“Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.” — General George Patton

Leadership is not limited to role or position.  Leadership is a set of skills that anyone can benefit from.  We lead ourselves first, and that’s how we lead others.

I finished sweeping my Leadership Books list.  It took a while to update it, but I think it reflects a good set of leadership books by key categories now.  I added a few new books to my leadership books list including The 5 Levels of Leadership, by John Maxwell, and StandOut, by Marcus Buckingham, which weren’t available when I first put my list of leadership books together.I also added some books to the list based on feedback from different folks.  For example, I added 177 Mental Toughness Secrets of the World Class, by Steve Siebold, Executive Presence: The Art of Commanding Respect Like a CEO, by Harrison Monarth, and The Leadership Test, by Timothy Clark.

I also added 180 Climbing the Two Ladders to Inner Strength & Outer Freedom, by Rob White to the list of leadership books because I think it’s a great book on leadership from the inside out, and I’m a big believer that all leadership starts with self-leadership.

If you’re looking to give the gift of wisdom this holiday, then explore and enjoy the list of leadership books.   There is something for everyone among the art and science of leadership.

My Related Posts

• Leadership Checklist
• Leadership Quotes

This is my collection of leadership quotes drawing from John Maxwell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sun Tzu, and more.   It’s wisdom of the ages and modern sages, all focused on the topic of leadership.  Use these quotes to add to your own repertoire of leadership knowledge.

When you think of your favorite leaders, what words come to mind?   Some of the words I think of are courage, compassion, connection, and conviction.  I also think of heart, hope, encouragement, inspiration, and optimism.  I also think of accountability, self-awareness, learning and growth.  These are the words I used to organize my leadership quotes.

There are many lessons we can learn on the art of leadership, but some of the most important I think are start with heart, lead by example, lead yourself first, focus on the greater good, know when to follow, don’t ask people to do what you wouldn’t do yourself, and balance connection with conviction.

For me, to put it simply, I think effective leaders bring out the best in people.

Read on to explore leadership in depth from a variety of people and perspectives.

Top 10 Leadership Quotes

1. “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” –  John C. Maxwell
2. “A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn’t like the tune.” – Anonymous
3. “All Leadership is influence.” — John C. Maxwell
4. “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
5. “Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.” — General George Patton
6. “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” — Warren Bennis
7. “Managers help people see themselves as they are; Leaders help people to see themselves better than they are.” — Jim Rohn
8. “The art of leadership is saying no, not yes.  It is very easy to say yes.” — Tony Blair
9. “The price of greatness is responsibility.” — Winston Churchill
10. “When the effective leader is finished with his work, the people say it happened naturally.” — Lao Tzu

A Leader Is …

• “A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.” — John C. Maxwell
• “A leader is not an administrator who loves to run others, but someone who carries water for his people so that they can get on with their jobs.” — Robert Townsend
• “A leader’s role is to raise people’s aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there.” — David R. Gergen
• “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” — Lao Tzu
• “A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others see.” — Leroy Eimes

Boldness and Courage

• “A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” — William Shedo
• “Boldness, more boldness, and always boldness!” — George Jacques Danton
• “Courage is the enforcing virtue, the one that makes possible all the other virtues common
  to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, confidence, compassion and humility.” — John McCain
• “Leaders make decisions that create the future they desire.” — Mike Murdock
• “Rely on your own strength of body and soul. Take for your star self-reliance, faith, honesty and industry. Don’t take too much advice — keep at the helm and steer your own ship, and remember that the great art of commanding is to take a fair share of the work. Fire above the mark you intend to hit. Energy, invincible determination with the right motive, are the levers that move the world.” — Noah Porter
• “The only safe ship in a storm is leadership.” — Faye Wattleton

Challenges and Difficulty

• “Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.” — Publilius Syrus
• “Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Confront issues and challenges – not each Other.” — Suzanne Mayo Frindt
• “Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.” — Winston Churchill
• “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing.  The worst thing you can do is nothing.” — Theodore Roosevelt
• “Leaders aren’t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.” — Vince Lombardi
• “Leaders do not avoid, repress, or deny conflict, but rather see it as an opportunity.” — Warren Bennis
• “Misfortunes, untoward events, lay open, disclose the skill of a general, while success conceals his weakness, his weak points.” – Horace
• “One of the true tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.” — Arnold H. Glasgow
• “People who let events and circumstances dictate their lives are living reactively. That means that they don’t act on life, they only react to it.” — Stedman Graham
• “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which have been overcome while trying to succeed.” — Booker T. Washington
• “The hallmark of a well-managed organization is not the absence of problems, but whether or not problems are effectively resolved.” — Steve Ventura
• “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
• “To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
  Character
• “Character creates consistency, and if your people know what they can expect from you, they will continue to look to you for leadership.” — John Maxwell
• “Character makes trust possible, and trust is the foundation of leadership.” — John Maxwell
• “I am personally convinced that one person can be a change catalyst, a “transformer” in any situation, any organization. Such an individual is yeast that can leaven an entire loaf. It requires vision, initiative, patience, respect, persistence, courage, and faith to be a transforming leader.” — Stephen R. Covey
• “I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.” — Lao-Tzu
• “If you have no character to lose, people will have no faith in you.” — Mahatma Gandhi
• “It’s true that charisma can make a person stand out for a moment, but character sets a person apart for a lifetime.” — John Maxwell
• “Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint.” — Lewis H. Lapham
• “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.” — Norman Schwarzkopf
• “Over time, is it easier or harder to sustain your influence within your organization?  With charisma alone, influence becomes increasingly more difficult to sustain. With character, as time passes, influence builds and requires less work to sustain.” — John Maxwell
• “The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.” — Jim Rohn
• “The greater a man is in power above others, the more he ought to excel them in virtue. None ought to govern who is not better than the governed.” — Publius Syrus
• “The real leader has no need to lead — he is content to point the way.” — Henry Miller
• “The three C’s of leadership are Consideration,Caring,and Courtesy.Be polite to everyone.” — Brian Tracy

Communication

• “Diligent follow-up and follow-through will set you apart from the crowd and communicate excellence.” – John Maxwell
• “Earn the right to be heard by listening to others. Seek to understand a situation before making judgments about it.” – John Maxwell
• “Great communication depends on two simple skills—context, which attunes a leader to the same frequency as his or her audience, and delivery, which allows a leader to phrase messages in a language the audience can understand.” – John Maxwell
• “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.” — General Colin Powel
• “Leadership is about magnetic communication. Leaders have a way of communicating that draws people toward the vision and the horizon.” — Doug Firebaugh
• “Persuasive communication involves enthusiasm, animation, audience participation, authenticity and spontaneity.” — John Maxwell
• “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” — Theodore Roosevelt
• “Take the emotional temperature of those listening to you. Facial expressions, voice inflection and posture give clues to a person’s mood and attitude.” – John Maxwell
• “The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and will to carry on.” — Walter J. Lippmann

