“Holding on for dear life. That’s a cliche from the movies. Dangling from a railroad bridge, only determination and firm grip can save the hero. In our modern world, we often end up holding on to ideas, to grievances or to our view of the world. Ironically, the harder we hold on to the things we’re hiding from, the less dear our life becomes. Perhaps we could let go for dear life instead.”
Seth Godin
Motivational Quotes
“Society is not like a machine that is created at some point in time and then maintained with a minimum of effort; a society is being continuously re-created, for good or ill, by its members. This will strike some as a burdensome responsibility, but it will summon others to greatness.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 127)
“Young people do not assimilate the values of their group by learning words (truth, justice, etc.) and their definitions. They learn attitudes, habits and ways of judging. They learn these in intensely personal transactions with their immediate family or associates. They learn them in the routines and crises of living, but they also learn them through songs, stories, drama, and games. They do not learn ethical principles; they emulate ethical (or unethical) people. They do not analyze or list the attributes they wish to develop; they identify with people who seem to them to have these attributes. That is why young people need models, both in their imaginative life and in their environment, models of what—at their best—they can be.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 124)
“Only birth can conquer death… Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous ‘recurrence of birth’ to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.”
Joseph Campbell, via Self-Renewal (Page 123)
“Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality and kindness are just as biological—and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish.”
Stephen Jay Gould, via Graceful (Page 14)
“The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They’re cooks, not chefs. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs.”
Seth Godin, Graceful (Page 5)
“The commitments you make determine who you can become… and the commitments you honor define who you are.”
Seth Godin, Graceful (Page 9)
“No society is likely to renew itself unless its dominant orientation is to the future. This is not to say that a society can ignore its past. A people without historians would be as crippled as an individual with amnesia. They would not know who they were. In helping a society to achieve self-knowledge, the historian serves the cause of renewal. But in the renewing society the historian consults the past in the service of the present and the future.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 105)
“A good many of the most valuable people in any society will never burn with zeal for anything except the integrity and health and well-being of their own families—and if they achieve those goals, we need ask little more of them. There are other valuable members of a society who will never generate conviction about anything beyond the productive output of their hands or minds—and a sensible society will be grateful for their contributions. Nor will it be too quick to define some callings as noble and some as ordinary. One may not quite accept Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dictum—’Every calling is great when greatly pursued’—but the grain of truth is there.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 104)
“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”
Richard Feynman
“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.”
Mitch Albom
“There are those who think of the meaning of life as resembling the answer to a riddle. One searches for years, and then some bright day one finds it, like the prize at the end of a treasure hunt. It is a profoundly misleading notion. The meanings in any life are multiple and varied. Some are grasped very early, some late; some have a heavy emotional component, some are strictly intellectual; some merit the label religious, some are better described as social. But each kind of meaning implies a relationship between the person and some larger system of ideas or values, a relationship involving obligations as well as rewards. In the individual life, meaning, purpose and commitment are inseparable. When one succeeds in the search for identity one has found the answer not only to the question ‘Who am I?’ but to a lot of other questions too: ‘What must I live up to? What are my obligations? To what must I commit myself?'”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 103)
“We pretend that so many courses, so many credits, so many hours in a classroom, so many books read add up to an education. The same is true of research, on which we now spend billions of dollars annually. We seem immensely satisfied with the outer husk of the enterprise—the number of dollars spent, the size of laboratories, the number of people involved, the fine projects outlined, the number of publications. Why do we grasp so desperately at externals? Partly because we are more superficial than we would like to admit. Perhaps partly because we are too lazy or too preoccupied to go to the heart of the problem. But also because it is easier to organize the external aspects of things. The mercurial spirit of great teaching and great scholarship cannot be organized, rationalized, delegated or processed. The formalities and externals can.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 82)
“Every top executive and every analyst sitting at the center of a communications network should periodically emerge from his world of abstractions and take a long unflinching look at unprocessed reality. Every general should spend some time at the front lines; every research administrator should spend some time in the laboratory doing research of his own; every sales manager should take his sample case out periodically and call on customers; every politician should get out and ring doorbells.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 79)
“Nothing is more vital to the renewal of an organization (or society) than the system by which able people are nurtured and moved into positions where they can make their contribution. In an organization this implies effective recruitment and a concern for the growth of the individual that extends from the earliest training stages through the later phases of executive development. For a society it implies the correction of social and economic conditions that blight and smother talent in childhood; a deeply rooted tradition—going far beyond formal schooling—of the full development of individual potentialities; and the existence of social mobility such that talent from any segment of the population may move freely into significant roles in the society.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 76)
“The ever-renewing organization (or society) is not one which is convinced that it enjoys eternal youth. It knows that it is forever growing old and must do something about it. It knows that it is always producing deadwood and must, for that reason, attend to its seedbeds. The seedlings are new ideas, new ways of doing things, new approaches. If all innovations must pass before one central decision point, they have just one chance to survive and a slim one at that. In an organization with many points of initiative and decision, an innovation stands a better chance of survival; it may be rejected by nine out of ten decision makers and accepted by the tenth. if it then proves its worth, the nine may adopt it later.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 68)
“Specialization is biologically, socially and intellectually necessary. The highest reaches of education will always involve learning one thing in great depth. The great artist or scientist often achieves the heights of performance through intensive cultivation of a narrow sector of his potentialities.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 24)
“Stoicism is not just invulnerability…if such a thing even exists. Stoicism is also having the self-awareness to know when you are struggling. It’s having the courage to admit when you could use a hand. It’s having the wisdom not to pretend you know the answer (you can’t learn that which you think you already know, Epictetus says). It takes daring and toughness to go to therapy—perhaps more than just white knuckling it. It’s a brave thing to share your struggles with a friend or to hire a coach or expert to help you get better at something. It takes a confident person to ask a question or admit, ‘I don’t know.’ Don’t be like the cowards who are too fragile or fearful to do this. Be truly courageous.”
Ryan Holiday