Firestarters: How Innovators, Instigators, and Initiators Can Inspire You to Ignite Your Own Life

The road to your highest achievements leads through environments that support you.

People’s confidence in their abilities influences how they approach life. Their dreams are likely anchored to what they feel they can achieve.

Innovators are owners of the situation. They own it because they create it—quite literally. They embrace the world as it should match the vision in their heads. And when something is missing from that vision, they fill the gap.

Firestarters are flexible. They recognize situational needs and are able to flow into the accessible role identity most relevant to overcome emergent challenges.

Collaborators don’t steal others’ ideas, take advantage of people, or sit back while others accomplish their tasks for them. Collaborators take action to ensure that everyone with whom they work can enjoy the maximum potential outcome.

Why doesn’t every fire once kindled, survive and thrive? Why doesn’t every person accomplish her dreams? The simple answer is that the Firestarter’s life is a constant fight against extinction.

Clarity of mission is important for acceleration. If you have a mission, but others don’t understand or your actions contradict it, then it will be less contagious.

If you want to make a difference, you must live like no one else and strive to achieve goals that others view as impossible to reach.

What others view as setbacks, Firestarters see as opportunities to learn and grow more.

If you feel you don’t know the right people, turn to the next person you see on the street and introduce yourself—that connection could be the key to your future.

Freedom in any moment is a product of two things: the autonomy you feel and the support for autonomy that the moment allows.

Interest isn’t just something you feel. It’s something you live.

Firestarters aren’t born lucky. They manufacture it.

Success is not only dependent on understanding your own skill-set. It’s also important to recognize the talents of others and know how to profit from them.

Firestarters are able to make associations between similar situations and use lessons learned from one sphere of their lives to inform actions and thoughts in seemingly unrelated situations. They look for patterns of success, and then they pounce on situations that have proven to be generators of that success.

When you travel mentally from a low point to a high point, the ensuing inspiration eclipses the negativity of the initial downfall.

Introspection is a form of self-management. You reflect. You decide. You change. You allow yourself to grow.

Belief that you can act is a powerful motivator. Belief that change can happen in a flash is an even stronger motivator.

I am building a fire, and every day I train, I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match. —Mia Hamm, member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame

A Fuel without an Igniter is wasted potential.

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. —Harriet Tubman

If you are doing what you love, you will always love what you are doing.

My mother taught me two very important lessons—the power of believing in a dream and the necessity of an unwavering work ethic in order to make that dream happen. There were a lot of starts and stops in my path, and I always had my mother as a beacon to remind me that it's possible.

Fear is crippling. Fear is confusing and distracting. It can be so powerful in a person's life and cloud your real judgment and what it is that you're destined to do in your life.

When people didn't believe in me, rather than that letting it get me down, I let that fuel my fire.

Passion is what lifts a car. When a mother lifts a car because a child is underneath, it is out of passion. That's where the magic and miracles happen.

I am a mapmaker. I draw my own path. I don't want a prescribed set of next steps.

Success is not the absence of failure, but the courage to persist in spite of it.