“Beware of him who tries to poison your mind against another under the pretense of helping you. The chances are a thousand to one he is trying to help himself.”
– Napoleon Hill

“Our language is a very real indicator of the degree to which we see ourselves as proactive people. The language of reactive people absolves them of responsibility.

“That’s me. That’s just the way I am.” I am determined. There’s nothing I can do about it.

“I can’t do that. I just don’t have the time.” Something outside me – limited time – is controlling me.

“If only my wife were more patient.” Someone else’s behavior is limiting my effectiveness.

“I have to do it.” Circumstances or other people are forcing me to do what I do. I’m not fee to choose my own actions.

That language comes from a basic paradigm of determinism. And the whole spirit of it is the transfer of responsibility. I am not responsible, not able to choose my response.”
– Stephen R. Covey

“The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.”
– Gustave Flaubert

“Because we are, by nature, proactive, if our lives are a function of conditioning and conditions, it is because we have, by conscious decision or by default, chosen to empower those things to control us.”
– Stephen R. Covey

“Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they’re big, flashing signs that something needs to change.”
– Gretchen Rubin

“Between stimulus and response is our greatest power – the freedom to choose.”
– Stephen R. Covey

“As you live your values, your sense of identity, integrity, control and inner-directedness will infuse you with both exhilaration and peace. You will define yourself from within, rather than by people’s opinions or by comparisons to others.

Ironically, you’ll find that as you care less about what others think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves and their worlds, including their relationship with you .. You’ll no longer build your emotional life on other people’s weaknesses. In addition, you’ll find it easier and more desirable to change because there is something – some core deep within – that is essentially changeless.”
– Stephen R. Covey

“Pop culture is enamored with the Bond villian, the psycho, the truly evil character intent on destruction.

It lets us off the hook, because it makes it easy to see that bad guys are other people.

But most of the stuff that goes wrong, much of the organizational breakdown, the unfixed problems and the help not given, ends up happening because the system lets it happen. It happens because a boss isn’t focusing, or priorities are confused, or people in a meeting somewhere couldn’t find the guts to challenge the status quo.

What we choose not to do matters.”
– Seth Godin

“If I try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other – while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity – then, in the long run, I cannot be successful. My duplicity will breed distrust, and everything I do – even using so-called good human relations techniques – will be perceived as manipulative.”
– Stephen A. Covey

“Two guys are running away from an angry grizzly when one stops to take off his hiking boots and switches to running shoes. “What are you doing,” the other guy yells, “those aren’t going to allow you to outrun the bear…” The other guy smiles and points out that he doesn’t have to outrun the bear, just his friend.

I was at a fancy event the other day, and it was held in three different rooms. All of these fancy folks were there, in fancy outfits, etc. More than once, I heard people ask, “is this room the best room?” It wasn’t enough that the event was fancy. It mattered that the room assigned was the fanciest one.

Class rank. The most expensive car. A ‘better’ neighborhood. A faster marathon. More online followers. A bigger pool… One unspoken objection to raising the minimum wage is that people, other people, those people, will get paid a little more. Which might make getting ahead a little harder.

When we raise the bottom, this thinking goes, it gets harder to move to the top. After a company in Seattle famously raised its lowest wage tier to $70,000, two people (who got paid more than most of the other workers) quit, because they felt it wasn’t fair that people who weren’t as productive as they were were going to get a raise. They quit a good job, a job they liked, because other people got a raise.

This is our culture of ‘getting ahead’ talking. This is the thinking that, “First class isn’t better because of the seats, it’s better because it’s not coach.” (Several airlines have tried to launch all-first-class seating, and all of them have stumbled.)

There are two challenges here. The first is that in a connection economy, the idea that others need to be in coach for you to be in first doesn’t scale very well. When we share an idea or an experience, we both have it, it doesn’t diminish the value, it increases it.

And the second, in the words of moms everywhere: Life is more fun when you don’t compare. It’s possible to create dignity and be successful at the same time. (In fact, that might be the only way to be truly successful.)”
– Seth Godin