“The consequences of attempting to shortcut the natural process of growth in the business world can be dire. Executives may attempt to “buy” a new culture of improved productivity, quality, morale, and customer service with strong speeches, smile training, and external interventions, or through mergers, acquisitions, and friendly or unfriendly takeovers. But they ignore the low-trust climate produced by such manipulations. When these methods don’t work, they look for other Personality Ethic techniques that will – all the time ignoring and violating the natural principles and processes on which a high-trust culture is based.”
– Stephen R. Covey

Education – continually honing and expanding the mind – is vital mental renewal.  Sometimes that involves the external discipline of the classroom or systematized study programs; more often it does not.  Proactive people can figure out many, many ways to educate themselves.”

• Stephen R. Covey

The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.”
– Stephen R. Covey

“No Country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.”
– Abraham Lincoln

“All change involves an if/then promise.

“If you want a delicious dinner, then try this new restaurant.”
“If you want to be seen as a hunk, drive this Ferrari.”
“If you want to avoid being dead, have this surgery.”

If people aren’t taking you up on your offer, there are two possible reasons:
1. Not enough if. Maybe the person doesn’t want the thing you’re promising as much as you need them to. Maybe they don’t care enough, won’t pay enough, just don’t want that sort of change.
2. Not enough then. More common is that we want the if, but we don’t believe your then. It’s easy to claim you’re going to deliver the then, but that doesn’t mean you have credibility.

When in doubt, add more if.

And definitely more then.”
– Seth Godin

Moving along the upward spiral requires us to learn, commit, and do on increasingly higher planes. We deceive ourselves if we thank that any one of these is sufficient. To keep progressing, we must learn, commit, and do – learn, commit, and do – and learn, commit, and do again.”
– Stephen R. Covey

“Shannon Weber decided that there wasn’t enough love, recognition or connection in her world, so she did something about it. When she finds an unsung (don’t say ‘ordinary’ hero) she makes them a cape.

Caping people, catching them doing something right, shining a light on a familiar hero.

It turns out that this is way more difficult than being cynical, or ironic, or bitter. Being closed is a lot easier than being connected. It takes guts.

What kind of impact does one act of kindness make? It can last for years.

Go, cape someone.”
– Seth Godin

You can be synergistic within yourself even in the midst of a very adversarial environment. You don’t have to take insults personally. You can sidestep negative energy; you can look for the good in others and utilize that good, as different as it may be, to improve your point of view, and to enlarge your perspective.”
– Stephen R. Covey

“Most of us think we don’t have enough time to exercise. What a distorted paradigm! We don’t have time to not to. We’re taking about three to six hours a week – or a minimum of thirty minutes a day, every other day. That hardly seems an inordinate amount of time considering the tremendous benefits in terms of the impact on the other 162-165 hours of the week.”
– Stephen R. Covey

Like the Far Eastern philosophy, “We seek not to imitate the masters, rather we seek what they sought,” we seek not to imitate past creative synergistic experiences; rather we seek new ones around new and different and sometimes higher purposes.”
– Stephen R. Covey