Quotes About Progress

change is not a one-way street.

It takes extraordinary effort to stop doing something in our comfort zone (because it's painless or familiar or mildly pleasurable) in order to start something difficult that will be good for us in the long run.

where there is no system for honoring the avoidance of a bad decision or the cessation of bad behavior. Our performance reviews are solely based on what we've done, what numbers we've delivered, what increases we have posted against last year's results. Even the seemingly minor personal goals are couched in terms of actions we've initiated, not behavior we have stopped. We get credit for being punctual, not for stopping our lateness.

Lamenting the past is a waste of time. I learned my lesson. Let's move on." That's one way of looking at regret—if only as a form of self-protection from the pain of knowing we missed out. We're comforted by the fact that no one is immune to regret (we're not alone) and that time heals all wounds (the only thing worse than experiencing pain is not knowing if and when the pain will go away).

We treat effort as a second-class citizen. It's the condolence message we send ourselves when we fail. We say, "I gave it my best shot," or "I get an A for effort." But after a few days, quantifying effort rather than outcome reveals patterns that we'd otherwise miss.

If we're satisfied with our life—not necessarily happy or delighted that we've exceeded our wildest expectations, just satisfied—we yield to inertia. We continue doing what we've always done.

The problem begins when this good enough attitude spills beyond our marketplace choices and into the things we say and do.

Understanding the past is perfectly admissible if your issue is accepting the past. But if your issue is changing the future, understanding will not take you there. My experience tells me that the only effective approach is looking people in the eye and saying, "If you want to change, do this.

We can always get better at something, even if it's just preserving the progress we've made. I

The Four Commitments. I need them to commit to: 1. Let go of the past. 2. Tell the truth. 3. Be supportive and helpful—not cynical or negative. 4. Pick something to improve yourself—so everyone is focused more on "improving" than "judging.

Marshall Goldsmith

the higher you go, the more your problems are behavioral.

Overcommitment can be as serious an obstacle to change as believing that you don't need fixing or that your flaws are part of the reason you're successful.

It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools!