"What getting good at marketing can do for the individual is to help him or her find the clients they could care about and be eager to help, and the types of work that would be truly stimulating. The better you are at marketing, the more truly professional you can be, because you are not forced to take money from anyone and everyone just because you need the cash."

--David Maister in "Doing It For The Money"

"Pessimists are usually more accurate, but optimists usually are more successful because they think they are doing better than they really are so they continue to take more action, and more action, and more action, and more action, and more action."
--Jerry (last name unknown)

"Writing is really an attempt to understand the chaos of this life and what it all means. There's always a deeper level of understanding to go to so it can never be perfect."

--Michael Ruhlman

"Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some; it is in everyone. And, as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

--Marianne Williamson

We have the knowledge and intuition to maintain health, but we ignore it by taking ourselves out of the present. We plan meal times instead of eating when we are hungry. We go on diets instead of living healthy. We have deferred life plans instead of choosing and doing our passion.

--Tara Stiles ("How To Look Better Naked And Get The Keys To The Universe")

We generally are where we are and who we are in life as the result of circumstance. It's usually not the circumstance themselves that are the cause of our condition—it's the choices we've made and the actions we've taken or not taken within the context of those circumstances that have created the "reality in which we live."

I'm not casting blame, nor am I ignoring the fact there are incredible challenges, disadvantages, hardships, and even cruelty in the world. Some of the conditions and situations people of the world have had to endure exceed my capacity to imagine or perhaps even cope. But for most of us, living in relative safety, freedom, and within the confines of civilized societies, there's more than simply "hope", there's the opportunity to create the life we can imagine.

--Spike Humer here

"I had to learn how to collaborate across disciplines, how to change gears when changing from research to development, how to make industry work - in short, how to be both effective and productive."

--Dr. James W. Black

Too busy? Can't spare the time? You are not alone.

Yet strangely enough, people can always find days, weeks, months and sometimes years to do things again – and again - after they get them wrong … but not the few hours it takes to find out how to do them right in the first place.

--Drayton Bird

Q. What are you trying to drive into people’s heads when you say, “It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s you.”

A. Look, what happened yesterday is now done. Tomorrow is a new day. I have to cut my costs viciously. I have to spend a great deal more time on my sales and marketing, and I have to stop whining and get to work.

--George Cloutier, founder of American Management Services
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/business/smallbusiness/11sbiz.html
http://www.amserv.com/

"I think that the successful Entrepreneur will continually create more opportunity and the unsuccessful Entrepreneur will continually give excuses for their challenges."

--Bill Glazer, GKIC

"If you improve by just 1 percent a day, in 70 days you’re twice as good."

[...]

"The good news and the bad news is that it takes only 1 percent a day, because while that sounds eminently achievable, it also denies you the excuse of volume, magnitude, and overwhelm. The sad reason that most people cannot make their dreams come true has more to do with procrastination than inability; delay rather than obstacle; lassitude instead of immovable objects."

--Alan Weiss in Thrive! Stop Wishing Your Life Away (http://bit.ly/auP7PJ)

"Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure -- or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you will find success. "

-- Thomas J. Watson, Sr. (Founder and former CEO of IBM)

"We generally judge the difficulty of a proposed action by how much we are resisting it rather than by how much skill or technical expertise it will take. So many people see doing their tax return as very difficult, even though no real skill is involved."

--Mark Forster

"I spend most of my day writing. I write everything on our website. Communicating clearly is my top priority. Web writing is terrible, and corporate sites are the worst. You don't know what they do, who they are, or what they stand for. I spend a lot of time taking a sentence and reworking it until it's perfect. I love the editing process."

--Jason Fried, 37Signals.com

"I have a very simple philosophy on life. You shouldn’t steal from yourself. If you’re going to commit your life to an enterprise, wealth creation, the security and the financial well-being of your family… and if other people your staff, your team, your employees, your vendors are going to commit their lives to you, you owe it to yourself and to everyone else to get the highest and best results. You should never accept a fraction of the yield when with the same effort or less, the same people or fewer, the same time or less, the same capital or less, the same opportunity cost or less, can deliver so much more to you currently, and perpetually."

--Jay Abraham

"Confidence and competence is not the same thing. No one should go into their garden and chant, 'There are no weeds. There are no weeds. There are no weeds.' For people to be true leaders, they have to first see things as they are, not worse. Then see it better than it is, and then make it the way you see it."

--Anthony Robbins (as quoted in SUCCESS Magazine, January 2009)

"Competition doesn't breed innovation; it breeds conformity."

--Steve Miller (http://theadventure.com/)

"I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time."

--Herbert B. Swope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Bayard_Swope

"Selling stuff is easy. All you gotta do is give away stuff that makes people happy …and then sell stuff that makes ‘em even happier."

-- Frank Kern

"Negative criticism is easy because it is always possible to find fault with anything if one looks hard enough. It is quite easy to concentrate on the faults and ignore what is worthwhile. But the main and overriding attraction of criticism is that it at once makes the critic superior to what he is criticizing."

--Edward de Bono (http://www.debonothinking.com/)