• ” I don’t primarily think of my work as about the study of business, nor do I see this as fundamentally a business book. Rather….I’m curious to understand fundamental differences between great and good, between excellent and mediocre. I just happen to use corporations as a means of getting inside the black box. “
• “Good is the enemy of great, and that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have a great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life. The vast majority of companies never become great, precisely because the vast majority become quite good-and that is their main problem. ”
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• “Entrenched myth: Successful leaders in a turbulent world are bold, risk-seeking visionaries. Contrary finding: The best leaders we studied did not have a visionary ability to predict the future. They observed what worked, figured out why it worked, and built upon proven foundations. They were not more risk taking, more bold, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons. They were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.”

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• “Writing a book is a long, hard process. So what should I be thinking about instead? What should my self-affirmations be? I should be imagining getting up and working on the book every morning. I should imagine working on it even when I don’t feel like it, and when I’m stuck, and when I think the book is terrible. I should tell myself that I have what it takes to keep at it through obstacles and difficulty. Evidence shows that visualizing the steps you’d have to do to achieve the goal helps. Students who imagined doing well on an exam got worse grades than those who imagined studying for the exam. Imagining the steps and the processes you need to undertake to achieve a goal activates some different brain areas than those activated when you imagine the goal being achieved.
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• “Start imagining a different way to work and live. Here’s how it might look for you:
  • Although you work in an open office, you’re less affected by the noise and interruptions and can stay deeply engaged in your work. You work faster, do better work, and enjoy your work more.
  • You take opportunities to rest your mind and inject moments of calm into your day. This makes you feel more creative and inspired, and you generate more insights and solutions.
  • You no longer feel controlled by your devices.
  • You work less and have more leisure time.
  • You give your full attention to your friends, family, hobbies, and recreation. People appreciate how present you are with them. As a result, you feel less burned out and more motivated and inspired when you’re back at work.
  • You’re more engaged in the moments in your life and find them richer and more satisfying.
  • You feel more in control and less stressed and impatient.”

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• “I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.”
• “I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school. Dad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse.* We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist.” Continue reading →

When we spend our lives waiting until we’re perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make. Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don’t exist in the human experience. We must walk into the arena, whatever it may be—a new relationship, an important meeting, our creative process, or a difficult family conversation—with courage and the willingness to engage. Rather than sitting on the sidelines and hurling judgment and advice, we must dare to show up and let ourselves be seen. This is vulnerability. This is daring greatly. Join me as we explore the answers to these questions:
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• “Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?
  It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.“

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• “Whatever success I had in life has had to do with my knowing how to deal with my not than anything I know. The most important thing I have learned is an approach to life based on principles that helped me find out what is true and what to do about it. “

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• “If I say, “I am grateful”, I could mean one of three things: that I am currently feeling grateful for something, that I am generally grateful for that thing, or that I am a grateful kind of person.”
  The first instance is an emotional experience, the second i is an emotion and the third is a trait. Continue reading →

• “It’s actually the nose that serves as laboratory, as much for the chef as for the perfumer. That’s why experienced cooks spend as much time smelling as they do tasting. The mingled scent of ingredients describes to the imagination how they might fit together before we actually combine them.”
• “Cooking is a creative process, and as with other creative pursuits— music, art, writing— there are concepts and tools that can help guide you. Rather than leaving you a set of too-large or too-small or not-in-the-direction-I-wanted-to-go footprints, we wanted to equip you to blaze your own trail. We aim to teach you to become a creative, confident cook who knows how to think about and respond to the ingredients available to you in ways that result in delicious, memorable food.”
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