Quotes About Progress

Focus on remedies, not faults

Through the years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.

Achievement is largely the product of steadily raising one's levels of aspiration and expectation.

One of the secrets of life is to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks.

The pain of writing stems from comparing your blank screen with the finished pages you see all around you. But beautiful writing is built one step at a time, just like a house. Take the steps slowly, break them down into pieces small enough to handle easily, and the agony will disappear.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

But I don't think we'll go there until we go back to the moon and develop a technology base for living and working and transporting ourselves through space.

If there is one thing you must understand about the future, it is that not only is the world changing; the rate of change is increasing at an exponential pace.

The world of tomorrow will not be created out of thin air either. It will come from the convergence of a wide variety of accelerating technologies.

They accept that failure is an integral component of moving forward and, instead, create an environment where "unsafe" thinking and failure are encouraged, recognized, and rewarded.

Don't underestimate technology.

Pick just one trend that you consider unstoppable—5G, sensor technology, big data, AI, blockchain, quantum computing, nanotechnology, robotics, 3D printing, biotechnology, synthetic biology, renewable energy, augmented reality, virtual reality, satellite technology, genomics, gene editing, online education, etc.—and research how it is already impacting your industry.

Emerging technologies may not revolutionize the business world tomorrow, but they will transform it sooner than many people expect. Therefore, anticipate cheapness.

Push into your discomfort zone!

Others include "The Vowel" rule: How do we need to Adapt? How is our world Evolving? How can we Innovate? Can we Organize differently? What do we need to Unlearn? WhY do we do things the way we do them?

Next, think about the future for one simple reason—you are going to spend the rest of your life in the future.

We all grew up, our grandmothers and mothers had about three channels to watch, so we watched those soaps and now, a generation has grown up with the Internet and computers and video games.

I was afraid of the internet... because I couldn't type.

Don't manage - lead change before you have to.

If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.

IT'S SAID that you can only live life forward and understand it backward.

When you put something out there into the world, there's all these words you don't want to hear, that you hope people don't say. I don't like anything that starts with 're' - like retro, reinvent, recreate - I hate that. It's always like living in the past - copying, emulating.

That's what happens nowadays with people working on computers. They can so easily fix things with their mouse and take out all the, 'Oh, somebody coughed in the background we need to take that out' - or somebody hit a bad note. Those are all the best moments.

In the space of a few, bright years, something new stirred in this land; something unprecedented; something wonderful; and men, being men, perceived it with stunned awe and then, being men, destroyed it without thought, for being new and strange.