Quotes About Achievement

12 In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, "I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.

As people decide among themselves to turn the fact of potential into the fact of results, the goal almost sets itself.

turning good into great takes energy, but the building of momentum adds more energy back into the pool than it takes out.

those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity.

Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.

those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity. Yes, turning good into great takes energy, but the building of momentum adds more energy back into the pool than it takes out. Conversely, perpetuating mediocrity is an inherently depressing process and drains much more energy out of the pool than it puts back in.

The only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving."38

Accomplishing a 20 Mile March, consistently, in good times and bad, builds confidence. Tangible achievement in the face of adversity reinforces the 10X perspective: we are ultimately responsible for improving performance. We never blame circumstance; we never blame the environment.

You don't get a chance to adjust and finagle, and decide that you really didn't intend to do that anyway, and readjust your objectives to make yourself look better. You never just focus on what you've accomplished for the year; you focus on what you've accomplished relative to exactly what you said you were going to accomplish—no matter how tough the measure. That was a discipline learned at Abbott, and that we carried into Amgen.3

But there is a second answer to the question of why greatness, one that is at the very heart of what motivated us to undertake this huge project in the first place: the search for meaning, or more precisely, the search for meaningful work. I

And while you must create robust new extensions to your flywheel (and given enough time, you might even create entirely new flywheels) be sure to keep building momentum with your winning strategies. Never forget, the Next Big Thing is very likely the Big Thing you already have. Make the most of your victories. Keep turning the flywheel.

The only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving.

A good rule of thumb is a 10- to 25-year horizon, perhaps longer if the mission is particularly challenging. Of course, some missions can be fulfilled faster than ten years, and it may be appropriate and effective to have a short time frame. Whatever time-length mission you set, be sure to recognize when you've fulfilled it and, most important, set a new one. Otherwise, you may fall into one of the most dangerous of traps: the "We've Arrived Syndrome.

part, always great," he said. "They never had to turn themselves from good companies into great companies. They had parents like David

The best BHAGs make you think big. They force you to engage in both long-term building and short-term intensity. The only way to achieve a BHAG is with a relentless sense of urgency, day after day, week after week, month after month, for years. What do you need to do today, with monomaniacal focus, and tomorrow and the next day and the day after that to defy the probabilities and ultimately achieve your BHAG?

For BHAG-driven people, the extended discomfort, the enduring quest, can itself be a form of bliss. When you commit to a BHAG, it lives with you.

A good mission has a finish line—you must be able to know when you've done it, like the moon mission or a mountaintop. A good mission is risky, falling in the gray area where reason says, "This is unreasonable," and intuition says, "But we believe we can do it nonetheless.

Finally—and this is important—a good mission has a specific time frame for its achievement.

What we did was so simple, and we kept it simple. It

Good is the enemy of great. And

Strategy is simply the basic methodology you intend to apply to attain your company's current mission. "This is how we will achieve our mission." That, in a nutshell, is strategy. There's no mystery to it. It's not a difficult concept.

In our research, we found no systematic pattern linking executive compensation to the process of companies going from good to great. Financial incentives don't—indeed cannot—cause companies to achieve greatness, for the simple reason that you cannot turn the wrong people into the right people with money. After all, if someone needs financial incentives to perform at a high level, he or she lacks the intense inner drive, the productive neurosis, required to do great things.

Smith never wavered. Twenty-five years later, Kimberly-Clark owned Scott Paper outright and beat Procter & Gamble in six of eight product categories.12 In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, "I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job."13

Asked to paint a picture of the company in 20 years, the executives mentioned such things as "on the cover of Business Week as a model success story . . . the Fortune most admired top-ten list . . . the best science and business graduates want to work here . . . people on airplanes rave about one of our products to seatmates . . . 20 consecutive years of profitable growth . . . an entrepreneurial culture that has spawned half a dozen new divisions from within . . .