Die Empty Quotes

“PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION How much work did you do today that you will be proud of tomorrow? I don’t mean just how you handled the big things, but also how you addressed the little, seemingly insignificant ones. Did you make progress on what matters most to you, or did you allow the buzz, busyness, and expectations of others to squelch your passion and focus? I’ve been asking these questions of others and myself each day for more than a decade, and they are the main reason I originally felt compelled to write Die Empty. Through my work I’ve encountered many teams of brilliant, sharp, amazing, talented people who have at some point “settled in” or begun coasting on past success. Unfortunately,”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“are battles that only you are equipped to fight, and while I can’t tell you what they are, I suspect you probably already know at least some of them. We”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Waiting for permission to act is the easy way out.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“the best way to learn something is to teach it.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“What do you already suspect to be true, but are ignoring because it seems impractical on the surface? You will never do your best work until you learn to hone and trust your instincts, then develop the courage to take small steps in the right direction.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

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

“one path toward unlocking our latent abilities is returning to a simple practice that came so naturally to us as children: 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. When we are conscious of the qualities we want to emulate, they become points of traction to help us coordinate our daily activities around a set of principles rather than reacting spontaneously to circumstances throughout the day. They comprise the operating system that guides how we engage our work, how we interact with others, and how we make decisions with our focus, time, and energy.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“The only thing we have to bring to community is ourselves, so the contemplative process of recovering our true selves in solitude is never selfish. It is ultimately the best gift we can give to others. —PARKER PALMER, THE ACTIVE LIFE”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“improving your sales skills, writing a book, learning to write code, or developing aptitudes that will increase your chances of landing a promotion are things you can control and measure, and therefore make good categories for stretch goals.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“To make a valuable contribution, you have to get uncomfortable and embrace lifelong growth and skill development.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Give yourself permission to not know things. Some people see ignorance as a point of failure, but successful people see it as acknowledgment of reality and an opportunity for growth.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“When you become more selective about where you spend your valuable attention, you cultivate the capacity to notice the subtleties of life and apply new observations to your work. This requires a commitment to the discovery process, and active pursuit of possibility. 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

“Principle: To counter aimlessness, you must define your battles wisely, and build your life around winning them.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“To countermand ego, you must adopt a posture of adaptability. This means being in a state of continual learning and openness to correction. Failure is never the ultimate goal; it should be a learning experience rather than a shaming experience.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“The key to overcoming the ill effects of a love of comfort is a commitment to continual growth and skill development.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“The cure for boredom is intentional and applied curiosity. To be successful intellectually and professionally you need to maintain a level of disciplined curiosity, which means staying in touch with your deeper questions, and practicing the mechanics of divergent problem solving.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Acquiring new skills and adapting to complex, uncertain environments isn’t easy, though. It requires persistent attention and near-constant effort to maintain a trajectory of growth. As such, it’s easy to grow tired or lose your drive. However, when you stop growing, you start dying. In much the same way that an organization needs to be persistently innovative in order to maintain market share, individuals must make a personal commitment to lifelong personal innovation through skill development, risk-taking, and experimentation in order to avoid stagnation. The seeds of tomorrow’s brilliance are planted in the soil of today’s activity.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. —T. S. ELIOT”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“when you allow the behavior of others to control your sense of engagement, you are abdicating control of your own work. There’s a high cost to protecting your ego in this way.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Two things will paralyze our creativity faster than anything else: 1. We haven’t defined success. 2. We haven’t defined failure.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“It’s easy to slip into guardedness and close ourselves off from the world when dealing with the messiness involved in navigating expectations, misunderstandings, and collaborative disagreements. This is especially true when we are busy or feel like we don’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to deal with the complexity of relationships.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“in against their will, or that it’s something that necessarily pulls us away from the people and activities we really care about. But work encompasses much more than just how we make a living. Any value we create that requires us to spend our time, focus, and energy—whether in the context of”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

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

“The average man does not know what to do with his life, yet wants another one which will last forever. —ANATOLE FRANCE”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“It's not possible to show a lack of discipline in one area without that choice affecting everything that's important to you.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“The rest of us need you to act, because if you don't, you're robbing yourself, your peers, your family, your organization, and the world of a contribution that only you can make.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“There is no one thing that you are wired to do, and there are many ways you can add value to the world, while operating in your sweet spot.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Someone who operates from a place of wishful thinking is—in essence—a closet pessimist.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“When there is silence around expectations, we will sometimes fill the gap and artificially escalate our expectations beyond even where the organization would set them.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“This morning Ava snuck into my office with an announcement: “I only have a few minutes here, because I have to go to work.” “Oh, all right,” I replied. Ava’s “office” is the closet in our basement. I often see her tucked away in there with her pink toy laptop typing away for several minutes at a time. Curious, I thought I’d probe a bit. “Ava, what do you do when you work?” She thought about it for a few seconds, eyes turned upward. “Well, I . . . I do things, and . . .” She paused again. “Well . . . I don’t know. They haven’t told me yet.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day