Quotes About Excellence

Great bosses and world-class organizations hire motivated people, set high expectations, and give their people room to become remarkable.

On top of this, if you do great work you gain the reward of knowing you're doing great work. Your day snaps into alignment with your dreams, and you no longer have to pretend you're mediocre. You're free to contribute.

You can't win by being more average than average.

A great school experience won't keep you from being remarkable, but it's usually not sufficient to guarantee that you will become so. There's something else at work here.

Sometimes, we're so focused on being consistent that we also lower the bar on amazing.

My new favorite word is 'awkward.'...The reason we need to be in search of awkward is that awkward is the barrier between us and excellence, between where we are and the remarkable. If it were easy, everyone would have done it already, and it wouldn't be worth the effort.

Excellence isn't about working extra hard to do what you're told. It's about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.

You really can't try to do everything, especially if you intend to be the best in the world.

It's Almost Impossible to Overinvest in Becoming the Market Leader.

most competitors quit long before they've created something that makes it to the top.

Quitting is difficult. Quitting requires you to acknowledge that you're never going to be #1 in the world. At least not at this. So it's easier just to put it off, not admit it, settle for mediocre.

The web has made kicking ass easier to achieve, and mediocrity harder to sustain. Mediocrity now howls in protest." The

People settle. They settle for less than they are capable of. Organizations settle too. For good enough instead of best in the world. If you're not going to put in the effort to be my best possible choice, why bother?

It's insulting to call a professional talented. She's skilled, first and foremost. Many people have talent, but only a few care enough to show up fully, to earn their skill. Skill is rarer than talent. Skill is earned. Skill is available to anyone who cares enough.

What will make someone a linchpin is not a shortcut. It's the understanding of which hard work is worth doing. The only thing that separates great artists from mediocre ones is their ability to push through the dip.

real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world. A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

If you want to be a superstar, then you need to find a field with a steep Dip—a barrier between those who try and those who succeed.

The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers. Am

When you're the best in the world, you share the benefits (the income, the attention, the privileges, the respect) with just a handful of people or organizations or brands.

Average Is for Losers

Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else. "Never

Organizing around the average, then, is too expensive. Organizing around average means that the organization has exchanged the high productivity of exceptional performance for the ease and security of an endless parade of average performers. The

The second reason there are such tremendous benefits to being number one is a little more subtle. Being at the top matters because there's room at the top for only a few.

They don't understand that Excellence isn't about working extra hard to do what you're told. It's about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.