The Top 75 Leadership Quotes of 2024 Part 2

There comes a time in the life of every leader when they must stand up and declare, “Follow me!”  Language and how to use it is a BIG deal for leaders.  Words matter.  They can mobilize people, inspire enormous change, and move others to life-changing action.  Therefore, when a leader speaks, the quotes they give, matter.

Quotes are powerful. A good quote synthesizes something with deep meaning into an easy-to-understand statement. Good quotes are pithy, repeatable, and memorable. When someone delivers a great quote, they capture in language what we all feel intuitively.

This is why I created this resource. The following are 75 quotes I captured during the second half of 2024. These will take 15 minutes to read and a lifetime to apply.

Let’s get started. You’re about to get smarter and become better as a leader!

Mastery

• “Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.” – Derek Sivers
• “Your reputation isn’t built on your best day. It’s built on your worst. Warren Buffett’s fortune was built on avoiding losses. Tom Brady became the GOAT not because of his highlight-reel throws, but because he rarely made a bad play. Moments don’t make legends. Consistency does. And the hardest consistency isn’t in doing brilliant things but avoiding stupid ones. Every mistake puts you in hard mode, forcing you to make up lost ground. Anyone can do it once. The outliers do it often.” – Shane Parrish

Culture

• “A lot of times people don’t do great things because it’s not really expected of them and nobody demands they try.  Nobody says “Hey that’s the culture here, to do great things.” If you set that up, people will do things that are greater than they ever thought they could.” ― Steve Jobs

Significance

• “I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people.” – Rosa Parks
• “You can become two things as you get older: An elder, or elderly.” – Brent Beshore
• “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” – Sebastian Junger
• “I’m not saying you don’t want to win championships, but if that’s it?  Man, it’s shallow and you’ll be empty.” – Sean McVay
• “In fact, nothing of significance in life is achieved alone. To do great things, we rely on teammates. And to win, team leaders must find ways to draw the best physical, mental, and emotional performance from the players working with them.” – Tom Brady
• “I didn’t want to spend one more day of my life waiting on someone’s MRI or hitting an agent at 1 a.m. about an ankle sprain.” – Former ESPN basketball insider Adrian Wojnarowski

Success

• “Wealth is money you don’t spend.” – Morgan Housel
• “When you’re good at something, you’ll tell everyone. When you’re great at something, they’ll tell you.” – Walter Payton
• “Without goals, training has no direction.” – Natalie Coughlin
• “Excellence for most of us blossoms and flourishes for only a brief flicker of time. Either because of human frailty, maturation, or simple outright exhaustion, it’s difficult to perform at a crescendo for an extended period. Very few stay at the top for very long.” – Bill Gross
• “A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.” — Sensei Ogui
• “There is no formula for success—you just begin and then you continue. I’m often asked how to have a career in stand-up and the answer is confoundingly simple: Do the work. Over and over again, just do the work.  After you build the courage to get onstage that first time, it’s all about repetition.” – Cameron Esposito
• “When the loyalty and the investment are both present, magic happens.” – Polina Pompliano
• “Most of us who aspire to be tops in our fields don’t really consider the amount of work required to stay tops.” – Althea Gibson
• “After you a make a fool of yourself a few hundred times, you learn what works.” – Gwen Stefani
• “People pay to see others believe in themselves.” – Kim Gordon
• “90 percent of success is not getting distracted. Talent and potential mean nothing if you can’t consistently do the boring things when you don’t feel like doing them.” – Shane Parrish
• “All that really matters is, are you making progress? Are you better than you were yesterday, the week before, the year before, whether that’s as an individual or as a business? I think as we seek excellence or perfection, sometimes, people forget that. If you’re seeking something that’s not possible, which is perfection, you tend to get discouraged, and when you get discouraged, you tend to stop making progress.” – IBM Senior Vice President of Software and Chief Commercial Officer Rob Thomas
• “The theater of October baseball is all outcome-based. If you have a good outcome, positive things are said and written. If you have a bad outcome, really bad things are said and written.” – Los Angeles Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman
• “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison
• “I never feared about my skills because I put in the work. Work ethic eliminates fear. So you if you do the work, what are you fearing? You know what you’re capable of and what you’re not.” – Michael Jordan
• “I have never seen ordinary effort lead to extraordinary results.” – Alexandr Wang
• “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success” – Henry Ford
• “Before success comes in any person’s life, he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat, and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a person, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of people do.” – Napoleon Hill

Risk

• “Fear is the most powerful human emotion, especially in sports. If you don’t care and you’re willing to make mistakes and be fearless, oftentimes you get the glory.” – @FOXSports commentator Landon Donovan
• “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.” – Christopher McDougal from his book Born To Run
• “No big challenge has ever been solved, an no lasting improvement has ever been achieved, unless people dare to try something different.” – Tim Cook
• “Fear of life closes off more opportunities for us than fear of death ever does.” – Agnes Moorehead

Productivity

• “We often fixate on the visible and exciting, overlooking that most success comes from consistently doing the mundane, unglamorous work that few notice.” – Shane Parrish
• “The difference between average results and exceptional if often found in what you don’t do. Everyone can say yes to great opportunities but only a focused person will say no to average ones. You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.” – Shane Parrish
• “The right time was yesterday. The best time is now.” – Shane Parrish
• “Most people go through life using up a very, very small part of their potential.  You could have a three-hundred-horsepower motor and get three hundred horsepower out of it or you can get a lot less.  The people who I see function well are not the ones with the biggest “motors,” but the ones with the most efficient ones.” – Warren Buffett
• “You don’t have to be special to be successful. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things by choosing to be what most people are unwilling to be: consistent, hardworking, patient, and determined.” – Shane Parrish
• “He who kills legends become legends.” – Kraven: The Hunter movie

