169 Posts Found

You do something all day long, don’t you? Everyone does. If you get up at seven o’clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put sixteen good hours, and it is certain that you have been doing something all that time. The only difference is that you do a great many things and I do one. If you took the time in question and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Thomas Edison | Source: Brain Pickings | Subjects: Achievement, Career, Success / Failure

People who are struggling with inaction invariably have one of the following three deep-rooted attitudes:
Fear: “I’m scared to do it.”
Entitlement: “I shouldn’t have to do it.”
Perfectionism: “I won’t try to do it if I can’t do it right.”
These all-too-common problems affect people across all professions, ages, and endeavors. You show me a person who is not achieving life at the level they … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Rory Vaden | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Career, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips, Success / Failure

The biggest problem with a successful company is that you don’t learn from success. Learning from failure is so much easier.

Content: Quotation | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Learning, Organizational Behavior, Success / Failure

Every great leader begins with a great dream. Ambitious visions not only require a capacity for meaningful change, but also provide the energy and inspiration to engage others. These tasks — articulating a dream and rallying others around it — are the essence of leadership. The study of leaders in every field tells us that leadership is the residue of ambition… Great leaders have an … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James A. Champy | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Achievement, Ambition, Leadership, Success / Failure

In the end it is the quality and character, a leader’s understanding of how to be, not how to do, that determines the performance, the results.

Content: Quotation | Author: Frances Hesselbein | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Achievement, Leadership, Success / Failure

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your objective. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Achievement, Attitude, Success / Failure

What is the question we always ask about the successful? We want to know what they’re like – what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of lifestyles they have, or what special talents they might have been born with. And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top … I … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Malcolm Gladwell | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Achievement, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

“I will tell you how to become rich. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.”

Content: Quotation | Author: Warren Buffett | Subjects: Market/Investment, Personal Development, Success / Failure

The awkward truth is that while failure may teach a company how to succeed, success often teaches a company to fail, by misleading it into thinking that it knows more than it does.

Content: Quotation | Author: James Krohe Jr. | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Achievement, Success / Failure

Invincibility lies in the defense; the possibility of victory in the attack.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sun Tzu | Subjects: Strategy, Success / Failure

One of the greatest challenges for any enterprise is to discuss constructively how it might fail so that it can act to prevent such failure.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Frederick Funston, Henry Ristuccia, Stephen Wagner | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Management, Success / Failure

Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don’t want to fail is the last time you try something. One fails toward success.

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Kettering | Source: OPEN Forum (American Express) | Subject: Success / Failure

The biggest obstacle in performance isn’t not knowing what to do; it’s not doing what we already know.

Content: Quotation | Author: Alan Fine | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Achievement, Personal Development, Success / Failure

As Charles Handy has pointed out, the “paradox of success” occurs because we need to change before we have to change. However, “when things are going well we feel no reason to change.”

Content: Quotation | Authors: Charles Handy, Marshall Goldsmith | Source: LeaderValues | Subjects: Change Management, Success / Failure

“Superstitious behavior” is merely the confusion of correlation and causality. Many leaders get positive reinforcement for the results that occur. They then assume that their behavior is what helped lead to these results. Just as successful athletes believe in “lucky” numbers or perform “rituals” before a contest, successful business leaders tend to repeat behaviors that are followed by rewards. They may … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marshall Goldsmith | Source: LeaderValues | Subject: Success / Failure

Successful people will almost always respond constructively to advice and input when they are involved in selecting the behaviors and selecting the advisors. By making the process confidential (not identifying raters), people will tend to focus on what they need to improve, not who did the rating. It is hard to deny the validity of items that we say are important as evaluated … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marshall Goldsmith | Source: LeaderValues | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

When successful people write down goals, announce these goals to respected colleagues and involve the colleagues in helping them improve (in a supportive way), positive measurable change is much more likely to occur.

Content: Quotation | Author: Marshall Goldsmith | Source: LeaderValues | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

Successful people are much more likely to change by envisioning a positive future than by reliving a humiliating past. Proving that a successful person was “wrong” is often a counter-productive waste of time. Successful people respond well to getting ideas and suggestions for the future that are aimed at helping them achieve their goals.

Content: Quotation | Author: Marshall Goldsmith | Source: LeaderValues | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

When I do talk with students, my goal is to help them develop what I consider to be two of the most important forms of intelligence: the ability to read other people, and the ability to understand oneself. Those are the two kinds of intelligence that you need to succeed at chess — and in life.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bruce Pandolfini | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Life, Skills, Success / Failure

Because the prescriptions of most success studies lack an empirical foundation, they should not be treated as how-to manuals, but as a source of inspiration and fuel for introspection. In short, their value is not what you read in them, but what you read into them.

How did these researchers create such compelling narratives, then, if their samples are suspect? The human mind being what it … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Andrew D. Henderson, Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Best Practices, Success / Failure