Quotes from Marcus Buckingham

When you feel as though you can't do something, the simple antidote is action: Begin doing it. Start the process, even if it's just a simple step, and don't stop at the beginning.

People buy pads all the time, because they want to write stuff down. We're never going to get away from paper, ever. People like writing; that's why more people are writing more real thank-you notes now - not just to stand out, but because there's something about pen to paper, about holding something cool in your hands.

Emphasize your strengths on your resume, in your cover letters and in your interviews. It may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people simply list everything they've ever done. Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.

Always work hard. Intensity clarifies. It creates not only momentum, but also the pressure you need to feel either friction, or fulfillment.

I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out.

The true genius of a great manager is his or her ability to individualize. A great manager is one who understands how to trip each person's trigger.

Google and Facebook, each in their own way, have revolutionized the delivery of advertising based on search and social networking, creating a sort of anti-Spam: targeted, relevant ads that a consumer might actually welcome rather than spurn.

Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment.

The best way to find out whether you're on the right path? Stop looking at the path.

Gen Y is really quite distinct from Gen X; it's really self-involved and very narcissistic - their cameras are filled with pictures of themselves; Facebook, it's about me. It's a generation that's been pampered by their parents and their schools, given prizes for just taking part.

It's a special person - and personality - who can lead a start-up to soaring success and sustain that success for the long term. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg are star examples.

Many of us feel stress and get overwhelmed not because we're taking on too much, but because we're taking on too little of what really strengthens us.

My career expertise is as a psychometrician - somebody who builds tests to measure personality. Companies would employ me to build interviews to measure the talents of people before they were hired.

A note of caution: We can never achieve goals that envy sets for us. Looking at your friends and wishing you had what they had is a waste of precious energy. Because we are all unique, what makes another happy may do the opposite for you. That's why advice is nice but often disappointing when heeded.

We dream of having a clean house - but who dreams of actually doing the cleaning? We don't have to dream about doing the work, because doing the work is always within our grasp; the dream, in this sense, is to attain the goal without the work.

How can we all grow?

The power of skills and knowledge is that they are transferable from one person to another. Their limitation is that they are often situation-specific — faced with an unanticipated scenario, they lose much of their power. In contrast, the power of talent is that it is transferable from situation to situation.

Sir, I'm afraid that the quality of this airline is partly measured by on-time departures. And unfortunately, on-time departures are measured by when we left the gate, not by wheels-up.

If you are innately skeptical of other people's motives, then no amount of good behavior in the past will ever truly convince you that they are not just about to disappoint you. Suspicion is a permanent condition.

In fact, over the last twenty years, authors have offered up over nine thousand different systems, languages, principles, and paradigms to help explain the mysteries of management and leadership.

Your childish clarity faded, and you started listening to the world around you more closely than you did to yourself. The world was persuasive and loud, and so you resigned yourself to conforming to its demands.

Whereas cascaded goals are a control mechanism, cascaded meaning is a release mechanism. It brings to life the context within which everyone works, but it leaves the locus of control—for choosing, deciding, prioritizing, goal setting—where it truly resides, and where understanding of the world and the ability to do something about it intersect: with the team member.

Simply put, this is one insight we heard echoed by tens of thousands of great managers: People don't change that much. Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough.

And what of the notion that "trust must be earned"? Sensible though it may sound, great managers reject it. They know that if, fundamentally, you don't trust people, then there is no line, no point in time, beyond which people suddenly become trustworthy.