Building Careers Quotes

A strong woman builds her own world. She is one who is wise enough to know that it will attract the man she will gladly share it with.

Begin somewhere. You cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.

Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.

In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

You deal. You survive. You grow up and you build a career. And you remember these big/little hardships. They make you human.

Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God.” The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.

If you can show people how to build castles, make sure you do not neglect building and nurturing your own.

Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

The source to low self-esteem is the lack of control you feel you have in your life. If you spend your life competing with others, trying to make right the wrongs done to you, or waste your time trying to look right, you will never achieve contentment and emotional balance. People you encounter in life can’t be controlled by you. You only have control of yourself. Build your life around a relationship with a higher power and achieving what you’re passionate about. When you let go of what you can’t control, true peace can then enter your life. This is the path to achieving emotional balance.

God has a way of picking a “nobody” and turning their world upside down, in order to create a “somebody” that will remove the obstacles they encountered out of the pathway for others.

Success is not just about what you achieve, but also about how you impact others. Be a leader, inspire those around you, and leave a lasting legacy.

Honestly, I never really understood the glorification of Fridays & weekends. I don't want to build a life and career, where I spent five days a week waiting for the weekend. No! I want to enjoy my life, and don't wish any weekday away. I want each day to matter to me, in some way, even if it's a small tiny way. I love my life. Everyday. That's the spirit we should convey all around us.

Dependent cultures not only kill the ambition of the people and the organization, they will ultimately drain the energy of the leader and result in the burnout that has killed so many promising careers

What is it that inspires you? What do you love to do? What would you do for free? At the beginning of my busi-ness career, my why was to become a millionaire—not a good why! And why not? Because that is an aspiration rather than a why. Aspirations, I have found, won’t fuel me when the going gets tough. But a true “why” will.

If your goal is to love what you do, you must first build up “career capital” by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the traits that define great work.

Your VISION and your self-willingness is the MOST powerful elements to conquer your goal

I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I’m coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment.

It doesn’t matter where you come from, where you think you are going, what job or career you have had or think you should have. You are not too late, and you’re not too early.

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.

You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day.

In the modern workplace, you gotta be a jack-of-all-trades. Mastering your career is all about being adaptable, versatile, and always learning.

Want to make waves in the business world? Then you gotta be bold, take risks, and always be ready to pivot.

If one can, anyone can. If two can, you can, too!

They say that success is a journey, not a destination. But let's be real, the destination is pretty sweet - especially if it comes with a six-figure salary and a company car.

Don't just climb the corporate ladder, master it! And if anyone tries to push you off, show them who's boss and climb even higher.

Success is not just about hard work, it's about working smart. So, take a break from the grind and strategize like a pro.

We are involved now in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. What political leader here can stand up and say, "My party is the party of principles?

They say that the first step to success is setting clear goals. Well, I've got plenty of goals - like finally getting that corner office with a view, and firing my most annoying colleague.

In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work

You had to be a go‑getter in your twenties more than any other time, where being a go‑getter meant building a safe career as quickly as possible or die trying.

To achieve career mastery, you must first master yourself. Take the time to assess your strengths, weaknesses, and goals, and then chart a course for success.

If you want to achieve career mastery, then you need to be willing to put in the work. But don't worry, the view from the top is totally worth it.

If you're not driving business growth and profitability, then you might as well be a houseplant. So get out there and make some money, honey!

DeathWish: You spent some time working with Courtney Love and Billy Corgan on a creative level, how did this experience help your growth as an artist? EA: It didn't -- it stunted it entirely. I gave up over a year of my life and career helping Billy with his flop of an album and designing and building all of the costumes for his music video. With Courtney, we were friends, but I spent years working to record and promote her flop of an album only to find that my value increased every time I peed in an orange juice bottle so that she could fake her way through a drug test. Not exactly a haven for artistic growth.

Professional development is important, but let's not forget about the most important kind of development - personal brand development. Because in the modern workplace, it's not what you know, it's who knows you.

My best advice to myself was to act like I’d been there before. I was in way over my head, and I was not skating down the line between good and bad anymore. I tried to justify my actions by reminding myself that it was part of my investigation but even I couldn’t fool myself that much. I drained my glass and then drained the one that Sara handed me. In no way, was this evening turning out to have career building opportunity written on it. I was getting more nervous by the minute.

The only way to build a fan base is to have a lot of material out there for readers to find. You can't manufacture a fan base. You create it, one story at a time.

Autumn is a momentum of the natures golden beauty…, so the same it’s time to find your momentum of life

Daydreaming is also important time for artists.

The modern job market is like a game of musical chairs. You need to be the one with a chair when the music stops, or you're out of luck.

The workplace is like a battlefield, and you need to be a warrior to survive. So arm yourself with knowledge and fight for your place in the corporate world.

Your traditional EDUCATION is not going to CHANGE your life but the life you are experiencing that can change you. Choose a POSITIVE life STYLE with positive ATTITUDE which could bring you a life with HAPPINESS and WISDOM

Why should a man marry and have children, study and build a career; why should he invent new techniques, build new institutions, and develop new ideas--when he doubts if there will be a tomorrow which can guarantee the value of human effort? Crucial here for nuclear man is the lack of a sense of continuity, which is so vital for a creative life. He finds himself part of a nonhistory in which only the sharp moment of the here and now is valuable. For nuclear man life easily becomes a bow whose string is broken and from which no arrow can fly. In his dislocated state he becomes paralyzed. His reactions are not anxiety and joy, which were so much a part of existential man, but apathy and boredom.

Other people you know seem to change quite easily. They have no problem at all with succeeding at their careers and buying apartments and moving to other cities and falling in love and getting married and hyphenating their names and adopting rescue cats and, finally, having children, and then documenting all of this meticulously on the internet. Really, it appears to be effortless on their part. Their lives are constructed like buildings, each precious but totally unsurprising block stacked before your eyes.

HONESTY COMPOUNDS. It compounds exponentially. No matter what happens in your bank account, in your career, in your promotions, in your startups. Honesty compounds exponentially, not over days or weeks, but years and decades. More people trust your word and spread the news that you are a person to be sought out, sought after, given opportunity, given help, or given money. This is what will build your empire.

Don't just build a career, build a legacy.

Your every positive action in your life will increase your self-esteem and this self-esteem will boost you for more positive action to take you on success

How you think and create your inner world that you gonna become in your outer world. Your inner believe manifest you in the outside

You can never stop being a teacher. It is the core responsibility of a leader.

What do you do in your spare time?” Arthur asks. What is it with this guy? Hope flinches, feeling less like she’s been interviewed and more like she’s been whiplashed. The spare time question was code for questions, you were, by law, not allowed to ask. Did she read books to sick kids? Find housing for the homeless? Support underprivileged women to build careers? Did she have a demanding husband? Two kids under five? And aging mother? But Hope had never put down stakes, either in the home or the do-good camp. Where she came from, at the end of a workweek, a person deserved a cold beer and some down time. “What spare time?

A feeling of belonging brings with it a desire to build something to mark one's connection, and then, having built - a garden, a house, a career, a tunnel system - one has to protect those things from intruders, violently if necessary. We try to create an illusion of permanence, but there is none.

The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her--one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she'd never experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time. All her life, she'd been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself--the entity that was Nico O'Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she'd worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored. She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else.

How do you choose a successor? Look at her or his track record. A good successor would have a track record of successes - great grades, great schools, great successes at work and steady climb up the ladder. Throughout her or his career, there has been challenges which were overcame. It builds character, fortitude, and strength. - STRONG by Kailin Gow

To build a career, the right question is not “What job am I passionate about doing?” but instead “What way of working and living will nurture my passion?

The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.

With focus and consistency you can change your habits. By changing your habits, you reprogram the behaviors that control most of your life and ultimately determine your success.

The enemy of creation is not uncertainty, it’s inertia.

