Getting There: A Book of Mentors

you can only know as much depth, happiness, and success in your life as you can know vulnerability.

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.

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.

Most behavior is habitual. They say the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

you become the company you keep.

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.

The most important thing in terms of your circle of competence is not how large it is but how well you define the perimeter.

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

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.

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

A great idea is worthless; execution is everything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Being an academic is real work. It’s just a different kind of real work.

The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people do all the things unsuccessful people don’t want to do.

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.