Connection

• “A big man is one who makes us feel bigger when we are with him.” — John C. Maxwell
• “A good leader can’t get too far ahead of his followers.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
• “A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position.” –  John Maxwell
• “As a leader you should always start with where people are before you try to take them to where you want them to go.” — Jim Rohn
• “I light my candle from their torches.” — Robert Burton
• “I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.” — Indira Gandhi
• “High sentiments always win in the end, The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.” — George Orwell
• “Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.” – John Maxwell
• “The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.” — Colin Powell
• “The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.” — Woodrow Wilson
• “To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them.” — Charles de Montesquieu
• “To lead people, walk beside them.  As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate.  When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves.’” — Lao-Tsu

Conviction

• “A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.” — Ralph Nader
• “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go but ought to be.” — Rosalynn Carter
• “A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.” — Max Lucado
• “Consensus is the negation of leadership.” — Margaret Thatcher
• “Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to cut all sources of retreat. Only by doing so can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win which is one of the essentials to success.” — Napoleon Hill
• “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.” — Herbert B. Swope
• “If I have the belief that I can do it, I will surely acquire the capacity to do it, even if I may not have it at the beginning.” — Mahatma Gandhi
• “In this world a man must either be an anvil or hammer.” — Henry W. Longfellow
• “Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise.” — Woodrow Wilson
• “Let him who would be moved to convince others, be first moved to convince himself.” — Thomas Carlyle
• “My leadership began to take flight when I allowed myself to press people to change—whether they thanked me or cursed me.” – John Maxwell
• “Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.” — Samuel Johnson
• “With the power of conviction, there is no sacrifice.” — Jim Rohn
• “We will either find a way or make one.” – Hannibal

Credibility

• “A highly credible leader under-promises and over-delivers.” – John Maxwell
• “Credibility is a leader’s currency. With it, he or she is solvent; without it, he or she is bankrupt.” – John Maxell
• “Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon them and to let them know that you trust them.” — Booker T. Washington
• “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.” — John Maxwell

Encouragement and Empowerment

• “A boss creates fear, a leader confidence. A boss fixes blame, a leader corrects mistakes. A boss knows all, a leader asks questions. A boss makes work drudgery, a leader makes it interesting. A boss is interested in himself or herself, a leader is interested in the group.” — Russell H. Ewing
• “As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.” — Marianne Williamson
• “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” — Bill Gates
• “Coaching isn’t an addition to a leader’s job, it’s an integral part of it.” — George S. Odiorne
• “I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.” — Charles M. Schwab
• “If you are going to help people reach their potential, they need to be recognised and rewarded. Everyone needs that.” — Jacqueline Norcel
• “If you wish a general to be beaten, send him a ream full of instructions; if you wish him to succeed, give him a destination, and bid him conquer.” — Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
• “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” — George Patton
• “No general can fight his battles alone. He must depend upon his lieutenants, and his success depends upon his ability to select the right man for the right place.” — Philip Armour
• “Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise.   They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.” — Sam Walton
• “People change when they hurt enough that they have to, learn enough that they want to, or receive enough that they are able to.” – John Maxwell
• “Talented performers flock to the best and brightest leaders, and these leaders in turn lift the lids off their people and uncork the latent talent inside of them.” – John Maxwell
• “The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” — Theodore Roosevelt
• “The people who are lifting the world onward and upward are those who encourage more than they criticize.” — Elizabeth Harrison
• “The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.” — John Buchan
• “The way to develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement.” — Charles Schwab
• “There is no more noble occupation in the world than to assist another human being to help someone succeed.” — Alan Loy McGinnis
• “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• “Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Example and Leading by Example

• “A leader leads by example not by force.” — Sun Tzu
• “Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily;even if you had no title or position.” — Brian Tracy
• “Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing.” — Albert Schweitzer
• “I think leadership comes from integrity – that you do whatever you ask others to do. I think there are non-obvious ways to lead. Just by providing a good example as a parent, a friend, a neighbor makes it possible for other people to see better ways to do things. Leadership does not need to be a dramatic, fist in the air and trumpets blaring, activity.” — Scott Berkun
• “Not the cry, but the flight of a wild duck, leads the flock to fly and follow.” – Proverb
• “Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself.” — Thomas J. Watson
• “The older I get the less I listen to what people say and the more I look at what they do.” — Andrew Carnegie
• “True leaders always practice the three R’s: Respect for self, Respect for others, Responsibility for all their actions.” — Anonymous

Fear and Failure

• “Don’t buy into the notion that mistakes can somehow be avoided. They can’t be.” – John Maxwell
• “’Failing forward’ is the ability to get back up after you’ve been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction.” – John Maxwell
• “Failure is not a one-time event; it’s how you deal with life along the way. Until you breathe your last breath, you’re still in the process, and there is still time to turn things around for the better.” – John Maxwell
• “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” — Babe Ruth
• “Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them. “ — Robert Jarvik
• “Seek advice, but make sure it’s from someone who has successfully handled mistakes or adversities.” – John Maxwell
• “The leader has a clear idea of what he wants to do professionally and personally, and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures.” — Warren G. Bennis
• “You are the only person who can label what you do a failure. Failure is subjective.” – John Maxwell

Following

• “A man is only a leader when a follower stands beside him.” — Mark Brouwer
• “Every leader needs to look back once in a while to make sure he has followers.” – Anonymous
• “He that cannot obey, cannot command.” — Benjamin Franklin
• “He who has learned how to obey will know how to command.” – Solon
• “He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.” – Aristotle
• “If you want to lead, first learn how to follow.” — Rick Beneteau
• “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” — Steve Jobs
• “Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.” — Tom Peters
• “Look over your shoulder now and then to be sure someone’s following you.” — Henry Gilmer
• “One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you.” — Dennis A. Peer
• “Take care, don’t fight, and remember: if you do not choose to lead, you will forever be led by others. Find what scares you, and do it. And you can make a difference, if you choose to do so.” — J. Michael Straczynski
• “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” — Ralph Nader
• “The height of ability in the least able consists in knowing how to submit to the good leadership of others.” — François de la Rochefoucauld
• “The leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leaders and followers … Leaders, followers and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership.” — Gary Wills
• “The led must not be compelled, they must be able to choose their own leader.” — Albert Einstein
• “Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.” — Oscar Wilde
• “To lead the people, walk behind them.” — Lao-Tzu
• “You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow, too.” — Sam Rayburn

Heart

• “A ruler should be slow to punish and swift to reward.” – Ovid
• “Great leadership usually starts with a willing heart, a positive attitude, and a desire to make a difference.” — Mac Anderson
• “He is greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.” — Henry Ward Beecher
• “It is impossible to imagine anything which better becomes a ruler than mercy.” – Seneca
• “People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” — John C. Maxwell
• “People don’t mind being challenged to do better if they know the request is coming from a caring heart.” — Ken Blanchard
• “The ability to summon positive emotions during periods of intense stress lies at the heart of effective leadership.” — Jim Loehr
• “The power is detested, and miserable the life, of him who wishes to be feared rather than to be loved.” — Cornelius Nepos
• “They may forget what you said, they may forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” — Carl W. Buecher

Influence

• “He who has great power should use it lightly.” – Seneca
• “I strongly believe that the responsibility of leadership is to shape the debate—to practice and project the right attributes—whether in a business enterprise, in our society, and even in our religions.” — Farooq Kathwari
• “Ill can he rule the great that cannot reach the small.” — Edmund Spenser
• “In the past a leader was a boss. Today’s leaders must be partners with their people … they no longer can lead solely based on positional power.” — Ken Blanchard
• “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.” — Abraham Lincoln
• “The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” — Kenneth Blanchard
• “There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple, and useful life.” — Booker T. Washington
• “What makes leadership is the ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do and like it.” — Harry Truman
• “What you cannot enforce, do not command.” – Sophocles
• “You don’t lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.” — Ken Kesey

Inspiration and Hope

• “A leader is a dealer in hope.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
• “A person, who no matter how desperate the situation, gives others hope, is a true leader.” — Daisaku Ikeda
• “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” — John Quincy Adams
• “Good leaders make people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization.   When that happens, people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.” — Warren Bennis
• “Lead and inspire people. Don’t try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people must be lead.” — Ross Perot
• “Nobody rises to low expectations.” — Calvin Lloyd
• “One cannot consent to creep when one feels the impulse to soar.” — Helen Keller
• “Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or to be the mirror that reflects it.” — Edith Wharton
• “We should seize every opportunity to give encouragement. Encouragement is oxygen to the soul. The days are always dark enough. There is no need for us to emphasize the fact by spreading further gloom.” — George M. Adams
• “Where there is no hope in the future, there is no power in the present.” — John Maxwell

Leadership Is …

• “Leadership is action, not position.” — Donald H. McGannon
• “Leadership is based on a spiritual quality; the power to inspire, the power to inspire others to follow.” — Vince Lombardi
• “Leadership is getting people to help you when they are not obligated to do so.” — John C. Maxwell
• “Leadership is getting someone to do what they don’t want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve.” — Tom Landry
• “Leadership is influence.” — John C. Maxwell
• “Leadership is much more an art, a belief, a condition of the heart, than a set of things to do. The visible signs of artful leadership are expressed, ultimately, in its practice.” — Max Depree
• “Leadership is no longer about your position. It’s now more about your passion for excellence and making a difference.  You can lead without a title.” — Robin Sharma
• “Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration — of oneself and of others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes. Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine.” — Lance Secretan
• “Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.” — Harold S. Geneen
• “Leadership is the ability to establish standards and manage a creative climate where people are self-motivated toward the mastery of long term constructive goals, in a participatory environment of mutual respect, compatible with personal values.” — Mike Vance
• “Leadership is the ability to get extraordinary achievement from ordinary people.” — Brian Tracy
• “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” — Warren G. Bennis
• “Leadership is the challenge to be something more than average.” — Jim Rohn

Learning and Growth

• “Confront your inadequacies and push your personal boundaries: It’s the surest way to grow, improve and expand the scope of your influence.” – John Maxwell
• “Education is the mother of leadership.” — Wendell Lewis Wilkie
• “Every relationship in your organization will affect you one way or another.  Those who do not increase you will inevitably decrease you. “ – John Maxwell
• “It all comes down to this: If you want one year of happiness, grow grain, if you want 10 years of happiness, grow trees, if you want 100 years of happiness, grow people.” — Harvey Mackay
• “In order to be happy, human beings must feel they are continuing to grow. Clearly, we must adopt the concept of continuous improvement as a daily principle.” — Tony Robbins
• “Leaders don’t rise to the pinnacle of success without developing the right set of attitudes and habits; they make every day a masterpiece.” – John Maxwell
• “Leaders never outgrow the need to change.” — John Maxwell
• “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” — John F. Kennedy
• “Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned.” — Harold Geneen
• “The better you are at surrounding yourself with people of high potential, the greater your chance for success.” – John Maxwell
• “The leadership instinct you are born with is the backbone.  You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it.” — Elaine Agather
• “The more seriously you take your growth, the more seriously your people will take you.” — John Maxwell
• “The most important part of being a leader is maintaining the desire to keep on learning. That means learning about yourself, about your peers, and about the people you serve.” — Brian Koval
• “The most valuable “currency” of any organization is the initiative and creativity of its members. Every leader has the solemn moral responsibility to develop these to the maximum in all his people. This is the leader’s highest priority.” — W. Edwards Deming

Self-Leadership

• “It’s amazing how many cares disappear when you decide not to be something, but to be someone. “ — Coco Chanel
• “Personal leadership is not a singular experience. It is, rather, the ongoing process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with those most important things.” — Stephen Covey
• “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.” — Robert M. Pirsig
• “To be able to lead others, a man must be willing to go forward alone.” — Harry Truman
• “Whatever you are, be a good one.” — Abraham Lincoln

Servant Leadership

• “A person who is worthy of being a leader wants power not for himself, but in order to be of service.” — J. Ervin, Jr.
• “Earn your success based on service to others, not at the expense of others.” — H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
• “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” — Martin Luther King Jr
• “Men are governed only by serving them; the rule is without exception.” — V. Cousin
• “Servant-leadership is more than a concept, it is a fact. Any great leader, by which I also mean an ethical leader of any group, will see herself or himself as a servant of that group and will act accordingly.” — M. Scott Peck
• “The adventure of life is to learn. The purpose of life is to grow. The nature of life is to change. The challenge of life is to overcome. The essence of life is to care. The opportunity of like is to serve. The secret of life is to dare. The spice of life is to befriend. The beauty of life is to give.” — William Arthur Ward
• “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” — Max DePree
• “True leadership must be for the benefit of the followers, not to enrich the leader.” — John C. Maxwell

Teamwork

• “Coming together is a beginning, and staying together is progress, but only when teams sweat together do they find success.” – John Maxwell
• “It is the very essence of good leadership to give away all credit for positive achievement, to identify only team goals and always to refer to them as such.” — Joe Klock
• “Remember the difference between a boss and a leader; a boss says ‘Go!’ … a leader says ‘Let’s go!’  — E.M. Kelly
• “Teams make you better than you are, multiply your value, enable you to do what you do best, allow you to help others do their best, give you more time, provide you with companionship, help you fulfill the desires of your heart and compound your vision and effort.” – John Maxwell
• “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I’. And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I’. They don’t think ‘I’. They think ‘we’; they think ‘team’. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but ‘we’ gets the credit…. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.” — Peter Drucker
• “The goal of an effective leader is to recondition your team to be solution focused rather than problem focused.” — Jim Rohn
• “Values hold the team together, provide stability for the team to grow upon, measure the team’s performance, give direction and guidance and attract like-minded people.” – John Maxwell

Vision

• “A leader’s job is to look into the future and see the organization, not as it is, but as it should be.” — Jack Welch
• “All who have accomplished great things have had a great aim, have fixed their gaze on a goal which was high, one which sometimes seemed impossible.” — Orison Swett Marden
• “Big thinkers are specialists in creating positive, forward-looking, optimistic pictures in their own minds and in the minds of others.” — David J. Schwartz
• “Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.” – Goethe
• “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” — John Welch
• “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants.” — Isaac Newton
• “Leaders need to be optimists.  Their vision is beyond the present.” — Rudy Giuliani
• “Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.” — Stephen R. Covey
• “The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.” — Eric Hoffer
• “The most elusive and desired quality of leadership is vision. Vision is the perfume of the mind.” — Harriet Rubin
• “The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.” — Theodore M. Hesburgh
• “Transmit your vision emotionally by gaining credibility, demonstrating passion, establishing relationships and communicating a felt need. Transmit it logically by confronting reality, formulating strategy, accepting responsibility, celebrating victory and learning from defeat.“ – John Maxwell

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This is my collection of Seth Godin quotes.  They’ll make you think and ponder as you wonder around from one idea to the next.

Seth’s sweet spot is marketing but his quotes easily span business, change, greatness, innovation, leadership, mediocrity, and strategy.  Seth’s quotes teach us that the individual is a powerful force, that multiplies when we dare to be different, take action, test our ideas, stay true to our authentic self, tell inspiring stories, make things meaningful, and lead tribes of like minds and shared values.

Perhaps the most important lesson we learn from Seth Godin is this:  Think and do great things.  And do the tough stuff, because it’s worth it.

Enjoy.

Top 10 Seth Godin Quotes

Here are my top 10 favorite quotes by Seth Godin:

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

Business

• “As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring.”
• “Choose your customers, choose your future.”
• “Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.”
• “Developing expertise or assets that are not easily copied is essential; otherwise you’re just a middleman. “
• “Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new. “
• “Everyone is not your customer. “
• “Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a deal breaker.”
• “Give up control and give it away … The more you give your idea away, the more your company is going to be worth. “
• “If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. “
• “In a world of free, everyone can play.”
• “It’s better to make a decision, even the wrong one, than to be in limbo.”
• “Lack of resources (payroll), time and competing priorities are why so many nonprofits haven’t done well. It’s that simple.”
• “Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.”
• “Once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow.”
• “One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. “
• “Playing safe is very risky. “
• “The application process changes the list of who applies. Your applicants reflect your methods.”
• “The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset.”
• “The market and the consumer and idea trump the system.”
• “Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.”

Change

• “Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.”
• “Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.”
• “If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.”
• “Knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.”
• “Little changes cost you. Big changes benefit you by changing the game, but only if you go first.”
• “No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn’t okay now. Change, by definition, changes things”
• “Sometimes we spend more time than we should defending the old thing, instead of working to take advantage of the new thing.”

Choice

• “If religion comprises rules you follow, faith is demonstrated by the actions you take.”
• “If there’s time for an emergency, why isn’t there time for brilliance, generosity or learning? “
• “If you could do tomorrow over again, would you? “
• “If you’re not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else. “
• “Just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.”
• “Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities. “
• “We notice what we choose to notice.”
• “Who gets to decide what you want?”

Greatness

• “Art is what we’re doing when we do our best work.”
• “Be personal. Be relevant. Be specific.”
• “Becoming a superstar takes about 10,000 hours of hard work.”
• “Doing justice to the work is your task, not setting a world record. “
• “Go ahead, do something impossible.”
• “If there isn’t a good reason, go home. If there is, then do something … loud, now, and memorable.”
• “Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.”
• “Tribes makes our lives better, and leading a tribe is the best life of all. “
• “When kids grow up wanting to be you, you matter.”
• “When the legacy you leave behind lasts for hours, days or a lifetime, you matter.”
• “When the room brightens when you walk in, you matter.”
• “When you see the world as it is, but insist on making it more like it could be, you matter.”
• “You are not your resume, you are your work. “
• “You can’t shrink your way to greatness! “

Ideas

• “Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person. “
• “Big ideas are little ideas that no-one killed too soon. “
• “Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death. “
• “No organization ever created an innovation. People innovate, not companies.”
• “There’s no correlation between how good your idea is and how likely your organization will be to embrace it. “
• “You can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.”

Leadership / Management

• “Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person. “
• “If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader. “
• “Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.”
• “Leadership on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.”
• “’Teamwork’ is the word that bosses use when they actually mean ‘Do what I say’”
• “The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate. – When people ask you to tell them what to do, resist.”

Marketing

• “Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.”
• “Bullhorns are overrated: having ten times as many Twitter followers generates approximately zero times as much value. “
• “But this is a remarkable egg, an egg worth talking about, an egg worth crossing the street for, an egg worth writing about. “
• “Good marketers measure. “
• “Good marketers tell stories. “
• “If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. “
• “If you can’t sell to 1 in 1000, why market to a million? “
• “If you’re a marketer who doesn’t know how to invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products, then you’re no longer a marketer. You’re deadwood.“
• “Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing though, that’s efficiency.”
• “Market-driven design builds the success of the product’s marketing into the product itself.”
• “Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your return policy.”
• “Marketing management is now tribal leadership. “
• “Most of the time, creative entrepreneurs lose interest long before their marketing message loses its power. “
• “People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. “
• “People rarely buy what they need. They buy what they want.”
• “Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts. “
• “Relying too much on proof distracts you from the real mission–which is emotional connection.”
• “Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t. “
• “The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does. “
• “The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about. “
• “Why waste a sentence saying nothing? “
• “You can win with consistent benefits, delivered over time. You win by incrementally earning share, attention and trust.”

Mediocrity / Status Quo

• “’Good enough’ stopped being good enough a long time ago. so why not be great? “
• “If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.”
• “It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.”
• “It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.”
• “In our desire to please everyone, it’s very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre.”
• “Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it’s a lot easier to launch work that matters.”
• “Successful people are the ones who are breaking the rules. “
• “The reason they want you to fit in… is that once you do, then they can ignore you.
• “The status quo is leaving the building, and quickly.”
• “You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it’s getting raised regardless. “
• “You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make every day.”

