Quotes from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“you can only know as much depth, happiness, and success in your life as you can know vulnerability.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people do all the things unsuccessful people don’t want to do. Most people don’t want to work more than they have to. They do the minimum they are paid to do. That’s not the way to get ahead. Always do the best you can, not the least you can get away with. When you do your job, even if its just cleaning an office, do it as if somebody you want to impress is watching your every step.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“if you alter your work for every rejection, you’ll end up running in all different directions trying to please an imaginary audience. It can be damaging and destructive.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“Most behavior is habitual. They say the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“you become the company you keep.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“Success unshared is failure. If you’ve “made it” and don’t help others out along the way—if you don’t do something to make the planet a better place—you’re not successful at all; you are a failure. But remember that you can’t help everybody out. You have to focus and contribute in ways that you think are most beneficial.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“The most important thing in terms of your circle of competence is not how large it is but how well you define the perimeter.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“Warren Buffett explains the vast benefits of being a good communicator—and why the people you choose to surround yourself with, even as friends, affect your own behavior and destiny”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“You must do something that you are passionate about—and something that is “within your circle of competence,” as Warren Buffett puts it. The road to get there is almost guaranteed to be arduous, but if you love what you do, you’ll thrive on the inevitable challenges and have the stamina to achieve your potential.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“Treat your employees with respect, and they will remain an asset. Treat them as expendable, and you will have difficulty holding your team together. We”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“A great idea is worthless; execution is everything.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“He didn’t think that trying something entrepreneurial was an objective risk because I’d always be able to rejoin the work force if it didn’t work out. It seemed like a risky thing to do because it looked very likely to fail, but the real risk was not doing it. The objective risk was wasting years of my life stuck in something that appeared attractive but that I really didn’t enjoy. A lot of entrepreneurship and innovation seems perilous, but it’s not. And a lot of things that seem safe and comfortable are, in fact, profoundly risky. That’s subjective versus objective risk.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“Over the years, people have come to me and said, “You can’t do everything.” That is total bullshit. You certainly can do everything. The people who do some things can do more.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“My father was a bookkeeper for a little dairy company. He worked seven days a week until he checked himself into the hospital to die.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“It’s important not to be either too encouraged or too discouraged by what’s happening at any particular moment. No matter what you do, there will be times when things go well and times when things go badly. The only thing for sure, in either scenario, is that things will change. When something good happens, I try to enjoy it. When something bad happens, I try to understand why it happened. But in either case, the next day I’m on to something else.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“I knew I needed a couple of hundred bucks to live off of, so I borrowed $350 from my mom to match Paul’s contribution. John Paul Mitchell Systems was started with only $700. Too proud to tell anyone about my situation, I moved into my car and figured out how to get by on two dollars and fifty cents a day.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“Being an academic is real work. It’s just a different kind of real work.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people do all the things unsuccessful people don’t want to do.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

“If you draw with your right hand and become so skilled that you can even close your eyes and make any kind of drawing, immediately change to the left. Repetition will kill you.”
― Gillian Zoe Segal, quote from Getting There: A Book of Mentors

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― Ovid, quote from The Metamorphoses

“Lady Linette has been teaching us seduction techniques.” She lowered her eyes and then looked off across the gray moor, presenting him with her profile, which was rather a nice one, or so Mademoiselle Geraldine told her.

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“The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

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"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, quote from The Velveteen Rabbit

“It’s life, that’s all. There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there’s not a thing you can do about it.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from How To Talk To A Widower

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