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

“ “I’m not sure what it is, but I’m against it.”

It’s a mistake to believe that people know all the facts before they decide.

In fact, most of the time, we decide and then figure out if we need to get some facts to justify our instinct.

There are two common causes of uninformed dissent:

The first is person who fears change, or is quite happy with the status quo. He doesn’t have to read your report or do the math or listen to the experts, because the question is, “change” and his answer is, “no.”

The second (quite common in a political situation), is the tribal imperative that people like us do things like this. No need to do the science, or understand the consequences or ask hard questions.

Instead, focus on the emotional/cultural elements and think about the facts later.”
– Seth Godin

“Synergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots commingle and improve the quality of the soil so that both plants will grow better than if they were separated. If you put two pieces of wood together, they will hold much more than the total of the weight held by each separately. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three or more.”
– Stephen R. Covey

“Go out with your spouse on a regular basis. Have dinner or do something together you both enjoy. Listen to each other; seek to understand. See life through each other’s eyes.”
– Stephen R. Covey

“The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior.”
– M. Scott Peck

“There are two pitfalls you can encounter in dealing with focus and process:
1. In moments of weakness, you take on a project or client that’s outside your focus zone. After all, you need the work.
2. In moments of blindness, you fail to expand what you do, relying on the fading glory of yesterday instead of realizing that you are perfectly positioned to go forward.

In 1994, I ignored the web, defining our business as being email pioneers, not, more broadly, pioneering digital interactions. It took three years to catch up from that error.

On the other hand, we raced to do business with online services from Apple and Microsoft. Not because they were in our focus, but because we could.

The easiest way to see these errors is in hindsight, which does you no good at all.

The best way to avoid these two errors is to regularly decide (in a moment of quiet, not panic) what you do and where you do it. With intention.”
– Seth Godin

“At first, it seems as though the things you declare, espouse and promise matter a lot. And they do. For a while.

But in the end, we will judge you on what you do. When the gap between what you say and what you do gets big enough, people stop listening.

The compromises we make, the clients we take on, the things we do when we think no one is watching… this is how people measure us.

It seems as though the amount of time it takes for the gap to catch up with marketers/leaders/humans is getting shorter and shorter.”
– Seth Godin

“… not if your goal is to find a breakthrough. Because your customers have trouble imagining a breakthrough.

You ought to know what their problems are, what they believe, what stories they tell themselves.

But it rarely pays to ask your customers to do your design work for you.

So, if you can’t ask, you can assert. You can look for clues, you can treat different people differently, and you can make a leap. You can say, “assuming you’re the kind of person I made this for, here’s what I made.”

The risk here is that many times, you’ll be wrong.

But if you’re not okay with that, you’re never going to create a breakthrough.”
– Seth Godin