Passion

• “If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do work that matters, this is it.”
• “If you have no wish, how can it possibly come true? “

Relationships

• “A long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.”
• “Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.) Ignore everyone else.”
• “You can be right or you can have empathy. You can’t do both.”

Strategy

• “Don’t have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve. “
• “Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend.“
• “The scalable, profitable strategy is to change the game, not to become the most average.”

Seth Godin Books
Here is a roundup of Seth Godin books you migh enjoy:

• All Marketers Tell Stories
• Free Prize Inside
• Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
• Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?
• Permission Marketing
• Poke the Box
• Purple Cow
• Small Is the New Big
• Survival Is Not Enough: Why Smart Companies Abandon Worry and Embrace Change
• The Big Red Fez: How To Make Any Web Site Better
• The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable
• The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
• Unleashing the Ideavirus
• We are All Weird

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This is a collection of John Maxwell quotes you can use to inspire yourself and others.

As you’ll see in his quotes, John Maxwell flows inspiration and wisdom in a relevant way.  While many of John Maxwell’s quotes are focused on teams and leaders, he also tackles interesting topics like character, choice, and every day success,.  There is truly something for everyone.

Enjoy.

Top 10 Quotes

Here are my top 10 favorite John Maxwell quotes:

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. “You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger.”
10. “You must manage your thought life daily and then you can manage your life.”

Character

• “Character creates consistency, and if your people know what they can expect from you, they will continue to look to you for leadership.”
• “Character makes trust possible, and trust is the foundation of leadership.
  It’s true that charisma can make a person stand out for a moment, but character sets a person apart for a lifetime.”
• “Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent.”
• “Over time, is it easier or harder to sustain your influence within your organization?  With charisma alone, influence becomes increasingly more difficult to sustain. With character, as time passes, influence builds and requires less work to sustain.”
• “There are three qualities a leader must exemplify to build trust: competence, connection, and character.”
• “You build trust with others each time you choose integrity over image, truth over convenience, or honor over personal gain.”

Choice and Decisions

• “Everything begins with a decision. Then, we have to manage that decision for the rest of your life.”
• “If you don’t change the direction you are going, then you’re likely to end up where you’re heading… “
• “The law of the [Cub Scout] pack guides the boys to move in the direction of being helpful, friendly, courteous, trustworthy and promote qualities which parents and the community are looking for. The whole purpose of scouting is to help the children grow up making good decisions in life.”
• “There are two paths people can take. They can either play now and pay later, or pay now and play later. Regardless of the choice, one thing is certain. Life will demand a payment.”
• “We choose what attitudes we have right now. And it’s a continuing choice.”
• “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”

Communication

• “A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.”
• “Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.”
• “Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.”
• “People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.”
• “Relational skills are the most important abilities in leadership.”
• “Remember, man does not live on bread alone: sometimes he needs a little buttering up.”
• “Talk to people, not above them.”

Credibility

• “A highly credible leader under-promises and over-delivers.”
• “Diligent follow-up and follow-through will set you apart from the crowd and communicate excellence.”
• “Credibility is a leader’s currency. With it, he or she is solvent; without it, he or she is bankrupt.”
• “Don’t hide bad news. With multiple information channels available, bad news always becomes known. Be candid right from the start.”

Daily Impact

• “As you begin changing your thinking, start immediately to change your behavior. Begin to act the part of the person you would like to become. Take action on your behavior. Too many people want to feel, then take action. This never works.”
• “Doing the right thing daily, compounds over time.”
• “Doing the wrong thing daily, compounds over time.”
• “It is truly one day at a time.”
• “Stay focused instead of getting offended or off track by others.”
• “Success is not a destination thing, it’s a daily thing.”
• “The law of process says — leaders develop daily, not in a day.”
• “The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”
• “Today matters.”
• “What is the main event today? What do you want me to focus on today?”
• “What you are going to be tomorrow, you are becoming today.”
• “Where there is no hope in the future, there is no power in the present.”

Failure

• “Don’t buy into the notion that mistakes can somehow be avoided. They can’t be.”
• “‘Failing forward’ is the ability to get back up after you’ve been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction.”
• “Failure is not a one-time event; it’s how you deal with life along the way. Until you breathe your last breath, you’re still in the process, and there is still time to turn things around for the better.”
• “Generally speaking, there are two kinds of learning: experience, which is gained from your own mistakes, and wisdom, which is learned from the mistakes of others.”
• “Seek advice, but make sure it’s from someone who has successfully handled mistakes or adversities.”
• “You are the only person who can label what you do a failure. Failure is subjective.”

Growth

• “A difficult time can be more readily endured if we retain the conviction that our existence holds a purpose, a cause to pursue, a person to love, a goal to achieve.”
• “A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.”
• “If we’re growing, we’re always going to be out of our comfort zone.”
• “Image is what people think we are; integrity is what we really are.”
• “The depth of your mythology is the extent of your effectiveness.”
• “Life doesn’t do anything to you. It only reveals your spirit.”
• “The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.”
• “The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one.”
• “You must do right before you feel good.”

Leaders and Leadership

• “A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position.”
• “A leader is great, not because of his or her power, but because of his or her ability to empower others.”
• “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”
• “A leader who produces other leaders multiples their influences.”
• “Believing in people before they have proved themselves is the key to motivating people to reach their potential.”
• “Encourage the many; mentor the few.”
• “Everyone is a leader because everyone influences someone.”
• “Leadership is developed daily, not in a day.”
• “Leadership is influence.”
• “Leaders must live by higher standards than their followers.”
• “Most People have a desire to look for the exception instead of the desire to become exceptional. “
• “Not everyone will become a great leader, but everyone can become a better leader.”
• “One is too small a number to achieve greatness.”
• “The first step to leadership is servant hood.”
• “The law of process says leaders develop daily, not in a day.”
• “The more credible you are, the more confidence people place in you, thereby allowing you the privilege of influencing their lives.”
• “We cannot lead anyone farther than we have been ourselves.”
• “What is the main event today? What do you want me to focus on today?”
• “You can’t become a leader in one conference.”

Success

• “Happiness simply cannot be relied upon as a measure of success.”
• “If you start today to do the right thing, you are already a success even if it doesn’t show yet.”
• “Once our minds are ‘tattooed’ with negative thinking, our chances for long-term success diminish.”
• “Successful leaders have the courage to take action while others hesitate.”
• “Successful people are willing to do things unsuccessful people will not do.”
• “To collaborative team members, completing one another is more important than competing with one another.”
• “True success comes only when every generation continues to develop the next generation.”
• “We all stand on the shoulders of the past generation”
• “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.”
• “You have to sow excellent seeds to have an excellent life. You must start with sowing excellent thoughts.”

