WORK: The Chance to Find Yourself
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April 11, 2013Creativity and the Play Instinct
Quotes on humor and playfulness
Idea Champions
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March 23, 2013The Power of Pause
Who
can
wait
quietly
while
the
mud
settles?
- Lao Tzu
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March 11, 201315 Awesome Quotes on the Real Meaning of Work
1. "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others." - Mahatma Gandhi
2. "Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you." - Mother Teresa
3. "How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?" - Vincent Van Gogh
4. "Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love." - Martin Luther King Jr.
5. "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." - Anne Frank
6. "Selfless service alone gives the needed strength and courage to awaken the sleeping humanity in one's heart." - Sai Baba
7. "I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted, and behold, service was joy." - Rabindranath Tagore
8. "As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do." - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
9. "Only those who have learned the power of sincere and selfless contribution experience life's deepest joy: true fulfillment." - Anthony Robbins
10. "Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old, shared a little of what he is good at doing." - Quincy Jones
11. "If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one." - Mother Teresa
12. "I shall pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again." - Mahatma Gandhi
13. I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do." - Edward Everett Hale
14. "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." - Edmund Burke
15. "Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do." - John Wooden
Big thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for finding these quotes.
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February 19, 2013Go Beyond Analysis Paralysis
One way to do so
Idea Champions
We talk our walk
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January 17, 2013Walt Disney Speaks!
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January 15, 201350 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. "The Wright brother flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility." - Charles Kettering
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. "I am where I am because I believe in all possibilities." - Whoopi Goldberg
8. "What is now proved, was once only imagined." - William Blake
9. "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." - Mark Twain
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. "God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed. That is the meaning of evolution." - Graham Greene
13. "Whether you believe you can or not, you're right." - Henry Ford
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. "The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react." - George Bernard Shaw
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. "When nothing is sure, everything is possible." - Margaret Drabble
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. "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." - Les Brown
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 Tennyson
50. "If not you, who? If not now, when?" - Rabbi Hillel
Something else that's possible
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January 02, 201338 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
Keynotes on Change
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December 17, 2012If You Want More Time to Create
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December 08, 2012Creators on Creating
Inspiring slide show of quotes by breakthrough thinkers, innovators, and other assorted wizards. View full screen for max impact.
Idea Champions
Creative Thinking training
Keynotes on Creativity and Innovation
Innovation Kits
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November 20, 2012Miles Davis on Mistakes
Idea Champions
50 quotes on failure
50 quotes on risk taking
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November 09, 201250 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.
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November 02, 2012Einstein as Nostradamus
Thanks to Farrell Reynolds for the heads up.
Idea Champions
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October 24, 2012100 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
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September 10, 201250 Awesome 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. "Go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is." -- Jimmy Carter
7. "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." -- Pablo Picasso
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.
Idea Champions
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August 27, 2012Walt Disney Speaks!
What are YOU dreaming about doing?
Online catalyst for your company
Idea Champions
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August 23, 201215 Awesome 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
Got others? Lay them on me!
This post is dedicated to Ramsey Margolis
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August 18, 2012Rene 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
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:39 PM | Comments (4)
July 25, 201220 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
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July 10, 2012100 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
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May 31, 201250 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
Big thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for locating most of these quotes.
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May 27, 201225 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
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." - Albert Einstein
"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
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May 06, 2012"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".
True, I did sign my birth name -- Mitchell Ditkoff -- to some pieces, including most of the blog posts on Heart of Innovation and Heart of the Matter, but that was all free stuff.
The vast majority of what I've written? All "anonymous". Bottom line, I've never really gotten my due.
How could I when millions of my readers never knew that "anonymous" was my pseudonym?
Please don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining, nor do I have any regrets about my decision. It felt right at the time. But now -- with one kid about to go to college and the other not far behind -- 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 read this anonymous pearl of mine -- or 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, from now on in, you encounter anything attributed to "anonymous" you link it to my website or any of the following cyberpalatial residences of mine.
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The goal? To model what it is 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
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April 22, 201234 Awesome 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.
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April 11, 201220 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
Thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for locating these quotes
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April 09, 2012Be a Student of Life
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April 06, 2012Punchline of the Day
"Everyone
has
a
plan
until
he's
punched
in
the
face."
