“Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.”
– George Washington Carver

“When someone handed you a calculator for the first time, it meant that long division was never going to be required of you ever again. A huge savings in time, a decrease in the cognitive load of decision making.

Now what?

You can use that surplus to play video games and hang out.

Or you can use that surplus to go learn how to do something that can’t be done by someone merely because she has a calculator.

Either way, your career as a long-divisionator was over.

Entire professions and industries are disrupted by the free work and shortcuts that are produced by the connection economy, by access to information, by robots. Significant parts of your job are almost certainly among them.

Now that we can get what you used to do really quickly and cheaply from someone else, you can either insist that you still get to do that for us at the same fee you used to charge, or you can move up the ladder and do something we can’t do without you.”

• Seth Godin

“There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things.  The first group is less crowded.”

• Mark Twain

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

• Thomas A. Edison

“Avoiding a problem with foresight and good design is a cheap, highly leveraged way to do your work.

Extinguishing a problem before it gets expensive and difficult is almost as good, and far better than paying a premium when there’s an emergency.

Fretting about an impending problem, worrying about it, imagining the implications of it… all of this is worthless.

The magic of slack (a little extra time in the chain, a few extra dollars in the bank) is that it gives you the resources to stop and avoid a problem or fix it when it’s small. The over-optimized organization misunderstands the value of slack, so it always waits until something is a screaming emergency, because it doesn’t think it has a moment to spare. Expensive.

Action is almost always cheaper now than it is later.”

• Seth Godin

“There are a billion people trying to do something important for the first time. These people are connected by the net, posting, creating, daring to leap first.

It’s hard, because the number of people racing with you to be original is huge.

The numbers are so daunting that the chances that you will create something that resonates, spreads and changes the culture are really close to zero.

But it’s also certain that someone will. In fact, there’s a 100% chance that someone will step up with an action or a concept so daring that it resonates with us.

Nearly zero and certain. At the same time.

Pick your odds, decide what you care about and act accordingly.”

• Seth Godin

“In this life, we have to make many choices. Some are very important choices. Some are not. Many of our choices are between good and evil. The choices we make, however, determine to a large extent our happiness or our unhappiness, because we have to live with the consequences of our choices.”

• James E. Faust

“Probably the most important deposit you can make into an Emotional Bank Account is just to listen, without judging or preaching or ready your own autobiography into what someone says. Just listen and seek to understand. Let him feel your concern for him, your acceptance of him as a person.

He may not respond at first. But as those genuine deposits keep coming, they begin to add up. That overdrawn balance is shrinking.”
– Stephen R. Covey

“ ‘If you’re going to bow, bow low,’ says Eastern wisdom. ‘Pay the uttermost farthing,’ says the Christian ethic. To be a deposit, an apology must be sincere. And it must be perceived as sincere.

Leo Roskin taught, ‘It is the weak who are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.’ ”
– Stephen R. Covey

“Appeasement is the policy of feeding your friends to a crocodile, one at a time, in hopes that the crocodile will eat you last.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt