Quotes About Growth

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.

All children, including TCKs, face a myriad of developmental tasks as they grow from helpless infants into healthy adults. Among them is the need to develop a strong sense of personal identity as well as group identity, answering the questions Who am I? and Where do I belong? Traditionally, the family and community mirror back the answers and the child sees his or her image reflected in them.

Psychology often presents individuals as if they are frozen in time and space, describing their score on an intelligence or personality test, how they remember or what their inner conflicts are. All imply that people are fixed and that a description of them at one point in time will inevitably be true of them at another.

It seems to me that all our endless failures are adding up to a magnificent success. It's just not what we had in mind. It's real.

So did Katagiri fail, and am I a failure because I can't remember what Buddhism is—and are all the rest of us failures, as it seems, when contrasted against our early pure and simple expectations and the clear-cut enlightenment of the story books?

I often quoted a popular Chinese proverb when addressing our leaders: "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.

Just as you're pushing for more efficiency throughout the organization via process change, you can also keep your organization increasingly slender and nimble as you grow by maintaining a leadership corps that is relatively small and stable but that punches far above its weight.

As you tighten up R&D, you'll be in a stronger position to grow sales even more by expanding geographically. When I joined Honeywell, three-quarters of global GDP occurred outside of the United States, but only 40 percent of our sales originated there. That thirty-five-point gap spelled opportunity.

As you pursue long-term growth, don't limit yourself to the specific initiatives discussed here. Stay alert for new growth areas.

The Five Initiatives 1.?Growth (via customer service, globalization, and technology) 2.?Productivity (went hand-in-hand with growth) 3.?Cash (improve working capital and have high-quality earnings) 4.?People (keep the best talent, organized the right way and motivated) 5.?Organizational enablers (including Six Sigma, Honeywell Operating System, and Functional Transformation)

While at General Electric, I'd noticed firsthand what a big difference it made to be in a good industry. When I ran General Electric's major appliance business, we had a great position but were in a crummy, highly competitive, low-growth industry. No matter how hard we worked, we stood little chance of excelling—the pressure on prices was just too intense. It was far easier, I found, to make progress with a business that occupied a bad position in a good industry.

Regarding a prospective company's position in its industry, think hard about whether you might roll up multiple players in a fragmented industry to create a juggernaut. When we entered the gas detection business, there were no big players, but over an eight-year period we were able to acquire several companies, roll them up into a single Honeywell business, and become number one in the industry.

An organization that is adept at constantly evolving usually won't need to take enormous risks to bring about revolutionary change, because it'll have been changing all along.

Ask people for suggestions on how to improve, and if they're going to reject you for being imperfect, let them do it and get it over with.

What does this negative thought or feeling show about you and your core values that's positive and awesome?

If the comments are wrong, there is really nothing for you to be upset about. On the other hand, if the criticism is accurate, there is still no reason for you to feel overwhelmed. You're not expected to be perfect.

If you can answer yes, then you are clearly motivated to change. You will probably succeed in gaining greater inner peace and self-esteem, and you will increase your effectiveness in life. This

The most loving women are the women who will test you the most.

But if she is a good woman, a strong woman, she won't tolerate your childish needs for a pat on the head, collecting bigger toys, and being king of the mountain. A good woman will love the childlike part of you, but she wants your life to be guided by your deepest truths, not your untended childhood wounds. She wants to feel that at your core you have grown beyond the need for kudos and million-dollar toys. She wants to feel your self-generated strength of truth.

Intimacy is about growing more than you could by yourself, through the art of mutual gifting.

Nobody will press your buttons or reflect your asshole to you better than your woman. She will point out your weaknesses better than a boot camp drill sergeant.

Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source.