Teamwork

• “Coming together is a beginning, and staying together is progress, but only when teams sweat together do they find success.”
• “Talented performers flock to the best and brightest leaders, and these leaders in turn lift the lids off their people and uncork the latent talent inside of them.”
• “Teams make you better than you are, multiply your value, enable you to do what you do best, allow you to help others do their best, give you more time, provide you with companionship, help you fulfill the desires of your heart and compound your vision and effort.”
• “The best way to serve the individuals on the team is to see that the whole team wins.”
• “The Wrong Person in the Wrong Place = Regression. The Wrong Person in the Right Place = Frustration. The Right Person in the Wrong Place = Confusion. The Right Person in the Right Place = Progression. The Right People in the Right Places = Multiplication.”
• “Values hold the team together, provide stability for the team to grow upon, measure the team’s performance, give direction and guidance and attract like-minded people.”

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Your power as a leader comes from being a good steward of their dreams.  Your ability to lead, and your perceived ability to lead, is directly related to your connection to those intangibles.  That’s why emotional intelligence and empathy are such a big deal when it comes to being an effective leader.  People have to trust that you have their best interest at heart, or all bets are off.

In the book, It’s Not About You, Bob Burg and John David Mann write about how the leader is a trustee of the intangibles.

You Become the Trustee of the Intangibles

As a leader, you take on the hopes, dreams, aspiration, and fears of the people you lead.  Burg and Mann write:
“As a leader, you become the container of others’ hopes.  When we say people put their trust in you, that is exactly what happens.  They place their hopes and dreams, trust and faith, even their fears, in your hands, because these things feel too fragile, too big, too important, too valuable to hold onto by themselves.  You become the trustee of their intangibles.”

You Hold Them Up

One of the key capabilities of a leader is to lift people up, when they can’t lift themselves.  Burg and Mann write:

“Like a good chair.  You hold them.  Believe in them when they forget how to believe in themselves.”

You are the Steward, Not the Deal

Always remember that the reason you are the leader, is because you are the steward of their dreams.  Burg and Mann write:

“But, you are not their dreams, you are only the steward of those dreams.  And leaders too often get it backwards and start thinking they not only hold the best of others but that they are that best.  They start thinking they are the deal.  And the moment you begin thinking that it’s all about you, that you’re the deal, is the moment you being losing your capacity to positively influence other’s lives.  In a word, to lead.”

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Photo by Hamed Saber.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Mahatma Gandhi

This is a collection of my favorite Mohandas Gandhi quotes.  When I think of Gandhi, I think of non-violence, compassion, conviction, truth, service and sacrifice.  He set the gold standard for leading with heart.

Gandhi may not be with us in body, but he’s with us in spirit as his life was his message.  His words of wisdom continue to ring true …

Top 10 Gandhi Quotes

1. “Imitation is the sincerest flattery.”
2. “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.”
3. “I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.”
4. “In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.”
5. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
6. “My life is my message.”
7. “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
8. “Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.”
9. “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
10. “Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.”

Action

• “A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.”
• “Action expresses priorities.”
• “Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.”
• “Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.”
• “An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”
• “Glory lies in the attempt to reach one’s goal and not in reaching it.”
• “Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.”
• “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problem.”
• “The moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted.”
• “To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.”
• “Unwearied ceaseless effort is the price that must be paid for turning faith into a rich infallible experience.”

Anger

• “Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.”
• “Anger is the enemy of non-violence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.”
• “Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.”

Compassion, Love, and Heart

• “A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.”
• “Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.”
• “In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
• “Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment.”
• “Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.”
• “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
• “There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.”
• “We may have our private opinions but why should they be a bar to the meeting of hearts?”
• “Where there is love there is life.“

Conviction and Will

• “A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.”
• “Everyone who wills can hear the inner voice. It is within everyone.”
• “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
• “I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.”
• “It is any day better to stand erect with a broken and bandaged head then to crawl on one’s belly, in order to be able to save one’s head.”
• “Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it.”
• “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
• “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
• “The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.”
• “The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.”
• “To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.”

Flaws, Faults, and Errors

• “An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. “
• “Confession of errors is like a broom which sweeps away the dirt and leaves the surface brighter and clearer. I feel stronger for confession.”
• “I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”
• “I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.”

Fear

• “Fear has its use but cowardice has none.”
• “Fear of death makes us devoid both of valour and religion. For want of valour is want of religious faith.”

Freedom

• “Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?”
• “Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.”
• “You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”

Humanity and Goodness

• “There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.”
• “To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse then starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.”
• “We win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party.”
• “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

Living

• “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
• “I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.”
• “If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
  Imitation is the sincerest flattery. “
• “It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.”
• “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
• “Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of plan living and high thinking the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants. Man’s happiness really lies in contentment.”
• “Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it.”
• “Providence has its appointed hour for everything. We cannot command results, we can only strive.”
• “Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition for building up a sound education.”
• “Rights that do not flow from duty well performed are not worth having.”
• “The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.”
• “Those who know how to think need no teachers.”
• “We do not need to proselytize either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.”

Peace, Gentleness, and Non-Violence

• “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.“
• “Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.”
• “Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.”
• “It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.”
• “Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.”
• “Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.”
• “Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed.”
• “Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.”
• “Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.”
• “Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.”
• “Peace is its own reward.”
• “We may never be strong enough to be entirely nonviolent in thought, word and deed. But we must keep nonviolence as our goal and make strong progress towards it.“

Religion and Faith

• “All the religions of the world, while they may differ in other respects, unitedly proclaim that nothing lives in this world but Truth.“
• “Each one prays to God according to his own light.”
• “Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent.”
• “Faith is not something to grasp, it is a state to grow into.”
• “Faith… must be enforced by reason… when faith becomes blind it dies.”
• “I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.”
• “I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.”
• “In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
• “It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.”
• “One’s own religion is after all a matter between oneself and one’s Maker and no one else’s.”
• “Spiritual relationship is far more precious than physical. Physical relationship divorced from spiritual is body without soul.”
• “The essence of all religions is one. Only their approaches are different.”

Service

• “Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.”
• “Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.”
• “That service is the noblest which is rendered for its own sake.”
• “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

Truth

• “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.”
• “I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.”
• “In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.”
• “The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one’s opponent.”
• “Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.”
• “Truth never damages a cause that is just.”
• “What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.”

Please share your favorite insight, quote, or lesson from Gandhi.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from David Straker on how to influence and change behavior. David is an expert on influence and change.  He is the creator of ChangingMinds.org and author of  Changing Minds: In Detail, where he shares his wealth of insight and action on the art of change.

Not very long ago, David and I had been discussing effective ways to persuade.  I had said to David that a rule that worked for me is, “Win the heart, and the mind follows.”

David responded that where we start depends, and that we’re most effective at changing ourselves and others when we fully engage head, heart, and hands. I liked the the idea of “head”, “heart,” and “hands” because it was simple and sticky. I asked David if he would write a guest post to share his thoughts on how our actions, thoughts, and feeling are shaped by our “head”, “heart”, and “hands”.

