Quotes About Balance

Suppose you have a teenage son and your normal conversation is something like, "Clean your room. Button your shirt. Turn down the radio. Go get a haircut. And don't forget to take out the garbage!" Over a period of time, the withdrawals far exceed the deposits.

In time management jargon, this is called the Pareto Principle—80 percent of the results flow out of 20 percent of the activities.

no exercise, poor nutrition, burning the candle at both ends—and when we have a problem, we expect the medical profession to pick up the pieces.

We need to move beyond time management to life leadership

But is there a chance that efficiency is not the answer? Is getting more things done in less time going to make a difference

learned to focus on truly important things, not just urgent things.

Their guidance is a function of the demands of the work. Their wisdom and power come in the limited areas of their work, rendering them ineffective in other areas of life.

In our quest for short-term returns, or results, we often ruin a prized physical asset—a car, a computer, a washer or dryer, even our body or our environment. Keeping P and PC in balance makes a tremendous difference in the effective use of physical assets.

Put First Things First).

we have inadvertently become so focused on our own building that we have forgotten the foundation that holds it up;

Dr. Frankl hypothesized that we have three parts to our nature: our body, our mind, and our spirit. But his deepest conviction is that most—not all—diseases originate in the spirit. That is, in a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of hollowness, a sense of purposelessness. No mission. No vision. No future.

My own maxim of personal effectiveness is this: Manage from the left; lead from the right.

More often than not, a person's center is some combination of these and/or other centers. Most people are very much a function of a variety of influences that play upon their lives. Depending on external or internal conditions, one particular center may be activated until the underlying needs are satisfied. Then another center becomes the compelling force.

Too much focus on PC is like a person who runs three or four hours a day, bragging about the extra ten years of life it creates, unaware he's spending them running.

The ability to listen first requires restraint, respect, and reverence. And the ability to make yourself understood requires courage and consideration. On the continuum, you go from fight and flight instincts to mature two-way communication where courage is balanced with consideration.

This is the single most powerful investment we can ever make in life—investment in ourselves, in the only instrument we have with which to deal with life and to contribute. We are the instruments of our own performance, and to be effective, we need to recognize the importance of taking time regularly to sharpen the saw in all four ways.

deals with both vision and principle-based values. It's not enough to have values without vision—you want to be good, but you want to be good for something. On the other hand, vision without values can create a Hitler.

To maintain the P/PC Balance, the balance between the golden egg (production) and the health and welfare of the goose (production capability) is often a difficult judgment call.

For convenience, history is often viewed as a conflict between the instinct for order and the impulse toward chaos. Both are necessary: both are manifestations of the need to survive. Without order, nothing exists: without chaos, nothing grows. And yet the struggle between them sheds more blood than any other war.

Perfection cannot endure in an imperfect world.

That is the paradox of white gold. Hope and despair run together for us.

You fear both strength and weakness, both power and lack of power.

Unearned knowledge rules its wielder, to the cost of both.

Now no one can be the slave of two masters