“How do I fit in my area or department? • How do all the departments fit into the organization? • Where does our organization fit in the market? • How is our market related to other industries and the economy?”

“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!”

“If the reaction is worse than the action, the problem usually increases. If the reaction is less than the action, the problem usually decreases.”

“But what price do you put on a great memory?”

“The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it. Exercise, lose weight, test your blood sugar, or whatever. Do it without motivation. And then, guess what? After you start doing the thing, that's when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.”

“Most people want to feel a part of the experience,”

“People don’t remember what we think is important; they remember what they think is important.”

“One of the paradoxes of life is that the things that initially make you successful are rarely the things that keep you successful.”

“One of the major keys to success is to keep moving forward on the journey, making the best of the detours and interruptions, turning adversity into advantage.”

“we need to make a few critical decisions in major areas of life and then manage those decisions day to day.”

“The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding the answer.”

“Nothing much happens without a dream. For something really great to happen, it takes a really great dream.”

“The challenge of leadership is to create change and facilitate growth.”

“The reason most major goals are not achieved is that we spend our time doing second things first.”

“You cannot always control what happens to you, but you can control what happens in you.”