Without further ado, here is David on shaping change through  “head,” “heart”, and “hands”.

In the field of business and personal change, there’s a pattern that keeps coming up. I’ve met it in change seminars, psychology text books and assorted theories and models. I call it ‘head, heart and hands’. You may have come across it in other forms, such as ‘cognitive, affective and behavioral’ (if you’re a psychologist) or, in more common parlance, ‘thinking, feeling and doing’.

Here’s a story of how it all began, at least in the history of management and psychology.

It was All About Hands

A century or so ago, psychology emerged out of the evolving ‘age of enlightenment’, where science grew wings and truth was what you could prove rather than what the local priest said. Psychologists sought to use the methods of natural sciences, where measurement, causality and proof were the order of the day. They could not measure what brains were doing, but they could analyze what people said and did, which led to behaviorism developing as the first step along the way.

Hard at the heels of psychological science came management science, which adopted the behavioral principles and where people such as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford viewed people as ‘rational man’ for whom behavior was directly correlated with external cues. Treat a person in a certain way and they will respond in a predictable manner.

In other words it was all about ‘hands’.

Hands Follow Head

Further developments in psychology found that to explain what people did, you had to consider what they were thinking. Game theory tripped over it in John Nash’s theory-of-mind equilibrium. Therapy went this way too, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) recognizes how behavior is closely linked to thinking. Then management followed suit, with motivation being more about getting people to understand rather than just telling them what to do.

And so we had ‘hands follow head’.

Hands Follow Head and Heart

Yet this still had problems. Psychologists had largely ignored emotions for a long time as they were almost the opposite of rational thinking and rather hard to measure. But they steadily realized that how you feel is real and cannot be ignored. If you are to treat an anxious person, it helps if you recognize and acknowledge the individual experience of anxiety. And in management, emotions at last poked through, notably in Daniel Goleman’s ‘Emotional Intelligence’. We can even see and measure emotions now, thanks to advances in brain scanning, with systems such as fMRI and PET.

And so now we had ‘hands follow head and heart’.

Explain or Enthuse First?

Is this the end? Well, not quite. There isn’t another ‘H’ on the horizon, but what we are finding is that the relationship between head, hands and heart is not as simple as we first thought. For example, to get somebody to act in a certain way, should you first appeal to their feelings and then explain, or should you explain first and then get them enthused? The answer seems to depend on circumstance and the individual.

Changing Actions, Changes Thoughts and Feelings

In a curious reversion to the original command idea, there is even an argument that you can change what people think and feel, just by getting them to act in certain ways. This is explained in Robert Cialdini’s classic ‘Influence’ book, where he talked of compliance and consistency, showing that if we have to do something, we may change our beliefs and what we feel about this to justify our actions. This helps explain some of the darker side of human behavior, from the cruelty of prison guards to conversion in brainwashing.

We can go from head, heart and hands to any of the others, with a quite reasonable thinking process to take us from A to B, as indicated in the table below.

Engage Head, Heart, and Hands for Effective Change

So how do you use this? In change, you really want to get to full engagement of head, heart and hands. A path you can follow is to use the above table to identify the best first step for your situation. Then use the table again, to reel in the third aspect. For example to go ‘head, heart, hands’, you first need to get them to think ‘This makes sense, so I feel good about it’, and then add in hands with either ‘I like the idea so I’ll give it a go’ or ‘It makes sense so I’ll give it a go’.

Whenever working in change, when you are trying to understand people or when you are just trying to persuade them of something, it can be very helpful to consider all three H’s in your analysis and plans. If you can get a person’s head, heart and hands all working together, then you have the person.

Photo by Swaity.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from David Straker on his best lessons learned in managing change.

If you don’t know David, he is the creator of ChangingMinds.org, the largest site in the world on all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do.  He is also author of the amazing book, Changing Minds: In Detail. As you can imagine, this is no ordinary post on the art of change.  David has a lifetime of experience as a student, teacher, and practitioner of change management. As you will soon see, David simplifies complexity and he hones in on the essential principles, patterns, and practices that work.

Without further ado, here is David with his top ten tips for managing change.

Change in business is something that affects most of us for a fair part of our working lives. We’ve all got tales of disaster and incompetence, with battle scars from perhaps both sides of the line. Sometimes, if we’re honest, we may even put ourselves in the culprit’s seat for the problems caused.

Creating a ‘top ten’ list is not magic. Just because we have ten fingers it does not mean there are ten key factors for anything. It is, however a useful limit for an article as a list of ‘things to think about in change’ could be very long. Anyway, enough talk and down to action.

Here’s my ten:

1. Take time to understand the real question

Change projects often start out with a whole set of assumptions that are based on limited data or wholesale opinion. This is often accompanied by urgency and unrealistic expectations of what can be done by when. In the contracting phase where I take on the project, I always insist on a period ‘discovery’ in which I talk to everyone involved to get a range of views of the need for the change and the likely support or opposition that may appear. Key question are ‘Who benefits? How? Who loses out?’ There may also be desk research, reading previous reports and so on. From this, I get a better picture and define the project in terms of what is wanted, what is needed and the best approach to take to achieve this.

One of the tricky issues you may well face is where the commissioning manager assumes that the problem is ‘them’ and not ‘me’. Yet with some careful listening you may conclude that the manager is a key part of the problem if not the root cause. Now you will have a nice problem – how to get them to accept this fact without kicking you off the project and getting in someone who will support their innocence.

2. Have courage and integrity

Managing change can be tough and unpopular. You may have to confront a manager who believes that they have a ‘get out of jail free’ ticket that absolves them from engaging in the change. You may also have to face an angry meeting of people who are going to personally lose out big-time.

It can be so tempting to soften the blow by backpedalling and avoiding what you know really must be done. Managing change is not a popularity contest, yet you should do it with compassion and concern.

When people see your courage, they will be less inclined to fight. When people see your integrity, they will trust you more to do the right thing.

3. Engage and impassion the people affected by the change

Deployment of the change starts on day one. It’s easy to start with offline, backroom musing and plotting and then spring it on an unexpecting audience as a fait accompli. This may work in command-and-control cultures but in most businesses you will likely hit a wall, which may feel like foam rubber, but it will still be effective at deflecting and derailing your carefully-plotted rational actions.

The best approach is almost always to get as many people involved as early as possible. Be clear about the problem and engage them in finding the best way forward. Expect integrity, monitor for defensiveness and be up-front if you see it.

4. Believe what people do, not what they say

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been involved in change where managers say they are ‘right behind it’, yet when problems appear they turn out to be right against it. Likewise people will agree to all sorts of things in meetings, yet somehow their agreed actions slip down their priority list as procrastination becomes the order of the day.

When people avoid change or engagement with it, try to understand why. Get inside their heads and identify the thinking processes. People always justify their actions to themselves. If you can understand this inner talk you can speak their language and so persuade them to better ways.

5. When things start going wrong, act quickly

Between college and business, I was a school teacher for a while. I quickly learned there the way that classes operate. The first lesson they are well behaved. The next lesson, someone puts a toe out of place. If you don’t respond, then the next toe and foot follow and before long you have chaos.

People in business are not as obvious as school children but you can see the same kind of incremental resistance. A typical example is change meetings, where they all turn up for the first one, but then a bit at a time they have ‘more important’ things until you end up chairing a mostly-empty room. One of the main activities of the change manager is chasing. Relentlessly follow up with people who miss things or have commitments. Get senior managers to help by first making clear imperative statements and then follow up with real corrective action.

6. Change the motivation system

It is pretty common for businesses to try to change how people behave without changing the underlying system by which they are motivated. A typical example is where the change seeks to make people more collaborative, yet the personal performance system compares people with one another and rewards individual performance over teamwork. In fact the simplest way to change how people behave is to go straight to these performance systems. When you do this, don’t forget to train managers in how to use the new systems.

Also watch out for the informal systems of motivation, which may be embedded in the unwritten culture and in particularly in the way that leaders behave. One of the biggest factors is what managers do when individuals act against the change. If there are no personal consequences then resistance will spread and the change will die.

7. Use positive methods

Change happens through a combination of pain and pleasure, carrot and stick, push and pull. People are more likely to buy into things that use positive pleasure, carrots and ‘pull’. This can be difficult to envisage when you have been brought up in a punishment culture, which can be common in families, schools and workplaces. With thought and innovation, a more pleasant pull can be applied remarkably well.

Positive methods, such as Cooperrider’s ‘Appreciative Inquiry’, work on the principle that people do more of what they feel good about. This is also confirmed by psychoanalysis and ‘Object Relations Theory’. If we feel bad about something we will push it away or run away from it. If we feel good about it we will ‘introject’ it, taking in as a part of our being.

Sometimes negative methods can be used, for example in shocking people out of complacency. But keep this to the absolute minimum. Sometimes you have to show the stick, but it’s the carrot that motivates the most.

8. Burn bridges

One reason people go back to former ways is because they can. It is too easy to keep the old systems going ‘just in case the new one fails’. This not only gives a path for retreat, it also says that you doubt that the change is really going to work, so encouraging people to hang back and slip back to old ways.

A courageous way forward is to ensure there is no way back. If you are implementing a new computer system, have a clear date by when the old one is turned off. If you are changing attitudes, ensure there are systems that catch and address any and all instances of old attitudes.

9. Get help

Sometimes when you are charged with managing change you feel you are responsible for it all and must carry any problems all by yourself. Doing this can weigh you down and wear you out.

Let’s face it: change is difficult! Otherwise there wouldn’t be so much written about it and perhaps you would be reading a nice novel rather than this list of tips. Reading around the subject is a good way to get help and I’d suggest chewing into psychology if you can. Otherwise get help from those who have, and from those who have done it before. Or even just from someone you respect who can step back and see things with a new pair of eyes.

External consultants specialize in change, so you might want to look here, especially if it’s a big change and you have the budget (good consultants are not cheap). Be careful! It is too easy to become dependent and some consulting firms will play on this, with ‘land and expand’ strategies that have more to do with their revenues than your success.

10. Look after yourself

Managing change can be a thankless and very stressful activity. Even if your job is not called ‘change manager’, you may still be mostly making change happen in one form or another and it can get you down. Listen to your body, which will punish you for over-stressing yourself. Take time out to refresh. Get regular exercise. Watch your sleep. And otherwise do whatever works for you to keep yourself energized and enthusiastic.

If you can make it work, I think creating real change that multiplies value is the best fun you can have!

Photo by chrisbb.

“A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” — Herm Albright

The little wins each day keep you going and add up over time.  The same is true of setbacks.

When things are on a roll, and you are making more progress than dealing with setbacks, you are in a virtuous cycle – a positive loop.  When you’re spending more time dealing with setbacks and not making as much progress, you are in a negative loop.  The key is to watch for and deal with the setbacks that can take you down a vicious cycle.   While you can’t avoid all the setbacks, you can respond more effectively, especially if you watch for them and nip them in the bud.

In the book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work , by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, the authors show us how to keep virtuous cycles going and abort vicious cycles early.

Keep Positive Loops Going and Abort the Negative Ones
Pay attention to the day to day, but look to the big picture to see what’s really going on in terms of progress.  Teresa and Steven write:

”Focusing on inner work life one day at a time keeps you vigilant, but people make sense of each day’s events against the backstory of the days that preceded it.  Myopic focus on a narrow timeframe can blind you to the big picture of what’s really going on with both inner work life and progress.  Because inner work life and progress exert mutual influence, the ideal is to keep positive progress loops — virtuous cycles — going as long as possible, and abort negative ones — vicious cycles — as soon as possible.”

Look at the Right Things Over Time
You have to look for key triggers and events over time to notice the true patterns.  Teresa and Steven write:

“These patterns are often hard to spot unless you keep looking at the right things over time.  In fact, we might never have recognize the progress principles had we not been carefully analyzing daily event descriptions, many of which seemed unimportant in isolation.  It was focusing on the day-to-day, and then stepping back to look for patterns that we revealed what was really happening in the teams we studied.”

Watch For and Deal with Setback Events
Recognize the virtuous cycles and stay alert to the negative signs of setbacks.  Teresa and Steven write:

”Sustaining virtuous cycles requires recognizing them to begin with.  When your private end-of-the-day review indicates a series of days with more progress events than setbacks, and no major signs of negative inner work life, the chances are good that your team is in a virtuous cycle.  If your team is fortunate to have one going, it’s important to stay alert for negative events — especially small hassles — that can sour good inner work life or halt progress.  The most fundamental step is watching for and dealing with actual setback events.”

In my experience, the old saying, “a stitch in time saves nine” tends to be true, and I like to deal with setbacks as quickly, and effectively as possible, to keep a virtuous cycle going, or get back on one.

Photo by shambhavi singh.

There is something amazingly powerful about taking decisive action.  It’s like flipping a switch and deciding it will be so.  It’s a completely different experience than waffling or wading through the jungle of indecision.

I was talking through the power of decisive action with one of my mentors, when they shared a quote with me.  The quote expresses the power of bold decisions in an articulate way.  It goes like this:

“Until one is committed, there is a hesitancy, the chance to draw back; always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man would have dreamed would come his way.
I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.’”

The quote is from W.H. Murray, in The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, 1951.

What bold decision might invent new possibilities in your life?

Photo by Nina Matthews Photography.