March 22, 2024
The World's Best Collection of Awesome, Memorable Quotes

If you're on the prowl for inspiring quotes you can use for work, your book, speech, website, love letter, kidnap letter, slide show, blog post, business proposal, graffiti, or time capsule, look no further. PS: We are all in this together!

Change
Possibility
Beginning
Vision
Communication

Innovation
Intuition
Peace
Time
Risk Taking

Appreciation
Failure
Leadership
Creativity
Einstein

Humor and Play
Purpose/Work
Collaboration
Story
Ideas

Asking the Right Question
Mastery
Uncertainty and Letting Go
Trust
Feedback

Education and Learning
Commitment
Excellence
Planning
Revolution

"The world is an illusion, but you have to act as if it's real." - Krishna

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Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:07 PM | Comments (4)

February 14, 2023
Happy Valentine's Day to You!

Here is an inspiring Valentine's Day slide show for you. Includes 21 wonderful quotes on love and vocals by Daya Rawat.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)

Happy Valentine's Day to You!

Here is an inspiring Valentine's Day slide show for you. Includes 21 wonderful quotes on love and vocals by Daya Rawat.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2021
15 Quotes on the Importance of Asking the Right Question

As a facilitator of the creative process, I continue to be astounded by how few organizations have any kind of process is place to PAUSE, reflect, and make sure they are coming up with the right questions. Apparently, I'm not alone.

1. "It's not that they can't see the solution. They can't see the problem." - G.K. Chesterton

2. "There are no right answers to wrong questions." - Ursula K. Le Guin

3. "We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong." - Bono

4. "Ask the right questions if you're going to find the right answers." - Vanessa Redgrave

5. "Asking the right questions takes as much skill as giving the right answers." - Robert Half

6. "What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question." - Jonas Salk

7. "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." - Werner Heisenberg

8. "The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions." - Antony Jay

9. "In school, we're rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question." - Richard Saul Wurman

10. "In all affairs, it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." - Bertrand Russell

11. "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso

12. "Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers." - Voltaire

13. "We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers." - Friedrich Nietszche

14. "My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions." - Peter Drucker

15. "He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever." - Chinese proverb

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:42 PM | Comments (1)

May 19, 2021
76 Provocative Quotes on Uncertainty and Letting Go

"I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few." - Brene Brown

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers." - Erich Fromm

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity." - Gilda Radner

"As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity." - Pema Chodron

"Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller

"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. It's mostly a question of editing. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell." - Margaret Atwood

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings." - Wendell Berry

"Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow." - Tony Schwartz

"Now that we have met with paradox we have some hope of making progress." - Niels Bohr

"Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes." - Marianne Williamson

"I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100." - Woody Allen

"Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines." - Buckminster Fuller

"And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." - Anais Nin

"There's no such thing as a completely fresh start. Everything new arrives on the heels of something old, and every new beginning comes at the cost of an ending." - Jennifer E. Smith

"I learned that it was in hard times that people usually changed the course of their life; in good times, they frequently only talked about change. Hard times forced them to overcome the doubts that normally gave them pause. It surprised me how often we hold ourselves back until we have no choice." - Po Bronson

"All you have to do is to pay attention; lessons always arrive when you are ready, and if you can read the signs, you will learn everything you need to know in order to take the next step." - Paulo Coelho

"The silence between the notes makes the music. And lest we forget, the longer the silence, the more incredibly beautiful and powerful the music when it finally swells and the symphony goes on." - Brianna West

"There are far, far better things out there than any we leave behind." - C.S. Lewis

"The longing for certainty is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably deal with." - Tony Robbins

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." - Andre Gide

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing that have have answers which might be wrong." - Richard P. Feynman

"The future is uncertain, but this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity." - Ilya Prigogine

"Where the fog is thickest, begin." - Marty Rubin

"Madness is the result not of uncertainty, but of certainty." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security there is." - John Allen Paulos

"For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars, makes me dream." - Vincent Van Gogh

"Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won't work." - Junot Diaz

"All of life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Uncertainty will always be part of the taking charge process." - Harold Geneen

"All great changes are preceded by chaos." - Deepak Chopra

"Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It's a very tender, non-aggressive, open-ended state of affairs." - Pema Chodron

"To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous." - Chinese proverb

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty, not knowing what comes next." - Ursula Le Guin

"Faith means living with uncertainty, feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark." - Dan Millman

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are so confident while the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell

"It's a dark place, not knowing. It's difficult to surrender to. But I guess it's where we live most of the time. I guess it's where we all live, so maybe it doesn't have to be so lonely. Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty." - Nina LaCour

"Give your heart permission to let go of the need for certainty and leave space for the unknown." - Amber Cantorna

"So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late." - Lee Iacocca

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." - Albert Einstein

"A truth which comes to us from outside always bears the stamp of uncertainty. We can believe only what appears to each one of us in our own hearts as truth." - Rudolf Steiner

"If you aren't in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret." - Jim Carrey

"I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty." - Billy Collins

"There will be very few occasions when you are absolutely certain about anything. You will consistently be called upon to make decisions with limited information. That being the case, your goal should not be to eliminate uncertainty. Instead, you must develop the art of being clear in the face of uncertainty." - Andy Stanley

"The thing about aging is all your old lovers, pretty much if they were really friends, become your family. It's great. You have those terrible feelings of possessiveness and uncertainty go out the window. You have what you shared. You know you would help each other in times of trouble no matter what." - Gloria Steinem

"In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals, herd together for protection." - James Surowiecki

"Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of not knowing." - Mark Danielewski

"Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't." - Steve Maraboli

"What's right is what's left if you do everything else wrong." - Robin Williams

"Not everything needs to be fixed." - Randy Pausch

"It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have." - Cheryl Strayed

"Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'." - Viktor E. Frankl

"Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go." - Hermann Hesse

"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us." - Alexander Graham Bell

"To let go is to release the images and emotions, the grudges and fears, the clingings and disappointments of the past that bind our spirit."
- Jack Kornfield

"When you follow your bliss... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else." - Joseph Campbell

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need." - Lao Tzu

"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet." - Rumi

"We must be willing to let go of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us." - Joseph Campbell

"Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed." - Wayne Dyer

"Don't dwell on what went wrong. Instead, focus on what to do next. Spend your energy moving forward together towards an answer." - Denis Waitley

"You've got to make a conscious choice every day to shed the old - whatever 'the old' means for you." - Sarah Ban Breathnach

"Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go." - Anais Nin

"When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them." - Andy Warhol

"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." - Alan W. Watts

"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." - Rumi

"Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." - George Bernard Shaw

"Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like." - Lao Tzu

"All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride." - Sophocles

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T. S. Eliot

"Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive and express what we really are." - Miguel Angel Ruiz

"You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself." - Alan Alda

"Things do not grow better; they remain as they are. It is we who grow better, by the changes we make in ourselves." - Swami Vivekananda

"You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending." - C.S. Lewis

"It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult." - Seneca

A funny story about not knowing
A story about trust against all odds

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)

May 14, 2021
50 Awesome Quotes on Possibility

1. "Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible." - St. Francis of Assisi

2. "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." - Lewis Carroll

3. "I'm grateful for always this moment, the now, no matter what form it takes." - Eckart Tolle

4. "In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd." - Miguel de Cervantes

5. "The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do." - Henry Moore

6. "It's kind of fun to do the impossible!" - Walt Disney

7. "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." - Mark Twain

8. "What is now proved, was once only imagined." - William Blake

9."There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. There are a thousand ways to go home again." - Rumi

10. "The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible." - Arthur C. Clarke

11. "Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing." - John Andrew Holmes

12. "Whether you believe you can or not, you're right." - Henry Ford

13. "God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed. That is the meaning of evolution." - Graham Greene

14. "Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision." - V.S. Naipaul

15. "I don't regret a single excess of my responsive youth. I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace." - Henry James

16. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki

17. "The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious." - John Sculley

18. "One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king." - Abraham Maslow

19. "When nothing is sure, everything is possible."> - Margaret Drabble

20. "We all have possibilities we don't know about. We can do things we don't even dream we can do." - Dale Carnegie

21. "An optimist expects his dreams to come true; a pessimist expects his nightmares to." - Laurence J. Peter

22. "The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react." - George Bernard Shaw

23. "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." - Albert Einstein

24. "I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist." - Max Lerner

25. "If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!"- Soren Kierkegaard

26. "All things are possible until they are proved impossible. Even the impossible may only be so, as of now." - Pearl S. Buck

27. "Until you're ready to look foolish, you'll never have the possibility of being great." - Cher

28. "This has always been a motto of mine: Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work." - Bette Davis

29. "You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices."- Deepak Chopra

30. "Some people see things as they are and say 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say 'Why not?'" - George Bernard Shaw

31. "The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility." - John Lennon

32. "I love those who yearn for the impossible." - Goethe

33. "Every man is an impossibility until he is born." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

34. "If you can't, you must. If you must, you can." - Tony Robbins

35. "A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility." - Aristotle

36. "If someone says can't, that shows you what to do." - John Cage

37. "You must do the thing you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt

38. "Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today." - Mark Twain

39. "Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done." - Louis D. Brandeis

40. "The possible's slow fuse is lit by the imagination." - Emily Dickinson

41. "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." - Pablo Picasso

42. "If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves." - Thomas Edison

43. "Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart." - Rumi

44. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." - Henry David Thoreau

45. "Everything you can imagine in real." - Picasso

46. "Everything that is done in the world is done by hope." - Martin Luther

47. "Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today." - James Dean

48. "I don't dream at night, I dream all day. I dream for a living."
- Steven Spielberg

49. "The shell must break before the bird can fly." - Alfred Lord Tennyson

50. "If not you, who? If not now, when?" - Rabbi Hillel

Al Siraat College
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:11 PM | Comments (2)

May 01, 2021
THE YEAR OF LIVING CREATIVELY: The Underground We Cover

This just in! You have a big, beautiful idea that you want to manifest -- a cool project, venture, or aspiration you want to get out of your head and into the world. Maybe you've been hatching this egg for years or maybe it's just made itself known to you. But no matter how long you've been noodling on this grand possibility, it's likely that you... er... uh... sometimes feel doubt, disengaged, discombobulated, or despair.

Welcome to the human race! Your resistance comes with the territory of trying to birth something new and wonderful. Which is precisely what The Year of Living Creatively is all about -- a two-month online course for anyone committed to transforming their creative aspirations into reality. Like YOU, for instance.

Selected topics below are addressed in the course. And while you're at it, feast on the quotes from some extraordinary people who know what it takes to navigate the often mysterious and crazy-making creative process. Ready? Fasten your seat belt...

