Best success quotes

We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or purpose that we must follow before all others. Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

Clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be - and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway. How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think.

A trick that screenwriters use: work backwards. Begin at the finish. If you’re writing a movie, solve the climax first. If you’re opening a restaurant, begin with the experience you want the diner to have when she walks in and enjoys a meal.

say “Don’t think,” what I mean is: don’t listen to the chatter. Pay no attention to those rambling, disjointed images and notions that drift across the movie screen of your mind. Those are not your thoughts. They are chatter. They are Resistance.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.

a quiet mind allows the weak connections of non-conscious processing to rise to awareness

Sometimes reducing a problem to one short sentence can be enough to bring about insight on its own.

study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test.

We are what we do. We are not what we think, or what we say, or how we feel. We are what we do.

It is difficult to remove by logic an idea not placed there by logic in the first place.

My favorite therapeutic question is “What’s next?” It bypasses the self-pity implied in clinging to past traumas.

Most people know what is good for them, know what will make them feel better: exercise, hobbies, time with those they care about. They do not avoid these things because of ignorance of their value, but because they are no longer “motivated” to do them. They are waiting until they feel better. Frequently, it’s a long wait.

Life’s two most important questions are “Why?” and “Why not?” The trick is knowing which one to ask.

Think of the last time you set a goal, started a new venture or new relationship. Think back to the excitement, the enthusiasm. Nothing you did felt like work, because it was all so new and fresh. And then, regardless of whether it happened gradually or overnight, you reached a point at which the new endeavor no longer felt so new. In fact, it felt like a lot of work. Congratulations, you just hit “The Dip”. The Dip is that critical turning point when the joys of starting have faded and yet the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel” is still out of reach.

“Winners never quit” is terrible advice. Instead, “winners never quit with a short term focus”. Winners definitely quit from dead end paths;

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.”

Short term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting.

you should set targets for yourself that are 10X greater than what you believe you can achieve and you should take actions that are 10X greater than what you believe are necessary to achieve your goals.

Being dependent on only one person or one solution for success is your fault. Winners bring in success from many different avenues.

Even when bad luck or random events strike there is always something you can do to be better prepared

Fear is a signal to do what you fear right now. Do not feed fear by waiting and letting it build.

Resistance comes when you do: Any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity. Any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower.

The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

If you’re feeling massive Resistance, the good news is, it means there’s tremendous love there too. If you didn’t love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn’t feel anything.

The amateur, on the other hand, overidentifies with his avocation, his artistic aspiration. He defines himself by it. He is a musician, a painter, a playwright. Resistance loves this. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him.

You already know all that you need to succeed. You don’t need to learn anything more. If all we needed was more information, everyone with an Internet connection would live in a mansion, have abs of steel, and be blissfully happy.

Small, seemingly insignificant steps completed consistently over time will create a radical difference.

Write out the half-dozen small, seemingly inconsequential steps you can take every day that can take your life in a completely new and positive direction.

I’m always happy when something is hard. Why? Because I know that most people won’t do what it takes.

Incomplete tasks keep calling you back to the past to take care of them.

You get in life what you tolerate. If you tolerate your body being overweight, tired, and perpetually sick, it will be.

instead of quitting, every time I hit one of those mental and emotional walls, I recognized that my competitors were facing the same challenges. I knew this was another moment that, if I kept going, I would be strides ahead of them. These were the defining moments of success and progress.

Pre-suasion’ is the art of influence by capturing and channeling attention. Rather than seek to change what people think (difficult), change what they think about instead by directing their attention (easy). The changed focus of our attention primes, anchors, frames and sets the agenda for our subseqeunt choices. Smart influence happens before any message is sent.

Whilst Influence focuses on what to say to influence consumers, distilling the findings of scientific research into six universal messages, Pre-suasion focuses on when to influence. And that time is before people notice they are being influenced.

If you want people to choose a bottle of French wine, first expose them to French background music before they decide.

If you want people to agree to try an untested product, first inquire whether they consider themselves adventurous

If you want people to feel warmly toward you, hand them a hot drink

If you don't pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.

You don't actually do a project; you can only do action steps related to it. When enough of the right action steps have been taken, some situation will have been created that matches your initial picture of the outcome closely enough that you can call it "done.”

You can fool everyone else, but you can't fool your own mind.

Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.

Anything that causes you to overreact or underreact can control you, and often does.

One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not to be done at all.

...if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first.

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you seem to be naturally motivated to continue.

Everyone procrastinates. The difference between high performers and low performers is largely determined by what they choose to procrastinate on.

The Key to Success is Action

In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk.

Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.

The single most powerful asset we all have is our mind. If it is trained well, it can create enormous wealth in what seems to be an instant.

If you realize that you're the problem, then you can change yourself, learn something and grow wiser. Don't blame other people for your problems

We all have tremendous potential, and we all are blessed with gifts. Yet, the one thing that holds all of us back is some degree of self-doubt. It is not so much the lack of technical information that holds us back, but more the lack of self-confidence.

Becoming is better than being

Did I win? Did I lose? Those are the wrong questions. The correct question is: Did I make my best effort?” If so, he says, “You may be outscored but you will never lose.

We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.

no matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.

Picture your brain forming new connections as you meet the challenge and learn. Keep on going.

...when people already know they're deficient, they have nothing to lose by trying.

It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an amateur at many different things

I won’t just have a job; I’ll have a calling. I’ll challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest

as much as talent counts, effort counts twice

Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won

...interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can't really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won't...Without experimenting, you can't figure out which interests will stick, and which won't.

Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped

Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.

This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: THE HABIT LOOP

As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong

An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

The ECLS data do show, for instance, that a child with a lot of books in his home tends to test higher than a child with no books

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition

My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it

Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants

The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people

Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy-not to mention more attractive-than the average person

When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later

Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one's sights and pushing toward the horizon.

The monkeys solved the puzzle simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.

Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.

The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts.

People can have two different mindsets, she says. Those with a “fixed mindset” believe that their talents and abilities are carved in stone. Those with a “growth mindset” believe that their talents and abilities can be developed. Fixed mindsets see every encounter as a test of their worthiness. Growth mindsets see the same encounters as opportunities to improve.

Many articles and books on creativity encourage us to 'think out of the box' and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when 'anything goes' and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.

Remember the motto: ‘Work hard, play hard.’ Regard your personal time as just as important as your work time and give as much attention to planning it as you do to planning your work. What are you working for if you don’t have a personal life?

In spite of what many teachers of ‘creative thinking’ say, the best way to be creative is not to try to think without limits but to very carefully define what those limits should be.

A closed list is a way of applying limits to our work in order to increase our efficiency.

We therefore tend to rely on willpower alone. This never works because the ideal sequence above is opposed by a stronger and more primitive one: Stimulus – Reaction. Without the right structures to keep it under control, Stimulus – Reaction will always tend to overwhelm Thought – Decision – Action.

The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.

To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.

Turning pro is like kicking a drug habit or stopping drinking. It's a decision, a decision to which we must re-commit every day.

When we're living as amateurs, we're running away from our calling — meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves. Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling. Why? Because to follow a calling requires work. It's hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure.

The amateur allows his worth and identity to be defined by others. The amateur craves third-party validation. The amateur is tyrannized by his imagined conception of what is expected of him. He is imprisoned by what he believes he ought to think, how he ought to look, what he ought to do, and who he ought to be.

Many artists are addicts, and vice versa. Many are artists in one breath and addicts in another. What's the difference? The addict is the amateur; the artist is the professional.