Quotes About Opportunity

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.

There are two perfectly good men, one dead, and the other unborn

An inch of time is an inch of gold, but you can't buy that inch of time with an inch of gold.

This is the great trap of life: One day rolls into the next, and a year goes by, and we still haven't had that conversation we always meant to have. Still haven't created that peak moment for our students. Still haven't seen the northern lights. We walk a flatland that could have been a mountain range. It's not easy to snap out of this tendency. It took a terminal illness for Gene O'Kelly to do it.

The "occasionally remarkable" moments shouldn't be left to chance! They should be planned for, invested in.

Studies of the elderly show that people regret not what they did but what they didn't do.

INSIGHT: Defining moments rewire our understanding of ourselves or the world. In a few seconds or minutes, we realize something that might influence our lives for decades: Now is the time for me to start this business.

Moments matter. And what an opportunity we miss when we leave them to chance!

Because day-to-day change is gradual, even imperceptible, it's hard to know when to jump. Tripwires tell you when to jump.

when you seek out situations where you might fail, failure loses some of its menace. You've been inoculated against it.

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question "What's working, and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?

In times of change, you may not know what options are available. And this uncertainty leads to decision paralysis as surely as a table with 24 jams.

Both women experienced moments of self-insight sparked by "stretching." To stretch is to place ourselves in situations that expose us to the risk of failure.

This and that." Often, for example, we'll get stuck in a mindset of prevention OR promotion. If we can do both, seeking out options that minimize harm AND maximize opportunity, we are more likely to uncover our full spectrum of choices.

Smart enough to get into Yale. Economists studied students who had been admitted to two schools of higher and lower prestige but decided to attend the school with lower prestige. Estimated sacrifice in lifetime earnings from attending the less prestigious school: none.

Parents are often shocked, too, to hear that, once you control for aptitude, a person's lifetime earnings don't vary based on what college they attended. In other words, if you're smart enough to get into Yale, it doesn't really matter (from an income perspective) whether you go there or instead choose your much cheaper state university. The

The Springboard. Denning

Life is full of "form letter in an envelope" moments, waiting to be transformed into something special.

What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?

Stay alert to the promise that moments hold.

34% of White applicants and 14% of Black applicants without records received callbacks, compared to 17% and 5% with records.

Any time in life you're tempted to think, 'Should I do this OR that?' instead, ask yourself, 'Is there a way I can do this AND that?' It's surprisingly frequent that it's feasible to do both things.

Top management challenged employees to be on the lookout for potential innovations—

Stay alert to the promise that moments hold. These moments do not need to be "produced.