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

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday.

Look around you - there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“Of course your fine.” She keeps walking. “You’re the devils bride and these are his creatures.”
― Susan Ee, quote from World After

“Evanlyn smiled grimly as she thought how once she might have objected to the cruelty of the bird's death. Now, all she felt was a sense of satisfaction as she realized that they would eat well today.
Amazing how an empty belly could change your perspective, she thought.”
― John Flanagan, quote from The Battle for Skandia

“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“If I do it you won't ever worry?'

'I won't worry about that because it's perfectly simple.'

"Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories

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About BookQuoters

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.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.