“Success is not a destination thing, it’s a daily thing.” – John Maxwell

When I think of leaders and leadership, I think of John Maxwell.  He is a speaker and author, and leadership is his super skill.  He leads by example but more importantly, he’s created an amazing knowledge base of leadership patterns and practices through his books and speaking engagements.

He takes up multiple shelves at the bookstore.  In fact, he’s written more than 50 books.   The beauty of his books is that he talks with you, not at at you, while at the same time challenging you to become a better version of yourself.   His books equip you with a wide range of ideas and language to help you frame out and master key areas of your life including your attitude, relationships, leadership skills, and success.  Along the way, he shares stories to bring the ideas to life and to share how he learned these lessons from the school of hard knocks and from multiple mentors.

From failing forward, to going on your success journey, to building a positive attitude, to winning with people, Maxwell covers a variety of  personal development and leadership skills that you can use in work and life.

I hope you enjoy these lessons as much as I’ve enjoyed putting them together …

25 Lessons Learned from John Maxwell
Here are 25 key lessons that capture and distill what I think are some of the most important insights from John Maxwell:

1. Leadership is influence.   Maxwell defines leadership as influence.  It’s simple, effective, and precise.  In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, Maxwell says, “True leadership cannot be awarded, appointed, or assigned.  It comes only from influence, and that can’t be mandated.  It must be earned.  The only thing a title can buy is a little time – either to increase your level of influence with others or to erase it.”
2. Leadership isn’t a position, it’s a process.   Leadership starts right where you are, from the inside out.  Maxwell says,  “Most people who want to get ahead do it backward. They think, ‘I’ll get a bigger job, then I’ll learn how to be a leader.’ But showing leadership skill is how you get the bigger job in the first place. Leadership isn’t a position, it’s a process.”
3. Just do it.  Forget motivation and just do it.  Maxwell says, “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.”
4. Your attitude towards life is still under construction.  According to Maxwell, your attitude towards life is constantly being shaped by the following factors:  personality (who are you), environment (what’s around you), word expression (what you hear), adult acceptance/affirmation (what you feel), self-image(how you see yourself), exposure to new experiences, association with peers (who influences you), physical appearance (how you look to others), and marriage, family, and job (your security and status.)  Maxwell believes that your environment shapes you more than your personality or other inherited traits, and that your outward actions are a direct reflection of your self-image (we tend to act consistently with how we see ourselves.)  In Attitude 101, Maxwell says, “Whether you are eleven, forty-two, or sixty-five, your attitude toward life is still under construction.  It’s never too late for a person to change his attitude.”
5. Use principles to guide you.   Drive from durable principles instead of a bunch of rules and policies.  According to Maxwell, “policies are many, principles are few, policies will change, principles never do.”
6. Leadership is a collection of skills.  Leadership is something you can learn and improve at.  Maxwell says, “Although it is true that some people are born with greater natural gifts than others, the ability to lead is really a collection of skills, nearly all of which can be learned and improved.”
7. Build trust through competence, connection, and character.  You won’t follow somebody you don’t trust.  As a leader, you have to build trust.  Maxwell says, “There are three qualities a leader must exemplify to build trust: competence, connection, and character.”
8. Success is a journey, not a destination.   Don’t think of success as a place.  Think of it as a path.   Success is a journey you can enjoy a day at a time.  Take the right people with you on your success journey.   In Your Road Map for Success, Maxwell identifies 10 things to look for when figuring out who to invest in or who to bring with you: 1) make things happen, 2) see and seize opportunities, 3) influence others, 4) add value, 5) attract other leaders, 6) equip others, 7) provide inspiring ideas, 8.) possess uncommonly positive attitudes, 9) live up to their commitments, and 10) have loyalty.
9. Success is a daily thing.  You can be successful one day or one decision at a time.   Maxwell says, “If you can handle today correctly, tomorrow will take care of itself.”
10. Success is a decision at a time.   Maxwell says, “You don’t become a success when you get your diploma.  You became a success when you decided to go to college.  When you get your diploma you get the rewards of success.”
11. 7 Steps for success.  In Success One Day at a Time, Maxwell shares 7 steps for success:  1) make a commitment to grow daily, 2) value the process more than events, 3) don’t wait for inspiration, 4) be willing to sacrifice pleasure for opportunity, 5) dream big, 6) plan your priorities, and 7) give up to go up.
12. Look for the landmarks of success.  The highest levels of success require a series of significant trade-offs.   Maxwell identifies the following trade-offs that serve as landmarks: 1) achievement over affirmation, 2) excellence over acceptability, 3) personal growth over immediate pleasure, 4) future potential over financial gain, 5) a narrow focus over scattered interests, and significant over security.
13. Leadership is a visual thing.  The greatest leadership is by example.  Maxwell says, “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”
14. Everybody needs encouragement.  No matter who you are, you still need encouragement.  Maxwell says, “Remember, man does not live on bread alone: sometimes he needs a little buttering up.”
15. Don’t take yourself too seriously.  In Your Roadmap for Success, Maxwell says we need to be able to laugh at ourselves, “… success depends more on your attitude than it does on how important you think you are.  Life should be fun.  Even if your job is important and should be taken seriously, that doesn’t mean you should take yourself seriously.  You’ll go farther in life and have a better time doing it if you maintain a sense of humor, especially when it comes to yourself.”
16. Use failure as a springboard.  Unsuccessful people avoid taking any risks to try and avoid failure.  Successful people turn failure into feedback.  They don’t dwell on mistakes or the negative consequences of failures.  Instead, they focus on the rewards of success and on learning from their mistakes.  In Your Road Map for Success, Maxwell shares 10 ways to fail forward effectively: 1) appreciate the value of failure, 2) don’t take failure personally, 3) let failure redirect you, 4) keep a sense of humor, 5) ask why, not who, 6.) make failure a learning experience, 7) don’t let failure keep you down, 8.) use failure as a gauge for growth, 9) see the big picture, 10) don’t give up.
17. Win with people.   Growing people is the key to growing your success.  Maxwell says, “The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership” and “true success comes only when every generation continues to develop the next generation.”  In 360 Degree Leader, Maxwell says, “Great leaders don’t use people so they can win.  They lead people so they can all lead together.  If that is truly your motivation, you can become the kind of person that people want to follow – whether they are beside, above, or below you in the organizational hierarchy.”  Maxwell makes people development a priority.  To avoid spreading himself too thin, he focuses 80 percent of his time developing only the top 20 percent of the people around him.  Maxwell says, “your time is limited, and it makes more sense to help a few learn how to fly and reach their potential rather than show a big group only enough to whet their appetite.”
18. Let people fly with you for a while.  In Maxwell’s experience, the most effective way to mentor and ramp people up is the same way craftspeople have done for years: 1) do it, 2) I do it — and you watch, 3) you do it – and I watch, 4) you do it.
19. 10 principles for personal growth.  In Your Road Map for Success, Maxwell shares 10 principles for improving your personal growth: 1) choose a life of growth, 2) start growing today, 3) be teachable, 4) focus on self-development, not self-fulfillment, 5) never stay satisfied with current accomplishments, 6) be a continual learner, 7) concentrate on a few major themes, 8.) develop a plan for growth, 9) pay the price, 10) find a way to apply what you learn.
20. Don’t make happiness your measure of success.  Happiness is fleeting while success is a stable path.  In Your Road Map for Success, Maxwell writes, “The continual search for happiness is a primary reason that so many people are miserable.  If you make happiness your goal, you are almost certainly destined to fail.  You will be on a continual roller coaster, changing from successful to unsuccessful with every mood change.  Life is uncertain, and emotions aren’t stable.  Happiness simply cannot be relied upon as a measure of success.”
21. Achievement over affirmation.   Focus on achievement rather than worry about fitting in.  Maxwell says, “Affirmation from others is fickle and fleeting.  If you want to make an impact during your lifetime, you have to trade the praise you could receive from others for the things of value that you can accomplish.  You can’t be ‘one of the boys’ and follow your destiny at the same time.”
22. 4 kinds of people when it comes to relationships.  In Success 101, Maxwell says there are 4 kinds of people when it comes to relationships: 1) some people add something to life (we enjoy them), 2) some people subtract something from life (we tolerate them), 3) some people multiply something in life (we value them), 4) some people divide something in life (we avoid them.)
23. Lead yourself exceptionally well.  Leadership starts from the inside out.  Lead yourself first.  In Success 101, Maxwell identifies 7 areas that successful people must self-manage: 1) you emotions, 2) your time, 3) your priorities, 4) your energy, 5) your thinking, 6) your words, and 7) your personal life.
24. Treat people like a “10.” Who gets your better effort? … a leader who treats you as a “2” or a leader who treats you as a “10”?  Maxwell says that in his experience, people usually rise to the leader’s expectations – if they like the leader.   Treat people like a 10 if you want their best.  Maxwell says one way to do this is to focus on a skill or strength that somebody has that is a “10.”  If you can’t find a “10” in terms of skill, then rather than write somebody off, look to a non-skill area where the person can grow into a “10”, independent of skill, such as attitude, desire, discipline, and perseverance.
25. Focus on production over politics.   In the 360 Degree Leader, Maxwell says there are two ways to get ahead: production and politics.  Maxwell says avoid office politics and instead focus on production.  Maxwell says that people who rely on production: depend on how they grow, focus on what they do, become better than they appear, provide substance, do what’s necessary, work to control their own destiny, grow into the next level, base decisions on principles.  On the other hand, people who rely on politics: depend on who they know, focus on what they say, appear better than they are, take shortcuts, do what’s popular, let others control their destiny, hope to be given the next level, base decisions on opinions.  Maxwell shares 6 ways to avoid politics: 1) avoid gossip, 2) stay away from petty arguments, 3) stand up for what’s right, not just for what’s popular, 4) look at all sides of the issue, 5) don’t protect your turf, and 6) say what you mean, and mean what you say.

Success Defined
Maxwell defines success in a very simple, but elegant way that’s empowering:

“Success is … knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.”

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
One of Maxwell’s greatest contributions to the leadership body of knowledge is the identification of 21 laws of leadership:

1. THE LAW OF THE LID — Leadership Ability Determines a Person’s Level of Effectiveness.
2. THE LAW OF INFLUENCE — The True Measure of Leadership is Influence — Nothing More, Nothing Less.
3. THE LAW OF PROCESS — Leadership Develops Daily, Not in a Day.
4. THE LAW OF NAVIGATION — Anyone Can Steer the Ship, But It Takes a Leader to Chart the Course..
5. THE LAW OF ADDITION — Leaders Add Value by Serving Others.
6. THE LAW OF SOLID GROUND — Truth is the Foundation of Leadership.
7. THE LAW OF RESPECT — People Naturally Follow Leaders Stronger Than Themselves.
8. THE LAW OF INTUITION — Leaders Evaluate Everything with a Leadership Bias.
9. THE LAW OF MAGNETISM – Who You Are is Who You Attract.
10. THE LAW OF CONNECTION. – Leaders Touch a Heart Before They Ask for a Hand.
11. THE LAW OF THE INNER CIRCLE – A Leader’s Potential is Determined by Those Closest to Him.
12. THE LAW OF EMPOWERMENT – Only Secure Leaders Give Power to Others.
13. THE LAW OF THE PICTURE – People Do What People See.
14. THE LAW OF BUY-IN – People Buy into the Leader, Then the Vision.
15. THE LAW OF VICTORY – Leaders Find a Way for the Team to Win.
16. THE LAW OF THE BIG MO – Momentum is a Leader’s Best Friend.
17. THE LAW OF PRIORITIES – Leaders Understand that Activity is Not Necessarily Accomplishment.
18. THE LAW OF SACRIFICE – A Leader Must Give Up to Go Up.
19. THE LAW OF TIMING – When to Lead is As Important as What to Do and Where to Go.
20. THE LAW OF EXPLOSIVE GROWTH – To Add Growth, Lead Followers – To Multiply, Lead Leaders.
21. THE LAW OF LEGACY – A Leader’s Lasting Value is Measured by Succession.

If you’re familiar with the original 21 laws, you’ll note the following changes:

• Law 5 – THE LAW OF E.F. HUTTON -> THE LAW OF ADDITION.
• Law 13 – THE LAW OF REPRODUCTION  -> THE LAW OF THE PICTURE
• Law 16 – THE LAW OF MOMENTUM -> THE LAW OF THE BIG MO

You can explore the 21 laws in depth in Maxwell’s book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You .

The 21 Indispensible Qualities of a Leader
Maxwell identified 21 qualities of a leader:

1. CHARACTER: Be a Piece of the Rock
2. CHARISMA: The First Impression Can Seal the Deal.
3. COMMITMENT: It Separates Doers from Dreamers.
4. COMMUNICATION: Without It You Travel Alone.
5. COMPETENCE: If You Build It, They Will Come.
6. COURAGE: One Person with Courage Is a Majority.
7. DISCERNMENT: Put an End to Unsolved Mysteries.
8. FOCUS: The Sharper It Is, the Sharper You Are.
9. GENEROSITY: Your Candle Loses Nothing When It Lights Another.
10. INITIATIVE: You Won’t Leave Home Without It.
11. LISTENING: To Connect with Their Hearts, Use Your Ears.
12. PASSION: Take This Life and Love It.
13. POSITIVE ATTITUDE: If You Believe You Can, You Can.
14. PROBLEM SOLVING: You Can’t Let Your Problems Be a Problem.
15. RELATIONSHIPS: If You Get Along, They’ll Go Along.
16. RESPONSIBILITY: If You Won’t Carry the Ball, You Can’t Lead the Team.
17. SECURITY: Competence Never Compensates for Insecurity.
18. SELF-DISCIPLINE: The First Person You Lead Is You.
19. SERVANTHOOD: To Get Ahead, Put Others First.
20. TEACHABILITY: To Keep Leading, Keep Learning.
21. VISION: You Can Seize Only What You Can.

You can explore the 21 qualities in depth in Maxwell’s book, The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader : Becoming the Person Others Will Want to Follow .

Top 10 Quotes
Here are my top 10 favorite quotes by John Maxwell:

1. “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.”
2. “Do not take the agenda that someone else has mapped out for your life.”
3. “Growth inside fuels growth outside. “
4. “Learn to say ‘no’ to the good so you can say ‘yes’ to the best.”
5. “Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.”
6. “People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
7. “The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.”
8. “We all stand on the shoulders of the past generation.”
9. “We cannot lead anyone farther than we have been ourselves.”
10. “You must manage your thought life daily and then you can manage your life.”

More Quotes by John Maxwell
I’ve included some of my favorite John Maxwell quotes below.  For simple scanning, I’ve organized them using the following categories: Choice and decisions, Communication, Daily Impact, Growth, Leaders and Leadership.

Books
John Maxwell has so many books that I organized them into categories.   I organized them by the following categories: 101 Series, Power Series, Workbooks, Attitude, Leadership, Relationships, and Success.

Catalog of John Maxwell’s Resources
Maxwell has a wide range of resources, from blog posts to videos.  For simple scanning, I organized Maxwell’s collection of resources into the following buckets: Key Links, Videos, and Popular Posts.

My Related Posts

• Lessons Learned from Seth Godin
• Lessons Learned from Tony Robbins
• Lessons Learned from Guy Kawasaki

“When the student is ready, the master appears.” — Buddhist Proverb

Mike Kropp has been one of my best mentors at Microsoft. He’s been my mentor for several years, growing my skills and maturing my thinking.

In my experience, Mike is one of the most effective leaders at Microsoft. He makes things happen with skill. He sets a high-bar for himself and he leads by example. He’s always testing himself and improving. He drives from impact, and he empowers people to make things happen. When it comes to employee engagement, he’s a tough act to follow.

Mike also has very seasoned executive skills from real-world experience, the school of hard knocks, and his amazing mentors. These skills are gold, and I’ve greatly appreciated the lessons he’s shared with me over the years. Mike also has unique experience in that he’s successfully started businesses from scratch within Microsoft. If you know what it takes to start a business at Microsoft, that’s a non-trivial statement. True to his nature, Mike started the patterns & practices team at Microsoft to share proven practices for customer success. He’s a coach at heart. In fact, he’s been a soccer coach for years. He brings this coach mindset to work to help people play their best game, and lift people up to be their best.

Top 3 Lessons
These are my top 3 lessons from Mike:

1. A sense of urgency.    There’s no time like the present.  A sense of urgency leads to inspired action.  People take decisive action and make moves like they mean it.  When there’s no sense of urgency, there’s no compelling reason to take action and ideas and change die a slow crippling death or get lost in analysis paralysis, or people get bored and move on to new things.
2. Win the hearts, the minds follow.  Mike’s super skill is connecting with people’s passion and creating a compelling future.  He doesn’t start with the business case.  Instead, he starts with, “How is the world going to be different?”  It’s about dreaming big and putting together dream teams.  If the vision isn’t compelling, let’s not even start.  If the vision is compelling, then let’s find a way to carve it up and make it happen.  Now we can go to the details of the business cases.  Let’s not kill great ideas out of the gate before exploring how we can make the world a better place for our customers.
3. It’s all about impact.   Make an impact.  As a colleague put it, “this is your footprints you leave on the world.”   It’s all about impact.  Mike taught me the value of impact over efficiency.  First make impact, then you can optimize it.  Otherwise, you’re optimizing things that might not matter.  When you drive from impact, you inspire yourself, and you inspire others.  Small wins snowball into bigger successes and this creates momentum.  Your momentum feeds your passion, and the cycle starts all over again.

42 Lessons Learned from Mike Kropp
Here are 42 nuggets or stratagems, where each one is a useful arrow to have in your quiver:

1. Live each day like it’s your last, but plan to live a 100 years.   What are you waiting for?  Take action now and start making impact today, but balance that with the fact you might be around a while.  In other words, don’t put your dreams on hold.
2. What are you about? It all starts from here.   Lead from the inside out.  What’s your personal brand stand for?  Know your values.  Play to your unique strengths, and compensate for your weaknesses, where you need to.  Play where you can make the most impact, in a way that you can have the most fun.  Another way to think of what are you about is in terms of value to the company, your customers, or your tribe – what is the perceived future contribution you will make?  This is where your capabilities and brand paint a picture.
3. Ask better questions.   Before you can find the right answer, you need to ask the right questions.  One cutting question is always, “Who’s the customer?” or “What’s the customer experience?”  Asking better questions is a skill, and you get better with practice.
4. Do what you say you will do (DWYSYWD.) This is leadership 101.   If you say you are going to do something, then do it.  It doesn’t take long to erode your credibility by saying one thing, but doing another.  When you do what you say you will do and you’re open and transparent with people, you build trust.  People feel like you got their back.  This means they will go out on a limb for you.  They don’t have to worry whether you mean what you say, or whether you’ll pull the rug from under them.  This is vulnerability-based trust in action.
5. Know the system you’re in.  Find the “centers of gravity” and know the levers in the system.  The centers of gravity are the key opinion leaders or people with power.  Walk the system end-to-end, identify the key levers in the system, and the key players in the system.  Walk the life cycle or map the system over time.  Know how decisions are made, how to influence the outcomes, and shape the impact.  Build allies before you need them and align your work to other workstreams where you can.
6. Use the system to educate.   Use the outside system to educate the inside system.   For example, rather than argue your opinion, leverage customer stories and data to educate on the inside.  Otherwise, it’s an uphill battle of proving your own credibility over just leveraging the system.
7. Don’t flip the bozo bit.   Always deliver compelling value, and focus on quality over scope.  Once you flip the bozo bit, it’s tough to flip it back, and people write you off.
8. “Would you bet your job on it?” People quickly go from over-confident to more thoughtful, when Mike asks this question.  To be clear, it’s not a threat, it’s a quick check to see how confident somebody really is when they make bold promises or pie-in-the-sky thinking without any accountability or thinking through any ramifications.
9. Get their fingerprints on it. If you want support for your plan, from the people that will do the plan, then get their fingerprints on it.  Otherwise, you are on your own.  You can set yourself up for success if people who own parts gets on board.
10. Have the right people in the room. Without the right people in the room, you have buy-in.  Without the right people in the room, you won’t think about the problem with the right lens or perspective.  Having the right people in the room means that you have the right coverage of the problem.
11. The tyranny of “OR.” Rather than think “this” or “that” … challenge yourself to find the “AND.”
12. Survival of the fittest.  Mike often reminds us of the realities of business and competition with a dose of Darwin – “scarce resources drive the competition that leads to survival of the fittest.”
13. Read the situation.  The writing is often on the wall, if you look for it and are open to it.  Test the waters – ask questions.
14. Build a coalition of the willing.  Part of winning over your naysayers is having the right allies on board.  By getting the opinion leaders supporting your idea, you build momentum in the system, and this will help you deal with your worst critics.  An effective coalition isn’t a numbers game – it’s a perception game and it’s about having the right people backing your plan.
15. Are you a quarterback or a blocker? Know whether you’re the one makes the passes or whether you’re the one blocking for somebody else.  It’s a simple metaphor but it can help remind you of your role or how you help out in the current situation.
16. Bow to the revenue god.   Just like you can’t argue with results, it’s tough to argue with revenue.  Profit speaks volumes.  If you’re trying to make a business case, or push your next big idea, you have to stack it up against the profit plan.  Passion is necessary but insufficient.  Profit is a key part of any sustainable business efforts – otherwise, you’re somebody else’s funding or cost or problem.
17. Make a product, the Star.  If a product group doesn’t support you, you’re done.  This is an important point, especially at Microsoft.
18. Know the waypoints.  You can use waypoints as a way to check direction and show signs of progress.  In GPS terms, a route is made up of two or more waypoints.  You can use this metaphor to think about how to chunk up a path from point A to point B.  When you chart a path, you figure out the waypoints to get there.  You can add milestones or checkpoints or other ways to check progress and direction along the way.
19. Know your Achilles heel.  Everybody has one or more things they wish they were better at.  Know your Achilles heel and pair up with people that help make your Achilles heel irrelevant.  If your Achilles heel is a real liability, then work at it, but don’t spend all your time trying to make it a strength.  Instead, spend that time investing in your strengths to make your true strengths that much better.
20. Speak softly, but carry a big stick.  Getting louder isn’t how you command respect or authority.   Think back to school to the teachers that controlled their classrooms effectively.  They didn’t do it by yelling.  In fact, the teachers that constantly yelled were the ones that were usually out of control.
21. Just enough process.  How much process do you need? … Just enough, and no more.  Process won’t make up for good people and it can get in the way of good people getting their job done.  Whatever process you use, make sure it’s more value than tax or overhead for the business, the people, and the outcomes.
22. Sometimes the best job, is the one you already have.   You can always start by making the most of what you’ve got.  Knowing your job and being great at your job sets a foundation to shape your job.
23. Don’t confuse concept with implementation.  Recognize a good idea when you see one.  Just because an idea doesn’t work out, doesn’t mean it was a bad idea.  Sometimes the market isn’t ready.  Sometimes the system you’re in wants something different.  If you factor out the implementation from the idea, then you can test different implementation paths.
24. Run the decision into the ground.  A lot of ideas sound like good ideas until you consider what it takes to make it happen, and what the impact will actually be.  Drill into the business decision.   An analogy is running a cost down – such as estimating the developer cost of a work item.   This is how you get clarity, know the trade-offs, and get a better handle on the work involved.   A simple way to test somebody’s decision is ask them, “Would you bet your job on it?”
25. Go up to the balcony.  You always think you have more power than you do.  Go up to the balcony.  Get a new vantage point. Take a vertical slice of the problem and reflect on what’s at stake, who has interests, and who has the power.
26. Distinguish between adaptive and technical challenges.  When you’re up against a challenge in the system, first figure out whether it’s an adaptive challenge or a technical challenge.  The most common mistake leaders make is to treat an adaptive challenge like a technical challenge.  A technical challenge means you can apply your current know-how and authorities can do the work.  In an adaptive challenge means you have to learn new ways, and the people with the problem do the work.  If you recognize an adaptive challenge, you can slow down and read the situation.  This will help you see where things are stuck and where the real levers are.
27. Give them something they can react to.  It’s hard for people to react to a blank slate. When you lead, you often have to create the strawman for people to react to.
28. The Baby’s ugly.  When somebody has an idea, it’s their baby.  You might have feedback for their idea.  However, what you might think is feedback, might come across like you’re calling their baby ugly.
29. Managers clear the path for team.  Leaders find the path through the jungle.   Managers clear the path for the team.  It’s about enabling, empowering, and optimizing.
30. It isn’t personal; it’s business.   When you get run over by the system or caught up in politics, remind yourself that it’s not about you.  Attacks can often seem personal, but it’s part of the game.   Just like in soccer, people go after the person with the ball.  It’s not personal; it’s about getting the ball.  If you separate yourself from the situation, then you can better think about the plays and the motivations that are really driving the situation.
31. Balance connection and conviction.   Don’t tip the scales too much to one side or the other.  Balance your conviction for making things happen, with connection to the people around you.  When you’re conviction is out of balance, you make things happen while burning bridges, making enemies, and leaving dead bodies.  When your connection is out of balance, you try to make everybody happy and you lose yourself and your way in the process – and you end up not making anybody happy.
32. Shipping is a team sport.   It’s not about shipping through heroic efforts.  It’s about playing well with others.  Effective teamwork is a part of the process by design.
33. When people know the frame, they self-correct.   Focus on the goals and feedback loops.  When people know what success looks like, and they get effective feedback, they can self-correct.  The anti-pattern is to micro-manage and get in people’s business, instead of set the frame and get out of the way.  Part of an effective frame is co-creating goals so that people buy in.  When they don’t buy in, they vote with their feet, and go somewhere else, or they drag their feet and slow everything down.  What you really want is people racing to the finish line, because they can see the end-in-mind.  This is how amazing results happen.
34. If you set the frame, you win.   People tend to operate against a frame, whether it’s explicit or not.  In any system, if you get to set the frame, this is like setting the rules.  It’s carving out what’s in the frame, and what’s not, as well as what the outcomes are.  When you set this frame, and people buy into this frame, you win.  You’ve basically created the end-in-mind.  The rest is execution and implementation details.
35. Productize, then commoditize.  Productize first.  The market will naturally drive things towards a commodity, as more competition enters the market and it’s easier to reproduce without any qualitative difference.
36. Make a good decision quickly, or the next one will be free.  Moving up the stack means making effective decisions and using good judgment.  If you can’t make decisions, they’ll be made for you.
37. Focus on empowerment and accountability over making people happy.  Happy will be a by-product.  Chasing happy is a slippery slope.
38. Two things get in the way of progress.  There are two things that commonly get in the way of progress:  charters (who owns what) and business models.
39. Don’t react.   When something unexpected happens, don’t react.  Think it through so you can respond.  Respond over react.  This is especially true in re-orgs where the natural reaction might be to just react.
40. Three ways to look.  There are 3 ways to look at any situation.  You can see it as a do-over, a challenge (change and adapt), or a leadership opportunity (lead through ambiguity.)
41. With the org, because of the org, or despite the org.   When you get something done at a corporation, you can think about whether it was with the org, because of the org, or despite the org.  You can use this same check for a team, too.  Was it with the team, because of the team, or despite the team?   This helps you get clarity on whether the org or team is enabling or crippling.
42. There’s no wood behind the arrow.  This is about backing things up with real action or real results or real impact.

Maximize Your Strength Quotient
Build teams to maximize strength quotient.  You do this by first discovering your strengths, and then surrounding yourself with strengths that create a whole greater than the sum of the parts.  That’s where the magic happens.  For example, you mind round out a team of strengths to cover some important bases:

• ship / deliver (execution makes life easier)
• customer focused
• strategically sound
• detail and business orientation
• tell your story (internal and external communication)

I saw first-hand how the collective team was a powerful combination for strategy, results, and impact.

