“Our culture tends to label everybody and everything either a success or a failure, a winner or a loser. I often wonder how the one winner and 58,000 losers in the Boston Marathon feel about that? I can't imagine even one of those runners thinking of himself as a loser. I believe that for every one of them, to run the race well is to succeed.”
“People who take responsibility for all they create are able to quickly sort truth from fiction in their lives, and in the communication they're receiving from those around them, by using the simple litmus test of “based on results.” Wishing and hoping, reasons and excuses will never tell you the truth. If you say you intend to have a happy marriage, have you got one? If you say you want to earn a degree from a good university, have you done it? If you say you want ten million dollars, do you have it? If you don't have what you say you want, then how come? You've either got the results you say you want, or you have reasons to explain why not. Developing a rigorous and honest relationship with results moves you powerfully toward creating your extraordinary life.”
“Contrary to what many people think, there is no such thing as an unimportant broken agreement. There may be bigger external consequences for breaking some agreements than others—but there are no broken agreements without a price.”
“In life, you either have the results you want, or you have reasons to explain why you don’t have them. If you have the results, you don’t need the reasons”
“Every time you break an agreement you lose self-esteem, self-respect and self-confidence, and you lose other people's trust in you. Every time you keep an agreement you increase these same valuable assets accordingly. It is just the way things are.”
“We are always committed to something. However, we’re not always committed to what we say we’re committed to—or even to what we think we’re committed to.”
“The challenge we face is distinguishing between useful envisioning of the future as something to be created, versus expecting things to evolve according to our preconceptions—and then feeling victimized when events don't unfold as we expected.”
“‘The greatest love of all is happening to me...’ So goes the popular song. It's a great song. It speaks to the heart, and deeply. It strikes powerfully to uplift the human spirit, at the quest for self-love and self-esteem, the pride in being alive that each of us is entitled to experience simply by being born a human being.”
“About the process of growing up ….. What follows is tragic. We stop risking for fear of making mistakes, fear of not fitting in, fear of being embarrassed or humiliated by saying the 'wrong' thing. Our instinctive joy and boundless enthusiasm are replaced by playing it safe and looking good. Our spontaneity deserts us, and with it much of our natural creativity. Predictability replaces passion. We learn to reveal very little of who we really are and what we really feel. We sell the richness of our passionate birthright for the security of this burdensome thing called our ‘image’. It weighs us down like a suit of medieval armor, restricting our every move, sapping our vitality and aliveness. We wander through life on automatic pilot, controlled by the need to live up to the false image that we invented.”
“Our lives, along with the weather and happiness, will forever be up and down and sideways and all over the place. That’s how life and the weather are, and that is as good as it gets. How do I know that? Simple. It is all I've got. If the future does not exist and the past is gone, then this must be as good as it gets, because there is, right now, nothing else. And even if you don't believe the truth of that statement, living each moment as if now is absolutely as good as it gets will have you celebrating your life every day. It’s not a bad way to live.”