I wake up the next morning, happy and full of life. I again stare at my ceiling that says, ‘Build a life worth living’ This is the first time in forever that I have felt that maybe I am building a life worth living, that I’m not just faking it. My career my twin, books, and Archer are all I’ve had for so long, which was always worth living for - but love. Love is something more. Love makes you feel wanted. Love makes life worth living, and it’s something I have never felt in this way. I have known this guy only for a little over a week. He walked right into my life and changed everything. I don’t know how that is possible, but it is.

If you are not EXCITED enough at your present life its mean your future is not EXITING. Excitement will give you ENTHUSIASM and enthusiasm will give you a positive energetic LIFE STYLE which could give you a successful exiting life…

When you can't win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out. You can shortcut the need for a genetic advantage (or for years of practice) by rewriting the rules. A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.

It’s hard to be your own coach, but not impossible. The key thing is to set up structures that provide you with objective feedback—and to not be so blind that you can’t take that feedback and use it.

After putting economics aside, I found that there were two primary reasons why people quit:   They hated their manager; generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were receiving.   They weren’t learning anything: The company wasn’t investing resources in helping employees develop new skills.

In the present day corporate world, it is utmost important to build a personal brand for yourself and anyone who knows the basics of brand-building would know that it is impossible without proper self promotion!

You only ever have three things: 1) your self, wellbeing and mindset 2) Your life network, resources and resourcefulness 3) Your reputation and goodwill. Treasure and tend the first. Value, support and build the second. And mindfully, wisely ensure that the third (your life current and savings account) is always in credit.

The overrated, unfashionable gender. The one social group it’s politically correct – no, no – virtuous to dislike. In fact, man-bashing has become mainstream, so lucrative that people build entire careers on it – which might explain why, for many, it musn’t be ruined with a reality check.

There are two ways to build a career or a business. We can go through life hunting and pecking, looking for opportunities or customers, hoping that something connects. Or we can go through life with intention, knowing what our piece looks like, knowing our WHY, and going straight to the places we fit.

The world is random and unpredictable, which means that it is close to impossible to outline exactly what your next best move is. But you can explore it—by doing and trying. Just make sure you don’t go all in before you’ve figured out that it works.

Trust me.” That’s what a CEO says every day to her employees. Trust me: This will be a good company. Trust me: This will be good for your career. Trust me: This will be good for your life. A layoff breaks that trust. In order to rebuild trust, you have to come clean.

We’re asked to apply our intellectual capital to solve hard problems—a creative goal that requires uninterrupted focus. At the same time, we’re asked to be constantly available by e-mail and messenger and in meetings—an administrative goal that creates constant distraction. We’re being asked, in other words, to simultaneously resist and embrace distraction to advance in our careers—a troubling paradox.

I was very lucky to be offered a lovely piece of property to build a career on. I started building a house on it, but it wasn't necessarily a house I would want to live in. So I ripped down that house, and I worked with these great lumberjacks to build a really cool cabin—a place I want to drink whiskey in and hang out until the sun rises.

If I don't keep this job, then my only future career-options are working in Argos, or being a prostitute,' I say, wildly. 'Maybe you could work in Argos as a prostitute,' my mother says, merrily. She appears to be enjoying this conversation. 'They could list you in the catalogue, and people could queue up, and wait for you to come down the conveyor belt.

As I have earlier noted, the most important things in life and in business can’t be measured. The trite bromide 'If you can measure it, you can manage it' has been a hindrance in the building a great real-world organization, just as it has been a hindrance in evaluating the real-world economy. It is character, not numbers, that make the world go ‘round. How can we possibly measure the qualities of human existence that give our lives and careers meaning? How about grace, kindness, and integrity? What value do we put on passion, devotion, and trust? How much do cheerfulness, the lilt of a human voice, and a touch of pride add to our lives? Tell me, please, if you can, how to value friendship, cooperation, dedication, and spirit. Categorically, the firm that ignores the intangible qualities that the human beings who are our colleagues bring to their careers will never build a great workforce or a great organization.

The best negotiating tactic is to build a genuine, trusting relationship. If you’re an unknown entrepreneur and the person you’re dealing with isn’t invested in you, why would he or she even do business with you? But on the other hand, if the person is your mentor or friend, you might not even need to negotiate.

Maybe universal nostalgia doesn't exist. Maybe each of us carries our own personal version of the better times. It's at about twnety-two years that we all begin to think of our childhood as the good ol' days and everything afterwards exists as a slow-motion face plant. The fall continues, through marriage, through career building, through parenthood, through old age, until we finally touch nose to ground. At twenty-two years old, I've just started, but I think I can already smell my own grave.

Acting on desire is more like a craft, a science, an art. It takes careful mindful practice. Be patient and quiet. Listen, observe, take notes. Figure out what you want, privately, and then choose to want it, publicly. Put your desire out in the open. I want to go swimming. I want to bake bread. I want to paint a picture. I want to build a chair. I want to write a book. You act and then you fail. Over and over. And it’s better to start failing when you’re young, when all you lose is an ice-cream cone or a basketball game or an afternoon of fun. When you’re older, the stakes are higher. If adults don’t know how to want, then they lose a love, a career, a life.

In the world of business, at least, Shakespeare proves the superior guide. Inside a firm, people become obsessed with their competitors for career advancement. Then the firms themselves become obsessed with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.

Yes, breadth of experience is likely necessary and desirable when you’re young—after all, you have to go out there and discover what seems worth investing yourself in. But depth is where the gold is buried. And you have to stay committed to something and go deep to dig it up. That’s true in relationships, in a career, in building a great lifestyle—in everything.

People hate thinking systematically about how to optimize their relationships. It is normal to hear someone say: “I will just wait for something to happen naturally” when talking about one of the most important aspects of their life while genuinely believing that this approach has reasonable odds of success. Imagine if people said the same thing about their careers. It would sound truly bizarre for someone to expect a successful career to “just happen naturally” and yet it is entirely normalized to expect that good relationships will. People pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive degrees in computer science, marketing, and neuroscience. They make tough sacrifices with the understanding that the skills and knowledge they build in these domains will dramatically affect their quality of life. Ironically, people spend very little time systematically examining mating strategies—despite the fact that a robust understanding of the subject can dramatically affect quality of life. We will happily argue that your sexual and relationship skills matter more than your career skills. If you want to be wealthy, the fastest way to become so is to marry rich. Nothing makes happiness easier than a loving, supportive relationship, while one of the best ways to ensure you are never happy is to enter or fail to recognize and escape toxic relationships. If you want to change the world, a great partner can serve as a force multiplier. A draft horse can pull 8000 pounds, while two working together can pull 24,000 pounds. When you have a partner with whom you can synergize, you gain reach and speed that neither you nor your partner could muster individually. Heck, even if you are the type of person to judge your self-worth by the number of people with whom you have slept, a solid grasp of mating strategies will help you more than a lifetime of hitting the gym (and we say this with full acknowledgment that hitting the gym absolutely helps). A great romantic relationship will even positively impact your health (a 2018 paper in Psychophysiology found that the presence of a partner in a room lowered participants’ blood pressure) and increase your lifespan (a 2019 paper in the journal Health Psychology showed individuals in happy marriages died young at a 20% lower rate). 

Quentin found himself staring at the end of his Brakebills careers across the perilously slender gap of only two months of time. It was like he'd been wending his way though a vast, glittering city, zig-zagging through side streets and wandering through buildings and haunted de Chrico arcades and little hidden piazzas, the whole time thinking that he'd barely scratched the surface, that he was just seeing a tiny sliver of one little neighborhood. And then suddenly he turned a corner and it turned out that he'd been through the whole city, it was all behind him, and all that was left was one short street leading straight out of town.

Those who romanticize the concept of leaderless movements often misleadingly deploy Ella Baker's words, "Strong people don't need [a] strong leader." Baker delivered this message in various iterations over her fifty-year career working in the trenches of racial-justice struggles, but what she meant was specific and contextual. She was calling for people to disinvest from the notion of the messianic, charismatic leader who promises political salvation in exchange for deference. Baker also did not mean that movements would naturally emerge without collective analysis, serious strategizing, organizing, mobilizing and consensus building.

I woke one night to find him staring at the ceiling, his profile lit by the glow of streetlights outside. He looked vaguely troubled, as if he were pondering something deeply personal. Was it our relationship? The loss of his father? “Hey, what’re you thinking about over there?” I whispered. He turned to look at me, his smile a little sheepish. “Oh,” he said. “I was just thinking about income inequality.” This, I was learning, was how Barack’s mind worked. He got himself fixated on big and abstract issues, fueled by some crazy sense that he might be able to do something about them. It was new to me, I have to say. Until now, I’d hung around with good people who cared about important enough things but who were focused primarily on building their careers and providing for their families. Barack was just different. He was dialed into the day-to-day demands of his life, but at the same time, especially at night, his thoughts seemed to roam a much wider plane.

Marriage is one of our most defining moments because so much is wrapped up in it. If building a career is like spending twelve hours at the blackjack table—seeing the cards as you make your decisions, playing each hand with current winnings in mind, having a new opportunity to take a chance or play it safe with every card dealt—then choosing a mate is like walking over to the roulette wheel and putting all your chips on red 32.

Your people give their days (and sometimes their nights) to you. They give their hands, brains, and hearts. Sure, the company pays them. It fills their wallets. But as a leader, you need to fill their souls. You can do that by getting in their skin, by giving the work meaning, by clearing obstacles, and by demonstrating the generosity gene. And you can do it, perhaps most powerfully, by creating an environment that’s exciting and enjoyable.

Studies consistently show that when we look back on our lives the most common regrets are not the risks we took, but the ones we didn’t. Of the many regrets people describe, regrets of inaction outnumber those of action by nearly two to one. Some of the most common include not pursuing more education, not being more assertive, and failing to seize the moment. When people reflect later in life, it is the things they did not do that generate the greatest despair.

Your work isn’t simply your job description, title, or industry. It’s when you wake up, what you wear, and your first 30 minutes in the office. It’s what your office is or is not, the five people you are physically closest to, and whether you can get up and walk or have to sit all day. It’s whether you fear for your job due to changing laws or innovation each day. It’s how it fits with your family and all the people and events that matter most. It’s the person you are when you come home.

Relief, fear, and humiliation. Her parents paid for a pricey prep school education in D.C. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown with a degree in political science. She breezed through law school and finished with honors. A dozen megafirms offered her jobs after a federal court clerkship. The first twenty-nine years of her life had seen overwhelming success and little failure. To be discharged in such a manner was crushing. To be escorted out of the building was degrading. This was not just a minor bump in a long, rewarding career.

So far in my life, I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a vice president at a hospital and the director of a nonprofit that helps young people build meaningful careers. I’ve been a working-class black student at a fancy mostly white college. I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts of rooms. I’ve been a bride, a stressed-out new mother, a daughter torn up by grief. And until recently, I was the First Lady of the United States of America—a job that’s not officially a job, but that nonetheless has given me a platform like nothing I could have imagined. It challenged me and humbled me, lifted me up and shrank me down, sometimes all at once. I’m just beginning to process what took place over these last years—from the moment in 2006 when my husband first started talking about running for president to the cold morning this winter when I climbed into a limo with Melania Trump, accompanying her to her husband’s inauguration. It’s been quite a ride.

Gentlemen,” he said, “I am a simple soldier. When I was a cadet at Norwich, I was told, and I believed, and my subsequent career has proven true, that the essence of command is to make sure the troops have confidence in what they are doing. Troops must have faith in their officers Officers build and maintain that faith in a very simple manner: They never lie to their troops; they never ask them to do something they cannot do themselves, or are unwilling to do themselves; and they never partake of creature comforts until the last private in the rear rank has that creature comfort. If you’ll keep that in mind, I’m sure that we’ll get along.

I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. It sounds simple, but like any important investment, these relationships need consistent attention and care. But there are two forces that will be constantly working against this happening. First, you’ll be routinely tempted to invest your resources elsewhere—in things that will provide you with a more immediate payoff. And second, your family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand your attention. They love you and they want to support your career, too. That can add up to neglecting the people you care about most in the world. The theory of good money, bad money explains that the clock of building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start. If you don’t nurture and develop those relationships, they won’t be there to support you if you find yourself traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.

We scoffed at the kids who weren't like us, the ones who already talked about careers, or bliddy mortgages and pensions. Kids wanting to be old before they were young. Kids wanting to be dead before they'd lived. They were digging their own graves, building the walls of their own damn jails. Us, we hung to our youth. We were footloose, fancy free. We said we'd never grow boring and old. We plundered charity shops for vintage clothes. We bought battered Levis and gorgeous faded velvet stuff from Attica in High Bridge. We wore coloured boots, hemp scarves from Gaia. We read Baudelaire and Byron. We read our poems to each other. We wrote songs and posted them on YouTube. We formed bands. We talked of the amazing journeys we'd take together once school was done. Sometimes we paired off, made couples that lasted for a little while, but the group was us. We hung together. We could say anything to each other. We loved each other.

Persistence trumps talent. What's the most powerful force in the universe? Compound interest. It builds on itself. Over time, a small amount of money becomes a large amount of money. Persistence is similar. A little bit improves performance, which encourages greater persistence which improves persistence even more. And on and on it goes. Lack of persistence works the same way -- only in the opposite direction. Of course talent is important, but the world is lit erred with talented people who didn't persist, who didn't put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone. Meanwhile, people who might have less talent pass them by. That's why intrinsic motivation is so important. Doing things not the get an external reward like money or a promotion, but because you simple like doing it. The more intrinsic motivation you have , the more likely you are to persist. The more you persist, the more likely you are to succeed.

It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to show your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately in your career or business, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential. It’s not necessarily about becoming a professional artist, online influencer, or business mogul: it’s about taking ownership of your work, your ideas, and your potential to contribute in whatever arena you find yourself in. It doesn’t matter how impressive or grand your output is, or how many people see it. It could be just between your family or friends, among your colleagues and team, with your neighbors or schoolmates—what matters is that you are finding your voice and insisting that what you have to say matters. You have to value your ideas enough to share them. You have to believe that the smallest idea has the potential to change people’s lives. If you don’t believe that now, start with the smallest project you can think of to begin to prove to yourself that your ideas can make a difference.

Like many of the kids I write about, I once was a runaway myself—and a few (but not all) of the other writers in the series also come from troubled backgrounds. That early experience influences my fiction, no doubt, but I don't think it's necessary to come from such a background in order to write a good Bordertown tale. To me, "running away to Bordertown" is as much a metaphorical act as an actual one. These tales aren't just for kids who have literally run away from home, but also for every kid, every person, who "runs away" from a difficult or constrictive past to build a different kind of life in some new place. Some of us "run away" to college . . . or we "run away" to a distant city or state . . . or we "run away" from a safe, secure career path to follow our passions or artistic muse. We "run away" from places we don't belong, or from families we have never fit into. We "run away" to find ourselves, or to find others like ourselves, or to find a place where we finally truly belong. And that kind of "running away from home"—the everyday, metaphorical kind—can be just as hard, lonely, and disorienting as crossing the Nevernever to Bordertown . . . particularly when you're in your teens, or early twenties, and your resources (both inner and outer) are still limited. I want to tell stories for young people who are making that journey, or contemplating making that journey. Stories in which friendship, community, and art is the "magic" that lights the way. (speaking about the Borderland series she "founded")

Cultivating a willingness to succeed despite any and all circumstances is the most important variable of the reengagement equation. Your willingness to succeed builds self-esteem. It broadens your concept of your own capability, yet it is the first thing we lose touch with when things go bad. After that, giving up often feels like the sanest option, and maybe it is, but know that quitting chips away at your self-worth and always requires some level of mental rehab. Even if what forces you to quit is an injury or something else beyond your control, you will still have to bounce back from the experience mentally. A successful mission seldom requires any emotional maintenance. In order to execute on your willingness to succeed, you will need to be able to perform without purpose. You’ve heard of purpose, that magical missing ingredient crucial to landing a fulfilling career and building a happy life. What if I told you the importance of finding your purpose was overblown? What if there never was any such thing as your good friend purpose? What if it doesn’t matter what the fuck you do with your time here? What if it’s all arbitrary and life doesn’t give a flying fuck if you want to be happy? What then? All I know is this: I am David Fucking Goggins. I exist; therefore, I complete what I start. I take pride in my effort and in my performance in all phases of life. Just because I am here! If I’m lost, I will find myself. As long as I’m on planet Earth, I will not half-ass it. Anywhere I lack, I will improve because I exist and I am willing.

