A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them.
The place to begin building any relationship is inside ourselves, inside our circle of influence, our own character.
I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They're either speaking or preparing to speak. They're filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people's lives.
Habit 1: Be Proactive Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind Habit 3: Put First Things First Habit 4: Think WinWin Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood Habit 6: Synergize Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
To achieve goals you've never achieved before, you need to start doing things you've never done before.
Be a light, not a judge, be a model not a critic. Little by little, your circle of influence will explode and you will avoid the emotional metastasizing cancers of complaining, criticizing, competing, comparing and cynicism, all which reflect victimization, all of which are the opposite of being proactive.
. . that a rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive.
A quiet mind married to integrity of heart is the birth of wisdom.
We now have in our hands—really, in our libraries—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years.
I have a strongly held belief that one of the reasons that Amazon has been successful is because we do not obsess over competitors. Instead we obsess over customers.