Quotes from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“An idea can only become a reality once it is broken down into organized, actionable elements.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“Most ideas are born and lost in isolation.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“Today never feels like it will be history, but it will. And more likely than not, you will look back and realize that you should have known.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“You can't rely on others—especially your managers and clients—to engage your strengths. In an ideal world, managers would constantly be thinking about how to best utilize their people—and clients would always unearth your greatest potential. Unfortunately, the reality is that bosses and clients are as worried about their own careers as you are about your own. You must take the task of marketing your strengths into your own hands.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“Everything in life should be approached as a project. Every project can be broken down into just three things: Action Steps, Backburner Items, and References.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“Constant motion is the key to execution.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“Self-leadership is about awareness, tolerance , and not letting your own natural tendencies limit your potential.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“Whether it means prizing the value of lessons learned, building games into your creative process, or getting gifts upon certain milestones of achievement, self-derived rewards make a big difference…You cannot ignore or completely escape the deeply ingrained short-term reward system within you. But you can become aware of what really motivates you and then tweak your incentives to sustain your long-term pursuits.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“The rewards system of the traditional workplace keeps us on track, in line with deadlines from the higher-ups. If we adhere to it, the deeply embedded rewards system of our adult lives is likely to keep s employed and secure within the status quo. . . However, these tendencies become destructive as soon as we begin to pursue long-term goals or attempt something extraordinary”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“Our ability to extinguish new ideas is critical to productivity and to our capacity to scale existing projects. In a team setting, the skeptics—the ones who always question ideas first rather than falling in love with them—are the white blood cells.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“We will ultimately live in a perpetual data-driven talent edition. Everything you create will be measured and tracked by others through comments, share, and likes. Your work will come up on the radar of potential employers and clients, and the data will tell them if you are worth talking to or hiring.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“When we don’t want to take action, we find reasons to wait. We use “waiting” nicknames like “awaiting approval,” “following procedures,” “further research,” or “consensus building.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“We can access our e-mail and schedule from anywhere in the world. In theory, we can always be reached.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“Diversity of opinions and circumstances increases the likelihood of ‘happy accidents.’ Serendipity comes from differences.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“a methodology is only effective when it is practiced consistently.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“Roger Berkowitz, CEO of Legal Sea Foods—a $215-million company with over four thousand employees—explained in an interview with Inc. magazine how his work style depends on the forces of nagging. “People who want me to do something . . . have to remind me repeatedly,” he explained. “It’s management by being nagged.” The reliance on—and even the encouragement of—nagging may at first appear bothersome. It may be annoying to be constantly reminded about something while trying to immerse yourself in a creative project. However, amidst the chaos of meetings and trying to prioritize the elements of multiple projects, nagging from others helps you prioritize by natural selection. When someone is consistently bothering you about something, chances are you have become a bottleneck in the team’s productivity.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“All great inventions emerge from a long sequence of small sparks; the first idea often isn’t all that good, but thanks to collaboration it later sparks another idea, or it’s reinterpreted in an unexpected way. Collaboration brings small sparks together to generate breakthrough innovation.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“The hyperconnectivity made possible by the Internet has acted as a massive accelerator for the “small sparks” that fuel the refinement of ideas.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“A surplus of ideas is as dangerous as a drought. The tendency to jump from idea to idea to idea spreads your energy horizontally rather than vertically. As a result, you’ll struggle to make progress.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“elevate true productivity over the appearance of hard work.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

“While some of the greatest ideas and solutions come up in meetings, we often fail to connect these ideas to a tangible set of next steps.”
― quote from Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

Popular quotes

“No hay felicidad en la existencia, no hay más que relámpagos de felicidad.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from The Death of Ivan Ilych

“Why do you want to be a vampire?” he asked. “It is not much fun. We can only come out at night. Humans despise us. We have to sleep in dirty old places like this. We can never marry or have children or settle down. It is a horrible life.”
― Darren Shan, quote from A Living Nightmare

“South Holding, was the acknowledged leader of the Twenty-ninth Cave, but Summer Camp and”
― Jean M. Auel, quote from The Shelters of Stone

“The Clock on the Morning Lenape Building

Must Clocks be circles?
Time is not a circle.
Suppose the Mother of All Minutes started
right here, on the sidewalk
in front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the parade
of minutes that followed--each of them, say, one inch long--
headed out that way, down Bridge Street.
Where would Now be? This minute?
Out past the moon?
Jupiter?
The nearest star?

Who came up with minutes, anyway?
Who needs them?
Name one good thing a minute's ever done.
They shorten fun and measure misery.
Get rid of them, I say.
Down with minutes!
And while you're at it--take hours
with you too. Don't get me started
on them.

Clocks--that's the problem.
Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours.
Clocks strap us into their shape.
Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we do
is corkscrew.
Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel
riders of us all, lug us round and round
from number to number,
dice the time of our lives into tiny bits
until the bits are all we know
and the only question we care to ask is
"What time is it?"

As if minutes could tell.
As if Arnold could look up at this clock on
the Lenape Building and read:
15 Minutes till Found.
As if Charlie's time is not forever stuck
on Half Past Grace.
As if a swarm of stinging minutes waits for Betty Lou
to step outside.
As if love does not tell all the time the Huffelmeyers
need to know.”
― Jerry Spinelli, quote from Love, Stargirl

“Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?”
― Lev Grossman, quote from The Magicians

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