One Small Step Can Change Your Life Quotes

“As Colleen Barrett, a former Southwest CEO, says, “We’re in the customer-service business; we happen to offer air transportation. We consider our employees to be our number one customer, our passengers our second, and our shareholders our third.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Somewhat paradoxically, a Mayo Clinic study revealed that going to the gym for an hour a day did not reduce the risks associated with sitting for six or more hours a day.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“The Harvard Business Review has reported that it’s much more efficient to leave a position empty than to fill it with the wrong person.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“As we’ve learned, radical programs for change can arouse your hidden and not-so-hidden doubts and fears (What if I fail? What if I achieve my goal—and I’m still unhappy?), setting off the amygdala’s alarms. Your brain responds to this fear with skyrocketing levels of stress hormones and lower levels of creativity instead of the positive, consistent energy you need to reach your long-term goals.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“«Añoro cumplir una tarea grande y noble, pero mi principal obligación es cumplir pequeñas tareas como si fueran grandes y nobles.»”
― Robert Maurer, Un pequeño paso puede cambiar tu vida

“What is a tiny step I could make to achieve my goal?”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“But one of the most solid predictors of success in life is whether a person turns to another human for support in times of trouble or fear.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Myth #3: Kaizen Is Slow; Innovation Is Quicker Perhaps the most dramatic example of what can happen when innovation is used and abused is Toyota, a company that calls kaizen its soul. For most of its history after World War II, Toyota exemplified quality automobile manufacturing. Consumers bought Toyotas not for the styling or prestige but for their unparalleled reliability. But by 2002, Toyota management decided it was not enough to build the highest-quality and most-profitable cars—it wanted to be the biggest car company in the world. And the company succeeded. It built factories rapidly and added enough capacity to produce three million additional automobiles in just six years. But productivity came at a high price: Suppliers could not sustain the quality for which Toyota was known, and the new factories did not have the time to build a kaizen culture. The result was over nine million recalls and some well-deserved bad publicity. Here is an internal memo written before the crisis became public: “We make so many cars in so many different places with so many people. Our greatest fear is that as we keep growing, our ability to maintain the discipline of kaizen will be lost.” —Teruo Suzuki General Manager, Human Resources In time, Toyota recognized that abandoning kaizen drove the company away from a commitment to its core principles. Since the crisis, Toyota has slowed down production, given local managers in the U.S. more responsibility for quality control, and trained new workers in the kaizen culture. Toyota has returned to focusing on quality, not quantity, as its mission, with an emphasis on correcting defects in production while they are small and easily fixed. And Toyota’s reputation for quality has been restored. The company’s story is an excellent illustration of the ways in which kaizen builds habits that can last a lifetime and helps avoid the painful consequences of steps that may, in retrospect, have been too big for the individual or the work group to swallow.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Kaizen is an effective, enjoyable way to achieve a specific goal, but it also extends a more profound challenge: to meet life’s constant demands for change by seeking out continual—but always small—improvement. Through decades of working with people of all stripes, with unique strengths and needs, I’ve developed a theory about why kaizen works when all else fails. I outline this theory in the first chapter. The succeeding chapters are devoted to the personal application of kaizen and encompass six different strategies. These strategies include: asking small questions to dispel fear and inspire creativity thinking small thoughts to develop new skills and habits—without moving a muscle taking small actions that guarantee success solving small problems, even when you’re faced with an overwhelming crisis bestowing small rewards to yourself or others to produce the best results recognizing the small but crucial moments that everyone else ignores”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Gratitude is often considered an element of spirit or purpose. But what are we expected to be grateful for? Innovation calls for financial gains, promotions, and possessions to stoke the fires of gratitude. But kaizen invites us to be grateful for health, for our next breath, for the moments with a friend or colleague. When famous songwriter Warren Zevon was suffering from terminal cancer, David Letterman asked him what wisdom he gleaned from his illness. Zevon’s answer was pure kaizen: “Enjoy every sandwich.” Some quotes on service and gratitude to begin your exploration of kaizen: “I long to accomplish a great and noble task but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.” —Helen Keller “We have to learn to live happily in the present moment, to touch the peace and joy that are available now.” —Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist Zen master “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” —Albert Einstein “I would rather have it said, ‘He lived usefully’ than ‘He died rich.’ ” —Benjamin Franklin”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“This book will show you how to harness the power of kaizen: using small steps to accomplish large goals. Kaizen is an ancient philosophy captured in this powerful statement from the Tao Te Ching: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Though it is rooted in ancient philosophy, it is just as practical and effective when applied to our hectic modern lives. Kaizen has two definitions: using very small steps to improve a habit, a process, or product using very small moments to inspire new products and inventions I’ll show you how easy change can be when the brain’s preference for change is honored. You’ll discover many examples of how small steps can achieve your biggest dreams. Using kaizen, you can change bad habits, like smoking or overeating, and form good ones, like exercising or unlocking creativity. In business, you’ll learn how to motivate and empower employees in ways that will inspire them. But first, let’s examine some common beliefs about change, and how kaizen dismantles all the obstacles we may have spent years putting in our way.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“If you tend to berate yourself with negative questions (Why am I so fat?), try asking: What is one thing I like about myself today?”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“You may have experienced this phenomenon in the form of test anxiety. The more important you believe the test to be, the more you have riding on the outcome, the more fear you feel. And then you find it difficult to concentrate.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“When life gets scary and difficult, we tend to look for solutions in places where it is easy or at least familiar to do so, and not in the dark, uncomfortable places where real solutions might lie.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Tao Te Ching: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” —Aesop, “The Lion and the Mouse”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“small rewards encourage internal motivation because they are really a form of recognition rather than material gain, signaling that the corporation or boss appreciates the employee’s internal desire to improve and contribute.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“While the modern medical name for the feeling produced by a new challenge or large goal is stress, for countless generations it went by the old, familiar name of fear.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“I would rather have it said, ‘He lived usefully’ than ‘He died rich.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Kaizen offers the possibility that through small acts of kindness, and even small moments of compassion and curiosity, we can change ourselves—and, eventually, humanity.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“consider how the world might be different if more of us conducted our social, business, and romantic lives with the belief that small steps matter, that even the shortest contact with another person is inherently important.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“These strategies include: asking small questions to dispel fear and inspire creativity thinking small thoughts to develop new skills and habits—without moving a muscle taking small actions that guarantee success solving small problems, even when you’re faced with an overwhelming crisis bestowing small rewards to yourself or others to produce the best results recognizing the small but crucial moments that everyone else ignores”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Kaizen and innovation are the two major strategies people use to create change. Where innovation demands shocking and radical reform, all kaizen asks is that you take small, comfortable steps toward improvement.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Kaizen has two definitions: using very small steps to improve a habit, a process, or product using very small moments to inspire new products and inventions”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Small things with great love. . . . It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into the doing. And it is not how much we give, but how much love we put into the giving. To God there is nothing small.” —Mother Teresa”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“People who struggle with kaizen do so not because the steps are hard but because they are easy. They can’t overcome the cultural training that says change must always be instantaneous, it must always require steely self-discipline, and it must never be pleasurable.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“What is one small step I could take to improve my health (or relationships, or career, or any other area)?”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“Today, we actually have three separate brains that came along at intervals of about one or two hundred million years. One of our challenges as humans is to develop harmony among these different brains so as to avoid physical and emotional illness.”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“kaizen: using small steps to accomplish large goals. Kaizen”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way

“asking small questions to dispel fear and inspire creativity thinking small thoughts to develop new skills and habits—without moving a muscle taking small actions that guarantee success solving small problems, even when you’re faced with an overwhelming crisis bestowing small rewards to yourself or others to produce the best results recognizing the small but crucial moments that everyone else ignores”
― Robert Maurer, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way