- Mike Tyson
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April 03, 2012Miles Davis on Mistakes
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March 28, 2012The Joy of Outlandishness
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Does Laughter Enable Thinking?
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March 27, 2012The Beauty of Bad
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March 23, 2012Thomas Edison on Making Mistakes
"I make
more
mistakes
than anyone
else
I know,
and sooner
or later,
I patent
most of them."
- Thomas Edison
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March 18, 2012Einstein 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
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50 Awesome Quotes on the Power of Your 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
Free the Genie
Innovation Kit
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)
February 29, 2012What 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?
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:17 AM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2012The 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).
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)
January 17, 201224 Awesome 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
Thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for locating a bunch of these
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)
January 05, 201221 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
Idea Champions
Free the Genie
Thanks to Val Vadeboncoeur for finding most of these quotes
Photo
Illustration
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2011Henry Miller on Confusion
The value of confusion
Idea Champions
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2011Thoroughly 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)
October 13, 2011John 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!
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)
October 03, 2011Mozart on Genius
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
September 30, 2011Go 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, 2011The Creative Adult...
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:06 PM | Comments (1)
September 19, 2011Intuit! 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, 2011Picasso on the Act of Creation
Yes, sometimes things have to fall apart before they can reform themselves into something new and sustainable.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 05:43 AM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2011Go 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, 2011Steve Martin on Presentation Skills
Now... if we can only get Steve Martin to facilitate our new presentation skills course.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)
September 07, 2011The 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.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:25 PM | Comments (1)
September 06, 2011The Joy of Not Knowing What Can't Be Done
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)
September 05, 201199% 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
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September 04, 201135 Awesome Quotes from Einstein
Since 1986, every innovation workshop I've facilitated has included a poster of Albert Einstein.
Somehow, Einstein's smiling countenance inspires everyone in the room -- no matter what their social style, gender, or title.
The only thing I find more fascinating than this is the incredible amount of powerful quotes he left behind.
1. "The only real valuable thing is intuition."
2. "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
3. "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
4. "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
5. "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."
6. "The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge."
7. "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
8. "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
9. "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
10. "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."
11. "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
12. "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
13. "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
14. "Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile."
15. "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That's relativity."
16. "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."
17. "What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world."
18. "A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be."
19. "A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?"
20. "A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?"
21. "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
22. "Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."
23. "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
24. "Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them."
25. "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
26. "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
27. "I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right."
28. "The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive."
29. "Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value."
30. "We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us."
31. "You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I've only ever had one."
32. "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
33. "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
34. "Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts."
35. "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
Idea Champions
Photo
Photo
Photo
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September 03, 2011Express 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, 2011Building 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
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August 27, 2011The Creative Impulse
Excerpted from this slide show
Idea Champions
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August 26, 2011A 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."
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:17 PM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2011Genius 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."
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 09:22 PM | Comments (2)
June 01, 2011There's Type "A" and also Plan "B"
"The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B."
- James York
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 06:40 PM | Comments (1)
May 08, 2011No 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
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 04:51 AM | Comments (1)
April 04, 2011George 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."
- George Bernard Shaw
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2011Be 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, 2011Music 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)
February 01, 201121 Awesome 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. "Correction does much, but encouragement does more. Encouragement after censure is as the sun after a shower." - Goethe
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. "Next to excellence is the appreciation of it." - William Makepeace Thackeray
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.
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)
January 27, 201136 Awesome Quotes on Time
The biggest excuse people make about why they can't innovate is the lack of time. Really?
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
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December 18, 2010Noodle 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...
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)
September 01, 2010One 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
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.
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May 08, 2010Get on the Stick!
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April 26, 2010Failure Is Not What You Think It Is
What do Henry Ford, Miles Davis, Thomas Edison, Confucius, Robert Louis Stevenson, Horace, Bill Cosby, 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 don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." -- Bill Cosby
"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 (6)
April 19, 2010A 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, 2010Kaleidoscopic 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.
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)
September 11, 2009Albert 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
Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)
August 29, 2009Mother 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 (1)
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, 2009Wright 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)
