I love quotes. Quotes bring me great clarity about a topic. They cut through the clutter break issues down to their essence. Leaders then use quotes to frame conversations and move people to action.
Twice a year I publish the finest quotes I collected the previous six months. I am honored to bring those to you at this time. The following are The Top 65 Leadership Of The First Half Of 2022 separated by categories.
To get additional great quotes and the leadership lessons learned from them, order any or all my books by clicking HERE or the image above.
Character
- “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett
- “The flaws you see in others are actually a reflection of yourself.” – Eve Branson
- “You must have full duty before you can expect to be fully paid.” – Dr. Ralph Bell
- “Never choose what you want now for what you want most later.” – Dr. Tim Elmore. If you don’t have it already, make sure you order a copy of Tim’s book The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership: Embracing the Conflicting Demands of Today’s Workplace
Historical Events and People
- “I don’t want Ukraine’s history to be a legend about 300 Spartans. I want peace.” – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
- “It was own decision to stay here and not to flee. First of all, because I’m a politician and I’m representing my people and they didn’t go anywhere.” – Ukrainian Parliament member Kira Rudik on the Russian invasion
- “I am a firm believer in people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point to is to bring them the real facts.” – Abraham Lincoln
- “Most of the time, success in the world depends on collaborating with other people. And learning how to do that, learning how to listen, learning how to treat people with respect and with dignity, learning how to be humble…those are the human qualities we all need in our everyday life.” – Doris Kearns Goodwin. Doris’s book Leadership: In Turbulent Times is one of the top five leadership books I have read.
- “Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.” — Nicolas Bentley
- “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
- “The greatest nation in the world is imagination.” – Albert Einstein
Winning Habits
- “Every action we take is like a vote for the type of person we wish to become. Your habits are how you embody a particular identity. So every day that you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. Every day that you send an attagirl to somebody on your team, you embody the identity of someone who is a caring leader. Every day that you go to the gym, even if it’s just for five minutes, you embody the identity of someone who doesn’t miss workouts. So in this way, our behaviors are like they’re casting votes for the story that we’re telling ourselves, and I think ultimately, at the deepest level, this is the real reason that habits matter.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
- “Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, to all the souls you can, in every place you can, at all the times you can, with all the zeal you can, every time you can.” – John Wesley
- “We never know what’s going to happen in the future. We really don’t. Kobe Bryant, a friend of ours, God rest his soul. We think we’re going to live forever, we’re not. We think we’re going to play forever, we’re not. What can we do? We can enjoy the moments that we have.” – Tom Brady, Let’s Go Podcast
- “You can usually accomplish more by giving something your full effort for a few years rather than giving it a lukewarm effort for fifty years. Pick a priority for this season of your life and do it to the best of your ability.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
- “Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there’s one simple test: because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve. They don’t assume, “I know the way.” – Wynton Marsalis
- “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.” -Daniel Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
- “Strong habits pull us toward familiar and comfortable. We need to learn to break these habits. Only then we will be ready to transform them – and ultimately, to create our own success.” – Francesca Gino
- “The best leaders are the ones who shut up when it’s time to go to work.” – Chris Webber on the April 14, 2021 The Colin Cowherd Podcast
Peak Performance
- “To be a true teacher, you need to have the ability to teach one thing many different ways.” – Baseball hitting coach Kevin Wilson
- “Effective practice isolates the skills that are necessary to produce results. Researchers like to distinguish between drills and scrimmages. Drills distort the game so as to work on a specific skill under maximum concentrations. Scrimmages mimic the game to get a feel for the cadence and circumstances. Skill transfer is the degree to which working on a skill in one setting translates into another.” – Michael J. Mauboussin and Dan Callahan of Morgan Stanley
- “Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” – Andy Benoit, Assistant to Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay
- “Don’t have a workout and post it on Instagram the next day and then go sit on your butt the next day, and everyone thinks you’re working hard, but you’re not. Work in silence. Don’t show everybody what you are doing. Let your game on Friday nights, Saturday nights and Sunday nights show all the hard work you put in. Don’t worry about all that social media stuff.” – Joe Burrow’s advice to Super Bowl Media Day advice to young athletes
- “It’s the things no one sees that bring the results everyone wants.” – Kevin Wilson
- “The reason most people fail is because they give up what they want most for what they want now.” – Emmanuel Acho, Fox Sports Analyst and Author
- “One last play to be world champs… give it everything you got. And I found a way to get to him.” – Aaron Donald after winning his first Super Bowl
- “The most important step in becoming successful in anything is to first become interested in it.” – Sir William Osler
- “Ultimately, the main lesson you learn about criticism the longer you do this is: The best way to respond is by putting in the work…In the NBA, in any sport—heck, in life, really—you don’t beat criticism by arguing with the critics. You beat it with your craft—by playing and winning. You don’t prove doubters wrong with words, but with work…Putting in the work is hard. Anything you do to get better at your craft—one extra rep, one extra practice shot, one extra hour of film—is more important and more significant than a thousand pieces of criticism.”― Chris Bosh, Letters To a Young Athlete
- “There’s this premise that the success of player depends on ability, which is made up of technical, physical, tactical and phycological aspects, and that this is then multiplied by their availability. Many players have told me that Arjen Robben could have been close to Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi in ability, but he didn’t make it because he didn’t have much availability.” – Dr. Jurdan Mendiguchi
- “I think that the good and great are only separated by the willingness to sacrifice.” – Kareen Abdul-Jabbar
- “All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having enough money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Ever single thing that we came out with that was really great, I’d never once done that thing in my life.” – Steve Wozniak
- “The best protection against inflation, though, still is your own personal earning bar. If you play the violin very well, you will do reasonably well during inflation. I mean, play it better than other people, people will pay you for doing that. All kinds of things. So your skills will not be taken away, and your money may be.” – Warren Buffett
- “One of the easiest ways to increase your value to an organization is to reduce the friction required to get you to do your job.” – the website Farnam Street
- “The best CEOs aren’t necessarily the world’s number one at direction setting, aligning the organization, mobilizing leaders, engaging the board, connecting with stakeholders, or maligning personal effectiveness, but they’re world-class at integrating all of these responsibilities simultaneously.” – McKinsey & Company senior partners Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra’s book CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest
Great Coaches
- “They’re not defined by one game… and I want to let everyone know how proud I am of these two guys.” – Alabama head coach Nick Saban on Bryce Young and Will Anderson after their national championship loss to Georgia
- “Don’t blink. If you’re a blinker, cut your eyelids off.” – Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin prior to the team’s play-off game against Kansas City
- “When it’s grim, be the grim reaper.” – Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid to quarterback Patrick Mahomes with 13 seconds remaining in their play-off game against the Buffalo Bills
- “Starting as a coach at the highest level, there was no handbook. You think you know most of it, and you don’t. Being able to communicate with your team, to your coaching staff, to management, the foundation of that is listening. That’s something I learned from Frank (Vogel). He’s always asking his guys questions; he’s always gauging the room.” – Dallas Mavericks head coach Jason Kidd
- “The winner was going to be joyous and the loser was going to be in agony.” – Duke head coach Mike Kryrzewski after the team’s Final Four loss to UNC
- “I’ve never strayed from living in the projects in North Philly, never strayed from the discipline that’s required to be successful. It is very simple. Discipline is being able to, in the moment, not do things that you want to do. Do things that created the habit for you to have the temptation not to. And, it’s a simple math-y life equation that I just try to teach our players. If you have a certain level of discipline … My favorite quote, and a quote that I live by, is a disciplined person can do anything.” – South Carolina women’s head basketball coach Dawn Staley after winning her 2nd NCAA Championship
- “I told them at half, ‘Would you be rather down 15 with 20 minutes left or down 9 with 2 minutes left?’ They said, ‘Let’s take 15.’ They played off that.” – Kansas Jayhawks head basketball coach Bill Self at halftime of the championship game against the North Carolina Tar Heels. To read an entire article about this quote, click How A Leader’s Healthy Perspective And Calm Approach Can Change An Entire Organization’s Future.