Managing Up
When it comes to managing up, Mike has two simple rules that have served me well:

• Speak in their language.  If you don’t speak in their terms or bridge, they’ll just tune you out.
• Think about what their job is trying to accomplish.  How is what you’re doing relate to why they care and what’s keeping them up at night

While they are simple rules, they are very effective.   They are both great reminders to map the value of what you’re doing back up the chain, and be able to articulate the value in a way that makes sense to key decision makers.

Guiding questions for Choosing Jobs
Mike uses a very simple set of guiding questions to evaluate a job.  I’ve used these time and again as a guide for myself and a guide for others:

1. What problem do I get to work on? For example, needs to be hard, challenging, and attract killer talent.
2. Who do I get to work with? For example, surround yourself with smart, capable, and amazing learning machines
3. What impact do I get to have? For example, you might set your bar on world-wide impact.  This is easy to say… but harder to do and find.
4. Do I trust who I work for? For example, do you really trust them?  This is the “Who’s got your back?” test.

Going from Vision to Results
Vision is how you keep your course.  Mike sticks to the basics and focuses on first getting clarity on the following:

1. how to get there (the map or path and how to chunk it down)
2. execution plans
3. accountability

Framing and Storytelling to Execs
Mike shared some very pragmatic guidelines for effective storytelling with execs:

• They get it. In fact, not only do they get it, but they tell the story to others.
• Emotional connection.  It has durability at the emotional level (life changing)  The caveat is to be careful about creating an emotional response.
• Keep it simple.  The key here is to think about who you are talking to.  For example, you can use metaphors to quickly paint ideas or relate information.
• Jump to instances.  Light up abstractions with concrete examples and instances (for instance, blah, blah, blah.)

As you can see, Mike is a wealth of wisdom and I continue to learn all that I can from him.

“Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn’t mean mattered.” – Seth Godin

There’s a hidden message in this post – it’s your free prize inside.  Whether you find the free prize or not, this post will make you think.  About your life.  About work.  About just about everything.  Why?  Because it’s a distillation of lessons from a man named Seth.  Seth Godin is an author, an agent of change, a meaning maker, and an Idea Merchant.

I have to say, this was my most challenging “greatness distilled” post to date.  Seth is a fountain of insight, and I wanted to do more than show the tip of the iceberg.  At the same time, I wanted to take the balcony view, look across his forest of ideas, and make a map of the most meaningful insights.  I won’t claim victory, but I smile inside as I think in the spirit of Seth, I won’t let perfect get in the way of the good.  I’m hoping people will share their lessons from Seth with me, and the map will go beyond my sketch and take a life of its own.  For now, this is my “Seth on a page.”

As you explore Seth’s work, find what you can use for the business of life, or the game of work.  If you walk away with the goal of finding 3 ah-has, you’ll change your frame … and a key to life is that if you change your frame, you change your game.

25 Lessons Learned from Seth Godin
Seth is full of lessons and insights.  Here are 25 lessons to chew on:

1. Have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets. Seth says — “Life is like skiing.  Just like skiing, the goal is not to get to the bottom of the hill. It’s to have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.”
2. Be remarkable.  Boring is invisible.  Remarkable products and remarkable people get talked about.  Seth on remarkable — “How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?”
3. Success is a skill.  Seth’s philosophy on success is — “it’s possible to enjoy your job, to do the right thing, to be transparent, to give more than you get and to be successful, all at the same time.”  It takes work.   Surround yourself with people who are succeeding.   You become who you hang with.  By surrounding yourself with people who are succeeding, you’ll learn what’s working and what’s not.  You can model their success and open doors that you might otherwise not see.  Seth on successful people – “”Successful people rarely confuse a can-do attitude with a smart plan. But they realize that one without the other is unlikely to get you very far.”
4. Being the best is the best place to be.  It’s better to be the best.   People pick the market leaders and they narrow their choices to the top.  Seth says, “Being the best in the world is seriously underrated.”   According to Seth, best in the world is relative – “It’s best for them, right now based on what they believe and in their world, the one they have access to.”  In the Dip, Seth shares 7 reasons why you might fail to become the best in the world:  1.) You run out of time, 2.) you run out of money, 3.) you get scared, 4.) you’re not serious about it, 5.) you lose interest or enthusiasm and settle for being mediocre, 6.) you focus on the short term instead of the long, 7.) you pick the wrong thing at which to be the best in the world.
5. Be missed.  Seth on how to be missed — “Connect, create meaning, make a difference, matter, be missed.”
6. Everybody is an expert about something.  You’re an expert at something.  Make meaning.  A SQUIDOO lens is a way to make meaning for others.  Seth on lenses – “A lens gives context. When it succeeds, it delivers meaning.”
7. Success is a hierarchy.   Seth teaches us the hierarchy of success: 1.) Attitude, 2.) Approach 3.) Goals 4.) Strategy 5.) Tactics 6.) Execution
8. Don’t do A as a calculated tactic to get B.  Do A because you believe in it.  Seth on success – “If we define success as the ability to make a living doing what I do, I’d say the following: 1.) No ulterior motive. I rarely do A as a calculated tactic to get B. I do A because I believe in A, or it excites me or it’s the right thing to do. That’s it. No secret agendas, 2.) I don’t think my audience owes me anything. It’s always their turn, 3.) I’m in a hurry to make mistakes and get feedback and get that next idea out there. I’m not in a hurry, at all, to finish the “bigger” project, to get to the finish line, 4.) I do things where I actually think I’m right, as opposed to where I think succeeding will make me successful. When you think you’re right, it’s more fun and your passion shows through, 5.) I’ve tried to pare down my day so that the stuff I actually do is pretty well leveraged. That and I show up. Showing up is underrated.”
9. Be in it for the long haul.  Things rarely come easy.  Make the journey worth it.  Chip away at success.  Seth says — “Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that’s how long it’s going to take, guys.”
10. Quit the right things and lean into the right Dips.  Winners quit the right things all the time.  Recognize when you’re in a Dip.  Pick the right Dips.  In the Dip, Seth teaches us 3 curves: 1) the Dip, 2) the Cul-De-Sac, and 3) the Cliff.  The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery.  The Dip is where success happens.  Stick it out, only if you’re going to get the benefits of being the best in the world.  The Cul-De-Sac is where you work and work and work, but nothing much changes.  These are dead-end jobs.  The Cliff is a situation where you can’t quit until you fall off.  If you’re in a Cul-De-Sac or Cliff, you need to quit.  You need to quit these so you can refocus on something with promise.
11. Decide if you’re a freelancer or entrepreneur.  In the Bootstrapper’s Bible, Seth teaches us that a freelancer sells their talents.  While they may have a few employees, they’re doing a job without a boss, but not running a business.  There’s no exit strategy or pot of gold, but they make their own hours and be their own boss.  Examples include layout artists, writers, consultants, film editors, landscapers, architects, translators, and musicians.  Seth writes that an entrepreneur is trying to build something bigger than themselves.  They take calculated risk and focus on growth.  An entrepreneur is willing to receive little pay, work long hours, and take on great risk in exchange for the freedom to make something big, something that has real market value.
12. It’s like walking through a maze.   Seth on building a business from scratch — “Learn as you go.  Change as you go.  Building a business from scratch is like walking through a maze with many, many doors.  Once you open one, 100 new doors present themselves.  As you move your way through the maze, you need to stop and check your location.  Look at a map.  If you’re in the wrong place move.  But if you’ve discovered a new place, there’s nothing wrong with exploiting it.”
13. Everyone is not your customer.  Seth teaches us the key to failure – “the key to failure is trying to please everyone.”  Listen to your real customers.  It’s not the media, the investors, or the early adopters.  Seth on everyone is not your customer – “The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down). Ignore them. Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers …”  Seth on figuring out what your customers really want — “Most people have no clue what they want, and if you ask them, you’ll get a lame answer. Most people don’t know they want Pretty Woman or Slumdog Millionaire. They don’t know they want Purple Cow or one of your killer articles. So if you want to have an impact, all you can do is lead. You can’t ask.”
14. Feed, grow, and satisfy the tribe.  Build your tribe.  According to Seth, “You can lead a tribe of people, connect them, commit to them and create a movement.”  Seth on building your tribe – “It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about. Everything the organization does is to feed and grow and satisfy the tribe.”
15. Small is the new big.  Focus on relevant, specialized, and unique.  It’s the difference that makes the difference.   According to Seth, small helps you be remarkable – “Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others, while you keep the power because you invent the remarkable and tell stories to people who want to hear them.”
16. Find the new scarce.  Where there’s scarcity, there’s value.
17. It’s the FREE PRIZE INSIDE.  Seth teaches us how to create a remarkable product – “The thing that makes something remarkable isn’t usually directly related to the original purpose of the product or service. It’s the FREE PRIZE INSIDE, the extra stuff, the stylish bonus, the design or the remarkable service or pricing that makes people talk about it and spread the word.”
18. The third century is about ideas.  We went from farms to factories to ideas.  Seth on the third century – “Fact is, the first 100 years of our country’s history were about who could build the biggest, most efficient farm. And the second century focused on the race to build factories. Welcome to the third century, folks.”
19. Spread your ideas. Be an idea merchant.  Spread your ideas.  Seth on being an idea merchant — “If you can get people to accept and embrace and adore and cherish your ideas, you win. You win financially, you gain power and you change the world in which we live.”   According to Seth, spreading is a formula of 8 variables: Sneezers, Hive, Velocity, Vector, Medium, Smoothness, Persistence and Amplifier.
20. Don’t wait for perfect. Test your ideas.  Learn and respond.  Don’t wait for perfect to land in your lap, and don’t let it get in the way of sharing a good idea.  Seth on testing ideas – “I’m in a hurry to make mistakes and get feedback and get that next idea out there.”  Seth on perfect — “Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.”  Seth on doing it well now, is better than perfect later — “The minute you start walking down a path toward a yak shaving party, it’s worth making a compromise. Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later.”
21. Don’t get paid to alter your behavior.  Be authentic.  There are two types of sneezers – the promiscuous sneezers and the powerful sneezers.  Promiscuous sneezers can be motivated by money and rewards to sell ideas to a hive.  Powerful sneezers have authority by setting a trend and can’t be bought.  A powerful sneezer can be worth many more times a promiscuous sneezer. Seth on staying a powerful sneezer — “After I left Yahoo!, I had many opportunities to serve on boards and do endorsements. I  chose not to. Why? Because I didn’t want to squander the powerful sneezing points I’d earned by writing my last book. … In every case, you’re getting paid to alter your behavior. That makes you more promiscuous and less powerful.”
22. The goal of reading is to choose what to change.  Find 3 take aways when you read a business book.   Seth on how to read a business book – “Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work.  Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.”
23. The world changes whether you like it or not.   The world’s getting bigger and smaller.  Seth on how the world is changing – “The world’s getting bigger because you can look everywhere, but it’s also getting smaller because categories are getting specialized.”
24. The game of marketing has changed.  It’s not price – it’s relevancy, difference, and value.  Marketing is now tribal leadership.  Small is the new big.  Fire customers that aren’t right for your business.  Attention is an asset.  Permission marketing works better than spam – “Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t.”  You take word-of-mouth marketing to the next level with IdeaViruses.  Tell the stories people want to believe.  Products that are remarkable get talked about.     Be authentic.  You can’t fool people.  According to Seth — “You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time.  And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.”  Marketing is an investment.  Seth says, “If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense.  Good marketers realize that it is an investment.”
25. Feed, grow, and satisfy your business.   Plan for the money.   If there’s no money, you’re out of the game.  In the Bootstrapper’s Bible, Seth shares 9 rules to take care of your business: 1.) find people who care about cash less than you do, 2.) survival is success, 3.) success leads to more success 4.) redo the mission statement and the business plan every three months, 5.) associate with winners, 6.) beware of shared ownership, 7.) advertise, 8.) get mentored, and 9.) observe those little birds that clean the teeth of very big hippos.

Top 10 Seth Godin Quotes
Here are my top 10 favorite quotes by Seth:

1. “Expectations are the engines of our perceptions.”
2. “Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.”
3. “Go ahead, do something impossible. “
4. “You can’t shrink your way to greatness! “
5. “Don’t try to please everyone. There are countless people who don’t want one, haven’t heard of one or actively hate it. So what?”
6. “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
7. “Why waste a sentence saying nothing? “
8. “If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?”
9. “Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.”
10. “Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.”

Quotes Organized by Category
I’ve included some of my favorite Seth Godin quotes below.  For simple scanning, I’ve organized them using the following categories: General, Business, Change, Greatness, Ideas, Leadership/ Management, Marketing, Mediocrity / Status Quo, Strategy.

Catalog of Seth’s Resources (Sites, Books, Videos)
Seth has a wide range of resources, from blog posts to books.  For simple scanning, I organized Seth’s collection of resources into the following buckets: sites, books, eBooks, videos, and popular posts.

My Related Posts

• Lessons Learned from the Dip
• Lessons Learned from the Bootstrapper’s Bible
• Lessons Learned from Tony Robbins
• Lessons Learned from Guy Kawasaki

Photo by jurvetson.

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” – Tony Robbins

This post is my attempt to surface and share some of my favorite lessons from Tony Robbins.

Tony Robbins is a living example of smart and gets results.   He walks his talk.   He’s a powerful combination of action, passion, and commitment to continuous improvement.   When it comes to unleashing your best, Tony Robbins sets the bar.  I actually think one of his super skills is bringing NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) to the masses and making it practical.

My Dad first introduced me to Tony Robbins by having me listen to Personal Power.  As I listened,  I felt like I was given the Holy Grail of Greatness.  I immediately used the information and techniques to shoot from #192 out of 196 students to #4, in one of my toughest classes at the time.  It was that single experience that both convinced me he was the real deal, and that skills can make all the difference in life.  Without further ado, here are my top 25 lessons from Tony Robbins.

