“Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves—to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today.”

“When the leader lacks confidence, the followers lack commitment.” 

“only people who can see the invisible can do the impossible.”

“People need your influence, but it will not come through ‘lip syncing’ those you admire.”

“He who thinketh he leadeth and hath no one following him is only taking a walk.”

“When people follow a leader because they have to, they will do only what they have to. People don’t give their best to leaders they like least. They give reluctant compliance, not commitment. They may give their hands but certainly not their heads or hearts.”

“Leaders Who Attract Followers . . . Need to Be Needed Leaders Who Develop Leaders . . . Want to Be Succeeded”

“As a leader, you should not be trying to carry everything yourself. To be successful, you must share the load. But you must have highly capable people to hand things off to.”

“People need clear objectives set before them if they are to achieve anything of value.”

“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!”

“What’s the key to relating to others? It’s putting yourself in someone else’s place instead of putting them in their place.”

“Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

“Successful people think differently than unsuccessful people.”

“what gets rewarded gets done. If you praise and honor the people who epitomize the values of the team, those values get embraced and upheld by other members of the team. There is no better reinforcement.”

“Do you know the difference between leaders, followers, and losers? Leaders stretch with challenges. Followers struggle with challenges. Losers shrink from challenges.”