Certain ideas stay with us because they express something we have learned through experience. The quotations below reflect principles that have shaped how I approach leadership, transformation, learning, and life: trust capable people, remain curious, persist through difficulty, and stay open to perspectives beyond your own.
They are not a leadership formula, but they are useful reminders of the values I try to bring to my work and relationships.
Leadership & Trust
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.
Lao Tzu
The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.
Steven Spielberg
Your value will be not what you know; it will be what you share.
Ginni Rometty
The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
Theodore Roosevelt
Change & Resilience
Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Lao Tzu
Energy and persistence conquer all things.
Benjamin Franklin
Remember, the struggles along the way, are only meant to shape you for your purpose.
Chadwick Boseman
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Curiosity & Learning
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Bill Gates
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Albert Einstein
Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it works.
Steve Jobs
Perspective & Purpose
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Attributed to Marcus Aurelius
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Attributed to Mark Twain
When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive: to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.
Marcus Aurelius
Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.
Mark Twain
The best ideas continue to reveal new meaning as our experience grows.