Random Meditations

"Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well." -Voltaire

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Life

"Kindness to one person is never wasted. Even if that specific person literally doesn't end up helping you in any way." -Steve Chandler (The Hands-Off Manager)

​"Why should we all use our creative power....? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money." -Brenda Ueland

"Anything you can't let go of has control over you." ​-Steve Chandler (The Hands-Off Manager)

"Slow down to the speed of life." -Steve Chandler (The Hands-Off Manager)

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change." -Unknown (Attributed to Charles Darwin)

"It's not that there are never constraints but that there are always constraints." -John Izzo (Stepping Up)

"If not me who? If not now when?" -John Izzo (Stepping Up)

"Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out." -John Wooden

"Most events in life can be categorized in one of two ways. A good time or a good story." -Unknown

“One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.” ― Oscar Wilde

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Speaking

"You can't be a speaker without a listener." -Steve Chandler (The Hands-Off Manager)

"The human brain starts working the moment you're born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public." -Unknown

"The most important person in the room is the audience." -Richard Zeoli (The 7 Principles of Public Speaking)

"Speak to serve." -Richard Zeoli (The 7 Principles of Public Speaking)

"It's not quantity but quality that matters." -Richard Zeoli (The 7 Principles of Public Speaking)

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Changing People

"Ordering change is a stupid, stupid, stupid waste of time." ​-Steve Chandler (The Hands-Off Manager)

"Never resist resistance." -Chip R. Bell (Managers as Mentors)

"A low feedback diet may be harmful to the health of your business." -Beverly Kaye (Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go)

“Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.” -Peter Drucker

"Stress and anxiety have a profoundly negative impact on performance." -Steve Chandler (The Hands-Off Manager)

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ― Margaret Mead

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." -​John Quincy Adams

"A leader is a dealer in hope." -Napoleon Bonaparte

​“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations