“The measure of a leader is not the number of people who serve him but the number of people he serves.”

“Ninety percent of all those who fail are not actually defeated. They simply quit.”

“A man is not defeated by his opponents but by himself.”

“The higher you want to climb, the more you need leadership. The greater the impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be.”

“Every human being has value, and every player on a team adds value to the team in some way.”

“Leadership has less to do with position than it does disposition.”

“Be more concerned about making others feel good about themselves than you are in making them feel good about you.”

“Why worry about things you can't control when you can keep yourself busy controlling the things that depend on you?”

“This poster in a Nordstrom’s department store once caught my attention: “The only difference between stores is the way they treat their customers.” That’s a bold statement. Most stores would advertise the quality of their merchandise or their wide selection as what sets them apart from the rest. The difference between Nordstrom’s and other stores, according to an employee of the competition, is that other stores are organization-oriented; Nordstrom’s is people-oriented. Their employees are trained to respond quickly and kindly to customer complaints. As a result, according to writer Nancy Austin, “Nordstrom’s doesn’t have customers; it has fans.” A study by TARP, Technical Assistance” 

“Most people who decide to grow personally find their first mentors in the pages of books.”

“Several years ago Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s book, Psycho-Cybernetics, was one of the most popular books on the market. Dr. Maltz was a plastic surgeon who often took disfigured faces and made them more attractive. He observed that in every case, the patient’s self-image rose with his and her physical improvement. In addition to being a successful surgeon, Dr. Maltz was a great psychologist who understood human nature. A wealthy woman was greatly concerned about her son, and she came to Dr. Maltz for advice. She had hoped that the son would assume the family business following her husband’s death, but when the son came of age, he refused to assume that responsibility and chose to enter an entirely different field. She thought Dr. Maltz could help convince the boy that he was making a grave error. The doctor agreed to see him, and he probed into the reasons for the young man’s decision. The son explained, “I would have loved to take over the family business, but you don’t understand the relationship I had with my father. He was a driven man who came up the hard way. His objective was to teach me self-reliance, but he made a drastic mistake. He tried to teach me that principle in a negative way. He thought the best way to teach me self-reliance was to never encourage or praise me. He wanted me to be tough and independent. Every day we played catch in the yard. The object was for me to catch the ball ten straight times. I would catch that ball eight or nine times, but always on that tenth throw he would do everything possible to make me miss it. He would throw it on the ground or over my head but always so I had no chance of catching it.” The young man paused for a moment and then said, “He never let me catch the tenth ball—never! And I guess that’s why I have to get away from his business; I want to catch that tenth ball!”

“when the real leader speaks, people listen. Leadership is influence-nothing more, nothing less.”

“Good Thinking Produces More Good Thinking”

“What we do on some great occasion will depend on what we are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.”

“The way President Abraham Lincoln is said to have handled a person who had a know-it-all attitude. Lincoln asked, “How many legs will a sheep have if you call a tail a leg?”  “Five,” the man answered. “No,” replied Lincoln, “he’ll still have four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”