All motivation is self-motivation. Your family, your boss, or your co-workers can try to get your engine going, but until you decide what to accomplish, nothing will happen.

If you are afraid to write or edit or assemble or disassemble, you are merely a spectator. And you are trapped, trapped by the instructions of those you've chosen to follow. Twenty people in the field and eighty thousand in the stands. The spectators are the ones who paid to watch, but it's the player on the field who are truly alive.

It's not an accident that successful people read more books.

Practice works because practice gives us a chance to relax enough to make smart choices.

A well-defined backup plan is sabotage waiting to happen. Why push through the dip, why take the risk, why blow it all when there's the comfortable alternative instead? The people who break through usually have nothing to lose, and they almost never have a backup plan.

In nearly every case, trying to lead everyone results in leading no one in particular.

Initiating is really and truly difficult, and that's what leaders do. They see something others are ignoring and they jump on it.

Organizations that destroy the status quo win. Whatever the status quo is, changing it gives you the opportunity to be remarkable.