Ask a woman who she is, and she’ll tell you who she loves, who she serves, and what she does. I am a mother, a wife, a sister, a friend, a career woman. The fact that we define ourselves by our roles is what keeps the world spinning. It’s also what makes us untethered and afraid. If a woman defines herself as a wife, what happens if her partner leaves? If a woman defines herself as a mother, what happens when the kids leave for college? If a woman defines herself as a career woman, what happens when the company folds? Who we are is perpetually being taken from us, so we live in fear instead of peace. We cling too tightly, close our eyes to what we need to look at hard, avoid questions that need to be asked, and in a million ways insist to our friends, partners, and children that the purpose of their existence is to define us. We build sandcastles and then try to live inside them, fearing the inevitable tide. Answering the question Who do I love? is not enough. We must live lives of our own. To live a life of her own, each woman must also answer: What do I love? What makes me come alive? What is beauty to me, and when do I take the time to fill up with it? Who is the soul beneath all of these roles? Each woman must answer these questions now, before the tide comes. Sandcastles are beautiful, but we cannot live inside them. Because the tide rises. That’s what the tide does. We must remember: I am the builder, not the castle. I am separate and whole, over here, eyes on the horizon, sun on my shoulders, welcoming the tide. Building, rebuilding. Playfully. Lightly. Never changing. Always changing.

PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully. Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children. Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant. Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone. Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions. Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle. Peacetime CEO has rules like “We’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number one or two.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number one or two and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.

....It was to complete his marriage with Maimuna, the daughter of Al Hareth, the Helalite. He had become betrothed to her on his arrival at Mecca, but had post-poned the nuptials until after he had concluded the rites of pilgrimage. This was doubtless another marriage of policy, for Maimuna was fifty-one years of age, and a widow, but the connection gained him two powerful proselytes. One was Khaled Ibn al Waled, a nephew of the widow, an intrepid warrior who had come near destroy- ing Mahomet at the battle of Ohod. He now became one of the most victorious champions of Islamism, and by his prowess obtained the appellation of " The Sword of God." The other proselyte was Khaled's friend, Amru Ibn al Aass ; the same who assailed Mahomet with poetry and satire at the commencement of his prophetic career ; who had been an ambassador from the Koreishites to the king of Abyssinia, to obtain the surrender of the fugitive Moslems, and who was henceforth destined with his sword to carry victoriously into foreign lands the faith he had once so strenuously opposed. Note.— Maimuna was the last spouse of the prophet, and, old as she was at her marriage, survived all his other wives. She died many years after him, in a pavilion at Serif, under the same tree in the shade of which her nuptial tent had been pitched, and was there interred. The pious historian, Al Jannabi, who styles himself "a poor servant of Allah, hoping for the pardon of his sins through the mercy of God," visited her tomb on returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, in the year of the Hegira 963, a.d. 1555. "I saw there," said he, "a dome of black marble erected in memory of Maimuna, on the very spot on which the apostle of God had reposed with her. God knows the truth ! and also the reason of the black color of the stone. There is a place of ablution, and an oratory ; but the building has fallen to decay.

I wish I had asked myself when I was younger. My path was so tracked that in my 8th-grade yearbook, one of my friends predicted— accurately— that four years later I would enter Stanford as a sophomore. And after a conventionally successful undergraduate career, I enrolled at Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship. After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t. At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my life for the worse. Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past. the best paths are new and untried. will this business still be around a decade from now? business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else. The few who knew what might be learned, Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show, And reveal their feelings to the crowd below, Mankind has always crucified and burned. Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everybody around them. In this respect, Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt’s Gulch. There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship—or jeering—for the truth. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.