive, don’t provide a concrete action plan for you. You must figure out how to apply their map to your situation.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“In a similar way, we each have resonant frequencies that we respond to naturally, and when we encounter them in others, their words or actions are amplified in us and we begin to resonate with the other person. This can happen in the least expected places, such as when you notice a subtle theme in a work of art, you hear someone voice their opinion at a meeting, or you read their story in the newspaper.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“I’ve learned that I need to lean into the fear of falling short, and push through the initial urge to retreat from the challenge of having to up my game. When I do this, my best work shines through.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“No matter how successful or skilled you are, you will inevitably fail at many things in your work.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“it’s easy to confuse progress with effectiveness. All progress is not true progress. It’s possible to gain ground for many days, weeks, months, or even years but be going in a completely wrong direction. That’s”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“The next great idea for your work will probably not come from watching your competitors, but from taking an insight from an unrelated industry and applying it to your own.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“pay attention to that little voice inside your head that sends you prompts, insights, and hunches. Note things that you don’t understand, and rather than shying away from them, turn them into questions to pursue.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“You can’t just wait around for inspiration to strike—you have to aggressively pursue it by asking probing questions and mining your environment for the raw materials of brilliance.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“it can be beneficial to disconnect from certain sources of information and streams of content so that you can cultivate a more curated flow of inspiration.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“some of the best ideas I’ve had in my life and in my work, they often occurred in the spaces “in between” my commitments. They materialized when I least expected, during a moment of downtime, and typically when I was doing something in no way related to the project.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“The Impact Equation,”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“The most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. In the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, never-launched businesses, unreconciled relationships, and all of the other things that people thought, ‘I’ll get around to that tomorrow.’ One day, however, their tomorrows ran out.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day