“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
“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating and then representing beauty is what humans do. With or without authorities telling us what it is, I think it would exist in any case. The startle and the wonder of being in this place. This overwhelming beauty—some of it is natural, some of it is man-made, some of it is casual, some of it is a mere glance—is an absolute necessity. I don’t think we can do without it any more than we can do without dreams or oxygen.”
Toni Morrison
“All too often we are giving our young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. We are stuffing their heads with the products of earlier innovation rather than teaching them to innovate. We think of the mind as a storehouse to be filled when we should be thinking of it as an instrument to be used.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 21)
“The relation of education to the level of motivation in the society is more direct than most people recognize. The goals the young person sets for himself are very heavily affected by the framework of expectations with which adults surround him. The educational system provides the young person with a sense of what society expects of him in the way of performance. If it is lax in its demands, then he will believe that such are the expectations of his society. If much is expected of him, the chances are that he will expect much of himself. This is why it is important that a society create an atmosphere that encourages effort, striving and vigorous performance.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 20)
“It is very good that people go on changing from this to that job; that keeps them fluid. In a better world, everything will be more mobile than it is, and people should be changing continually so that nothing becomes a fixation—a fixation is a disease. Each new job, each new project, brings a new quality to your being—it makes you richer.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 179)
“Everyone has noted the abundant resources of energy that seem available to those who enjoy what they are doing or find meaning in what they are doing. Self-renewing people know that if they have no great conviction about what they are doing they had better find something that they can have great conviction about. All of us cannot spend all of our time pursuing our deepest convictions. But all of us, either in our careers or as part-time activities, should be doing something about which we care deeply.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 16)
“We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure—all your life. It’s as simple as that.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 15)
“The Buddhists believe that our presence can be healing; that by simply sharing space with another person and giving them our full, undivided attention, we can ease their suffering. Sometimes I wonder if the reason we don’t all feel so broken and lonely and insecure is because we rarely give each other our full, undivided attention.”
Cole Schafer
“Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems. We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to know ourselves, don’t want to depend on ourselves, don’t want to live with ourselves. By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 13)
“Even if you have drifted off the path. Marcus Aurelius tried to remind himself that there was a spring of goodness inside of him and that no matter what he or anyone shoveled on some of it, it was still there, still fresh and new and ever-flowing. The Stoics did not believe in original sin. They did not think we were hopelessly broken. They believed that being who we were—living well, living as our nature intended us to live—was always possible. You might be low and awful right now, Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, but in just a few days you can be worthy of being seen as a god. He was telling himself he just had to go back to the teachings, go back to his principles, go back to the spring.”
Ryan Holiday
“Exploration of the full range of our own potentialities is not something that we can safely leave to the chances of life. It is something to be pursued systematically, or at least avidly, to the end of our days. We should look forward to an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our potentialities and the claims of life—not only the claims we encounter but the claims we invent. And by potentialities I mean not just skills, but the full range of our capacities for sensing, wondering, learning, understanding, loving and aspiring.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 11)
“That is why travel is a vivid experience for most of us. At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 9)
“Imagine there is a small version of you and a big version. When you are playing small, your behavior is timid, you feel less than, and you are often surrounded by people and projects that drain you. When you are playing big, your behavior is confident, you feel motivated, and you tend to be investing in people and projects that energize you. How can you spend more time playing the big version of yourself this year?”
James Clear