9 Quotes that will help you think differently…

Sparks of insight can come from experiences (but only if you take the time to think about them). They can also come from learning or listening – again only if you’re thoughtful about what you’ve learned. In fact, insights can come from something as simple as a powerful quote… with some pondering on your part on how that might apply to you.

With that in mind, here are 9 great quotes that might give you a new perspective.

“Here is a simple but powerful rule: Always give people more than what they expect to get.”

– Nelson Boswell

Do you under-promise and over deliver? (Or do you over promise and under deliver sometimes?). And if you agree with the sentiment and the importance, do you have a system in place that helps insure that you’re under-promising and over-delivering?

“Efficiency is doing things right; Effectiveness is doing the right things.”

– Peter Drucker

All of us would love to have more time and so we tend to focus on time management and efficiency. But if you want to make a real impact on your time, give some thought to effectiveness. Are you prioritizing how you spend your time and could you cut out some big chunks of what you do because they don’t really move the needle?

“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”

– Norman Vincent Peale

How you view things makes all the difference in the world. Is it an issue or could it be an opportunity? Still needs to be addressed, but it makes a big difference in terms of how you might go about doing something. Personal example – do you have to work out / go to the gym… or do you GET to work out / go to the gym?

“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”

– Charles Swindoll

Magic happens when you can take the time to choose a response as opposed to acting emotionally. What could you do to be more thoughtful? How can you slow down… even if it’s just a bit?

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re certain to end up somewhere else.”

– Yogi Berra

I have a client who is really struggling with making some big decisions (long term contracts, investments, etc.) and although these are challenging things, the real issue is that they are trying to make those big decisions without having a clear idea of where they want to go. They have no idea what they want their business to look like in 3 years… and absent that direction it’s almost impossible to make a meaningful decision. Have you ever struggled with that?

“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

As a business owner, your job isn’t to be a hero – to swoop in all the time and save the day, put out the fire or rescue the team. If that’s how you operate, you are going to end up a tragic story. Great businesses don’t need heroes, they’ve done the hard work up front to mitigate the problems before they happen. Are you acting like a hero?

“94% of problems in business are systems driven and only 6% are people driven.”

– W. Edwards Deming

If you’re consistently having problems in your business, it may be because you have the wrong people, but it’s much more likely that you don’t have systems in place to handle the challenges. Don’t run out and just solve the problem, work with your team to solve the problem and put systems into place so that problem doesn’t happen again. Do you think about systems?

“The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.”

– Henry Ford

Even if you have the greatest work environment in the world, you’ll have employees that are going to leave you. When they do, you want them telling everyone they know how you helped them grow. Are you building your team or purposely holding them back?

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”

– Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)

Life is full of challenges. We all have to decide what we want and be willing to run through those brick walls to get what we really want. Are your brick walls holding you back? How?

Hopefully you got something out of these quotes. I know just sharing them made me think of a lot of big ideas, so I hope at least one of them sparked something in you. If you have a minute, leave a comment and share your favorite down below.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

1 thought on “9 Quotes that will help you think differently…”

  1. Ritesh Singh says:

    Thanks for such a great collection of quotes valid for both personal and professional lives. I’ll surely try to apply them both in my personal life as well as in the new entrepreneurial journey that I have started on. I’ll be happy to see more such motivational and inspiring content!

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