Inspire people to do the things that inspire them and, together, we can change our world.
In the military, they give medals for people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may survive. In business, we give bonuses to people who sacrifice others.
Customers will never love a company until its employees love it first.
When we accept the fact that we can't do everything, we are more willing to ask for and accept help when we do anything.
The reason we grow up to be healthy adults is because our parents played this game of giving us responsibility, disciplining us when necessary, letting us try, letting us fail. No matter what we know they are there to support us and see us do well. Leaders are exactly the same.
Work requires effort. Things we love to do feel effortless. Only do the things you love and you'll never have to work again.
Leadership is about empowering others to achieve things they did not think possible.
Dr. King gave the "I have a dream" speech, not the "I have a plan" speech.
We have no choice, we must all die. How we live, however, is entirely of our choosing.
My challenge is to make sure the things I say and the things I do remain consistent for as often and as long as possible. My why is to inspire people to do the things that inspire them so that together we can change our world. That's why I wake up every single day. I'm agnostic to the form it takes: I teach, I write, I speak, I advise.
We don't learn much when everything goes right. We learn the most when things go wrong.
It's important to slow down, every now and then, for no other reason than to call someone to say 'Hi.' It doesn't have to be a long conversation. Just calling out of the blue does more to let someone know you still care about them than nearly anything else.
I never set out to do the things I'm doing now.
Value is a perception not a calculation. Value is something people feel, not something we tell them they get
Focus on where you're going and you'll know what steps to take. Focus on the steps you're taking and you won't know where you're going.
Some good leaders are rough around the edges and some leaders are difficult. Some have difficult personalities and some are really nice to be around, but those are not the qualifications. The qualifications are their desire to see us achieve more, their desire to push us to be the best we can be. Not for their selfish gain, but because they believe that we have something to offer.
If our leaders are to enjoy the trappings of their position in the hierarchy, then we expect them to offer us protection. The problem is, for many of the overpaid leaders, we know that they took the money and perks and didn’t offer protection to their people. In some cases, they even sacrificed their people to protect or boost their own interests. This is what so viscerally offends us. We only accuse them of greed and excess when we feel they have violated the very definition of what it means to be a leader.
Stories are attempts to share our values and beliefs. Storytelling is worthwhile when it tells what we stand for.
Selfish is easy. It's sharing that takes courage.
Quality effective leaders have the confidence to trust others to try, succeed, and sometimes to fail. We very often confuse personality with leadership. In other words, leadership is not about being a nice person or not a nice person.
All these companies that grew to any sizable proportions were all founded with a belief or a cause bigger than their products or services. It was their products or services that helped them bring that cause to life.
There's only one why. You only have one why, and your why is fully formed by the time you're 17, 18 or 19years old, maybe even earlier. The rest of your life are simply opportunities to either live in or out of balance and the career choices we make and the decisions we make in our lives either put us in balance with our why, which makes us happy, fulfilled and inspired. Or it puts us out of our why, which makes us frustrated, stressed out and sometimes we fail.
When someone asks for your time, and you put your phone away to talk to them... that's leadership.
Ideas are like dreams; they will disappear unless we record them. Write a book, a blog, build a company, anything that makes the ideas real.
The next time someone starts listing all the reasons an idea won't work or can't happen, ask them to give 3 reasons it can.