25 Lessons Learned from Tony Robbins
While it’s always a challenge to distill somebody’s greatness into a set of lessons, it’s especially challenging with Tony Robbins given his depth and breadth in the field of human excellence.  He’s paved so many paths, turned over so many stones, and shared such a wealth of know-how, that I found it tough to pick the right lessons to share.   Here we go:

1. 3 levels of mastery.  Robbins says we move through three levels of mastery: intellectual, emotional, and physical.  We might understand something intellectually, but not have any emotional reaction to it or be able to actually do it.  When we do know something at the emotional level, we have an emotional reaction.  This is a simple, but powerful model for thinking about stages of mastery, and it actually parallels Bloom’s Taxonomy.
2. 4 classes of experience.   Robbins outlines four types of experience as a frame for thinking about what types of experience to do more of, and what to do less of:  Good for you, good for other people; good for you, bad for other people, bad for you, good for other people, and bad for you, bad for other people.
3. 6 human needs.  We go through cycles of needs and some seem at odds.  Robbins says our 6 human needs are: certainty, uncertainty, significance, connection, growth, contribution.  We have a need for certainty until we are certain, and then we need surprise and variety.  We have a need to stand out and be significant and make our mark on the world, but we also have a need to blend in and be part of the crowd.  We have a need to experience growth and to make our contribution and give back to others.
4. Act on it.  Knowledge is power, and action is results.  Start with something simple and build momentum.  Decide and act.  Take massive action.  Have a bias for action.  Take consistent action.  Throw massive action at your problems.  Robbins teaches us that smart’s not enough.  If we’re smart, but don’t take action, we can end up smart and broke, smart and fat, or smart and alone.  We need to take consistent actions and improve our results.  Along those lines, it’s not enough to know what to do, you need to do what you know.
5. Ask better questions.  Learn how to ask better questions to get more effective results.  Thinking is asking and answering questions.  If you want better answers, ask better questions.  Take control of your question and answering process by asking empowering questions.  Don’t ask “why” question (e.g. why can’t I do this?), ask “how” questions (e.g. how can I do this?)   Ask happy questions or inspiring questions.  Use precision and ask precisely instead of generalizing or abstracting.
6. Be a student of possibilities.  Robbins teaches us to be open to other possibilities and continuous learning.  Don’t let your attitudes and beliefs limit you.  Change your internal representation – your belief about what’s possible.  Find ways that work for you to uncover and change your limiting beliefs.
7. Be resourceful.  To be resourceful, ask resourceful questions. (e.g. How might you solve this? Who can help?   How can you leverage what you’ve got? )   By asking your brain the right questions, you’ll engage your RAS (reticular activating system) to help you solve your problems.
8. Build a library of profound knowledge.  Find reference examples of greatness.  Create a personal knowledge base of success patterns and distinctions.  Study and collect stories of successful people that you can learn from and inspire you.
9. Change the frame to change your game.   How you look at things determines what you think, feel, and do.  A frame is how you see things.  Reframe things to change your perspective.  Practice the power of perspective and add new lenses you can use to see things a new way.
10. Focus on continuous improvement.  Achieve physical, mental, financial, and spiritual wealth.  Robbins suggests adopting a principle he calls CANI.  It stands for Constant And Never Ending Improvement.  According to Robbins, “You’re growing or dying … you’re either climbing or sliding.”
11. Know your rules.  We all carry around a bunch of rules about things.  When you have conflict, it’s usually because of a conflict in rules.  For example, somebody has rules about how they know you love them, and your behavior doesn’t match (e.g. You tell them you love them, but they need to see it with random acts of kindness.)  You can keep getting tripped up by these rules until you know what they are.  You can dump your rules by asking questions, “In order to be successful, I need to …” and whatever follows are your rules.  You can ask other people.  You can ask your kids, “In order to be a successful Mom or Dad, what do I need to do?”  Robbins makes the point that what you don’t know can hurt you, and by dumping it out, you know whether the rules are helping you or getting in the way, and you can better meet expectations for yourself or others.  For example, you might find that your rules for success are unreasonable and you would never meet them, so no matter how hard you try, you will always shoot yourself down.  Get a grip on your rules and make them work for you.
12. Learn effective techniques for learning faster with improved results.  Skill takes repetition and practice.  Robbins says, “Repetition is the mother of skill.”  Use repetition to improve your skills.  If you use repetition with improvement, you create life mastery.  People hate repetition, but it creates power.  Be willing to do the boring things everyday to improve yourself.  Don’t just do the same things over and over – improve the actions.
13. Learn how to handle and solve problems more effectively.  We become more of who we are by the problems we solve.  Robbins says, “The only people without problems are those in cemeteries.”  You improve your ability to solve problems by framing and reframing problems and by improving your communication to yourself and others.  Adopt a healthy attitude towards your problems.  Reframe problems as “challenges.”  Adopt the belief that “resistance makes you stronger” and that we expand and grow ourselves the most by solving problems.
14. Learn how to set more effective goals.  Use goals to help shape your destiny and unleash your best.  Ask yourself, who would you like to become? … what do you want to have, do, or create? … and what do you want to earn and contribute.  Write your goals down to improve your chance of success and improve your clarity.  Make sure your ladder isn’t up against the wrong wall (don’t climb to the top, only to find it’s not what you want.)  To make your goals sticky, have a compelling reason for them.   If you can’t write at least a paragraph on why you need to complete the goal, then it’s not compelling enough.  Either find the right goal or find the right reason.  Have a timeframe on your goals and start taking simple actions towards your goals, a day at a time.  Robbins suggests, “stay committed to your goals, but flexible in your approach.”
15. Learn how to master your body.  Robbins encourages several success patterns here including, breathing effectively, eating water-rich foods, eating less, and combining foods effectively.  According to Robbins, if you like to eat a lot, the secret of eating a lot, is eating a little, because then you’ll be around long enough to eat a lot.  Aside from learning from experts, Robbins also suggests exploring Natural Hygiene.
16. Learn how to master your communication with yourself and others. Robbins teaches us that the quality of your life is the quality of your communication, with ourselves and others.  Learn more effective self-talk.  You can be your best friend or your own worst enemy.  Go from critic to coach.  Robbins answers the question, “Why do we communicate?”  We communicate to feel good or expand the feeling, get rid of a negative feeling, or to change a result.  Focus on rapport before influence.   Communication often breaks down because you’re stressed or you have different perceptions of reality or different meanings.  Robbins suggests a technique he calls reality bridging.  The idea is to acknowledge that you have different views, and continue to feel good about each other, while working for a solution.
17. Learn how to master your emotions.  Master your emotional intelligence.  Robbins asks, “Why do we do anything we do?” – It’s to change our state or to change how we feel.  Make positive emotions a habit.  Don’t let other people push your buttons.  Learn how to run your emotions or they’ll run you.  Avoid throwing your emotions into a pendulum, by leading a balanced emotional life.  Learn how to change your state.  Motion creates emotion.  Change your physiology to change how you feel.
18. Learn how to master your energy.  It’s tough to go out and change the world if you don’t have the energy.  Eat well, get enough sleep, and pay attention to how blood sugar levels make you feel.
19. Learn how to master your mind.  Learn how your brain works to gain pleasure and avoid pain.  Direct your mind with focus and questions.  You get what you focus on.  To change your focus, change your questions.
20. Learn how to master your relationships.  Nurture and grow your relationships.  People are your greatest resource.  Make everyone your mentor and learn from everyone you know.  Never question intent.  You can question behavior, but not intent.  When you question intent, such as “You don’t care about me” or “You wanted to hurt me”, judging can destroy communication.  Instead, focus on the behavior, not the individual.  Remember to give other people what you want – the benefit of the doubt, and remind yourself that “people always do the best they can with the resources they’ve got.”
21. Live with passion.  Find your passion and unleash it in others.  Robbins teaches us to “live with passion” and “happily achieve over achieve to be happy.”  Follow your heart.  Passion is our fuel for life.  It’s our drive.  Make work your play and play at your work.
22. Make meaning.   You’re the most important meaning maker in your life.  You determine the meaning that comes from something; it then becomes a reality to you.  Choose a meaning that makes you more effective.  Metaphors are a powerful way to shape how you think about things.  Use metaphors that empower you.  For example, what’s your metaphor for life — is life a game? … is it a dance? … is it an epic adventure? … is it a comedy? … is it a tragedy?
23. Model success.  Learn and model the success of others.  Robbins teaches us that “success leaves clues.”  Find the people that are the best at what they do and use them as reference examples.  Find real-world examples of people or things with the results you want.  Work backwards from success to save time figuring it out from scratch.   Find the short-cuts and the proven paths based on people who have been there and done that.  You can use techniques and concepts from NLP such as modeling, to model excellence more effectively.
24. Raise your standards.  If you want to dramatically change your life, raise your standards.  Stop accepting certain things.  Turn your “SHOULDs” into “MUSTs” and your “some days” into “today.”
25. Test it yourself.   Does it work?  The only way to really know is to test it for yourself.  Robbins says don’t take his word for it, try it out for yourself.  Let results be your judge.

Top 10 Tony Robbins Quotes
Robbins has an amazing way with words and so many of his quotes are sticky and hit home.  Here are my top 10 Tony Robbins Quotes:

1. Determination is the wake-up call to the human will.
2. It not knowing what to do, it’s doing what you know.
3. Repetition is the mother of skill.
4. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers
5. Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.
6. The past doesn’t equal the future.
7. The quality of your life is the quality of your communication, with yourself as well as with others.
8. There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.
9. The path to success is to take massive, determined action.
10. There’s always a way – if you’re committed.

He has the perfect way of saying some things that you already know to be true, but he makes them hit home, and he has a way with coming up with some incredibly profound insights.

Tony Robbins Quotes Organized by Topics

I’ve included some of my favorite Tony Robbins quotes below.  I’ve organized them using the following categories: General, Action, Change / Decisions, Communication, Fear / Failure, Goals, Life, Questions, and

Success:

General

• Nothing has any power over me other than that which I give it through my conscious thoughts.
• The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.
• The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment.
• The only people without problems are those in cemeteries.
• Want to learn to eat a lot? Here it is: Eat a little. That way, you will be around long enough to eat a lot.
• Whatever happens, take responsibility.
• When people are like each other they tend to like each other.

Action

• I believe life is constantly testing us for our level of commitment, and life’s greatest rewards are reserved for those who demonstrate a never-ending commitment to act until they achieve.
• If you can’t, you must. If you must, you can.
• In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.
• Personal power is the ability to take action.
• The higher your energy level, the more efficient your body The more efficient your body, the better you feel and the more you will use your talent to produce outstanding results.
• The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors.
• We will act consistently with our view of who we truly are, whether that view is accurate or not.
• You always succeed in producing a result.

Change / Decisions

• A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.
• All personal breakthroughs being with a change in beliefs. So how do we change? The most effective way is to get your brain to associate massive pain to the old belief.
• Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards.
• For changes to be of any true value, they’ve got to be lasting and consistent.
• If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.
• It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.
• More than anything else, I believe it’s our decisions, not the conditions of our lives, that determine our destiny.
• We can change our lives. We can do, have, and be exactly what we wish.
• Your life changes the moment you make a new, congruent, and committed decision.

Communication

• The people who shape our lives and our cultures have the ability to communicate a vision or a quest or a joy or a mission.
• To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.

Fear / Failure

• Let fear be a counselor and not a jailer.
• Most people fail in life because they major in minor things.
• One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.

Goals

• Goals are a means to an end, not the ultimate purpose of our lives. They are simply a tool to concentrate our focus and move us in a direction.
• How am I going to live today in order to create the tomorrow I’m committed to?
• People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals – that is, goals that do not inspire them.
• Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.

Life

• I challenge you to make your life a masterpiece. I challenge you to join the ranks of those people who live what they teach, who walk their talk.
• In life you need either inspiration or desperation.
• Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.
• Live life fully while you’re here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You’re going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process.
• Live with passion!

Purpose / Meaning

• Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.
• Everything happens for a reason and a purpose, and it serves you.
• It is not what we get. But who we become, what we contribute… that gives meaning to our lives.
• Things do not have meaning. We assign meaning to everything.

Questions

• Quality questions create a quality life.
• Questions provide the key to unlocking our unlimited potential.

Success

• If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results.
• Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year – and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!
• Success is doing what you want to do, when you want, where you want, with whom you want, as much as you want.
• Success is the result of good judgment, good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is often the result of bad judgment!
• Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.
• Take control of your consistent emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life.
• The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t, life controls you.

Where to Go For More
You can get more information on Tony Robbins at the following sites:

• Tony Robbins (Wikipedia)
• Tony Robbins.com
• Anthony Robbins Foundation

Books / Audio
Here are links to some of Tony Robbins’ products:

• Anthony Robbins’ Personal Power, Classic Edition (Amazon)
• Unlimited Power : The New Science Of Personal Achievement (Amazon)
• Awaken the Giant Within : How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! (Amazon)
• Giant Steps : Author Of Awaken The Giant And Unlimited Power (Amazon)

Do you have any favorite lessons from Tony Robbins you can share?

Part of “standing on the shoulders of giants”, is finding the heroes to learn and model from.  Starting with the assumption that “everybody has flaws,” you can choose to focus on people’s super skills and insights.  Everybody brings something to the table.

In this post, I’m focusing on Guy Kawasaki.  His super skill is making Entrepreneurs more effective.  He’s also a master at the business of life.  He lives life in a sustainable way, living his mantra of “empower Entrepreneurs,” keeping things real, enjoying the ride, and staying authentic.

As a thought leader and a people leader in the startup space, Guy provides practical advice from being a more effective evangelist to helping Entrepreneurs pitch and test their ideas more effectively.  As a writer, speaker, and consultant, he’s a powerful force of good that you can draw from for insight, inspiration and results.  At a minimum, you can use his advice to improve your slide decks and pitch your ideas more effectively.