1. Follow Your Calling: "Every moment of your life is infinitely creative and the universe is endlessly bountiful. Just put forth a clear enough request, and everything your heart desires must come to you." - Mahatma Gandhi

2. Embrace New Beginnings: "Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

3. Clarify Your Vision: "A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock pile when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind." - Antoine Saint-Exupery

4. Cultivate Patience: "The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones." - Confucius

5. Go Beyond Self-Doubt: "The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath

6. Discover Your Real Question: "There are no right answers to wrong questions." - Ursula K. Le Guin

7. Trust Yourself Deeply: "Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts." - Rita Mae Brown

8. Let Go of Perfectionism: "And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." - John Steinbeck

9. Make Friends With Uncertainty: "The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers." - Erich Fromm

10. Rethink Success: "Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful." - Albert Schweitzer

11. Acknowledge Daily Progress: "Research has shown over and over again that the more you acknowledge your past successes, the more confident you become in taking on and successfully accomplishing new ones." - Jack Canfield

12. Embrace Polarities: "The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites." - Carl Jung

13. Honor Thy Intuition: "Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next." - Jonas Salk

14. Go Beyond Your Obstacles: "The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it." - Moliere

15. Transform Your Limiting Assumptions: "Begin challenging your assumptions. Your assumptions are the windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won't come in." - Alan Alda

16. Attract Alchemical Collaborators: "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller

17. Let Discipline Be Born of Love: "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." - Mozart

18. Be Willing Not to Know: "By not knowing, not hoping to know and not acting like we know what's happening, we begin to access our inner strength." - Pema Chodron

19. Create More Time: "You will never find the time for anything. If you want time, you must make it." - Charles Burton

20. Reframe Failure: "I have not failed once. I've just found 10,000 ways that didn't work." - Thomas Edison

21. Find Your Courage: "I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me." - Erica Jong

22. Take Some Risks: "If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner." - Tallulah Bankhead

23. Experiment! Pilot! Try New Things: "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." - Pablo Picasso

24. Be a Divine Maniac: "Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission." - Peter Drucker

25. Act As If: "By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired." - Nikos Kazantzakis

26. Originate Bold, New Ideas: "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

27. Learn from Feedback: "Average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached. Great players want to be told the truth." - Doc Rivers

28. Establish Your Creative Workspace: "There is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down." - Twyla Tharp

29. Embrace Solitude: "Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude." - Goethe

30. Be Playful: "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves." - Carl Jung

31. Simplify: "It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas." - Charles Peguy

32. Be In the Moment: "I'll play it first and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis

33. Persevere: "Every strike brings me closer to the next home run." - Babe Ruth

34. Ask for Help: "You can do anything, but not everything." - David Allen

35. Dream Big: Blue Sky Thinking: "The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." - Albert Einstein

36. Complete What You Started: "Genius is infinite painstaking." - Michelangelo

37. Let the Old Forms Die: "Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction." - Pablo Picasso

38. Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway: "I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life -- and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do." - Georgia O'Keefe

39. Honor What Makes You Unique: "There is a vitality, a life force, that is translated to you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and will be lost." - Martha Graham

40. Change the Old Story You're Telling Yourself: "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou

41. Tune Into When and Where You Get Your Best Ideas: "Why is it I always get my best ideas while shaving?" -- Albert Einstein

42. Maintain Your Positive Momentum: "An object at rest tends to stay at rest. An object in motions tends to stay in motion." -- Newton's First Law of Motion

43. Incubate! Lay Fallow! Let It Be! "It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing." -- Gertrude Stein

44. See Through New Eyes: "It's not what you look it. It's what you see." -- H.D. Thoreau

45. Embrace Messiness, Awkwardness, and Frustration: "Confusion is just a name for an order that is not yet understood." -- Henry Miller

46. Honor Your Crazy Ideas: "If at first the Idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." -- Albert Einstein

47. Boundary Alert: Know When to Say No: "When you say yes to others, make sure you are not saying no to yourself." -- Paulo Coelho

48. Develop a Practice of Creativity: "There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well." - Agatha Christie

49. Establish Your Creative Workspace: "Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can." -- Arthur Ashe

50. Diffuse Your Inner Critic: "If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?" -- Maya Angelou

51. Pause and Reflect: "We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience." -- John Dewey

52. Get Out of the Box "He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch." - Jean-Luc Godard

OTHER TOPICS

53. The 12 Traits of Highly Creative People
54. Nurture or Fracture: Doing the Significant Other Dance
55. Persevere No Matter What
56. Play the Long Game
57. The Relationship Between Haha and Aha

58. Tap Into Your Subconscious Mind
59. Act As If
60. Discover the Elegant Solution
61. Increase Your Focus and Attention
62. How to Be a Creative Catalyst
63. How to Identify Your Blind Spots

64. The Wisdom of Rumi
65. The Wisdom of Albert Einstein
66. The Wisdom of Leonardo DaVinci
67. The Wisdom of Georgia O'Keefe
68. The Wisdom of Elon Musk

69. The Wisdom of Pablo Picasso
70. The Wisdom of Helen Keller
71. The Wisdom of Frank Zappa
72. The Wisdom of Nicola Tesla
73. The Wisdom of Michelangelo

74. The Wisdom of John Lennon
75. The Wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi
76. The Wisdom of Martin Luther King
77. The Wisdom of Prem Rawat
78. The Wisdom of Amadeus Mozart

79. The Wisdom of Frieda Kahlo
80. The Wisdom of Steve Jobs
81. Where and When Do You Get Your Best Ideas?
82. Spark Your Creative Imagination
83. The Power of Immersion

84. The 12 Traits of Highly Creative People
85. After the Honeymoon: The Messy Middles
86. Innovation Is All About Making New Connections
87. Let the Old Forms Die
88. Freely Express Yourself
89. Let Go of Attachment to Results

The Year of Living Creatively
Testimonials
The Year of Living Creatively Manifesto
Who Is The Year of Living Creatively Really For?

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 03:03 PM | Comments (1)

January 01, 2021
FOLLOW YOUR CALLING!

"Your profession is not what brings home your weekly paycheck. Your profession is what you're put here on earth to do, with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling." - Vincent van Gogh

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." - Gospel of Thomas

"Love your calling with passion. It is the meaning of your life." - Auguste Rodin

"Vocation does not come from a voice out there calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice in here calling me to be the person I was born to be." - Thomas Merton

"You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don't make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can't take their eyes off of you." - Maya Angelou

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud." - Emile Zola

"If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?" - Stephen King

"I don't ask for the full ringing of the bell. I don't ask for a clap of thunder. A scrawny cry will do." - Wallace Stevens

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you." - Annie Dillard

"The only durable sense of success is if you've followed your calling." - Jim Harrison

"Those who have a WHY to live can bear with almost any HOW." - Viktor Frankl

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.'" - Martin Luther King

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." - Steve Jobs

"The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it." - Steven Pressfield

"I believe there's a calling for all of us. I know that every human being has value and purpose. The real work of our lives is to become aware. And awakened. To answer the call." - Oprah Winfrey

"When the flower opens, the bees will come." - Kabir

A simple way to follow your calling

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September 16, 2020
Great Quotes on Leadership

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

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." - Peter Drucker

"To lead people, walk beside them. As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. When the best leader's work is done, the people say, 'We did it ourselves!'" - Lao Tzu

"Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence, and making sure that impact lasts in your absence."- Sheryl Sandberg

"Average leaders raise the bar for themselves; good leaders raise the bar for others; great leaders inspire others to raise their own bar." - Orrin Woodward

"Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing." - Albert Schweitzer

"A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be." - Rosalynn Carter

"Successful leaders see the opportunities in every difficulty rather than the difficulty in every opportunity." - Reed Markham

"Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy." - Norman Schwarzkopf

"Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." - Warren Bennis

"I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear." - Rosa Parks

"All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership." - John Kenneth Galbraith

"Ninety percent of leadership is the ability to communicate something people want." - Dianne Feinstein

"Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well." - Dwight Eisenhower

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

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." - Abraham Lincoln

"True leaders understand that leadership is not about them but about those they serve. It is not about exalting themselves but about lifting others up." - Sheri Dew

"A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better." - Jim Rohn

"What you do has far greater impact than what you say." - Stephen Covey

"To be a leader, you have to make people want to follow you, and nobody wants to follow someone who doesn't know where he is going." - Joe Namath

"Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers who can cut through argument, debate. and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand." - Colin Powell

"The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things." - Ronald Reagan

"Leadership is the ability to guide others without force into a direction or decision that leaves them still feeling empowered and accomplished." - Lisa Cash Hanson

"You don't have to hold a position in order to be a leader." - Henry Ford

"To have long term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way." - Pat Riley

"Our emerging workforce is not interested in command and control leadership. They don't want to do things because I said so, they want to do things because they want to do them."- Irene Rosenfield

"The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails." - John Maxwell

"Outstanding leaders go out of the way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish." - Sam Walton

PS: Great leaders take the time to reflect on what it really means to be a leader. They turn theory into action. Towards that end, choose a quote above that you most resonate with and ask yourself how you can embody its particular wisdom on the job.

Leaders communicate their responsibilities to their teams
Go beyond the team leader overload syndrome
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July 28, 2020
37 Great Quotes on Trust

If you are a member of a team, there will be times when trust flies out the window. Your willingness to rely on others to do the right thing will shrivel. Such is life. But just because trust shrivels, doesn't mean it's gone. Smaller? Yes. Gone? Not necessarily. It can be restored. Indeed, it must be restored -- that is, IF you have any aspirations to enjoy life, your work, and the possibility of making a difference in the world.

"You must trust and believe in people, or life becomes impossible." - Anton Chekhov

"Earn trust, earn trust, earn trust. Then you can worry about the rest." - Seth Godin

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them." - Ernest Hemingway

"Trusting is hard. Knowing who to trust, even harder." - Maria Snyder

"He who does not trust enough will not be trusted." - Lao Tzu

"Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters." - Albert Einstein

"Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships." - Stephen R. Covey

"Remember teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability." - Patrick Lencioni

"People follow leaders by choice. Without trust, at best you get compliance." - Jesse Lyn Stoner

"To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved." - George MacDonald

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." - Warren Buffett

"We are all mistaken sometimes. Sometimes we do wrong things, things that have bad consequences. But it does not mean we are evil, or that we cannot be trusted ever afterward." - Alison Croggon

"Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties." - Aesop

"Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work." - Warren Bennis

"The best proof of love is trust." - Joyce Brothers

"A king who trusts no man is weak." - Patricia Briggs

"Trust no friend without faults." - Doris Lessing

"Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts." - Rita Mae Brown

"People that have trust issues only need to look in the mirror. There they will meet the one person that will betray them the most."
- Shannon L. Alder

"It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them." - Confucius

"Those who trust us educate us." - George Eliot

"I'm suspicious of people who don't like dogs, but I trust a dog when it doesn't like a person." - Bill Murray

"I believe in trusting. Trust begets trust. Suspicion is foetid and only stinks. He who trusts has never yet lost in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi

"Trust is like a vase. Once it's broken, though you can fix it, the vase will never be same again." - Walter Anderson

"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go." - Natalie Goldberg

"I don't trust anyone who doesn't laugh." - Maya Angelou

"When a gifted team dedicates itself to unselfish trust and combines instinct with boldness and effort, it is ready to climb." - Patanjali

"Love cannot live where there is no trust." - Edith Hamilton

"Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do." - Benjamin Spock

"I trust no one, not even myself." - Joseph Stalin

"Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake." - Christopher Hitchens

"Trust is earned when actions meet words." - Chris Butler

"Trust is not simply a matter of truthfulness, or even constancy. It is also a matter of amity and goodwill. We trust those who have our best interests at heart, and mistrust those who seem deaf to our concerns." - Gary Hamel

"I believe in trusting men, not only once but twice -- in giving a failure another chance." - James Cash Penney

"I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason." - Stanley Baldwin

"The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say I And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say I. They don't think I. They think we. They think team. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but we gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done." - Peter Drucker

"I'm not upset that you lied to me. I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Trust is built with consistency." - Lincoln Chafee

"The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Either we're a team or we aren't. Either you trust me or you don't."
- Ally Carte

"There's never a reason to trust someone. If there's a reason, then it's not trust." - Gerald Morris

"Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

FOR YOUR REFLECTION:

1. How much do you trust yourself?
2. Who is the person you trust the most in your life?
3. What are the attributes of the person you trust the most?
4. How trustworthy are you?
5. When people lose trust in you, do you know why?
6. Who, in your life are you not trusting these days?
7. Do you know why you are not trusting this person?
8. Are you (and that person) committed to restoring trust?
9. What's the level of trust on whatever teams you are on?
10. If you are a team leader, how much do team members trust you?
11. What do you need to do to regain the trust of others?
12. What is the simplest thing you can do to be more trustworthy?

