Quotes About Challenges

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

Opportunity is often difficult to recognize we usually expect it to beckon us with beepers and billboards.

Even though I'd like to avoid the circumstance or situation, I will not. Avoidance behavior will only increase my anxiety. I will go ahead, experience the unpleasant feelings, and I'll get through it.

Jesus promised His disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy and in constant trouble.

All great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.

Establish by word and example that this is a time to step back and take stock, a time to question the "usual," and a time to come up with new and creative solutions to the organization's difficulties. Explain how business as usual chokes off creativity and explain why the present is the best possible time to generate and test new ideas. Model this new manner yourself by taking time to step back and question how your own job is done.

Embrace losses, setbacks, or disadvantages as entry points into new solutions.

And although it may be hard to think about larger issues while you are in the immediate turmoil of a transition, you must finally deal with them if you are to understand not only what is happening, but why, when, and how it is happening. In other words, I am not telling you to stop bailing - just to cast an eye over the map and think about where your little boat is heading.

Second Law of Organizational Development: the successful outcome of any phase of organizational development triggers its demise by creating challenges that it is not equipped to handle.

The neutral zone takes a heavy toll on most people's self-confidence because it is a period of lowered productivity and diminished feelings of competence. It may also, if it resonates with past difficulties in a person's life, activate serious problems of low self-esteem. For that reason people are likely to need some fairly quick successes if they are to return to their former effectiveness.

the First Law of Organizational Development is evident: those who were most at home with the necessary activities and arrangements of one phase are the ones who are the most likely to experience the subsequent phase as a severe personal setback. They will talk about it as a "strategic mistake," as "dumb," "unnecessary," and "too expensive.

GRASS: Guilt, Resentment, Anxiety, Self-absorption, and Stress. These are the five real and measurable costs of not managing transition effectively.

Old weaknesses, previously patched over or compensated for, reemerge in full flower.

Fourthly, As to the difficulty of procuring the necessaries of life, this would not be so great as may appear at first sight; for though we could not procure European food, yet we might procure such as the natives of those countries which we visit, subsist upon themselves. And this would only be passing through what we have virtually engaged, in by entering on the ministerial office.

Three things alone are certain when you venture into a loft: that you will crack your head on a beam at least twice, that you will get cobwebs draped over your face, and that you will not find what you went looking for.

Crossing the Black Water

Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage.

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.

All problems become smaller if you don't dodge them but confront them.

There are no great men, just great challenges which ordinary men, out of necessity, are forced by circumstances to meet.

All problems become smaller if you don't dodge them but confront them.

Back of ninety-nine out of one-hundred assertions that a thing cannot be done is nothing, but the unwillingness to do it.

Here is the secret of inspiration: Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you.