Quotes About Progress

Your ikigai is a work in progress because you are a work in progress. Knowing your ikigai, then, takes patience and insight, and courage, and honesty.

You start with your 1 and then you suspend judgment on what you're doing, because you don't know what you have when you start. When you are constantly judging what you're doing, you aren't here. You aren't present. You are standing outside of your life, looking in, observing. The time for judgement will come at some point, but in the moment, you have only the 1. And then the 2. And then the 3...

because everything is connected to everything else, and the more we know about who and where we come from, the more we know about where we're headed.

We are always in the endless process of figuring out our ikigai. Your ikigai is a web of work and family and play and how you spend your time, what you give your energies to, what you say "yes" to, what you say "no" to, what new challenges you take on, things that come your way that you never wanted or planned for or know what to do with— your ikigai is a work in progress because you are a work in progress.

It's like I'm figuring it out, but as soon as I do, something shifts, and we get to figure it out all over again. I resist this endless figuring it all out, but over time, it starts to work a kind of magic on me.

I realize I've been living for years with the assumption that at some point you arrive. You get it all nailed down. You sort it all out. And then from there you get on with it.

I AM is less noun, more verb. Less a destination and more a direction.

It is your responsibility to stop listening to voices that hinder your ongoing growth and maturity.

Failure, we see again and again, isn't final, judgment has a point, and consequences are for correction.

All work is ultimately creative work because all of us are taking part in the ongoing creation of the world. There's

This is a pattern. Something bonded with something like it, and that introduced something new, something more complex, something that previously didn't exist. Something the universe had never seen before. All because of a drive. A drive to bond, to unite, to come together. Where does this drive come from? It comes from within. This

Sometimes we hold back from throwing ourselves into it because we think that the only work worth doing is something completely original that's never been done before.

Far too often, we don't start because we can't get our minds around the entire thing. We don't take the first step because we can't figure out the seventeenth step.

To do anything new—to do the 1—requires tremendous mental fortitude to not think about 2 or 3 yet. That time will come. And it is not now. Now is the time for 1. You start with 1. And you work on that. Just 1. And when 1 is done, you move to 2.

When you do crash and burn, ask yourself lots of questions about whatever it is that happened: What can you learn here? How will you see things differently moving forward? Why did I do that? leads to, What have I learned? leads to, How will I do it differently in the future?

The universe is unfinished, and God is looking for partners in the ongoing creation of the world.

The universe has been expanding for over thirteen billion years, and we never stop being invited to expand along with it.

You need to evade every influence that tends to keep you frozen in the past.

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. Robert A. Heinlein

the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, some seventy different education bills—they're all passed during the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson.

It was Abraham Lincoln who struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink of history's eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.

Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.

A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.

Belief gets in the way of learning.