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June 13, 2020
Tuning Into the WHY and PURPOSE of Being the Leader of a Team

If you are the leader of a team in your school, business, or organization, you have your work cut out for you. Leading a team is a task that will take time, focus, resilience, patience, adaptability, and a good sense of humor. Towards that end, check out quotes below and choose one that most resonates with you. Then, contemplate it's meaning. How does it relate to your challenge of leading a team?

1. "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." -- Nietzsche

2. "The person without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder." -- Thomas Carlyle

3. "Purpose is what inspires you to get up in the morning." -- Betsy Smith

4. "Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure." -- Paulo Coelho

5. "There's no better exercise for the human heart than reaching down and lifting someone up." -- John Holmes

6. "The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

7. "If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path." -- Brene Brown

8. "You can have anything you want if you want it badly enough. You can be anything you want to be, do anything you set out to accomplish if you hold to that desire with singleness of purpose." -- Abraham Lincoln

9. "Above all, be of single aim; have a legitimate and useful purpose, and devote yourself unreservedly to it." -- James Allen

10. "To the person who does not know where he wants to go there is no favorable wind." -- Seneca

11. "Nothing is more likely to help a person overcome or endure troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life." -- Victor Frankl

12. "The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving." -- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

13. "True happiness is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose." -- Helen Keller

14. "It is not enough to be busy. Ants are busy. What are you busy about?" -- Henry David Thoreau

15. "Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart." -- Rumi

16. "If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

17. "Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile." -- Albert Einstein

18. "If you prepare yourself at every point as well as you can, you will grasp the opportunity for broader experience when it appears." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

19. "What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question." -- Margaret Atwood

20. "The question isn't who's going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." -- Ayn Rand

21. "I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve." -- Albert Schweitzer

22. "What power there is in our service when our actions line up with our mission, skills, and joy." -- Mary Anne Radmacher

23. "A hero is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or something other than himself." -- Joseph Campbell

24. "We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop." -- Mother Teresa

25. "Instead of asking yourself 'Do I have time for this?' what if you tried a different question: 'Is this a priority?'" -- Savannah Ivanitski

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June 02, 2020
90 Quotes on Education & Learning

1. "Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each." - Plato

2. "The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist.'" - Maria Montessori

3. "Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all." - Aristotle

4. "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." - Mahatma Gandhi

5. "I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn." - Albert Einstein

6. "Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself." - Paulo Coelho

7. "The highest result of education is tolerance." - Helen Keller

8. "Education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul." - Muriel Spark

9. "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." - Oscar Wilde

10. "A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron." - Horace Mann

11."Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of mind which teaches young people how to begin to think." - Mary Wollstonecraft

12. "They know enough who know how to learn." - Henry Adams

13. "Nine-tenths of education is encouragement." - Anatole France

14. "Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners." - John Holt

15. "I don't want revenge on the Taliban, I want education for sons and daughters of the Taliban." - Malala Yousafzai

16. "Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer -- into a selflessness which links us with all humanity." - Nancy Astor

17. "Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education." - John Hersey

18. "Computers can do all the left hemisphere processing better and faster than the human brain. So what's left for the human brain is global thinking, creative thinking, intuitive-problem solving, seeing the whole picture. All of that cannot be done by the computer. And yet the school system goes on, churning out reading, writing, and arithmatic, spelling, grammar." - Betty Edwards

19. "When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling." - John Taylor Gatto

20. "We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being." - Maria Montessori

21. "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them." - Aristotle

22. "It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning." - Claude Bernard

23. "If you don't feel safe as a child, you cannot learn." - Lady Gaga

24. "The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change." - Carl Rogers

25. "A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." - Thomas Carruthers

26. "The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding." - Leonardo da Vinci

27. "Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is." - Isaac Asimov

28. "The only thing better than education is more education." - Agnes Benedict

29. "I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework." - Lily Tomlin

30. "Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities -- that's training or instruction -- but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed." - Thomas Moore

31. "Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." - Will Durant

32. "Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young." - Henry Ford

33. "Education is learning what you didn't know you didn't know." - George Boas

34. "The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values." - William Burroughs

35. "The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see." - Alexandra K. Trenfor

36. "We want the education by which character is formed, strength of mind is increased, the intellect is expanded, and by which one can stand on one's own feet." - Swami Vivekananda

37. "The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson." - Tom Bodett

38. "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." - Andy McIntyre

39. "What we learn with pleasure we never forget." - Alfred Mercier

40. "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." - Doris Lessing

41. "You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over." - Richard Branson

42. "We need to give up the notion of a single ideal of the educated person and replace it with a multiplicity of models designed to accommodate the multiple capacities and interests of students." - Nel Noddings

43. "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." - Benjamin Franklin

44. "Knowing is not enough. We must apply. Willing is not enough. We must do." - Bruce Lee

45. "Don't just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything." - George Carlin

46. "Be curious, not judgmental." - Walt Whitman

47. "Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible." - Richard Feynman

48. "True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own." - Nikos Kazantzakis

49. "I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught." - Winston Churchill

50. "Everybody's a teacher if you listen." - Doris Roberts

51. "Being a student is easy. Learning requires actual work." - William Crawford

52. "Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon." - E.M. Forster

53. "I am still learning." - Michelangelo (at 87)

54. "Even the genius asks questions." - Tupac Shakur

55. "Never let formal education get in the way of your learning." - Mark Twain

56. "Children need to be taught how to think, not what to think." - Margaret Mead

57. "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." - John Wooden

58. "Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel." - Socrates

59. "The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn." - Gloria Steinem

60. "The paradox of education is precisely this: that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated." - James Baldwin

61. "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Maimonides

62. "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein

63. "Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon." - Alexander Pope

64. "No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete." - G.K Chesterton

65. "An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't." - Anatole France

66. "If you become a teacher, by your pupils you'll be taught." - Oscar Hammerstein

67. "He who laughs most, learns best." - John Cleese

68. "Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants." - John Gardner

69. "Not too soon and not too late; the secret of education lies in choosing the right time to do things." - Natalia Ginzburg

70. "The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things." - Jean Piaget

71. "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."- Epictetus

72. "Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master." - Leonardo da Vinci

73. "When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course." - Peter Drucker

74. "There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly." - Buckminster Fuller

75. "A child educated only at school is an uneducated child." - George Santayana

76. "Schooling is what happens inside the walls of the school, some of which is educational. Education happens everywhere, and it happens from the moment a child is born -- and some people say before -- until a person dies." - Sara Lawrence Lightfoot

77. "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of becoming." - Goethe

78. "All I want is an education, and I am afraid of no one." - Malala Yousafzai

79. "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle

80. "You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself." - Galileo

81. "When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think." - Bertrand Russell

82. "The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher." - Elbert Hubbard

83. "Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers." -
- Richard Bach

84. "Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality."- Dalai Lama

85. "When you wish to instruct, be brief; children's minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind." - Cicero

86. "To know how to suggest is the art of teaching." - Henri Frederic Amiel

87. "Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself." - Virginia Woolf

88. "Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education." - Chuang Tzu

89. "The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards."
- Anatole France

90. "The teacher must adopt the role of facilitator not content provider." - Lev S. Vygotsky

What I'm learning these days
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May 22, 2020
20 Inspiring Quotes on Commitment

"Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans." - Peter Drucker

"Commitment is what transforms a promise into a reality." - Abraham Lincoln

"There are only two options regarding commitment; you're either in or you're out. There's no such thing as life in-between." - Pat Riley

"The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed." - Martina Navratilova

"People do not follow uncommitted leaders. Commitment can be displayed in a full range of matters to include the work hours you choose to maintain, how you work to improve your abilities, or what you do for your fellow workers at personal sacrifice." - Stephen Gregg

"Commitment is an act, not a word." - Jean-Paul Sartre

"Desire is the key to motivation, but it's determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal -- a commitment to excellence -- that will enable you to attain the success you seek." - Mario Andretti

"The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor." - Vince Lombardi

"Something in human nature causes us to start slacking off at our moment of greatest accomplishment. As you become successful, you will need a great deal of self-discipline not to lose your sense of balance, humility, and commitment." - Ross Perot

"The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt." - Rollo May

"If your energy is as boundless as your ambition, total commitment may be a way of life you should seriously consider." - Dr. Joyce Brothers

"The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment." - Tony Robbins

"It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow." - Ralph Ellison

"There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstance permit. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results." - Art Turock

"It's always too early to quit." - Norman Vincent Peal

"Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose and commit myself to what is best for me." - Paulo Coelho

"If you can't value a commitment made by someone else, your own commitments lose their value too." - Ram Mohan

"Commitment is the enemy of resistance, for it is the serious promise to press on, to get up, no matter how many times you are knocked down." - David McNally

"There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses; only results." - Kenneth Blanchard

"Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person." - Albert Einstein

What are YOU committed to these days? What project, pursuit, cause, creation, effort, or endeavor have you fully embraced? And if, perchance, you haven't fully embraced it yet, what obstacle do you need to overcome? What do you need to do, today, in order to fully commit?

Quotes on mastery
Quotes on Excellence
Storytelling for the Revolution

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March 27, 2020
Kindness is Contagious!

You want to be innovative these days? Start with kindness! Now there's a good idea!

