What to Make of a Life Quotes

“Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“Richard P. Carlton, former CEO of 3M, once put it: You so often get where you are going by stumbling, but you can only stumble if you’re moving.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“She worked her way out of the fog and into the clear by simplex stepping.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“Courage, the saying goes, is not the absence of fear but the ability to act in the presence of fear.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“Imagine you’re trying to find your way to a destination, but you don’t know what that destination is. Imagine all you can see is a small 360-degree circle around you, and you cannot see possible steps beyond that circle. So, you simply take what looks like the next best step within that small circle.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“A Compass in the Fog”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“(whatever anyone else thinks about me is none of my business).”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“building,” Pei lamented. “It absorbs me completely and I can’t think of anything else. This may be a matter of hours or it may take as long as a month of sleeping badly, being irritable, sketching ideas and rejecting them. I am useless to everyone else. It is traumatic for my wife.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“There is absolutely no point in dwelling on what’s past; there’s just too much energizing stuff yet to do.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“Some people were fired up by a cause or noble purpose, while others simply wanted to solve puzzles or make music. Some felt a burning ambition to achieve visible success or climb the highest peaks of power, while others sought mainly to be left alone to do their own thing. Some people simply wanted to create something exquisitely beautiful for its own sake, while others felt more fired up by making a social impact. Again, every person in the study differed from every other person in the study in how they were encoded and in what drove them.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

“There is a big difference between being in love with the idea of one’s work and being in love with doing the work itself. It means not just the love in the 0.001% highlight moments; it means love in the other 99.999%.”
― Jim Collins, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative