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

“After he saw God [Tony Amsterdam] felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn’t seen God. He told me one day he got really mad; he just freaked out and started cursing and smashing things in his apartment. He even smashed his stereo. He realized he was going to have to live on and on like he was, seeing nothing. Without any purpose. Just a lump of flesh grinding along, eating, drinking, sleeping, working, crapping.”

“Like the rest of us.” It was the first thing Bob Arctor had managed to say; each word came with retching difficulty.

Donna said, “That’s what I told him. I pointed that out. We were all in the same boat and it didn’t freak the rest of us. And he said, ‘You don’t know what I saw. You don’t know.’ ”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from A Scanner Darkly

“The stone is called the Rose of Lucifer, or Lucifer’s Bane,” the senator explained with a smile. “Have you heard the story?”
― Melissa de la Cruz, quote from Masquerade

“He carried Hell with him, as we all did, like a little load on our backs that we hardly noticed most of the time, or like a huge great hump of suffering that bent us over with its weight.”
― John Marsden, quote from Tomorrow, When the War Began

“I do not wish to offend you, believe me. I have told you my decision. Nothing can change it. I must leave, I must travel, I must be free. Let me thank you cordially once again, and let us bid each other a friendly farewell.”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Narcissus and Goldmund

“From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.

"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
― Philip K. Dick, quote from Ubik

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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