Idea Champions
Mitch Ditkoff
Storytelling for the Revolution
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January 22, 2020
How Einstein Would Solve a Problem If He Only Had an Hour

Other Einstein quotes
Our half-day workshop on this
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January 19, 2020
13 Awesome Quotes on Planning

"A goal without a plan is just a wish." -- Antoine de Saint Exupery

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." -- Abraham Lincoln

"Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential." -- Winston Churchill

"No matter what the work you are doing, be always ready to drop it. And plan it, so as to be able to leave it." -- Leo Tolstoy

"Pray to Allah, but tie your camel." -- The Prophet Muhammed

"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." -- Benjamin Franklin

"If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else." -- Yogi Berra

"The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining." -- John F. Kennedy

"It's takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Plan for what is difficult while it is easy. Do what is great while it is small." -- Sun Tzu

"A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow." -- George S. Patton

"Many people spend more time in planning the wedding than the do the marriage." -- Zig Ziglar

"All human plans are subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe." -- Arthur C. Clarke

Idea Champions

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January 17, 2020
15 Quotes on Collaboration

1. "It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles Darwin

2. "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller

3. "If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless." - Darryl F. Zanuck

4. "If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself." - Henry Ford

5. "Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

6. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton

7. "It takes two to speak the truth -- one to speak, and another to hear." - Henry David Thoreau

8. "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." - George Bernard Shaw

9. "Politeness is the poison of collaboration." - Edwin Land

10. "I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively." - Golda Meir

11. "It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed." - Napoleon Hill

12. "No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you." - Althea Gibson

13. "The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team." - Phil Jackson

14. "Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success." - Henry Ford

15. "The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind." -- Thomas Carlyle

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July 04, 2019
HAPPY JULY 4th! Inspiring Quotes on Independence

"Freedom is the will to be responsible to our selves." -- Friedrich Nietzche

"It's easy to be independent when you've got money. But to be independent when you haven't got a thing -- that's the Lord's test." -- Mahalia Jackson

"We need to help people to discover the true meaning of love. Love is generally confused with dependence. Those of us who have grown in true love know that we can love only in proportion to our capacity for independence." -- Fred Rogers

"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance." -- Henry Miller

"In the progress of personality, first comes a declaration of independence, then a recognition of interdependence." -- Henry Van Dyke

"The most courageous act is to think for yourself. Aloud." -- Coco Chanel

"To find yourself, think for yourself." -- Socrates

"The first of earthly blessings: independence." -- Edward Gibbon

"Independence is essential to permanent, but fatal to immediate success." -- Samuel Butler

"Independence... is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes." -- Mark Twain

"The price for independence is often isolation and solitude." -- Steve Schmidt

"I am lord of myself, accountable to none." -- Benjamin Franklin

"You don't need a significant other to lead a significant life." -- Mandy Hale

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility is being superior to your former self." -- Ernest Hemingway

"Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone for others. Unfold your own myth." -- Rumi

"The essence of independence is to do something for one's self." -- Maria Montessori

"Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes." -- Mahatma Gandhi

"Diversity: the art of thinking independently together." -- Malcolm Forbes

"I will not be 'famous' or 'great.' I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded." -- Virginia Woolf

"How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?" -- Anais Nin

"Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient become independent of it." -- John D. Rockefeller

"Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity." -- Thomas J. Watson

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June 17, 2019
50 Quotes on Risk Taking

1. "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." -- Goethe

2. "Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." -- Helen Keller

3. "It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult." -- Seneca

4. "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far it is possible to go." -- T.S. Eliot

5. "What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter." -- Peter Drucker

6. "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." -- Pablo Picasso

7. "Go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is." -- Jimmy Carter

8. "Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting. -- Karl Wallenda

9. "If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough." -- Mario Andretti

10. "Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps." -- David Lloyd George

11. "It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all." -- William James

12. "Do one thing every day that scares you." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

13. "Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's." -- Billy Wilder

14. "The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety." -- Goethe

15. "Do not fear mistakes. There are none." -- Miles Davis

16. "A man would do nothing, if he waited until he could do it so well that no one would find fault with what he has done." -- Cardinal Newman

17. "Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast." -- Tom Peters

18. "Never let the odds keep you from doing what you know in your heart you were meant to do." -- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

19. "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -- Mark Twain

20. "Leap and the net will appear." -- Zen Saying

21. "The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you. Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved." -- William Jennings Bryan

22. "Pearls don't lie on the seashore. If you want one, you must dive for it." -- Chinese proverb

23. "Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome." -- Samuel Johnson

24. "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." -- Anais Nin

25. "Are you placing enough interesting, freakish, long shot, weirdo bets?" -- Tom Peters

26. "Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash." -- General George Patton

27. "I can accept failure. Everybody fails at something. But I can't accept not trying. Fear is an illusion." -- Michael Jordan

28. "Opportunity dances with those on the dance floor." -- Anonymous

29. "Yes, risk-taking is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise, it would be called 'sure-thing-taking.'" -- Jim McMahon

30. "People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year." -- Peter Drucker

31. "Necessity is the mother of taking chances." -- Mark Twain

32. "99 percent of success is built on failure." -- Charles Kettering

33. "Progress always involves risks. You can't steal second base and keep your foot on first." -- Frederick Wilcox

34. "What great thing would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?" -- Robert Schuller

35. "Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers." -- Mignon McLaughlin

36. "You can only be as good as you dare to be bad." -- John Barrymore

37. "Anything that is successful is a series of mistakes." -- Billie Armstrong

38. "Give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself." -- Robert Louis Stevenson

39. "If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission." -- Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

40. "If you risk nothing, then you risk everything." -- Geena Davis

41. "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most." -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

42. "Remember, a dead fish can float down a stream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream." -- W.C. Fields

43. "Take risks: if you win, you will be happy; if you lose, you will be wise." -- Anonymous

44. "To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself." -- Soren Kierkegaard

45. "You'll always miss 100% of the shots you don't take." -- Wayne Gretzky

46. "It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves." -- Andre Gide

47. "Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

48. "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." -- Andre Gide

49. "Danger can never be overcome without taking risks." -- Latin Proverb

50. "I'll play it first, and tell you what it is later." -- Miles Davis

Thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for gathering these goodies. If you have other favorites, let us know.

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March 30, 2019
21 Awesome Quotes on Intuition

"The only real valuable thing is intuition." - Albert Einstein

"Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." - Benjamin Spock

"Systems die; instincts remain." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover." - Henri Poincare

"Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data." - John Naisbitt

"A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something." - Frank Capra

"It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It's my partner." - Jonas Salk

"All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas." - Immanuel Kant

"Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's. - Billy Wilder

"Your time is limited, don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinion drown your own inner voice. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs

"The more and more each is impelled by that which is intuitive, or the relying upon the soul force within, the greater, the farther, the deeper, the broader, the more constructive may be the result." - Edgar Cayce

"I feel there are two people inside me -- me and my intuition. If I go along against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely." - Kim Basinger

"Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer." - Robert Graves

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant
and has forgotten the gift." - Albert Einstein

"You must train your intuition. You must trust the small voice inside which tells you exactly what to say, what to decide." - Ingrid Bergman

"The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days." - Lao Tzu

"People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind." - William Butler Yeats

"Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives."- Carlos Casteneda

"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next." - Jonas Salk

"Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away
just below the conscious level." - Dr. Joyce Brothers

"Follow your instincts. That's where true wisdom manifests itself."
- Oprah Winfrey

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February 20, 2019
Creators on Creating

Inspiring quotes on creating by off-the-grid creators (and a voice over by Idea Champions Co-Founder, Mitch Ditkoff.

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November 22, 2018
20 Awesome Quotes on Beginning

1."Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2. "There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth -- not going all the way, and not starting." - Buddha

3. "Be willing to be a beginner every single morning." - Meister Eckhart

4. "All great ideas and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning." - Albert Camus

5. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." - Lao Tzu

6. "Beginnings are always messy." - John Galsworthy

7. "When there is a start to be made, don't step over! Start where you are." - Edgar Cayce

8. "So many fail because they don't get started -- they don't go. They don't overcome inertia. They don't begin." - W. Clement Stone

9."Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." - Seneca

10."The beginning is the most important part of the work." - Plato

11."The beginnings of all things are small." - Cicero

12. "What's well begun is half done." - Horace

13. "Every exit is an entry somewhere else." - Tom Stoppard

14. "The person who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones." - Chinese Proverb

15. "No good ending can be expected in the absence of the right beginning." - I Ching

16. "Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." - Martin Luther King

17. "Beginning is easy -- continuing hard." - Japanese Proverb

18. "There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning." - Louis L'Amour

19. "The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette." - Henry Hoskins

20. "Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible." - St. Francis of Assisi

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August 22, 2018
Creativity and the Play Instinct

Quotes on humor and playfulness
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August 17, 2018
50 Awesome Quotes on Vision

1. "If you can dream it, you can do it." - Walt Disney

2. "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, and magic and power in it. Begin it now." - Goethe

3. "The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo

4. "It's not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?" - Henry David Thoreau

5. "You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case." - Ken Kesey

6. "If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

7. "Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside awakens." - Carl Jung

8. "The empires of the future are empires of the mind." - Winston Churchill

9. "Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." - Jonathan Swift

10. "Management has a lot to do with answers. Leadership is a function of questions. And the first question for a leader always is: 'Who do we intend to be?' Not 'What are we going to do?' but 'Who do we intend to be?' - Max DePree

11. "Vision without action is a daydream. Action with without vision is a nightmare." - Japanese Proverb

12. "The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Alan Kay

13."Where there is no vision the people perish." - Proverbs 29:18

14. "Vision without execution is hallucination." - Thomas Edison

15. "Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." - Warren Bennis

16. "If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise." - Robert Fritz

17. "Create your future from your future, not your past." - Werner Erhard

18. "To the person who does not know where he wants to go there is no favorable wind." - Seneca

19. "You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction." - Alvin Toffler

20. "To accomplish great things we must dream as well as act.: - Anatole France

21. "A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it." - Soren Kierkegaard

22. "A leader's role is to raise people's aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there." - David Gergen

23. "The very essence of leadership is that you have a vision. It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet." - Theodore Hesburgh

24. "Determine that the thing can and shall be done and then we shall find the way." - Abraham Lincoln

25. "Dreams are extremely important. You can't do it unless you can imagine it." -George Lucas

26. "Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements." - Napoleon Hill

27. "Pain pushes until vision pulls." - Michael Beckwith

28. "Vision animates, inspires, transforms purpose into action." - Warren Bennis

29. "The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which; he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both." - Buddha

30. "Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction." - Kenichi Ohmae

31. "It's not what the vision is, it's what the vision does." - Peter Senge

32. "In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield." - Warren Buffett

33. "A leader will find it difficult to articulate a coherent vision unless it expresses his core values, his basic identity. One must first embark on the formidable journey of self-discovery in order to create a vision with authentic soul." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

34. "The best vision is insight." - Malcolm Forbes

35. "You have to know what you want. And if it seems to take you off the track, don't hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry." - Gertrude Stein

36. "The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." - Albert Einstein

37. "I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's were the fun is." - Donald Trump

38. "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer

39. "People only see what they are prepared to see." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

40. "The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision." - Helen Keller

41. "Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion." - Jack Welsh

42. "A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more." - Rosabeth Moss Kanter

43. "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton

44. "The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious." - John Scully

45. "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours." - Henry David Thoreau

46. "Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

47. "Looking up gives light, although at first it makes you dizzy." - Rumi

48. "You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." - Mark Twain

49. "In order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles." - - David Ben-Gurion

50. "The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust

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July 09, 2018
The Only Risk is Not to Risk

50 quotes on risktaking
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June 26, 2018
100 Awesome Quotes on What It Really Takes To Innovate

1. "I want to put a ding in the universe." - Steve Jobs

2. "Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them." - Alfred North Whitehead

3. "Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next." - Jonas Salk

4. "If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong." - Charles Kettering

5. "Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller

6. "If you can dream it, you can do it." - Walt Disney

7. "You can't solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level." - Albert Einstein

8. "Do not fear mistakes. There are none." - Miles Davis

9. "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves." - Carl Jung

10. "There is only one thing stronger than all the armies of the world: and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

11. "If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think."
- Clarence Darrow

12. "Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." - John Steinbeck

13. "To accomplish great things we must dream as well as act." - Anatole France

14. "It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas."
- Charles Peguy

15. "There's no good idea that cannot be improved on." - Michael Eisner

16. "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." - Anais Nin

17. "We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."
- Thomas Edison

18. "The best vision is insight." - Malcolm Forbes

19. "Genius is infinite painstaking." - Michelangelo

20. "Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude." - Goethe

21. "Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together, go to the making of genius. Love, Love, Love. That is the soul of genius." - Mozart

22. "Swipe from the best, then adapt." - Tom Peters

23. "Give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself." - Robert Louis Stevenson

24. "You can expect no influence if you are not susceptible to influence." - Carl Jung

25. "Whether or not you can observe a thing depends upon the theory you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed." - Albert Einstein

26. "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." - Goethe

27. "Sit, walk, or run, but don't wobble." - Zen proverb

28. "The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites." - Carl Jung

29. "We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish." - John Culkin

30. "I will act as if what I do will make a difference." - William James

31. "There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start." - Charles Baudelaire

32. "What is now proved was once only imagined." - William Blake

33. "Remember, a dead fish can float down a stream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream." - W.C. Fields

34. "99 percent of success is built on failure." - Charles Kettering

35. "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow

36. "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." - Albert Einstein

37. "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

38. "The ultimate creative thinking technique is to think like God. If you're an atheist, pretend how God would do it." - Frank Lloyd Wright

39. "I start where the last man left off." - Thomas Edison

40. "Never confuse motion with action." - Ernest Hemingway

41. "The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child." - Thomas Edison

42. "No matter how well you perform, there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy." - Sir Laurence Olivier

43. "You must do the thing you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt

44. "I'll play it first and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis

45. "The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away." - Linus Pauling

46. "Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought." - Albert Szent-Gyorgi

47. "A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock pile when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind."- Antoine Saint-Exupery

48. "Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn't do nothing." - Duke Ellington

49. "You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take." - Wayne Gretzky

50. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki

51. "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." - General George Patton

52. "The man with a new idea is a crank - until the idea succeeds." - Mark Twain

53. "A problem well stated is a problem half solved." - Charles Kettering

54. "The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil." - Thomas Edison

55. "Don't be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps." - David Lloyd George

56. "The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development." - Alfred North Whitehead

57. "A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor." - Victor Hugo

58. "Money never starts an idea; it is the idea that starts the money." - William J. Cameron

59. "Systems die; instincts remain." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

60. "You will never find the time for anything. If you want time, you must make it." - Charles Burton

61. "Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission." - Peter Drucker

62. "One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

63. "The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind." - Thomas Carlyle

64. "I failed my way to success." - Thomas Edison

65. "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

66. "The way to succeed is to double your failure rate." - Thomas Watson, (Founder of IBM)

67. "Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze." - Peter Drucker

68. "The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast." - Peter Drucker

69. "You can only be as good as you dare to be bad." - John Barrymore

70. "No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered."
- Winston Churchill

71. "Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives." - Carlos Casteneda

72. "After years of telling corporate citizens to 'trust the system,' many companies must relearn instead to trust their people - and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power." - Rosabeth Moss Kanter

73. "If the creator has a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surely would have meant for us to stick it out." - Arthur Koestler

74. "If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself." - Rollo May

75. "Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have." - Emile Chartier

76. "There's always an element of chance and you must be willing to live with that element. If you insist on certainty, you will paralyze yourself." - J.P. Getty

77. "Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are just produced." - A.N. Whitehead

78. "Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys." - Sam Walton

79. "The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." - Albert Einstein

80. "Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction." - Pablo Picasso

81. "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." - Groucho Marx

82. "Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein

83. "Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way." - William James

84. "Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." - Jonathan Swift

85. "The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Alan Kay

86. "If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it." - Gordon MacKenzie

87. "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

88. "There is a vitality, a life force, that is translated to you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and will be lost." - Martha Graham

89. "We have approximately 60,000 thoughts in a day. Unfortunately, 95% of them are thoughts we had the day before." - Deepak Chopra

90. "Confusion is a word we have invented for an order that is not yet understood." - Henry Miller

91. "I refuse to be intimidated by reality anymore. What is reality? Nothing but a collective hunch." - Lily Tomlin

92. "Now that we have met with paradox we have some hope of making progress." - Niels Bohr

93. "Microsoft is always two years away from failure." - Bill Gates

94. "We've reached the end of incrementalism. Only those companies that are capable of creating industry revolutions will prosper in the new economy. - Gary Hamel

95. "If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied." - Alfred Noble

96. "I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it." - Steven Wright

97. "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new." - Steve Jobs

98. "I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done." - Henry Ford

99. "You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere." - Lee Iacocca

100. "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

Idea Champions

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May 03, 2018
34 Quotes on Leadership

1. "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." - Peter F. Drucker

2. "If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates,' then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny." - Dee Hock

3. "A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say 'we did it ourselves.'" - Lao Tzu

4. "The led must not be compelled; they must be able to choose their own leader." - Albert Einstein

5. "The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why." - Warren Bennis

6. "The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you." - Max DePree

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

8. "The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist." - Eric Hoffer

9. "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." - Abraham Lincoln

10. "Lead and inspire people. Don't try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people must be lead." - Ross Perot

11. "Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob." - Oscar Wilde

12. "All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership." - John Kenneth Galbraith

13. "Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions." - Harold S. Geneen

14. "Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them." - John Maxwell

15. "The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision."-Theodore Hesburgh

16. "The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority." - Kenneth Blanchard

17. "Leaders conceive and articulate goals that lift people out of their petty preoccupations and unite them in pursuit of objectives worthy of their best efforts." - John Gardner

18. "Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

19. "The ability to summon positive emotions during periods of intense
stress lies at the heart of effective leadership." - Jim Loehr

20. "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they
will surprise you with their ingenuity." - General George Patton

21. As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others." - Bill Gates

22. "Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy." - Norman Schwarzkopf

23. I'm sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control." - Margaret Wheatley

24. "The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership." - Harvey S. Firestone

25. "One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency." - Arnold Glasow

26. "The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers." - Ralph Nader

27. "You don't lead by hitting people over the head. That's assault, not leadership." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

28. "Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out." - Stephen Covey

29. "No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings." - Peter Drucker

30. "The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it." - Theodore Roosevelt

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

32. "To be able to lead others, a man must be willing to go forward alone." - Harry Truman

33. "Example is not the main thing in influencing others; it is the only thing." - Albert Schweitzer

34. "People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert." - Theodore Roosevelt

Big thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for locating most of these quotes.

Idea Champions
Ingenious Leadership
How Leaders Foster a Culture of Innovation

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April 29, 2018
Be Frightened of Old Ideas

About John Cage
Idea Champions
Want to upgrade your brainstorming?
50 quotes on the power of ideas
If you google "brainstorm training"

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March 19, 2018
The Marriage of Zany and Practical

Feedback from Charter Manufacturing in response to an Innovation workshop of ours with 27 of their high potential leaders of the future.

"Idea Champions has the unique quality of being able to combine zany out-of-box thinking with a pragmatic approach that appealed to every participant in the session. Even those who relish the status quo and the proven way of doing things couldn't help but relax, laugh. and lean into their untapped creativity. Participants left the session feeling hopeful and powerful about their individual ability to create and innovate."

- Maureen Toshner, Director, Organizational Development & Learning

Idea Champions
What our other clients say
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January 25, 2018
ANONYMOUS REVEALED

I have a confession to make. Actually, it's more like a revelation than a confession.

You know all those fabulous quotes and articles you've read over the years with no attribution other than "Anonymous"? It was me. It's true. I have written thousands of things I've never signed my name to. I couldn't. I mean -- the writing just came through me. Like a storm. In fact, I was in such a state of presence as these pearls of wisdom appeared, there wasn't even a "me" involved, so how could I sign my name?

So I did the only thing I could do -- and that was to sign what I wrote with the now all-too-familiar word "Anonymous".

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining, nor do I have any regrets about my selfless decision. It felt right at the time. But now, with the economy slowing down -- it's starting to make sense that I claim what is rightfully mine.

After countless hours of consultations with pundits, epistemological savants, numerologists, and intellectual property lawyers, I've arrived at an approach that is not only honorable and fair, but flawless and timely with absolutely no carbon footprint. Nor were any animals harmed in the writing of this paragraph.

I am pleased to announce that YOU, dear reader, get to play a key role going forward -- one that will take you less time than it will to order a take-out pizza.

Since I am claiming no royalties whatsoever from my past writings (many of which, by the way, went on to become blockbuster movies, novels, bumper stickers, and refrigerator magnets), I think it is only fair to request that every time you forward anything attributed to "Anonymous" you link it to this page -- a promo for my new online creativity course -- soon to be offered as a subscription service

My goal? To model what it's like to claim one's true inheritance and take the risk that this post will go viral and I will have to answer a lot of questions from slick talk show hosts more interested in their own TV ratings than my no longer anonymous success.

A small example of what I've never been paid for

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:37 PM | Comments (8)

22 Awesome Quotes on Revolution

My new book, STORYTELLING FOR THE REVOLUTION, will be published in May. The revolution I'm writing about is not a political revolution, its a revolution of the heart and, more specifically, how we communicate wisdom to each other. My weapon of choice is not a gun. It's a story. Actually, 40 stories. The quotes below speak to the spirit of where I'm coming from.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."- Buckminster Fuller

"A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution." - Martin Luther King Jr

"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first." - Jim Morrison

"If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution." - Emma Goldman

"Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries." - Anais Nin

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy

"The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!" - Albert Einstein

"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only BE the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere." - Ursula K. Le Guin

"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?" - Dorothy Day

"The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action." - Malcolm X

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again." - Thomas Paine

"But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is to tell the truth." - Howard Zinn

"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit." - Abbie Hoffman

"A great revolution in just one single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of humankind." - Daisaku Ikeda

"Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must." - Victor Hugo

"If your regime is not strong enough to handle a joke, then you have no regime." - Jon Stewart

"He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being." - Stanislav Grof

"Revolution is the harmony of form and color and everything exists, and moves, under only one law: Life. Nobody is separate from anybody else. Nobody fights for himself. Everything is All and One. Anguish and pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence." - Frida Khalo

"The most heroic word in all languages is revolution." - Eugene Debs

"Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one." - Marianne Williamson

"Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something." - Pancho Villa

Pre-order your book here
PHOTO: Sabine Schulte, Unsplash

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January 22, 2018
24 Quotes on Good Communication

1. "The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said." - Peter Drucker

2. "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." - George Bernard Shaw

3."Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people." - William Butler Yeats

4. "We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak." - Epictetus

5. "Speak when you are angry -- and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret." - Laurence Peters

6. "In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do." - Stephen Covey

7. "The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them." - Stephen King

8. "Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language." - Walt Disney

9. "Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

10. "The two words information and communication are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through." - Sydney Harris

11. "Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing." - Rollo May

12. "Humor is the affectionate communication of insight." - Leo Rosten

13. "Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break." - Earl Wilson

14. "Communication is everyone's panacea for everything." - Tom Peters

15. "Two monologues do not make a dialogue." - Jeff Daly

16. "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something." - Plato

17. "Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot." - D.H. Lawrence

18. "Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening." - Emma Thompson

19. "When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." - Ernest Hemingway

20. "You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time." - Scott Peck

21. "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." - Mark Twain

22. "That which we are capable of feeling, we are capable of saying." - Cervantes

23. "I have an answering machine in my car. It says, 'I'm home now. But leave a message and I'll call when I'm out.'" - Steven Wright

24. "Give me the gift of a listening heart." - King Solomon

Idea Champions

Thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for locating a bunch of these

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November 02, 2017
The Best Definition of Creativity?

If you google the phrase definitions of creativity, guess how many definitions show up? 135 million! That's right, 135 million. And so, if you are looking for THE definition, give up now. You won't find it. It doesn't exist. What does exist is mucho people's attempts to define creativity -- definitions, by the way, that are influenced by their particular world view, expertise, profession, assumptions, mindset, nationality, and language skills.

That being said, it is still a useful exercise to zero in on a definition that floats your boat -- especially if you are charged with the responsibility of helping your team, department, organization, or own lone-wolf self become more creative.

Towards that end, what follows are 15 definitions I have curated on your behalf. Some are culled from the work of people whose names you will recognize. Some are from complete unknowns. It doesn't matter in the least. What matters is your willingness to think more deeply than usual about this fascinating topic and that you find (or create) a working definition for yourself to get the party started. Ready?

Dictionary.com: "The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, and relationships."

Rollo May: The process of bringing something new into being -- something that brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life."

Maria Popova: "The ability to connect the seemingly unconnected."

Roger van Oech: "Imagining familiar things in a new light. Digging below the surface to find previously undetected patterns and find new connections between unrelated phenomena."

Daniel Pink: "Giving the world something it didn't know it needed."

Elizabeth Gilbert: "The strange partnership between a human being's labor and the mystery of inspiration."

Henry Miller: "The occurrence of a composition which is both new and valuable."

Carl Rogers: "The emergence of a novel, relational product growing out of the uniqueness of the individual."

Mihaly Csikszentmhalyi: "An idea, act, or product which changes an existing domain or transforms an existing domain in a new way."

Bernadette: Jiwa: "Tapping into your soul and your intuition and allowing them to guide you what to make."

Michael Grybko: "An idea that is novel, good, and useful. Making connections between different ideas to solve a new problem."

Danny Sullivan: "Building universes out of nothing."

David Merman Scott: Seeing patterns that others don't and effectively communicating them.

Scott Godin: "This might not work."

God: "Let there be light."

The commonalities above? Bringing something new into existence. Transcending existing norms. Going beyond the status quo. Making new connections. Seeing unseen patterns. Tapping into inspiration and intuition. Using your imagination in fresh ways. Adding value to the lives of others.

For the moment, think of creativity as a two-sided coin. One side of the coin is all about the WHAT -- as in the product, service, or deliverable you are birthing. The other side of the coin is all about the HOW -- as in what you need to do in order to birth something new and brilliant in the world.

25 awesome quotes on creativity
Idea Champions

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June 22, 2017
25 Awesome Quotes on Creativity

"The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity." - Alfred North Whitehead

"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good sense.'" - Pablo Picasso

"Everyone who's ever taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference." - Nolan Bushnell

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

"As competition intensifies, the need for creative thinking increases. It is no longer enough to do the same thing better . . . no longer enough to be efficient and solve problems." - Edward de Bono

"I make more mistakes than anyone else I know, and sooner or later, I patent most of them." - Thomas Edison

"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things." - Theodore Levitt

"There is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it." - Twyla Tharp

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." - Scott Adams

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things." - Ray Bradbury

"Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity." - Edwin Land

"There's room for everybody on the planet to be creative and conscious if you are your own person. If you're trying to be like somebody else, then there isn't." - Tori Amos

"The key question isn't 'What fosters creativity?' But it is why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create, but why do people not create." - Abraham Maslow

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." - Joseph Chilton Pierce

"You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." - Maya Angelou

"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The non-existent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired." - Nikos Kazantzakis

"Creativity is discontent translated into arts." - Eric Hoffer

"A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations." - Gerald Jampolsky

"Things are only impossible until they're not." - Jean-Luc Picard

"Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity." - T.S. Eliot

"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous." - Bill Moyers

"The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of the new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization." - Otto Rank

"The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards."
- Arthur Koestler

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
- Henry David Thoreau

"If you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself." - Carl Jung

Idea Champions

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May 30, 2017
38 Awesome Quotes on Change

1. "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin

2. "Change before you have to." - Jack Welch

3. "People don't resist change. They resist being changed!" -- Peter Senge

4. "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." - Leo Tolstoy

5. "The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking." - Albert Einstein

6. "Nothing endures but change." - Heraclitus

7. "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller

8. "Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have." - Margaret Mead

9. "I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed."- George Carlin

10. "The key to change... is to let go of fear." - Rosanne Cash

11. "When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them." - Andy Warhol

12. "Be the change you want to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi

13. "Things do not change; we change." - Henry David Thoreau

14. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." - St. Francis of Assisi

15. "We change whether we like it or not." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

16. "When you're finished changing, you're finished." - Benjamin Franklin

17. "All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." - Anatole France

18. "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." - Victor Frankl

19. "Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer." - Shunryu Suzuki

20. "If you want to make enemies, try to change something." - Woodrow Wilson

21. "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." - John Kenneth Galbraith

22. "Our only security is our ability to change." - John Lilly

23. "If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude." - Maya Angelou

24. "Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

25. "The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." - Alan Watts

26. "The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress." - Charles Kettering

27. "We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing." - R.D. Laing

28. "People change and forget to tell each other." - Lillian Hellman

29. "The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades." - John Kotter

30. "Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got." - Peter Drucker

31. "In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy."- J. Paul Getty

32. "Change your thoughts and you change your world." - Norman Vincent Peale

33. "Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon...everything's different." - Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes

34. "We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us." - Joseph Campbell

35. "It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." - C. S. Lewis

36. "If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." - Lao Tzu

37. "The changes we dread most may contain our salvation." - Barbara Kingsolver

38. "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got." - Anon

Big thanks to Val Vadeboncouer for locating these quotes.

Idea Champions
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One way to deal effectively with the coming changes

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:00 PM

April 30, 2017
If You Want to Jump Start Innovation, This Meme Will Help

For the past 27 years I have been working "in the belly of the beast" as Che Guevera once said -- corporate America. Along the way, I have met a ton of awesome people: visionary, creative, soulful, committed, and kind people. I have also met quite a few curmudgeons, naysayers, and skeptics. Such is life. No matter where YOU are on this spectrum, this blog post is dedicated to you. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE! Indeed that's where innovation begins -- in the mind. Your thoughts matter. As do your assumptions, intentions, self-talk, and mojo. Let go of doubt and hesitation. Lean into the possibilities before you! Let it rip!

50 quotes on possibility
Storytelling and the Innovation Mindset
Idea Champions

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April 20, 2017
Want to Innovate? Get Hungry!

Illustration: gapingvoid
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Build the appetite with storytelling

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April 02, 2017
Ready, Fire, Aim!

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March 17, 2017
Anti-Complaining Medicine for Bummed Out, Cranky Innovators

Idea Champions

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February 25, 2017
NOW IS THE TIME TO BEGIN!

20 awesome quotes on beginning
Awesome illustration: Gaping Void
Idea Champions

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November 11, 2016
How Einstein Looked at Problems

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September 28, 2016
I Exist As I Am

TimelessToday

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February 14, 2016
Send Some Love on Valentines Day

DEAR HEART OF INNOVATION READERS: Just in case there is someone you want to send some love to on Valentines Day, here's the love. Go ahead. Be forward. Forward it. Time to express your appreciation! Time is passing. Now's the time to let it rip!

Idea Champions
Infuse your stories with love
Hey, anything's possible!

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December 05, 2015
I'll Have the Salman Rushdie

The power to rethink a story
What would Maurice Ravel say?
Ditkoff on storytelling

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December 01, 2015
50 Quotes on the Power of Ideas

1. "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." - Albert Einstein

2. "If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself." - Rollo May

3. "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." - Oscar Wilde

4. "Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." - John Steinbeck

5. "The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away." - Linus Pauling

6. "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

7. "Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them." - Alfred North Whitehead

8. "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow." - Ovid

9. "All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea." - Napoleon Hill

10. "You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere." - Lee Iacocca

11. "No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

12. "Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged." - Thomas Edison

13. "It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas."
- Charles Peguy

14. "Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have." - Emile Chartier

15. "I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it." - Samuel Goldwyn

16. "An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself." - Charles Dickens

17. "Everyone is in love with their own ideas." - Carl Jung

18. "Why is it I always get my best ideas while shaving?" - Albert Einstein

19. "One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

20. "The air is full of ideas. They are knocking you in the head all the time. You only have to know what you want, then forget it, and go about your business. Suddenly, the idea will come through. It was there all the time." - Henry Ford

21. "Everything begins with an idea." - Earl Nightengale

22. "Capital isn't that important in business. Experience isn't that important. You can get both of these things. What is important is ideas." - Harvey Firestone

23. "A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one." - Mary Kay Ash

24. "We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us."- Friedrich Nietzche

25. "I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas." - Albert Einstein

26. "A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind." - Antoine St. Exupery

27. "If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it." - Charles Kettering

28. "Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea." - Woody Allen

29. "Just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come." - Jerry Garcia

30. "I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else." - Pablo Picasso

31. "New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done; 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing; 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!" - Arthur C. Clarke

32. "Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are just produced." - Alfred North Whitehead

33. "Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they're looking for ideas." - Paula Poundstone

34. "You do things when the opportunities come along. I've had periods in my life when I've had a bundle of ideas come along, and I've had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I'll do something. If not, I won't do a damn thing." - Warren Buffet

35. "If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied." - Alfred Noble

36. "Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life. Think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success. That is way great spiritual giants are produced." - Swami Vivekananda

37. "Money never starts an idea; it is the idea that starts the money." - William J. Cameron

38. "No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered."
- Winston Churchill

39. "If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it." - Thomas Mann

40. "The ability to express an idea is well nigh as important as the idea itself." - Bernard Baruch

41. "You can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea." - Medgar Evers

42. "After years of telling corporate citizens to 'trust the system', many companies must relearn instead to trust their people and encourage them to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power." - Rosabeth Moss Kanter

43. "The man with a new idea is a crank -- until the idea succeeds." - Mark Twain

44. "To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, requires a lot of discipline." - Steve Jobs

45. "An idea is salvation by imagination." - Frank Lloyd Wright

46. "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage

47. "The great accomplishments of man have resulted from the
transmission of ideas of enthusiasm." - Thomas Watson

48. "The new idea either finds a champion or it dies. No ordinary involvement with a new idea provides the energy required to cope with the indifference and resistance that change provokes." - Tom Peters

49. "Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys." - Sam Walton

50. "Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward: they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game." - Goethe

Idea Generating Keynotes
Idea Champions
Upgrade your brainstorming

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 05:20 PM | Comments (1)

November 30, 2015
What's the Story with Story?

If you want to deliver a meaningful, memorable message in your organization, consider delivering it as STORY, not a pep talk, harangue, slide show, case study, or download of data. People respond to and remember story WAY MORE than all of that other stuff.

Storytelling at Work
Our new storytelling blog
Our storytelling podcasts, videos, and interviews

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:09 PM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2015
The World Is Made of Stories

My new book on storytelling
Why businesses should care about storytelling
Newly launched Storytelling at Work blog

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2015
Albert Einstein on the Intuitive Mind

"The intuitive
mind
is a
sacred gift
and the
rational mind
a faithful
servant.
We have created
a society
that honors
the servant
and has
forgotten
the gift."

- Albert Einstein

One way to tap into the intuitive mind
And another way
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

October 10, 2015
Einstein Wasn't Into Six Sigma

"Not
everything
that
can
be
counted
counts;
not
everything
that
counts
can
be
counted."

- Albert Einstein

Brainstorm facilitation training
Idea Champions
Free the Genie

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:11 AM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2015
George Bernard Shaw on Innovation

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."

Idea Champions
Innovation through storytelling
What's the problem?

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2015
20 Awesome Quotes on Humor, Play, and Creativity

1. "To stimulate creativity one must develop childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition." - Albert Einstein

2. "If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play." - John Cleese

3. "If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think." - Clarence Darrow

4. "The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct arising from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves." - Carl Jung

5. "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny!'" - Isaac Asimov

6. "Serious play is not an oxymoron; it is the essence of innovation." - Michael Schrage

7. "Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing." - William James

8. "Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too." - Jimmy Buffett

9. "Keep your sense of humor, my friend; if you don't have a sense of humor it just isn't funny anymore." - Wavy Gravy

10. "Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place." - Mark Twain

11. "Play so that you may be serious." - Anarchasis

12. "When truly creative people come up with a new idea they don't reject it immediately because of its flaws. They play with it, looking for strengths and sliding over weaknesses." - David Campbell

13. "I'll play it first and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis

14. "All work and no play doesn't just make Jill and Jack dull, it kills the potential of discovery, mastery, and openness to change and flexibility and it hinders innovation and invention." - Joline Godfrey

15. "If I had no sense of humor, I would have long ago committed suicide." - Mahatma Ghandi

16. "Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain." - Edward de Bono

17. "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious." - Peter Ustinov

18. "The number one premise of business is that it need not be boring or dull. It ought to be fun. If it's not fun, you're wasting your life." - Tom Peters

19. "It's no accident that AHA and HAHA are spelled almost the same way." - Mitch Ditkoff

20. "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet." - Woody Allen

What we do
Our online web workshops
Laughter and AHA!

Photo

Photo

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August 24, 2015
The Power of Pause

Who
can
wait
quietly
while
the
mud
settles?

- Lao Tzu

Illustration
Idea Champions
My forthcoming book
My HuffPost articles

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:21 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2015
Don't Just Take Our Word For It

Many of you who read this blog, know us only from our writing. But we do way more than write a blog. We help organizations raise the bar for innovation in a wide variety of ways. And we've been doing it since 1987. Click through the slide show above to get the perspective from the folks who know -- our clients.

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:27 AM | Comments (0)

July 17, 2015
A Creative Tip from Einstein

One way to do so
Idea Champions
We talk our walk
Brainstorm Facilitation Training

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January 22, 2015
21 Quotes on Appreciation

1. "There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread." - Mother Theresa

2. "If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice." - Meister Eckhart

3. "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated." - William James

4. "Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it." - William Arthur Ward

5. "I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appreciate." - Elbert Hubbard

6. "Celebrate what you want to see more of." - Tom Peters

7. "Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others." -- Cicero

8. "We have to move from the unbridled pursuit of self-gain at the expense of others to recovering appreciation for what we gain by caring and sharing with one another." - Gail Sheehy

9. "The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them." - G.K.Chesterton

10. "Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune." - Sam Walton

11. "Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure." - Oprah Winfrey

12. "Encouraged people achieve the best; dominated people achieve second best; neglected people achieve the least." - Anonymous

13. "Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart."-- Seneca

14. "Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around." - Leo Buscaglia

15. "I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among men the greatest asset I possess. The way to develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement." - Charles Schwab

16. "You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink." - G.K. Chesterton

17. "We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures." - Thornton Wilder

18. "In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong." - John Ruskin

19. "There are two things people want more than sex and money -- recognition and praise." - Mary Kay Ash

20. "Appreciation can make a day, even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary." - Margaret Cousins

21. "Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful." - Buddha

Big thanks and a flying chest bump to Val Vadeboncoeur for finding these great quotes.

Idea Champions
MitchDitkoff.com
I appreciate Al Siraat College in Melbourne, Australia.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2014
Thoroughly Thoreau

"I have learned,
that if one
advances
confidently
in the direction
of his dreams,
and endeavors to
live the life
he has imagined,
he will meet
with a success
unexpected
in common hours."

-- Henry David Thoreau

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)

July 31, 2014
Genius Is Simpler Than You Think, According to Mozart

"Neither
a lofty
degree
of intelligence,
nor
imagination,
nor both together,
go to the
making of
genius.

Love, Love, Love.
That
is the
soul of
genius."

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:22 PM | Comments (2)

July 07, 2014
Rene Descartes Had It Backwards

Rene Descartes, the famous French philosopher, mathematician, and writer is remembered by many as the author of the famous phrase, "I think therefore I am."

With all due respect to the probably-way-smarter-than-me Mr.Descartes, I don't buy it.

Based on my non-Aristotelian, late night sojourns into the flip side of thinking, it's become very clear to me that a more accurate statement would be "I am therefore I think."

Then again, since we all know Werner Heisenberg irrefutably proved that the experimenter affects the experiment, it is likely that the truest philosophical statement of being would probably take on the shape of the person who said it.

And so, in a highly non-caffeinated fit of blogospheric bravado, I present to you 15 alternate statements of epistemological coolitude that give Descartes' tired phrase (and mine) a run for their money.

1. "I wink, therefore I am." - Sarah Palin
2. "I blink, therefore I am." - Malcolm Gladwell
3. "I link, therefore I am." - Larry Page and Sergey Brin
4. "I sink therefore I am." - Davey Jones and his Locker
5. "I stink therefore I am." - Pepe LePew

6. "I drink, therefore I am." - WC Fields
7. "I ink, therefore I am." - Kinkos
8. "I slink, therefore I am." - Marilyn Monroe
9. "I rink, therefore I am." - Wayne Gretzky
10. "I kink, therefore I am." - Ray Davies

11. "I clink, therefore I am." - Moet Chandon
12. "I fink, therefore I am." - Vinny "The Rat" Scalucci
13. "I pink, therefore I am." - Mary Kay
14. "I tink, therefore I am." - Bob Marley
15. "I plink, therefore I am." - Ernest Kaai

Got others? Lay them on me.

A big thank you to Cary Bayer and Barney Stacher for a bunch of the aforementioned pearls of wisdom

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:39 PM | Comments (5)

April 07, 2014
Not Knowing What Can't Be Done

Who do you need to collaborate with who lives the spirit of what Henry Ford was talking about? And when will you contact them?

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2014
Creators on Creating

Idea Champions
What We Do
Sampling of our articles
Our innovation keynotes

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2013
Miles Davis on Mistakes

Idea Champions
50 quotes on failure
50 quotes on risk taking

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2013
WORK: The Chance to Find Yourself

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2013
Walt Disney Speaks!

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:38 PM | Comments (0)

November 09, 2012
50 Awesome Quotes on Risk Taking

Is it time
to try
something new?
Get out of
your comfort zone?
Take a new step
or leap?
Feeling
a little queasy?
Need some
inspiration
to go beyond
the status quo?
Here's the ticket.
50 quotes on risk taking,
my latest piece
on Huffington Post.

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2012
100 Awesome Quotes on What It Really Takes to Innovate

100
cool quotes
on what
it really
takes
to innovate.
Noodle
on
anyone
of these
to get
your
creative
juices
flowing.
Just published
in the
Huffington Post.

My others posts there.
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2012
Be a Student of Life

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:02 PM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2012
Punchline of the Day

"Everyone
has
a
plan
until
he's
punched
in
the
face."

- Mike Tyson

Idea Champions
Innovation webinars
Free the Genie

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2012
Miles Davis on Mistakes

Rethinking Failure
Our new webinars
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:09 AM | Comments (1)

March 28, 2012
The Joy of Outlandishness

Idea Champions University

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)

Does Laughter Enable Thinking?

Our webinars

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2012
The Beauty of Bad

Our new webinar series

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:35 AM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2012
Thomas Edison on Making Mistakes

"I make
more
mistakes
than anyone
else
I know,
and sooner
or later,
I patent
most of them."

- Thomas Edison

Rethinking Failure
Risk taking quotes Innovation keynotes

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2012
Einstein on Stupidity

"Everybody
is a genius.
But if you
judge a fish
by its ability
to climb a tree,
it will live
its whole life believing
that it is stupid."

- Albert Einstein

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

February 29, 2012
What Our Clients Say About Us

Some readers
of this blog
think
all we do is write
this blog.
Not true.
Our main thing is
helping organizations innovate.
What we write about
is the fruit
of our experience.
Better to hear
what our clients say about us
than what we say.
Interested?
See the value?

Click here.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:17 AM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2012
The Art and Science of Losing Count

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
-- Albert Einstein

If you have even the slightest respect for the wild-haired father of modern physics, consider this: Your organization's fascination with metrics is often nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to quantify the unquantifiable -- a compulsive effort to validate that which you and everyone else already know to be true.

I'm not suggesting you abandon metrics (I track, daily, how may unique visitors make it to my website) -- all I'm saying is not everything needs to be measured, at least not all of the time.

The core of your company's "innovation process" is actually less about mind, and more about heart. (And if you're about to ask me how I know that, please read the Einstein quote one more time).

More from Albert

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2011
Henry Miller on Confusion

The value of confusion
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)

October 13, 2011
John Lennon on Life

Innovators: You may be conjuring up an unbelievably cool future product or service, but please remember that THIS MOMENT is precious. Be present with your wife, husband, children, friends, neighbors, customers, clients, and self. Smell the flowers!

Idea Champions
Innovation Kit

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2011
Mozart on Genius

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)

September 30, 2011
Go After What You Want

Here's to the Crazy Ones
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:57 PM | Comments (1)

Everyone's a Genius, But....

If you want to create a culture of innovation in your organization, make sure you are matching people to projects that have passion for and have enough competence to succeed in.

If you're sensing that "things" aren't going all that well, it may be due to the fact that you've got fish climbing trees. Your task? Find a pond for the fish... and find some lovers of tree-climbing to pick the fruit or swing from the branches. Problem solved.

Idea Champions
Thanks to Lee Alter for the heads up.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

How Many of Your Thoughts Are Original?

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:06 AM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2011
The Creative Adult...

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:06 PM | Comments (1)

September 19, 2011
Intuit! Then Do It!

What is your intuition telling you about your most fascinating project?

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:47 PM | Comments (1)

September 15, 2011
Picasso on the Act of Creation

Yes, sometimes things have to fall apart before they can reform themselves into something new and sustainable.

