The Top 50 Leadership Quotes Of 2022 Part 2

As I continue my end of the year compilation posts, the following are my Top 50 Leadership Quotes Of 2022 Part 2.  Just in case you missed Part 1, click HERE or on the image below to download.

Quotes are an invaluable resource to leaders.  They help put into words what we are felling intuitively.  In addition, if you ever have to deliver a public address to a crowd of any size, quotes can provide you the level of authority needed to take what you are saying from a good speech to a life-changing message.

Quotes also are insightful.  The best ones have a level of brilliance that makes us smarter and challenges of our thinking.  This is what you will learn by reading the 50 quotes below.  They will take you only a few minutes to read, days and weeks to understand, and a lifetime to apply.

Now let’s get started.  The following are The Top 50 Leadership Quotes Of 2022 Part 2:

Christianity

• “You (leaders) have been given the task of representing what God looks like to your people.” – Mike Linch

Entertainment

• “We all think you we can run into a burning building.  But until you feel the heat, you never know.” – The character Fay from the movie Tenet
• “You know what? I made Titanic. This building that we’re meeting in right now, this new half-billion dollar complex on your lot? Titanic paid for that, so I get to do this.” – James Cameron in a New York Times interview on how he got approval for certain parts of the new Avatar film including its length
• “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” – Johnny Cash
• “Success doesn’t change you.  Fame does.” – Whitney Houston
• “If everybody claims to be a victim, then nobody will hear the real victims.  Even me getting smacked by Suge Smith… I went to work the next day, I got kids.” – Chris Rock
• “The future is coming and you’re not in it.  Your kind is headed for extinction.” – Admiral Chester “Hammer” Cain played by Ed Harris in Top Gun: Maverick.  To which Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, responded, “Maybe so, sir.  But not today.”

Personal Growth

• “Ambition is when you close the gap between your circumstances and your expectations. Entitlement is when you expect others to close the gap between your circumstances and your expectations.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits
• “One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
• “Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, add up over time.” – Daniel F. Chambliss
• “Commitment separates those who live their dreams from those who live their lives regretting the opportunities they have squandered.” – Bill Russell
• “What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.” – Warren Buffett
• “‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.” ― Tim Ferriss
• “Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes.  Making mistakes is the privilege of the active – of those who can correct their mistakes and put them right.” – Ingvar Komprad, founder of IKEA
• “Who you are as a person is going to have more to do with your success in whatever you’re choosing to do than anything else.” – Alan Mulally

Productivity and Success

• “Do the work. That’s all the productivity advice you need, and the only useful productivity advice you’re ever going to get. You can direct your attention to a million optimizations— email, meetings, notes, calendar, time tracking, goals, todo lists, time estimates, prioritization frameworks, quantified self sensors, analytics, apps, documents, journaling. But don’t. Ignore all this, and do the work. When you do the work, everything else optimizes itself.” – Farnam Street
• “Most successful people are just an anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.” – Andrew Wilkinson
• “To be a good manager, you want things to run smoothly.  And insights are not ways of running smoothly.  Insights are disorganizing and disruptive.  And so, that’s a major reason that organizations, without even intending to, block the insights that come their way.” – Gary Klein
• “The person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero.” – Stan Lee
• “Long days in the company of someone I had never met but would come to know better than anyone else in the world.” – Biographer James Atlas on what motivated him
• “Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the only thing they can’t afford to lose.” —Thomas Edison
• “In sports, one of the primary sources of advantage is choosing how to play the game. In life, one of the primary sources of advantage is choosing which game to play.” – James Clear
• “To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.” – Winston Churchill
• “Your customer service never exceeds the culture you created.” – Kevin Scott

