There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care. The world cares about what you can do with what you know – do you have the skill, do you have the will.

~ Tony Wagner (via Explore)

Life is too short to waste it with people who don’t get it, whatever “it” may be for you, so make sure you surround yourself with people who do.

~ Xenios Thrasyvoulou (quoted in Bob Sutton’s post on The Power of the People Around You)

3. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

~ From Bruce Mau’s brilliant Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

And I saw how, if you steadily worked at something, what you don’t know gradually erodes and what you do know slowly grows and at some point you’ve gained a degree of mastery. What you know becomes what you are. You know photography and you are a photographer. You know writing and you are a writer.

Mary Jo Bang: On Learning, Self-Discipline, and Taking the Road Less Traveled

…when you are inspired, your work can be inspirational to others.

~ Ken Robinson ‘The Element’

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

~ John Quincy Adams

Living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the time…rather, it’s about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there.

(via The 99 Percent)

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

~ John Wooden

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

~ Steve Jobs

(via suzanne.z)

Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
If you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

~ Kahlil Gibran (quoted in Charles Waterstreet’s SMH column)

Letting go is a Catch-22. You don’t want to let go until you have something new to cling to, but you can’t discover the new thing until you let go. In between, you must cross a mystery zone. Eventually you get to the point where you can’t stand the feeling of things not adding up for one more minute. That’s when you take a leap of faith, and the questions start to feel more important than the answers. You’re in a new place. The bad news: There are no maps. The good news? You are the mapmaker.

Shoshana Zuboff (via fuckfailgoawesome) (via kareem)