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 05:43 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2011
Go Beyond Logic and Analysis

Idea Champions
More Einstein quotes

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

The Case for Laughter

There's a reason why AHA and HAHA are almost spelled the same...

Clarence Darrow
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:43 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2011
Steve Martin on Presentation Skills

Now... if we can only get Steve Martin to facilitate our new presentation skills course.

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2011
The Beauty of Invisible Labor

What is work, anyway? Too many of us devote ourselves to looking busy when, in fact, the breakthroughs often come when nothing seems to be happening.

Victor Hugo
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:25 PM | Comments (1)

September 05, 2011
99% of Success is Built on Failure

Or as Thomas Watson, former CEO of IBM once said, "Hurry up and make your first 500 mistakes." Your move...

Charles Kettering
Idea Champions
Rethinking Failure

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)

September 03, 2011
Express Your Ideas!

BTW, Rollo May wrote one of the best books on the roots of creativity that I have ever read. Very compelling. It's a classic: The Courage to Create.

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2011
Building Innovation Capabilities

Most Heart of Innovation readers only know about Idea Champions from what they read on this blog. They do not necessarily know what we DO when we're not writing this blog.

If this describes you, here -- in the words of one of our newest clients (Highmark) -- is a clue.

"Idea Champions did a fantastic job conducting training for our leadership team! They have a very pragmatic approach to building innovation capabilities -- one that leaders can really connect with. The training was entertaining and hit the key points home. They are highly recommended and we plan to continue having them as a partner."

- Darcy Smith, VP, Subsidiary HR

What our other clients say
Image

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2011
The Creative Impulse

Excerpted from this slide show
Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2011
A Leadership of the Average

"No institution
can possibly survive
if it needs geniuses
or supermen
to manage it.
It must be organized
in such a way
as to be able to get along
under a leadership
composed of
average human beings."

- Peter Drucker

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:17 PM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2011
No Time to Innovate?

"Time
is
a
created
thing.
To
say
'I
don't
have
time'
is
to
say
'I
don't
want
to.'"

- Lao Tzu

Image

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:51 AM | Comments (1)

March 16, 2011
Be There Then

"You can't just
ask customers
what they want
and then try to
give that to them.
By the time
you get it built,
they'll want
something new."

- Steve Jobs

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2011
Music to My Ears

"I
can't
understand
why
people
are
frightened
of
new
ideas.
I'm
frightened
of
the
old
ones."

- John Cage

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2011
36 Awesome Quotes on Time

1. "Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time' is to say 'I don't want to.'" - Lao Tzu

2. "To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time." - Leonard Bernstein

3. "Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." - H. Jackson Brown

4. "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." - Albert Einstein

5. "The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time."- Abraham Lincoln

6. "Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in." - Napoleon Bonaparte

7. "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs

8. "Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion." - Eckhart Tolle

9. "Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time." - Jim Rohn

10. "Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends." - William Shakespeare

11. "Time is what we want most, but what we use worst." - William Penn

12. "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in." - Henry David Thoreau

13. "Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity." - Henry Van Dyke

14. "You may delay, but time will not." - Ben Franklin

15. "If you want work well done, select a busy man -- the other kind has no time." - Elbert Hubbard

16. "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know." - Saint Augustine

17. "Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right -- it holds my golden time!" - Oliver Wendell Holmes

18. "Both young children and old people have a lot of time on their hands. That's probably why they get along so well." - Jonathan Carroll

19. "My time is now." - John Turner

20. "All my possessions for a moment of time." - Queen Elizabeth

21. "What may be done at any time will be done at no time." - Scottish proverb

22. "Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save." - Will Rogers

23. "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." - Groucho Marx

24. "I've been on a calendar, but I have never been on time." - Marilyn Monroe

25. "The surest way to be late is to have plenty of time." - Leo Kennedy

26. "A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours." - Milton Berle

27. "The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet." - William Gibson

28. "The key is in not spending time, but in investing it." -
Stephen Covey

29. "It's not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?" - Henry David Thoreau

30. "Take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves." - Lord Chesterfield

31. "In truth, people can generally make time for what they choose to do; it is not really the time but the will that is lacking." - Sir John Lubbock

32. "I am definitely going to take a course on time management -- just as soon as I can work it into my schedule." - Louis Boone

33. "You will never 'find' time for anything. If you want time, you must make it." - Charles Bruxton

34. "The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot." -
- Michael Altshule

35. "Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the only thing he can't afford to lose." - Thomas Edison

36. "The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something." - Carl Sandburg

Idea Champions
Time to think creatively

Image
Photo

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:57 AM | Comments (1)

December 18, 2010
Noodle on This Today

I know
there is something
you really want to do
that feels a bit risky.
A new venture?
Speaking your truth?
Going back to square one?
Well, guess what?
Now's the time.
No more stalling.
No more over-analyzing.
No more jive.
Go for it!
You can do this...

Idea Champions

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2010
One Stop Shopping for Great Innovation Quotes

Seems like our past postings on quotes have been a big hit in the blogosphere (and maybe New Jersey). So, here ya go -- links to all the cool quotes posted on The Heart of Innovation in the past year.

1. 100 Awesome Quotes on What It Really Takes to Innovate

2. 50 Awesome Quotes on Risktaking

3. 15 Awesome Quotes on Creative Collaboration

4. Rethinking Failure

5. 20 Awesome Quotes on the Relationship Between Play, Humor, and Creativity

6. The Timeless Wisdom of Einstein

7. Famous Last Words

By the way, besides posting tons of free stuff on this blog and Twitter, we also work for a living. kick asss... Creative Thinking Training... Brainstorm Facilitation Training... Leadership Development... Online brainstorming... Ideation sessions... Innovation workshops... Culture of Innovation consulting.

Photo

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:06 PM | Comments (1)

May 08, 2010
Get on the Stick!

Source

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 03:37 PM | Comments (1)

April 26, 2010
Failure Is Not What You Think It Is

What do Henry Ford, Miles Davis, Thomas Edison, Confucius, Robert Louis Stevenson, Horace, Robert Kennedy, Sir Laurence Olivier, Thomas Watson, Beverly Sills, Douglas McArthur, Winston Churchill, Malcolm Forbes, John Barrymore, Paramahansa Yogananda, and Charles Kettering have in common?

An enlightened view of what "failure" is.

If you want to innovate, you will first need to let go of your notion of what failure is all about...

"An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots." -- Charles Kettering

"Do not fear mistakes. There are none." -- Miles Davis

"The way to succeed is to double your failure rate."
-- Thomas Watson, Founder of IBM

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently."
-- Henry Ford

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." -- Confucius

"Give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself." -- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it." -- Horace

"I have not failed once. I've just found 10,000 ways that didn't work." -- Thomas Edison

"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
-- Robert F. Kennedy

"No matter how well you perform, there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy." -- Sir Laurence Olivier

"If your life is free of failures, you're not taking enough risks."
-- H. Jackson Brown

"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try." -- Beverly Sills

"I failed my way to success." -- Thomas Edison

"99 percent of success is built on failure." -- Charles Kettering

"Act as if it were impossible to fail." -- Dorothea Brande

"Failure is success if we learn from it." -- Malcolm Forbes

"You can only be as good as you dare to be bad." -- John Barrymore

"The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success." -- Paramahansa Yogananda

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down." -- Mary Pickford

"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." -- Winston Churchill

"We are not retreating -- we are advancing in another direction."
-- Douglas MacArthur

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -- Thomas A. Edison

"Fall seven times, stand up eight." -- Japanese Proverb

"Stumbling is not falling." -- Portuguese Proverb

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:19 AM | Comments (7)

April 19, 2010
A General Rule of Thumb

"Never
tell
people
how
to
do
things.
Tell
them
what
to
do
and
they
will
surprise
you
with
their
ingenuity."

-- General George Patton

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2010
Kaleidoscopic Leaders

"Creativity is a lot like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. You look at a set of elements, the same ones everyone else sees, but then reassemble those floating bits and pieces into an enticing new possibility. Effective leaders are able to shake up their thinking as though their brains are kaleidoscopes, permitting an array of different patterns out of the same bits of reality." - Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Thanks to Chuck Frey for the quote.

Image

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2009
"The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child." - Thomas Edison

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2009
Mother Teresa on Innovation (and Life)

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; BE KIND ANYWAY.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends, and some true enemies; BE SUCCESSFUL ANYWAY.

If you are honest and sincere, people may deceive you; BE HONEST AND SINCERE ANYWAY.

What you spend years creating, others may tear down overnight; CREATE ANYWAY.

If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous; BE HAPPY ANYWAY.

The good you do today, will often be forgotten tomorrow; DO IT ANYWAY.

In the final analysis, it's between you and God; IT WAS NEVER ABOUT YOU AND THEM ANYWAY.

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 02:42 AM | Comments (2)

May 01, 2009
"Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted, counts." (Einstein)

Some things we can measure. Some things we can't. And just because we can measure something doesn't make it more real or significant.

Einstein knew this. There was always the "X factor" for him -- mystery, the unknown, and the impossible to quantify.

That's why he used to conduct "thought experiments" in his lab -- times when he turned away from the blackboard with all those exotic formulas and simply daydreamed -- letting the intuitive side of him take over for a change.

Hmmm... what might YOU be attempting to quantify or measure that would best be left alone?

What might you be needing to TRUST that abides outside the boundaries of the rational, logical, analytical, scientific mind?

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2009
Wright Brain Thinking

OK. Break time. Park your left brain and get into your right. I mean Wright, as in Steven -- a truly funny fellow I once ran into while jogging on the streets of New York City.

If the following jams your mind, good. You've been thinking too much anyway. Like I said, it's time for a break...

"Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time."

"I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side."

"For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier. I put them in the same room and let them fight it out."

"I bought some batteries, but they weren't included."

"I intend to live forever. So far, so good."

"I like to reminisce with people I don't know."

"I invented the cordless extension cord."

"I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second."

"If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?"

"What's another word for Thesaurus?"

"I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter."

"I think it's wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly."

"I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering."

"I watched the Indy 500, and I was thinking that if they left earlier they wouldn't have to go so fast."

"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

"I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time". So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance."

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2009
"Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it." -- Horace

OK, movers and shakers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and other assorted humanoids adversely affected by the crumbling global economy... it's time to embrace the fact that the difficulties you're facing actually have a SILVER LINING.

The old forms are dying. Everything you were depending on is no longer dependable. For many of you, it's back to Square One -- time again to reinvent yourself, your business, and your way of relating to the world. Is this a problem? Only if you think it is. And only if the required imperative to adapt and change puts you into some kind of catatonic state.

SNAP OUT OF IT!

You can't afford the luxury of obsessing about the past or blaming the banks or Bernie Madoff or your company or Wall Street or whatever. It's time to take the bull by the horns. (Or at least wave a red flag instead of a white one).

As the Roman poet, Horace, so eloquently said: "Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it" -- the Italian version of that old saw, "Necessity is the mother of invention."

So... may all you latent geniuses of the world rise up and embrace the moment of change that is upon you.

And remember, you are not in this alone. Join forces with others! Create alliancies, collaborations, and partnerships with people who bring something to the table -- and who realize, as you do, that now is the time to make magic happen.

Photo lovingly lifted from Horace's home page on Wikipedia

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 12:07 PM | Comments (1)