25 Lessons Learned from Guy Kawasaki
This collection of insights is based on drawing from Guy’s presentations, blog posts, and books.  I consolidated as much as possible, to paint a map of some of his best contributions.  You can use this as a launch pad for exploring his work.  At the end of this post, I’ve consolidated some resources you can use to continue your exploration.  Here are my 25 lessons learned from Guy Kawasaki:

1. Make a mantra, not a mission.  Mission statements are often too long or they don’t resonate.  You need something you can easily remember, easily say, and identify with.  Summarize your cause in 2 or 3 words.  According to Guy, some effective examples might be Nike – “authentic, athletic performance” and Wendy’s – “healthy, fast food.”  The key is to capture the essence in just a few words.  This helps remind you of your cause and reinforce it with your actions.
2. Make meaning over money.  According to Guy, “Evangelism starts with the desire to make meaning.”  When you focus on the money, you focus on the wrong thing.  You have to first make meaning.   You need to mean something to the world and to your customers.  “The root of great companies is make meaning vs. make money.” – Guy Kawasaki.
3. Know what you want your life to be about.  Know what you want your life to be about and live your mantra.  Guy lives his life, actualizing his mantra “empowering Entrepreneurs.”  I like this approach, and I’ve been thinking about refining mine.  It might be closer to “results by design” or “proven practices for results” or “empowering Underdogs.”  Whenever I think about my posts, I’m asking, is it helping lift people up or help them be their best in any situation.
4. Be unique and valuable.  This is the key to effective marketing.  If you’re not unique, you’re competing on price.  Eventually, you’ll be priced out of the market.  If you are unique, but you aren’t valuable, then you have no market.  The sweet spot is valuable to the market and unique.
5. The secret of evangelism is touch things that are gold. Don’t evangelize crap.  Evangelize great things.  “The secret of evangelism is Guy’s golden touch – whatever is gold, Guy touches.  That’s very different than saying whatever Guy touches turns gold.” – Guy Kawasaki
6. Remember DICEE to make great things.  This is how to be great out of the gate.  According to Guy, DICEE is an acronym to help remind you how to make things that are gold.  “D” is for Deep.  It has to have lots of power.  You don’t run out of power and you’re not waiting for a more powerful version.  It anticipated what you need to do.  “I” is for Intelligent.  It’s a smart solution to a problem.  “C” is for Complete.  Great products are complete.  Complete means the totality of what the product means   This means all the stuff around the product (the OEMs, the forums, the plug-ins, service, support … etc.) “E” is for Elegant.  When you look at it, you inherently know what to do.  You can kind of figure out without a manual.  “E” is for Emotive – great products have emotion.
7. Don’t worry, be crappy.   Ship, then test.  Don’t wait for the perfect world, or you’ll never ship.  As long as you are truly making meaning and you have a revolution, the market will accept elements of crap.  Ship something revolutionary with elements of crappiness to it.  You can then prioritize which crap to improve based on real usage and feedback.
8. Version it.  Think in terms of versions.  Ask, “what’s good enough for now?”  It’s not about slicing and dicing value and spreading it out over time.  Instead, it’s about being complete and good enough for now so that you don’t miss the market.  It’s also about continuous improvement over time.  Each version should be a useful, relevant, and marked improvement.  Guy thinks in terms of versions all the time.  In one example, he says, “My wife was in Beta with our second child … Shipped on time and no bugs.”  He also versioned his Alltop project. (see Alltop Version 2.0: The Art of Aggregation)  and he versioned, Entrepreneurship (See Entrepreneurship 2.0.)
9. Don’t let the Bozos grind you down.  Don’t listen to people that tell you that you’ll fail, because if you don’t try, then you definitely will fail.  According to Guy, there are two types of Bozos.  One type of bozo is a loser.  You don’t listen to them anyway, so that’s not the dangerous bozo.  The dangerous bozo is the rich, successful, well-known person.  Remember that rich, successful and well-know does not equal smart.  “Inoculate yourself from dangerous bozos.” – Guy Kawasaki.
10. Smile, it’s contagious.  Guy wears a smile often.  It’s easy to find pictures of him flashing his pearly whites and it’s contagious.  Take yourself seriously, but not too seriously.  “Life is good.” – Guy Kawasaki
11. Ask, “Is it defensible?” This is about evaluating startups against the following:  Proven team?  … Proven management?  … Proven technology?  … Proven business model?  These are some of the early warning flags that you don’t want to get in the way or that you have a good answer for.
12. Follow the 10-20-30 rule for content, length, and font.  Use a maximum of 10 slides.  Your presentation should be no more than 20 minutes, even if it’s an hour presentation.  Use a 30 point font.  It forces you to put the core text.  If you need to use a smaller font it’s because you don’t know your material.  If you start reading your material, your audience will read ahead and stop listening to you.  See The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint and Video: Guy Kawasaki 10-20-30 Presentation Rule.
13. Pitch your ideas in 10 slides.  Pitch your ideas more effectively.  Don’t be a solution looking for a problem, make meaning, and show how you’ll make money.  The idea is to communicate enough, not everything and stimulate interest, not seal the deal.  10 slides forces you to focus on the essentials and the fewer slides you need, the more compelling the idea.  According to Guy, here’s what those 10 slides should be:  1) Title and what you do slide 2) problem slide, 3) solution slide, 4) business model slide, 5) underlying magic (secret sauce) slide, 6) marketing and sales slide, 7) competitive landscape slide, management team slide, 9) financial projects and key metrics slide, 10) current status slide.  See The Art of Pitching MP3.
14. Ask, “So what? … Who gives a shiitake?” This is about asking, why does it matter, and who does it matter for.  According to Guy, you can do this by imagining a little guy on your shoulder that asks you, “so what?”  You can make this very effective by pairing up “so what?” with “for instance.”  After you answer, the “so what?” question, you can then give a real world, concrete example starting off with, “for instance …”
15. Make it personal. Personalize over generalize.   Instead of talking about paradigm shifts, make it real and make it relevant to the person.  What does it mean to them?
16. Success is a numbers game.  It’s a numbers game.  According to Guy, how venture capitalism really works is, that out of 20 – 30 bets, 1 or 2 succeed.  Of course, when your 1 or 2 bets succeed, you tell everybody how you knew it all along, and how it’s your partner that missed the other 18.  Guy readily admits he missed predicting the successes of Yahoo, Google, and YouTube.  See Gnomedex 2007 – Guy Kowasaki.
17. Be a straight shooter.  Keep it human.  Guy speaks in simple terms and keeps it real.  Whether you’re talking about your mantra or benefits of your product for people, don’t speak in lofty terms.  Keep it down to Earth.  Be authentic.  Be true to you.  Don’t be a suck up.  Guy’s a perfect blend of down to Earth, politically incorrect, and authentic, that we can model from.
18. Create very slippery slopes.  This is about creating glide paths for adoption.  Adoption shouldn’t be a pill that’s too big to swallow.  Create very slippery slopes.  This means thinking in terms of incremental buy-in and incremental adoption.
19. It’s a beautiful time for Entrepreneurs.   Now is a perfect time to be an Entrepreneur.  Test your ventures.  Ship something.  Show an adoption curve that’s growing.  Put something out and “prove the dogs are eating the food.”   You can test your ventures without depending on VC funding to start.  For example, instead of a million dollars in development and marketing costs to test an idea, it’s $12k.  This is how much it cost for Guy to spin up Truemors.  See By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09.
20. Align your interests.  This is about “alignment of interest” vs. “conflict of interest.”  Line up with the people, ideas, and things you believe in. See The Short Tale: Much Ado About Not Much.
21. It’s about the experience.   Make the most of every experience and live life to the fullest.  Guy has a way of creating and sharing engaging experiences.  See 26 Hours at Sea: The Longest Posting in the History of Blogging and BlogHer Pictures for examples of experiences.
22. Let 100 flowers blossom.   Find what works for you and your customers, then stand back and let your flowers bloom.  You can’t necessarily predict what will work and what won’t.  Instead, fan the flames of what works and get out of the way.
23. Find a coalition of the willing.   It’s way easier to sell to an existing customer or to somebody who is not already entrenched in a competing product or idea.  Build your raving fans, by building on your existing fan base and by winning over folks that are untainted.   According to Guy, it’s more effective to preach to the choir or focus on the agnostic, than try to convert the atheist.  Another way to put it is, focus on the market you’ve got, versus the one you don’t.
24. Know the real influencers.   Don’t spend all your energy on the CXO level.  Win over the front-lines and people in the trenches.  They’re the ones that will ultimately be your raving fans and will do your word-of-mouth marketing for you.  They will either be your resistance or your champions.  Create a tipping point with opinion leaders, such as the engineer’s engineer.
25. Be creative and productive.  Guy is life imitating art.  Being an Entrepreneur is all about creating something bigger than yourself.  To be effective, you need to be productive.  Guy regularly shares his life hacks on his blog, and Alltop is a great example of a creativity and productivity.

Top 10 Quotes
Between his books, blog, articles, and presentations, Guy is a flowing fountain of words of wisdom.  Here are my 10 favorite quotes from Guy:

1. A good idea is about ten percent and implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent.
2. Don’t worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test… Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap – but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.
3. Evangelism is selling a dream.
4. Evangelism starts with the desire to make meaning.
5. It’s a beautiful time for Entrepreneurs … Life is good.
6. Leverage your brand, … You shouldn’t let two guys in a garage eat your shorts.
7. Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.
8. Simple and to the point is always the best way to get your point across.
9. You have to start with the basic premise that you need to know what your competition is doing,
10. Shut up, take notes, summarize, regurgitate, and follow up.

I really like Guy’s point about making meaning.  I also like his focus on simple and to the point.

Where to Go from Here?
Guy is still in the game and you can learn more about him through his books, blog, and presentations.  I think his blog is a great starting point, rich with nuggets.  He’s shared many of his best nuggets from his books on his blog and in his videos and presentations.

I’ve created a browsable map below to help you explore some of the additional resources on Guy.  I’ve organized the map by key links, books, projects, popular posts, and videos.  Because he has a number of great posts and videos, I listed my top 3 favorites first, to help chunk up the lists.

Do you have a favorite lesson from Guy?  I’d like to hear about it.  Feel free to share it in the comments.

Photo by ShashiBellamkonda.

Photo by MIX2010.

Photo by leokoivulehto.

Whether you’re a fan or not, there is no doubt that Oprah Winfrey changes lives, starting with her own.  As a real life rags-to-riches story and a self-made success, she knows the power of choice, living with courage, and following your dreams.  She makes things happen.

My Mom has been a long-time fan of Oprah.  I get why.  Oprah stands out as authentic.  She comes across as somebody who generally wants to use all her power to lift people up and make a better world.

This post is my attempt to summarize and distill some of the many lessons we can learn from Oprah.  Success leaves clues.   Using Oprah’s words of wisdom and endless resources for information, we can add many patterns and practices for success to our personal knowledge base.

25 Lessons Learned from Oprah Winfrey
While I can’t possibly do justice to Oprah’s lifetime of contribution and service, what I can do is look for themes and patterns.  I think the most important theme I noticed is that Oprah is a self-starter and she’s a visionary.  Her determination and drive carry her forward, while her reflection and continuous growth help her redefine who she is and carry the best forward.  It’s like a fine wine getting better with age.  Here are 25 lessons from Oprah we can learn and model from:

1. Keep your dreams right in front of you. Keep your eye on the prize and follow your dreams. Oprah is a fan of using your dreams as inspiration and guide for your choices in life.   She’s recommended creating a vision board to map out what you really want.
2. Anyone can go from rags to riches. No excuses. It’s not what you were born into; it’s what you do with what you’ve got. Oprah made herself who she is.  No matter how bad your past was, it doesn’t need to limit your destiny unless you live in the past.
3. Surround yourself with an A-team. Learn from the best.  Find the mentors and coaches that can help you bring out your best.  Oprah has a team of experts on her side.  For health, Oprah has Dr. Mehmet Oz, Bob Greene, and Dr. Katz.  For spirit, she has Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Elizabeth Lesser, and Martha Beck.  For style, she has Val Monroe and Adam Glassman.  For relationships, she has Lisa Kogan and Dr. Laura Bergman.  For home, she has Nate Berkus, Peter Walsh, and Simran Sethi.  For money, she has Suze Orman and Jean Chatzky.   She’s worked with best-selling author, Eckhart Tolle and “relationship and life strategy expert,” Dr. Phil.  Who’s in your corner?  It doesn’t need to be somebody famous.  You can learn from people in the past or in the present, from books, or in real life.  “Stand on the shoulders of giants” instead of start from scratch.
4. Declutter your life.  Clean up your messes.  This could be your house (and Oprah has plenty of resources for organizing and simplifying.)  This could be your emotions.  This could be your everyday schedule.  Declutter to create space for opportunity, creativity, and a sense of well-being.  Decluttering can help you get rid of the energy drains and chaos.
5. Live in a more conscious way. Increase your awareness.  Be mindful.  Be in the moment.  Make thoughtful choices.  For example, don’t make emotional food choices.  Improve your self-awareness.
6. Practice an attitude of gratitude.  Don’t have a sense of entitlement.  Appreciate what you’ve got, what you get, and don’t take things for granted.
7. Make the most of what you’ve got. Make the most of … your mind … your body … your emotions (including self-esteem and confidence) … your relationships … your home.
8. Embrace the body you’ve got. Nourish your body. Look your best. Feel your best.  Like it or not, your body is yours.  Take care of it, so it can take care of you.  After all, it needs to last you a life time.
9. Learn for life. Nourish your mind. Reading is fundamental. Oprah is a firm believer in education and the power of know-how. In the words of Oprah, “Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.”
10. Live your best life.  Take responsibility.  Be accountable to yourself and to your dreams.  Don’t settle.  Oprah has extensive resources to help you live your best life.  Check out Live Your Best Life and Oprah’s Best Life Video Webcast Archive.
11. Live your own dreams. Be true to you.   Live your truths.  At the end of the day, you’re the one that knows your hopes and dreams and can make them happen.  Make sure they’re you’re dreams and not somebody else’s.
12. Enjoy your space. Take care of your surroundings. According to Oprah, one of the best things you can ever give yourself is to have beautiful surroundings.
13. Don’t let fear hold you back.  Take bold action.  Don’t let fear make your decisions for you.
14. Think you can. If you believe, you can achieve. Build your confidence and your self-esteem, one small moment, one choice, or one private victory at a time.
15. Give back. Oprah consistently demonstrates philanthropy and contribution. She’s effectively dedicated her life to helping other’s live their best life.
16. Keep it real. She lives larger than life, but she’s human. She’s vulnerable. She has her flaws. She strives for a better life. She lives a life of continuous improvement.
17. Own it. It’s your life.  Don’t point fingers.  Don’t play the blame game.  Make your dreams happen.
18. Find your inner peace. Drop the baggage. Forgive and forget. Another key here is self-knowledge and integrity. Be the person you say you are, forgive yourself when you aren’t, and lead the life you want to live.
19. Don’t give up. Don’t give up on your dreams. Don’t give up on you.  Persistence pays off.
20. Be present. Live in the now, with an eye to the future.  Know the results you’re getting.  If you don’t like what you’re getting, change your approach.  The most important thing you can change first is your attitude.
21. Journal it.  Writing your thoughts can help you reflect and get a more objective look at things.  There’s a lot to be said for thinking on paper, even if it’s simple as just organizing your thoughts.  Your journal can help improve your self-talk and it can help remind you what you think is important.  It can also help you declutter your emotions and your mind.
22. Life’s short.  It really is.  As 25 years of the Oprah Winfrey Show ends, and a new chapter for Oprah begins, it’s another reminder that time is limited, life it short, and the best you can do is make the most of what you’ve got.
23. Live without ego.  Eckhart Tolle teaches us that our egos get in the way of living our best life, and Oprah reinforces this message.  Through self-acceptance, living in the moment, finding our truths, and giving ourselves to a higher purpose, we unleash our best.
24. Savor the moments. Savor your relationships.  Savor your choices.  Savor your food.  Savor your joys.  Take in your moments.  Your moments make up your life.
25. Add fresh starts to your life.  Whether it’s a new day, a new week, a new month, a new year … or simply a new attitude, make it a fresh start.  Find the ways to renew yourself, whether it’s a make-over for you or your house, and find the inspiration for a new lease on life.