Decision-Making

• “Man does not live by truth, but by the illusions that his brain conceives.” – Clarence Darrow
• “It’s not enough to simply apply effort; you must work on the right thing.  One hour solving the right problem beats ten hours on the wrong one.  Spend time thinking about what to focus on.” – Shane Parrish
• “The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” – Richard Powers
• “No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.” – Ian Wilson
• “You can’t make good decisions unless you have good information and can separate facts from opinion and speculation.” – Colin Powell
• “If you just want to have your ideals, you can have them, but you may not have a business. So you have to engage with the market. You can try to influence the market, you can try to educate the market, but at the end of the day, they vote every day with their pocketbooks for exactly what they want. If you’re not prepared to serve them what they want, then they’re going to go find it somewhere else and your business may end up failing. So there is that tension between your ideals [and reality]. You have to mediate between them. I always like to say we’re always pushing our ideals, but always listening to our customers.” – John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods
• “Science is organized knowledge.  Wisdom is organized life.” – 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant

Books

• “There is no better teacher than history in determining the future. There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.” — Charlie Munger
• “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.  But that’s not enough:  You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.” – Charlie Munger
• “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” – Mark Twain
• “To experience time travel, read.  To achieve immortality, write.” – James Clear
• “[Books] are the most vital, intimate, personal, mind-altering, thought-twisting, friend-giving, empathy-strengthening, thrill-riding, emotional, world-shaking technology we will ever have.  And in a world where we are increasingly connected via technology, but disconnected by society, books and stories can be the glue that bonds us.” – Matt Haig
• “There’s a second component of reading that many people don’t realize exists: searching for the good books.  There are a huge number of books and only a small percentage of them are really good, so reading means searching.  Someone who tries to read but doesn’t understand about the need to search will end up reading bad books, and will wonder why people who read a lot like to do something so boring.” – Paul Graham

Luck

• “The phrase ‘it’s better to be lucky than good’ must be one of the most ridiculous homilies ever uttered. In nearly any competitive endeavor, you have to be damned good before luck can be of any use to you at all.” – chess champion Garry Kasparov

Relationships

• “A great relationship is not only finding the person you have fun with, but also finding the person you want to be bored with. The beauty of long-term relationships is often hidden in boring, ordinary moments.” – James Clear
• “Never tell someone to go to hell unless you can send them there.” – then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson
• “It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.” – Agatha Christie
• “Think of relationships like a garden: some plants naturally thrive and help everything around them grow, while others struggle despite constant care. Every hour spent on a toxic connection is stolen from relationships with real potential.” – Shane Parrish

Personal Growth

• “What I’d say to people, and I say to young coaches on our staff, is the last thing you want to do is take a job for status, for title, or for money.  You want to take jobs and surround yourself with people who will push you, who will help you grow.  That’s the greatest thing in the world — when you can sit in a room and feel yourself improve daily.” – Florida State defensive coordinator Adam Fuller
• “It’s those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.” – Malcolm Gladwell
• “The best dividends on the labor invested have invariably come from seeking more knowledge rather than more power.” – David McCullough
• “Compete externally and you compare.  Compete internally and you improve.” – James Clear
• “I realized the ability to learn is really the superpower that nobody talks about,” he said. “It’s part effort. It’s part attitude. It’s part humility to acknowledge I’ve got to figure this out.” – IBM Senior Vice President of Software and Chief Commercial Officer Rob Thomas
• “I was terrible (as a 12-year-old).  Awful.  I wasn’t the most athletic.  I had to look long term. Because I wasn’t going to give up on the game, right?  So I had to say, ‘Ok, this year I’m going to get better at this. Next year, that.’ And so forth and so on.  And patiently, I got better.  It was piece by piece.  It was the consistency of the work.  The consistency of the work: Monday, get better. Tuesday, get better. Wednesday, get better. You do that over a period of time—three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years—you get to where you want to go.” – Kobe Bryant

Failure

• “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.” – John Wooden
• “Failure is really the only moment that real growth occurs…You don’t find out about people until they fail.” – Sean McVay
• “Worrying gets you nowhere.  If you turn up worrying about how you’re going to perform, you’ve already lost.” – Usain Bolt
• “In my experience, each failure contains the seeds of your next success—if you are willing to learn from it.” – Paul Allen
• “I believe that defeat is life’s way of nudging you and letting you know you’re off course. There’s always some sort of hidden opportunity or lesson in each episode—a chance to build your character. Spanx wouldn’t exist if I had aced the LSAT.” – Sara Blakely

Creativity and Innovation

• “Boredom is a filter. Common ideas come before it. Uncommon ideas come after it. Sit with a project long enough to get bored with it, then sit a little more. The most useful insights bubble up after you get bored.” – James Clear
• “True innovation is often met with ridicule. Enduring that non-belief is the price of admission for anyone who wants to alter the status quo.  Innovation is about everyone agreeing with you…later.” – Sahil Bloom
• “Technology finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.” – Jared Diamond
• “Process makes you more efficient. But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.” – Steve Jobs
• “Creativity Law of Thermodynamics: Before you can radiate, you need to absorb.” – James Cameron
• “Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” – Andy Benoit
• “A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.” – Paul Graham

Character

• “We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you’re going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.” – Warren Buffet
• “The discipline of desire is the background of character.” — John Locke
• “Competence is how good you are when there is something to gain.  Character is how good you are when there is nothing to gain.  People will reward you for competence.  But people will only love you for your character.” – Mark Manson

90 More Top Leadership Quotes of 2024 Part 1

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