Decision-Making

• “A large part of the difference between the experienced decision maker and the novice in these situations is not any particular intangible like “judgment” or “intuition.” If one could open the lid, so to speak, and see what was in the head of the experienced decision maker, one would find that he had at his disposal repertoires of possible actions; that he had checklists of things to think about before he acted; and that he had mechanisms in his mind to evoke these, and bring these to his conscious attention when the situations for decisions arose.” – Herbert Simon
• “You have to learn to quit being right all the time, and quit being smart all the time, and quit thinking this is a contest about how smart you are and how right you are, and realize that you are here to make a positive difference in the world. And being smart and being right is probably no longer the way to do that.  See when you’re in school, you take test after test, after test, after test. You have to prove you’re smart over and over. Thousands of times, you have to prove you’re smart. It’s very difficult to stop. We are programmed to prove we’re smart.” – Marshall Goldsmith
• “Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that’s unthinkable.” – Paul Graham
• “One of the difficult things about making decisions is it reduces opportunity in the short-term, but that’s the only thing that really creates great opportunity in the long-term.” – Reid Hoffman
• “When we are debating an issue, loyalty means giving me your honest opinion, whether you think I’ll like it or not. Disagreement, at this stage, stimulates me. But once a decision has been made, the debate ends. From that point on, loyalty means executing the decision as if it were your own.” – Former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell
• “I place more value on decision speed. If you can make twice as many decisions at half the precision, that’s actually often better. And then, given the fact that the rate of improvement of decision-making with additional time almost necessarily tends to flatten out, I think that most people should be operating earlier in that curve. Make more decisions with less confidence but in significantly less time. And just recognize that in most cases, you can course-correct and treat fast decisions as a kind of asset and capability in their own right. It’s quite striking to me how some of the organizations that I hold in the highest regard tend to do this. The second thing is to not treat all decisions uniformly. I think the most obvious axis to break them down on are degree of reversibility and magnitude. Things with low reversibility and great impact and magnitude, those ones you do want to really deliberate over and try to get right.” – Farnam Street
• “Since focus requires saying no, it also means really smart people and good competitors are saying no to really good ideas. If you’re a person trying to find your way in an organization, it’s worth thinking about the most focused people around you and the best idea they’re not working on. If you’re a company, it’s worth thinking about what your best competition is not doing. You can often figure this out by interviewing smart focused people from another company.” – Farnam Street
• “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” – Historian Niall Ferguson

Humility

• “None are as empty as those who are full of themselves.” – Benjamin Whichcote
• “Many people say I’m the best women’s soccer player in the world.  I don’t think so.  And because of that, someday I just might be.” – Mia Hamm

Athletic Success

• “When you win, it takes an incredible amount of awareness and discipline to stay curious about how you can close the gap between where you are and what the ultimate team could look like.” – Sue Enquist, Founder and CEO of One Softball
• “I always say that I’m a sponge: At night I go to bed and I squeeze myself out so that the next day I can take up as much new information as I can.” – Serena Williams
• “The first time you quit it’s hard.  The second time, it gets easier.  The third time, you don’t even have to think about it.” – Paul “Bear” Bryant
• “I never wanted a coach that was a know it all. What was common with the best coaches I worked for was that it was a collaborative effort…. It’s a group effort, I think players appreciate that. They see strength when coaches do that.” – Steve Kerr
• “The hallmark of greatness is consistency.” – Hall of Fame tight end Tony Gonzalez
• “One lesson I’ve learned is that if the job I do were easy, I wouldn’t derive so much satisfaction from it. The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. That is how you win championships, that is what separates the great player from the merely good player. The difference lies in how well you’ve prepared.” – Rafael Nadal from his book Rafa
• “You cry in practice, you laugh in competition. … A sword is made strong by putting it through fire. I try to create that sword.” – Coach Paul Assaiante, 17-time national champion men’s Squash coach at Trinity College

Self-Awareness

• “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it’s faced.” – James Baldwin
• “Most people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it is, with the world as they think about it, and talk about it, and describe it.” – Alan Watts
• “My life is one long obstacle course with me as the chief obstacle.” — Jack Parr
• “Criticism is something you can easily avoid — by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” — Aristotle
• “Whatever age you are today, your future self would love to be it. Most people do not consider 65 to be a young age, but when you’re 75 you’d love to rewind to 65 and regain those years. Few people would describe 35 as your youth, but in your mid-50s your mid-30s will seem like the “young you.” Today is a great opportunity, no matter your age. Looking back in a few years, today will seem like the time when you were young and full of potential or the moment when you could have started early or the turning point when you made a choice that benefited your future. The moment in front of you right now is a good one. Make the most of it.” – James Clear

Sacrifice

• “To develop physical and mental toughness, you have to be able to deny yourself pleasures that others are indulging in, that you could indulge in, other than the simple fact that you decided that you’re going to work at this time.” – Jim Zorn
• “I know for all those of you who lost someone, 21 years is both a lifetime and no time at all… Grief is the price we pay for love.” – President Joe Biden at the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial anniversary
• “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” – Historian Niall Ferguson
• “On the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that on other days, on other fields will bear the fruits of victory.” – General Douglas MacArthur

Now get to work applying these lessons!

As previously mentioned, The Top 65 Leadership Quotes Of 2022 Part 1 is a resource every leader should have.  Great quotes bring clarity and put into words who we intuitively feel as leaders.  They give us wisdom and insights which advance the mission and vision of our organizations.  This eBook includes thoughts and insights from leaders like Warren Buffett, Nick Saban, James Clear, Dawn Staley, Jurgen Klopp, Jerry Seinfeld, and even Ted Lasso.  This resource will take you about 10 minutes to read but a lifetime to apply.  You will want to stop and ponder the implications of each quote.  Click HERE or on the image provided for immediate download!