Top 10 Quotes
Oprah is a wealth of great quotes and she has many words of wisdom.  You can learn a lot about her and her insights through her quotes.  Here are my top 10 favorite Oprah quotes:

1. Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.
2. Every time you suppress some part of yourself or allow others to play you small, you are in essence ignoring the owner’s manual your creator gave you and destroying your design.
3. I knew there was a way out. I knew there was another kind of life because I had read about it. I knew there were other places, and there was another way of being.
4. The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
5. The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance – and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.
6. Turn your wounds into wisdom.
7. We are each responsible for our own life – no other person is or even can be.
8. What I know is, is that if you do work that you love, and the work fulfills you, the rest will come.
9. What I know for sure is that if you want success, you can’t make success your goal.  The key is not to worry about being successful, but to instead work toward being significant, and the success will naturally follow.
10. You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it.

Oprah Winfrey Quotes
I’ve included some of my favorite Oprah Winfrey quotes below.  I’ve organized them using the following categories: General, Choice, Dreams / Destiny / Purpose, Giving / Gratitude, Growth, Fear / Failure, Identity / Individuality, Opportunity / Possibility, Passion / Energy, Relationships, and Success.

General

• Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.
• I define joy as a sustained sense of well-being and internal peace – a connection to what matters.
• I think that when you invite people to your home, you invite them to yourself.
• I still have my feet on the ground, I just wear better shoes.
• In every aspect of our lives, we are always asking ourselves, How am I of value? What is my worth? Yet I believe that worthiness is our birthright.
• It’s much easier for me to make major life, multi-million dollar decisions, than it is to decide on a carpet for my front porch. That’s the truth.
• Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.
• There’s no easy way out. If there were, I would have bought it. And believe me, it would be one of my favorite things!

Choice

• Be more splendid, more extraordinary. Use every moment to fill yourself up.
• Follow your instincts. That’s where true wisdom manifests itself.
• I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.
• I believe that uncertainty is really my spirit’s way of whispering, “I’m in flux. I can’t decide for you. Something is off-balance here.
• I believe the choice to be excellent begins with aligning your thoughts and words with the intention to require more from yourself.
• My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.
• Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.
• With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice.

Dreams / Destiny / Purpose

• Before you agree to do anything that might add even the smallest amount of stress to your life, ask yourself: What is my truest intention? Give yourself time to let a yes resound within you. When it’s right, I guarantee that your entire body will feel it.
• I believe that everyone is the keeper of a dream – and by tuning into one another’s secret hopes, we can become better friends, better partners, better parents, and better lovers.
• I knew there was a way out. I knew there was another kind of life because I had read about it. I knew there were other places, and there was another way of being.
• I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.
• I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it.
• I’ve come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that’s as unique as a fingerprint – and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.
• It isn’t until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are – not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within – that you can begin to take control.
• Often we don’t even realize who we’re meant to be because we’re so busy trying to live out someone else’s ideas. But other people and their opinions hold no power in defining our destiny.
• The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.
• The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance – and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.
• Use what you have to run toward your best – that’s how I now live my life.
• You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at once.

Giving / Gratitude

• Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.
• I don’t think you ever stop giving. I really don’t. I think it’s an on-going process. And it’s not just about being able to write a check. It’s being able to touch somebody’s life.
• I finally realized that being grateful to my body was key to giving more love to myself.
• Living in the moment brings you a sense of reverence for all of life’s blessings.
• The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.
• What I know for sure is that what you give comes back to you.

Growth

• Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don’t fight them. Just find a different way to stand.
• I am a woman in process. I’m just trying like everybody else. I try to take every conflict, every experience, and learn from it. Life is never dull.
• Getting my lifelong weight struggle under control has come from a process of treating myself as well as I treat others in every way.
• The whole point of being alive is to evolve into the complete person you were intended to be.
• You are built not to shrink down to less but to blossom into more.

Fear / Failure

• Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.
• Every one of us gets through the tough times because somebody is there, standing in the gap to close it for us.
• I believe that one of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.
• I don’t believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.
• I have a lot of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.
• It is confidence in our bodies, minds and spirits that allows us to keep looking for new adventures, new directions to grow in, and new lessons to learn – which is what life is all about.
• So go ahead. Fall down. The world looks different from the ground.
• The thing you fear most has no power. Your fear of it is what has the power. Facing the truth really will set you free.
• Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.
• You can take from every experience what it has to offer you. And you cannot be defeated if you just keep taking one breath followed by another.

Identity / Individuality

• All these years I’ve been feeling like I was growing into myself. Finally, I feel grown.
• As you become more clear about who you really are, you’ll be better able to decide what is best for you … the first time around.
• Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.
• I always knew I was destined for greatness.
• I don’t think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.
• I’m black, I don’t feel burdened by it and I don’t think it’s a huge responsibility. It’s part of who I am. It does not define me.
• If you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are.
• Let your light shine. Shine within you so that it can shine on someone else. Let your light shine.
• Partake of some of life’s sweet pleasures. And yes, get comfortable with yourself.
• Though I am grateful for the blessings of wealth, it hasn’t changed who I am. My feet are still on the ground. I’m just wearing better shoes.
• What we’re all striving for is authenticity, a spirit-to-spirit connection.

Opportunity / Possibility

• Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.
• Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.
• Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.
• Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself.
• If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.
• When I look into the future, it’s so bright it burns my eyes.

Passion / Energy

• Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you’re going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus.
• If you neglect to recharge a battery, it dies. And if you run full speed ahead without stopping for water, you lose momentum to finish the race.
• Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.

Relationships

• Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
• My idea of heaven is a great big baked potato and someone to share it with.
• Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.
• When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Success

• For every one of us that succeeds, it’s because there’s somebody there to show you the way out.
• I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity.
• If you want to accomplish the goals of your life, you have to begin with the spirit.
• I’ve learned that you can’t have everything and do everything at the same time.
• The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.
• Unless you choose to do great things with it, it makes no difference how much you are rewarded, or how much power you have.
• What material success does is provide you with the ability to concentrate on other things that really matter. And that is being able to make a difference, not only in your own life, but in other people’s lives.

Where to Go From Here?
There are plenty of places to go and learn more about Oprah.   Rather than a laundry list of resources, I’ve identified a few that I think are especially useful.  I’m sure there are many Oprah fans out there, so feel free to share your favorite Oprah resources in the comments.

Here is my short-list of essential Oprah Winfrey resources:

• Oprah Winfrey (Wikipedia)
• Oprah.com – Forums, articles, and tools.
• Live Your Best Life (Oprah.com)
• Oprah’s Best Life Video Webcast Archive
• Living Oprah – A project dedicated to living Oprah’s advice for a year.  The writing is fun and down to Earth, and the stories are insightful.

To keep the lessons simple and easy to share, I’ve structured them as a set of 25 lessons. Each lessons is a bit of insight or a way of thinking that you can apply at a micro or macro context. Here are my 25 lessons from John:

1. Above the line or below the line.  Distinguish between what’s "above the line" and what’s "below the line."  Below the line is just doing what’s expected.  If you get it right, nobody cares.  If you get it wrong, or miss the boat, everybody gets upset.  Above the line is where people look for real value.  When you’re doing your job, some things are just expected.  You need to ask, what’s above the line that really counts?
2. Demand side vs. supply side.  When it comes to delivering value, there’s a supply side and a demand side.  On the supply side, it’s what you’re “pushing” out the door.  On the demand side, it’s what people are “pulling” for.  To be relevant, know the demand side.  If you can tap into demand, you can streamline your supply to be relevant and valuable in the eye of the beholder.  To know the demand side requires customer empathy.  It also means knowing where the growth is.   
3. Change the business or run the business.  Some people are change agents at heart.  They have an eye to the future and they like to change and evolve the business.  Others are more focused on running the business.  This means they focus on improving the systems and processes to improve execution and results around the current business.  They are complimentary.  One isn’t better than the other, but sometimes the business needs more influence from one than the other.  Another way of viewing this is a metaphor: CEO (Chief Executive Officer) vs. COO (Chief Operating Officer.)
4. Surprise and pop.  The key to an evocative or sticky idea is to have an element of surprise and “pop” right from the start.   If you just have an intellectually sound idea, it might be missing the emotional element that can take it to the next level.  Surprise and pop are a way to give an idea legs right from the start.
5. Everybody has flaws.  There are no great people.  There are people that do great things.  Heroes fall.  It’s the “feet of clay” scenario. People aren’t heroes, they do heroic things.  The point is, don’t miss the good because of the bad, and don’t get caught up in putting people on pedestals.
6. The customer, the problem, the competition, and success. This is a line of questioning for evaluating a project proposal or when figuring out business strategy or what to do.  To get clarity and focus, you can ask the questions, “what is the customer problem they are trying to solve?” … “who is the competition?” … “what is success?”  They are questions that cut right to the chase.
7. If you’re explaining, you’re losing.  If you have to explain it, you’re losing.  Idea or arguments should resonate.  They should make sense to the audience, simply, without the need for exhaustive elaboration.  If you find yourself explaining, you’re probably losing, and it’s worth either changing your position, or finding a simpler way to make your point.
8. Slippery Slope.  This is a metaphor where a small first step can lead to a chain of events that amplify a negative impact.  For example, if you fall over the edge of a slope, you can slide all the way to the bottom, gaining momentum and force along the way.  You basically slide out of control.  The idea here is to watch out for ideas or solutions or decisions that might seem like little impact up front, but that can lead to a downward spiral out of control.
9. The “How” Trap.  Don’t get stuck in the “How” trap, arguing over how something should get done.  Get the “what” right, first.  Stay focused on the goals, and stay flexible in your approach.  Give smart people the room to creatively solve challenges, rather than dictate their approach.  Agree to the goals and get out of the way.         
10. Periodically surprise people.  To avoid being taken for granted, periodically surprise people.   
11. Simple is always better.  The simplest explanation is the best.  When you have an option between simple and complex, always go for the simpler one.  It’s the one that will succeed in the long run.
12. 3 year Bets / Business Strategy / Roadmap.  When thinking about the business, make a map.  Use a time frame of 3 years to paint a future.  Where do you want to be?  What will the customer look like?  What will demand be?  What will the competition be doing?  How will you scale the business?  Use the 3 year time box to help shape the strategy and to paint a roadmap.  Keep in mind, it’s a straw man that you can evolve, but it helps build a shared picture.
13. You put yourself in your own box.  It’s easy to box ourselves in, either by our thinking or our actions.  Own the box you put yourself in.  Don’t limit yourself.  Don’t let others box you in.  Expand the box. 
14. Fundamentally flawed.   Some ideas never make sense right from the start.  They’re based on an idea or concept that just won’t hold up.  Find the fundamental flaws so you don’t waste time going down a path that will never work.  Don’t fool yourself or ignore the fundamental flaws.  Find them fast, acknowledge them, and move on.
15. The space between the products.    This is often a sweet spot when it comes to adding value for customers.  If you think in terms of a Venn diagram, you can imagine the map of customer demand and you can imagine the map of product or service supply.  The intersection is what’s addressed.  All the open gap where customer demand is unfulfilled becomes opportunity.  You can then evaluate the value of the opportunity.  The space between the products is the domain of opportunity.
16. Watch out for science projects.  When a project is purely academic and has no business case, you can think of it as a science project.  While science projects have value, in the context of business, you need to know the value – both to the business and for the customers. It’s tough to justify science projects in the context of a business.
17. Metrics, people, and process.  A simple frame for thinking about the business is metrics, people, and process.  Take care of the people so you can run the business.   Set the metrics so people buy in and achieve business results.  Improve the processes to support the people and achieve the right results, based on the metrics.
18. Bridging process and people.  Processes should support people, not the other way around.  Bridge the gap between people and process so that people don’t have to work around processes to get things done.  Get rid of processes that don’t work or get in the way.  Provide enough process to go from chaotic results to more predictable impact.
19. It’s leadership failure.   When things fail at a grand scale, it’s leadership failure.  To make progress as a person or a company, stand for something.  Lead the change you want to see.
20. It’s about the people.  The heart of the business is the people.  Focus on the people.  If you take care of the people, they can take care of the business.  Don’t let a focus on the business, turn a blind eye to the people that make it happen.
21. Get clarity on the impact you want to make.  When you’re thinking through your career aspirations, get clarity on what you want to accomplish.  Is it level versus title versus responsibility versus actual customer/business impact versus perceived impact?  … What is the end goal?  Is it the level or the title or the responsibility?  Is it the actual customer/business impact or perceived impact?
22. Live your values.  Life’s short.  Live your values.  Live your values at work.  If the values don’t mesh, it’s not the right place for you.
23. People-centric vs. System-centric.  When you drive a team or organization, you can be people-centric or system-centric.  A people-centric leader focuses on the people and makes the most of the people at hand.  A system-centric leader drives through policy, processes, and procedures, focused more on the system, than the people at hand.  The ideal is a hybrid, blending the best of people-centric and system-centric to enable and support the people for the best impact, in a sustainable way (supported by enough process.)
24. It’s about business strategy.   Technology has to support the business and it can’t be for technology’s sake.  Whether it’s Enterprise Architecture or product XYZ, it’s about the business strategy.  The business is the heart and soul that exists in the long run, and technology is an enabler, not the end, and not the dominant, driving force. 
25. Connection and conviction.  This is a helpful model to think about balancing connection with people, with a conviction to business results or some idea.  The sweet spot is in the middle where you stay connected with people, while having conviction and courage to bring an idea or change to fruition.