- “Surely the highlight of our season can’t be three games above .500…. The more I win, the more I want to win.” – Minnesota Timberwolves first-year head coach Chris Finch
- “If you want to win big, you have to be ready to lose big.” – Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp. For more wisdom from Klopp, click 15 Amazing Leadership Quotes And Lessons From Liverpool FC’s Jurgen Klopp.
- “Probably the biggest lesson I learned during my career was finding outcome independence – that was really the key to performing under pressure. You had to be willing to fail.” – Steve Kerr
- “If everybody could learn, we’d need less coaches. If the group didn’t need management, then we wouldn’t make as much. I don’t run away from coaching. I run to coaching. When you say someone can’t learn, you’re seeking comfort because your teaching is struggling.”… You can’t do ordinary stuff and expect unique results.” – Mike Tomlin on the June 21st The Pivot Podcast
***BONUS*** Jimbo Fisher’s May 19 comments on Nick Saban’s assertion Texas A&M bought players in the most recent recruiting class.
- “Some people think they’re God. Go dig into how ‘God’ did his deal, you may find out about a lot of things that you don’t want to know.”
- “It’s despicable that a reputable head coach can come out and say this when he doesn’t get his way or things don’t go his way. The narcissist in him doesn’t allow those things to happen and it’s ridiculous when he’s not on top.”
- “I don’t cheat. I don’t lie. I learned that when I was a kid, if you did, your old man would’ve slapped you upside the head. Maybe somebody should have slapped him.”
Books and Increasing Intelligence
- “I notice that when all a man’s information is confined to the field in which he is working, the work is never as good as it ought to be. A man has to get a perspective, and he can get it from books or from people — preferably from both. This thing of sleeping and eating with your business can easily be overdone; it is all well enough—usually necessary—in times of trouble but as a steady diet it does not make for good business; a man ought now and then to get far enough away to have a look at himself and his affairs.” — Harvey S. Firestone (written in 1926)
- “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time—none. Zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads—and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.” – Charlie Munger
- “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” = Charlie Munger
- “A good book can take you places an airplane cannot.” – Scott Monty
- “The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read?” and the others—a very small minority—who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means … allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.” – Nassim Taleb, Black Swan
Fear, Stress, and Anxiety
- “How do I define fear? It’s when I’m visualizing a future event that hasn’t even happened and it’s impacting how I think and feel in in the present.” – Fear management expert Tony Blauer
- “You know what the happiest animal on Earth is? It’s a goldfish. You know why? It’s got a 10-second memory.” – Ted Lasso
- “I have always felt comedy and tragedy were roommates.” – Gilbert Gottfried
- “The most successful people see adversity not as a stumbling block, but a stepping-stone to greatness.” – Shawn Achor
- “The first sign of pressure is poor decisions. The second sign of pressure is poor execution.” – Peter Kostas, CBS golf correspondent from the new ESPN 30 For 30 Shark
- “When it rains, you open an umbrella.” – SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son
- “There’s a reason why going to a high school reunion is so awkward, and in some cases so terrifying: we are re-engaging with people with whom we shared a baseline, with whom we were (and still are) close to in age, and with whom we shared a common social environment at one point in our lives. our lives. That is why it is all the more mortifying to see the disparities, and why the urge to compare is far stronger than it would be with someone who went to high school in a different state or who graduated in a different year. We’re less likely to think of ourselves as their rival.” – Luke Burgis
Failure and Hard Decisions
- “He is no longer a Buc. Awright, that’s the end of the story. Let’s talk about the guys that went out there and won the game.” – Tampa Bay head coach Bruce Arians after Antonio Brown left during the game
- “We don’t ask for spring break, we don’t promote it, we don’t encourage it; we just endure it.” – Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber
- “If you could take your experiences and ask to trade them in, the last ones I would trade would be the failures. Those are the most valuable ones.” – Jerry Seinfeld
- “Don’t let today’s mistakes be the seeds of tomorrow’s failure.” – Scott Pioli
- “You need to have a higher tolerance for failure and experimentation. You have to admit that it’s challenging to communicate across different cultures and it’s always difficult to find good leaders. You cannot build a global company sitting in your comfort zone.” – UiPath CEO Daniel Dines