Peter Drucker was a leader in management philosophy and effectiveness.  As a writer, management consultant, and social ecologist, he played an influential role in shaping key concepts around business, innovation, decision making, leadership, productivity, time management, and personal effectiveness.  He first coined the term “knowledge worker” back in 1959, and helped pioneer knowledge work productivity.

I originally stumbled across Drucker while I was studying effective decision making techniques and I found that he was a wealth of insight in many other areas.  Drucker had a crisp way of making his points and he challenged the status quo.  I think what I liked most about Drucker was his ability to articulate things that you know to be true.  While I never got to meet Drucker, I get to study his legacy in the form of several books and great quotes.  This post is a walkthrough of the lessons I’ve learned as well as my favorite Drucker quotes.

My Top 10 Lessons from Peter Drucker
These are my top 10 lessons from Peter Drucker:

• 3 answers for the second half of life.  According to Drucker, there are 3 answers for the second half of life: 1) start a second career, 2) develop a parallel career, and 3) become a “social entrepreneur.” (See 3 Answers for the Second Half of Life)
• 3 kinds of innovation.  According to Drucker, there are 3 kinds of innovation:  1) process, 2) product, and 3) market. (See Innovation Objectives.)
• Boundary conditions for effective decisions.   Think of success in terms of a range or continuum of possibilities.  Know the boundary conditions for your important decisions.  Know what good looks like.  Know the minimum the decision needs to satisfy.  Don’t depend on everything going as planned.  Know when you need to abandon a decision.  If the decision is a failure from the start, don’t go down that path.  (See Boundary Conditions for Effective Decisions.)
• Consolidate your discretionary time.  Figure out how much discretionary time you have.  Consolidate your operating work for Mondays and Fridays.  Use your power hours on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays for your high priority work.  Work from home one day a week.  (See Consolidate Your Discretionary Time.)
• First know what’s right.  First know what’s right for effective decision making.  To make the right compromise, first know what right is.  Don’t worry whether it’s liked, worry whether it’s right.  After you know what’s right, then you can compromise.  (See First Know What’s Right for Effective Decision Making.)
• How much profit do you really need to make? Know the minimum profitability you need to survive. Know the minimum might be higher than you expected.  Plan for minimum profitability over profit maximization.  (See How Much Profitability Do You Need?.)
• Know thy time.  Time is the scarcest resource.  You can’t make more time.  You have what you got.  Make the most of it.  Log and analyze your time.  Consider keeping lits of deadlines for urgent and unpleasant tasks.  Effective people make it a habit to work at improving their time management.  (See Know Thy Time.)
• Opinions over facts for effective decision making.  Know that decisions are judgments.  Start with opinions over facts.  Know the criteria of what’s relevant.  Test your opinions against reality.  (See  Opinions Over Facts for Effective Decision Making.)
• What is the relevant decision making criteria.  Know what to measure.  Whatever you measure isn’t the answer.  It’s about judgment.  Finding the right measurements is risk-taking judgment.  Insist on having alternatives to choose from.  (See What is the Relevant Decision Making Criteria.)
• What our business is, will be, and should be.   Don’t spend your energy defending yesterday.  Instead, spend your energy exploiting today and the future. (See What Our Business Is, Will Be, and Should Be.)

More Lessons from Peter Drucker
In addition to my top 10 lessons, I’ve learned several other key lessons from Drucker.  I regularly draw from Drucker for advice when it comes to thinking about time management or how to make better decisions or how to think about business impact.  I think Drucker also helped pave the way for thinking about employee engagement and employee empowerment.

Photo by laffy4k.

Here are some more of my lessons from Peter Drucker.

• 4 major time-wasters caused by management deficiency.  There are 4 main signs of management deficiency: 1) lack of system foresight 2) overstaffing 3) malorganization, and 4) malfunction in information (See 4 Major Time-Wasters Caused by Management Deficiency.)
• 4 Types of Problems.  Know the four types of problems: 1) truly generic, 2) truly unique, 3) generic, but unique for the situation, and 4) new generic problem.  (See 4 Types of Problems.)
• 5 bad entrepreneurial habits.  The 5 bad entrepreneurial habits are: 1) Not invented here 2) Creaming 3) Quality 4) Premium price 5)  Maximize rather than optimize.  (See 5 Bad Entrepreneurial Habits.)
• Decentralization and simplification.  Companies work best when they are decentralized.
• Develop disagreement rather than consensus.  Don’t make a decision unless there’s disagreement.  Disagreement provides alternatives, stimulates the imagination, and helps you break out of preconceived notions.  Understand the alternatives.  Know why people disagree.  Know both sides of the issues.  (See Develop Disagreement Rather Than Consensus.)
• Effectiveness over universal expert.  You can’t be an expert in all things.  You can round out your knowledge and get the basics, while still specializing in a few areas.  (See Effectiveness Over Universal Expert.)
• Employees are assets.  Employees are assets not liabilities.
• Focus on the customer.  The primary function of a business is to serve the customer and the primary goal of your business is to create customers.
• Half a loaf over half a baby.  Half a loaf is better than no bread.  Half a baby is worse than none.  (See Half a Loaf Over Half a Baby.)
• Innovation Objectives.   Innovation is how you grow your business.  The key challenge with innovation objectives is measuring relative impact and importance.  (See Innovation Objectives.)
• Know where your time goes.  To manage your time, you need to know where it goes.  The only way to know where you spend your time is to log it.  Your memory tells you that you spend time where you think you should spend your time, but it’s wrong.  (See Know Where Your Time Goes.)
• Manage by objectives.  Set the goals and get out of the way.  Help unblock people, enable and empower people to reach the goals.  Avoid the how trap.
• Non-profits provide fulfillment.  When you can’t find fulfillment at work, you might find it by volunteering for a non-profit.
• Planned abandonment.  Plan an ending.  Determine how long the commitment will be for, and create some boundaries around it.  If you won’t have enough time to finish it, don’t take it on.  Build in a review mechanism so you can determine whether to continue or change course or stop.  When you stop something, you make room for something else.
• Productivity objectives.  Results are the best way to compare effectiveness.  Quality of management is a key differentiator.  Focus on continuous productivity improvement.  (See Productivity Objectives.)
• Resource objectives.  Your business needs to attract land, labor and capital.  Your jobs have to satisfy the business and the people in the market.  The first sign of decline is loss of attraction to qualified, ambitious people.  Design jobs to attract and retain the kind of people you want.  (See Resource Objectives.)
• Service to others.   Business should contribute to society and to the greater good.
• Social responsibility objectives.  Bake social objectives into your strategy.  Society and the economy need to believe that your business serves a necessary, useful and productive job.  Think through your social and economic impact and responsibilities.  (See Social Responsibilities Objectives.)

Peter Drucker Quotes
It’s not just what he said, but how he said it.  Drucker had a way of nailing key concepts with precision.  His one-liners pack a lot of wisdom and insight into a bite-sized nugget, that’s easy to share.  Here are some of my favorite quotes:

Photo by cote.

• Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.
• Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you’ve got.
• Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.
• Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
• Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
• Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.
• Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
• Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.
• Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.
• Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
• Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
• My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.
• No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.
• People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.
• Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
• Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
• The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
• The best way to predict the future is to create it.
• The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
• The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.
• The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.
• The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.
• The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager.
• The purpose of a business is to create a customer.
• There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
• Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
• Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.
• Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes… but no plans.
• We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

As you can see, Drucker paved a path for effectiveness and you can apply his insights and perspectives to work and life.

Sure you know Bruce Lee the martial artist and movie star.  But do you know Bruce Lee the philosopher, comedian or master of personal development?  Bruce was one of my early inspirations.   He continuously pushed his mind and body to new levels and his physical prowess inspired and influenced body builders and martial artists alike.  As far as heroes go, Bruce Lee truly set an example of what it means to be YOUR best.  Bruce was all about making the most of what you’ve got, seeking truth knowledge, and applying what you know.   If you’ve seen him in movies or you know some of his quotes, you know exactly what I mean.   In this post, I share my lessons from Bruce Lee.

My Top 10 Lessons from Bruce Lee
These are my top 10 lessons from Bruce Lee:

• Be YOUR best.  It’s not about following in someone else’s footsteps or trying to be somebody you’re not.  It’s about unleashing your best version of yourself.  According to Bruce, “Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”
• Absorb what is useful.  It’s not about blindly adopting patterns and practices.  It’s about taking the best of the best and tailoring it.  It’s also about throwing away what doesn’t work.  Bruce borrowed concepts and techniques from everybody and every art in a relentless pursuit of the best of the best.  According to Bruce, “Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.”
• Keep an open mind.  You have to be willing to throw out what you already know and have a curiosity to explore new paths.  If you’re cup is already full, you can’t learn new things.  According to Bruce, “First empty your cup.”
• Aim past your target. Aim past your target, so when you fall short, you still land in the ballpark of success.  Bruce Lee was famous for his one-inch punch, but in reality he was aiming past the one-inch.  According to Bruce, “Don’t fear failure.  Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.”
• Stay flexible.  Be flexible in your approach.  Learn from everybody and everything and don’t get locked into a particular style.  According to Bruce, “Expose yourself to various conditions and learn.”
• Focus on growth.   Push past your limits.  According to Bruce, “There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”
• Know yourself. Your blind spots and ignorance can be your biggest weakness.  According to Bruce, “After all, all knowledge simply means self-knowledge.”
• Master your mind and body.   It’s not enough just to be smart.  It’s not enough just to master your body.  Your body and mind support each other.  Your body helps turn what you think or dream up into results.  According to Bruce, “As you think, so shall you become.”
• Apply what you know.  Life is not about watching from the sidelines.  Use what you know and put knowledge into practice.  Test yourself.  According to Bruce, “Knowing is not enough, we must do.  Willing is not enough, we must apply.”
• Make things happen.  When there is no wave, make one.  According to Bruce, “To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.”

I think it really boils down to making the most of what you’ve got, including your mind and body, pushing past your limits and following a path of continuous learning and growth.

Bruce Lee’s Physical Feats
While we don’t know whether the following stretch the truth, we do know you don’t look the way Bruce did by default.  It was by design and he pushed his physical limits.

These are some of the physical feats attributed to Bruce based on various demonstrations, his friends and associates, and interviews:

• Bruce performed one-hand push-ups using only the thumb and index finger.
• Bruce performed 50 reps of one-arm chin-ups.
• Bruce performed a sidekick while training with James Coburn and broke a 150 lb (68 kg) punching bag.
• Bruce could cause a 200-lb bag to fly towards and thump the ceiling with a sidekick.
• Bruce could snatch a dime off a person’s open palm before they could close it, and leave a penny behind.
• Bruce’s striking speed from three feet with his hands down by his side reached five hundredths of a second.

Bruce Lee Quotes
I’ve included some of my favorite Bruce Lee quotes below.  I’ve organized them using the following categories: Art / Artistry, General, Goals, Growth / Learning, Life, Mistakes, Positive Thinking, Personal Development, Power / Speed / Flexiblity, Self-Awareness, Simplicity, Time, and Truth.

Art / Artistry

• Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.
• Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life. The aim of art is not the one-sided promotion of spirit, soul and senses, but the opening of all human capacities – thought, feeling, will – to the life rhythm of the world of nature. So will the voiceless voice be heard and the self be brought into harmony with it.
• The second-hand artist blindly following his sensei or sifu accepts his pattern. As a result, his action is and , more importantly, his thinking become mechanical. His responses become automatic, according to set patterns, making him narrow and limited.

General

• It’s not what you give, it’s the way you give it.
• Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience. — To realize that it’s just an inconvenience, that it is not a catastrophe, but just an unpleasantness, is part of coming into your own, part of waking up.
• Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.
• Obey the principles without being bound by them.
  Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.
• Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.
• Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.
• “What is” is more important than “what should be.” Too many people are looking at “what is” from a position of thinking “what should be.”

Goals

• A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.
• If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.
  Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.

Growth / Learning

• A quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough.
• As you think, so shall you become.
• A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
• Don’t fear failure.  Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
• Empty your mind; be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
• Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.
• I am not teaching you anything. I just help you to explore yourself.
• If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.
• If you want to learn to swim jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.
• In order to taste my cup of water you must first empty your cup.
• Knowing is not enough, you must apply; willing is not enough, you must do.
• The knowledge and skills you have achieved are meant to be forgotten so you can float comfortably in emptiness, without obstruction.

Life

• Life is better lived than conceptualized. — This writing can be less demanding should I allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role creation. Fortunately for me, my self-knowledge has transcended that and I’ve come to understand that life is best to be lived — not to be conceptualized. If you have to think, you still do not understand.
• Life is never stagnation. It is constant movement, unrhythmic movement, as we as constant change. Things live by moving and gain strength as they go.
• Life is wide, limitless. There is no border, no frontier.
• Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.
• Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.
• Real living is living for others.
• Reality is apparent when one ceases to compare. — There is “what is” only when there is no comparison at all, and to live with what is, is to be peaceful.
• The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

Mistakes

• Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.
• The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.

Positive Thinking

• Choose the positive. You have choice, you are master of your attitude, choose the positive, the constructive. Optimism is a faith that leads to success.
• If you think a thing is impossible, you’ll make it impossible.
• To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.

Personal Development

• Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.
• Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.
• I am learning to understand rather than immediately judge or to be judged. I cannot blindly follow the crowd and accept their approach. I will not allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role creation. Fortunately for me, my self-knowledge has transcended that and I have come to understand that life is best to be lived and not to be conceptualized. I am happy because I am growing daily and I am honestly not knowing where the limit lies. To be certain, every day there can be a revelation or a new discovery. I treasure the memory of the past misfortunes. It has added more to my bank of fortitude.
• I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.
• The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits.
• What you habitually think largely determines what you will ultimately become.

Power / Speed / Flexibility

• A powerful athlete is not a strong athlete, but one who can exert his strength quickly. Since power equals force times speed, if the athlete learns to make faster movements he increases his power, even though the contractile pulling strength of his muscles remains unchanged. Thus, a smaller man who can swing faster may hit as hard or as far as the heavier man who swings slowly.
• Do not be tense, just be ready, not thinking but not dreaming, not being set but being flexible. It is being “wholly” and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.
• Endurance is lost rapidly if one ceases to work at its maximum.
• I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
• Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.
• One should be in harmony with, not in opposition to, the strength and force of the opposition. This means that one should do nothing that is not natural or spontaneous; the important thing is not to strain in any way
• The athlete who is building muscles though weight training should be very sure to work adequately on speed and flexibility at the same time. In combat, without the prior attributes, a strong man will be like the bull with its colossal strength futilely pursuing the matador or like a low-geared truck chasing a rabbit.
• The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.
• When one has reached maturity in the art, one will have a formless form. It is like ice dissolving in water. When one has no form, one can be all forms; when one has no style, he can fit in with any style.

Self-Awareness

• After all, all knowledge simply means self-knowledge.
• Fear comes from uncertainty; we can eliminate the fear within us when we know ourselves better. As the great Sun Tzu said: “When you know yourself and your opponent, you will win every time. When you know yourself but not your opponent, you will win one and lose one. However, when you do not know yourself or your opponent, you will be imperiled every time.”
• Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.
• The biggest adversary in our life is ourselves. We are what we are, in a sense, because of the dominating thoughts we allow to gather in our head. All concepts of self-improvement, all actions and paths we take, relate solely to our abstract image of ourselves. Life is limited only by how we really see ourselves and feel about our being. A great deal of pure self-knowledge and inner understanding allows us to lay an all-important foundation for the structure of our life from which we can perceive and take the right avenues.
• To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
• To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.
• Understanding comes about through feeling, from moment to moment in the mirror of relationship.
• When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same if they are seen from the center of the moving circle. I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist.

Simplicity

• It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.
• Simplicity is the key to brilliance.
• To spend time is to pass it in a specified manner. To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to spend or waste, and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever.
• When there is freedom from mechanical conditioning, there is simplicity. The classical man is just a bundle of routine, ideas and tradition. If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow – you are not understanding yourself.

Time

• Flow in the living moment. — We are always in a process of becoming and nothing is fixed. Have no rigid system in you, and you’ll be flexible to change with the ever changing. Open yourself and flow, my friend. Flow in the total openness of the living moment. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.
• If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
• The moment is freedom. — I couldn’t live by a rigid schedule. I try to live freely from moment to moment, letting things happen and adjusting to them.
• The timeless moment. — The “moment” has no yesterday or tomorrow. It is not the result of thought and therefore has no time.

Truth

• All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
• Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.

Where to Go From Here?
While there are countless resources on the Web, and you can always check out his movies, my favorite book on Bruce Lee, is by Bruce Lee.

It’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do .  Aside from the fact that it’s written by the master himself, I like the fact that Bruce wrote it while he was bedridden for six months.  You can just imagine how Bruce, the warrior, put everything he could into sharing the best of what he knew, while dealing with a pretty traumatic point in his life.  I also like the simple sketches throughout the book which show how he borrowed the best of the best, such as the boxer’s hands or a wrestler’s grappling moves.

My Related Posts

• Lessons Learned from Jack Canfield
• Lessons Learned from Ken Blanchard
• Lessons Learned from Peaceful Warrior
• Lessons Learned from Per
• Lessons Learned from Stephen Covey

spoke at Microsoft earlier this year.  He’s all about empowering people, growing people, and helping everybody get an A.  This post is my notes from the session.

Catch People Doing Something Right, Accentuate the Positive
I’m putting this right up front because Ken said if there was only one thing he could be remembered for, he would want it to be:

“Catch People Doing Something Right, Accentuate the Positive.”

Random Highlights
Here’s a sampling of some of the one-liners and insights from the session:

• The triad is the provider of choice, employer of choice, investment of choice.
• People will compete with you in garages — have the triad.
• Bring your brains to the job vs. kiss up the hierarchy.
• Write the final exam up front.
• Life’s about getting A’s.  Everybody gets A’s.
• The journey of an effective leader starts with self-leadership (who are you)
• None of us is as smart as all of us (the collective brain)
• Don’t ask yes/no questions — ask, what’s one thing we could have done differently to make your experience better?
• Know your rank order values.  Walk your values.  Don’t have too many values.
• Profit is the applause you get for taking care of customers and being a motivating place to work.
• Get customers telling stories about you.
• Who does she work for? a duck or an eagle? Ducks quack excuses.  Eagles soar above the crowd.   Bring your brains to work.
• You got what you got (your team), what are you going to do?
• Help people accomplish goals and have goals tied into the organization.
• Now you have the position, don’t use it (don’t use your position — it’s on loan.)
• All the important stickers went on people (people are the most important asset.)
• Ken’s favorite insight from the movie Ghost – “You can take the love with you.”
• What Ken’s mom taught him — “Don’t act like you’re better than anybody …but don’t let anybody act like they’re better than you.”

Philanthropy is the News Around the World
Ken travels the world and the big news he kept hearing about was the philanthropy.  Specifically, the news was focused on Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.  The fact that Buffet trusts the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help the world sends a powerful message.

4 Keys to Lead at a Higher Level
Ken framed out 4 keys to lead at a higher level:

1. Set your sights on the right target and vision.  Ken reminded us that since Alice didn’t know where she wanted to go, the Chesire cat told her that the direction doesn’t matter.
2. Treat your customers right.  Decide, discover, and deliver.
3. Treat your people right.  If you don’t treat your people right, they won’t take care of your customers (the customers are the only people they can beat up.)
4. Have the right kind of leadership.  Effective leadership starts on the inside.  You don’t own the position, it’s on loan.  Be a servant leader over a self-serving leader.

Decide, Discover and Deliver
To treat your customers right, Ken provided a decide, discover, deliver approach:

• Decide.  Decide what experience you want your customers to have.  For example, one gas station used the “Indianapolis pitstop experience” and had the slogan, “jump to the pump.” 
• Discover.  Listen to what your customers want and see if it makes sense to include their suggestions in your vision.  Don’t ask yes/no questions — ask, what’s one thing we could have done differently to make your experience better?
• Deliver.   To implement your customer service vision, invert the traditional pyramid and empower your people.

Turn the Pyramid Upside Down
Turn the pyramid upside down.  Have your team bring their brains to work vs. kiss up the hierarchy.  Don’t have them be ducks (who just quack excuses why they can’t do this or can’t do that.) Empower them to be eagles who soar above the crowd. 

A Fortunate 500 List According to Ken Blanchard
Ken suggested the idea of a Fortunate 500 list.  A Fortunate 500 Company would have a triple bottom line and be a good citizen in the community.

Customers, Business, Employees (The Triple Bottom Line)
The triple bottom line includes:

1. Provider of choice (customers)
2. Employer of choice (employees)
3. Investment of choice (business)

Ken remarked that profit is the applause you get for taking care of customers and being a motivating place to work.

Organizational Vitality, Employee Passion, Customer Devotion
Ken outlined the keys to organizational vitality:

• Organizational vitality.  Organizational vitality is supported by customer devotion and employee passion (which support each other).  The employees don’t see strategic initiatives in their day to day, so the biggest impact on org vitality is how does their boss threat them and how are they evaluated? (fair/just?)
• Strategic leadership.  Strategic leadership supports org vitality.  Strategic leadership includes vision, culture, and strategic imperatives.
• Organizational leadership.  Organizational leadership supports employee passion and customer devotion.   Organizational leadership includes policies and procedures (indirect relationship on strategy), leader behaviors, and fairness / justice.

From Self-Leadership to Organizational Leadership
The journey of an effective leader starts with self-leadership (who are you) and progresses to organizational leadership:

• Self-leadership (who are you)
• One-to-one leadership
• Team leadership
• Organizational leadership

Ken noted that one of his favorite mantras is — none of us is as smart as all of us.

3 Skills of Situational Leader
Ken identified 3 skills of a situational leader:

1. Diagnosis – figuring our the development level.
2. Flexibility – adapting your leadership style based on the development level.
3. Partnering for performance – helping everybody get A’s. 

The 4 D’s (Development Level)
The four development levels vary by competence and motivation.  If you can identify which development level somebody is in, you can use the right leadership style:

• D1 – Enthusiastic beginner (low competence, high commitment)
• D2 – Disillusioned learner (low competence, low commitment)
• D3 – The capable, but cautious performer (low to some competence, variable commitment)
• D4 - The self-reliant achiever (high competence, high commitment)

4 Leadership Styles
The four leadership styles range from directing to delegating:

• S1 – Directive
• S2 – Coaching
• S3 – Supportive
• S4 – Delegating

Your leadership style varies by how you need to teach skills and provide motivation.   You match your leadership style based on the development level.

More Supporting, Less Delegating
Ken noted that the most common style in tech is delegating (telling folks what to do), but that it only works if you have self-reliant achievers.  He said lots of situations where somebody fails, it’s because the leader didn’t spend enough time supporting.  For example, somebody might be great at sales, but poor at administration and could use more support.

Don’t Be a Seagul
Ken described the seagul type manager:

1. Flies in
2. Makes a lot of noise
3. Dumps on everyone
4. Flies out

Yuck!  Don’t be a seagul.

How to Manage Effectively
Ken gave us a recipe for managing effectively:

1. Teach situational leadership II
2. Agree on goals
3. Agree on level of performance
4. Diagnose development level
5. Agree on appropriate leadership style
6. Follow up on agreements

Leadership vs. Management
When a colleague asked Ken about his thoughts on the difference between leadership and management, he said he doesn’t get involved in the debate.  He doesn’t think management should play 2nd fiddle.

Don’t Rank Employees on a Bell Curve
Ken made a few key points against ranking employees on a bell curve:

• Why screw a certain percentage?
• You don’t hire losers to fill slots.
• Putting your new people at the bottom doesn’t encourage them.

Help Everybody Get A’s
Ken’s recipe for results is:

• Give out the final exam up front
• Teach people answers to get the A’s
• Demonstrate how you’ve helped them get A’s each quarter
• Have an informal formal review each quarter
• A review at the end of the year should be a review — not a surprise.

Share Them With Your Competition
What happens if you give help people get A’s but they don’t get A’s:

• If they’re a good citizen, then help them find the right position.
• If they’re not a good citizen, then share them with your competition.

From self-serving leaders to Servant Leadership
Ken gave us three ways that somebody moves from a self-serving leader to servant-leadership:

1. Near death experience
2. Spiritual awakening
3. Be a role model

Basically it’s life-changing events or by following an example.

Egos Anonymous
There’s two ends of the spectrum with ego issues:

1. False pride
2. Self-doubt / fear

The problem with ego issues is that the world spins around you.  Ken said the key is to put the focus somewhere else.  When you put the focus on something else, the fear goes away.

Ken told us about “Egos Anonymous” meetings.   He said at the meetings, people introduce themselves with “I’m an ego maniac, the last time my ego got in the way …” 

The irony is, everybody wants to go last to be more clever, funnier — and that’s an ego thing.

Bigger Emphasis on Results or Developing People?
Ken pointed out that it’s not an either/or it’s a both/and.  The keys are:

1. Fixing motivation.
2. Fixing capability.

The Secret of Great Leaders
Ken told us the secret of great leaders:

• Values, results and people
• Emphasis on results
• Significant investment in their lives
• Express appreciation

You’re Learning or Dying
Ken told us we’re learning or dying:

• Reinvent continuously.
• How will your resume be different next year?
• Are you learning from mentors?

SERVE – What Great Leaders Know and Do
Ken explained that SERVE is what great leaders know and do:

• See the future.
• Engage and develop others
• Reinvent continuously.
• Value results and relationship.
• Embody the values.

Leadership is Love
Ken told us leadership is love:

• Loving your mission
• Loving your customers
• Loving your people
• Loving yourself — enough to get out of the way so others can be magnificent.

How To Implement the program
Ken said he’s seen remarkable impact when organizations apply the knowledge.  He said there’s three keys:

1. Performance management program (3,4,5x the difference)
2. Situational leadership
3. Final exam.

Wrap Up
At the end of the talk, I met Ken and he signed my copy of The 3 Keys to Empowerment.   What surprised me the most was how down to earth and engaged in the moment he was.   I thanked him for teaching people situational leadership.  I asked him where the II part came from in Situational Leadership II and he told me the story of the split.   I told him it would be great to be able to read stories like that in his blog, if he had one. 

3 Actions
As a habit, I challenge myself to turn what I learn into three things I can apply.  There’s always more I can do, but I start with three.  Here they are:

1. Help everybody get A’s.  I’ll start by diagnose the development levels on my team.  Does somebody on the team need more encouragement or more instruction than they’re getting right now?
2. Figure out how my resume will be different next year.  I used to do this exercise regularly, but it’s been a while.  Flashing forward is a great way to help me choose certain paths over others.
3. Decide, discover, and deliver the right customer experience.  Very practically put, stop asking yes, no questions and start asking, what’s one thing we could have done differently to make your experience better?

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