David Schwartz Quotes

Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing a solution paves the way to solution.

Action cures fear.

The mind is what the mind is fed.

Look at things not as they are, but as they can be. Visualization adds value to everything. A big thinker always visualizes what can be done in the future. He isn't stuck with the present

Remember, you see in any situation what you expect to see.

Hope is a start. But hope needs action to win victories

WHERE THERE IS A WILL, THERE IS A WAY

the thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than how much intelligence you have

those who believe they can move mountains,do.Those who believe they can't,cannot.

Look at things as they can be, not as they are.

Most of us make two basic errors with respect to intelligence: 1. We underestimate our own brainpower. 2. We overestimate the other fellow’s brainpower.

WHEN YOU BELIEVE, YOUR MIND WILL FIND WAY TO DO

Build castles, don't dig graves.

Then it dawned on me that no one else was going to believe in me until I believed in myself.

The point is clear. People who get things done in this world don’t wait for the spirit to move them; they move the spirit.

Think you are weak, think you lack what it takes, think you will lose, think you are second class - think this way and you are doomed to mediocrity.

Belief triggers the power to do.

whether the psychological problem is big or little, the cure comes when one learns to quit drawing negative form one's memory bank and withdraws positive instead

Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success.

Treating someone as second-class never gets you first-class results.

when we do what is known to be wrong, two negative things happened. First, we feel guilt and this guilt eats away confidence. Second, other people sooner or later find out and lose confidence in us

Take the initiative in building friendships—leaders always do. It’s easy and natural for us to tell ourselves, “Let him make the first move.” “Let them call us.” “Let her speak first.

The point is this: Big thinkers are specialists in creating positive, forward-looking, optimistic pictures in their own minds and in the minds of others. To think big, we must use words and phrases that produce big, positive mental images.

You win when you refuse to fight petty people. Fighting little people reduces you to their size.

a man big enough to be humble appears more confident than the insecure man who feels compelled to call attention to his accomplishments. A little modesty goes a long way.

Remember, the main job of the leader is thinking. And the best preparation for leadership is thinking.

Put these two thoughts deep in your mind. First, give your ideas value by acting on them.

Nothing—absolutely nothing—in this life gives you more satisfaction than knowing you’re on the road to success and achievement. And nothing stands as a bigger challenge than making the most of yourself.

Meet problems and obstacles as they arise. The test of a successful person is not the ability to eliminate all problems before he takes action, but rather the ability to find solutions to difficulties when he encounters them.

This is a fact of paramount significance: Each human being, whether he lives in India or Indianapolis, whether he’s ignorant or brilliant, civilized or uncivilized, young or old, has this desire: He wants to feel important.

Look important. It helps you think important. How you look on the outside has a lot to do with how you feel on the inside.

the big things that make a good speaker: knowledge of what he’s going to talk about and an intense desire to tell it to other people.

Put service first, and money takes care of itself—always.

Go out of your way to meet people. And don’t be timid. Don’t be afraid to be unusual. Find out who the other person is, and be sure he knows who you are.

Here is a basic truth: To do anything, we must first believe it can be done.

Practice calling people by their names. Every year shrewd manufacturers sell more briefcases, pencils, Bibles, and hundreds of other items just by putting the buyer’s name on the product. People like to be called by name. It gives everyone a boost to be addressed by name.

Every day thousands of people bury good ideas because they are afraid to act on them. And afterwards, the ghosts of these ideas come back to haunt them.

Your mind will create a way if you let it.

Be an experimental person. Break up fixed routines. Expose yourself to new restaurants, new books, new theaters, new friends; take a different route to work someday, take a different vacation this year, do something new and different this weekend.

Reminding yourself, you never gain anything from an argument but you always lose something.

Whoever is under a man's power is under his protection, too.

Belief releases creative powers.

Einstein taught us a big lesson. He felt it was more important to use your mind to think than to use it as a warehouse for facts.

illustrates just one point: action cures fear. Indecision, postponement, on the other hand, fertilize fear.

Persons who reach the higher rungs in business management, selling, engineering, religious work, writing, acting & in every other pursuit get there by following conscientiously & continuously a plan for self-development & growth.

Capacity is a state of mind. How much we can do depends on how much we think we can do. When you really believe you can do more, your mind thinks creatively and shows you the way.

Concentrate on your assets. You’re better than you think you are.

UPGRADE YOUR THINKING. THINK LIKE IMPORTANT PEOPLE THINK

Belief, strong belief, triggers the mind to figure ways and means and how-to.

Here is a psychological principle that is worth reading over twenty-five times. Read it until it absolutely saturates you: To think confidently, act confidently.

As you approach your job each day, ask yourself, “Am I worthy in every respect of being imitated? Are all my habits such that I would be glad to see them in my subordinates?

Big thinkers train themselves to see not just what is but what can be.

Think first class about everyone around you, and you’ll receive first-class results in return.

If employees are doing something wrong or are making a mistake, I am doubly careful not to hurt their feelings and make them feel small or embarrassed. I just use four simple steps: “First, I talk to them privately. “Second, I praise them for what they are doing well. “Third, I point out the one thing at the moment that they could do better and I help them find the way. “Fourth, I praise them again on their good points.

Here’s a technique that works: before complaining or accusing or reprimanding someone or launching a counterattack in self-defense, ask yourself, “Is it really important?” In most cases, it isn’t and you avoid conflict.

The story is told that the great scientist Einstein was once asked how many feet are in a mile. Einstein’s reply was “I don’t know. Why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?

When you believe something is impossible, your mind goes to work for you to prove why. But when you believe, really believe, something can be done, your mind goes to work for you and helps you find the ways to do it.

The success combination in business is: Do what you do better and do more of what you do.

Believe triggers the power to do.

Knowledge is power only when put to use—and then only when the use made of it is constructive.

Act the way you want to feel.

talk only Happiness, talk only Progress, talk only Prosperity.

And the seed of money is service. That

To be on top, you’ve got to feel like you’re on top. Give yourself a pep talk and discover how much bigger and stronger you feel.

Next time you are in a large group, observe something very significant: the most important person present is the one person most active in introducing himself.

Be constructively self-critical. Don’t run away from inadequacies. Be like the real professionals. They seek out their faults and weaknesses, then correct them. That’s what makes them professionals.

Take the initiative. Be like the successful. Go out of your way to meet people. And don’t be timid. Don’t be afraid to be unusual. Find out who the other person is, and be sure he knows who you are.

I’m going to live until I die and I’m not going to get life and death confused. While I’m on this earth I’m going to live. Why be only half alive? Every minute a person spends worrying about dying is just one minute that fellow might as well have been dead.

Ideas in themselves are not enough. That idea for getting more business, for simplifying work procedures, is of value only when it is acted upon.

With a pencil and paper you can tie your mind to a problem.

Success shuns the man who lacks ideas.

Don’t let ideas escape. Write them down.

Successful people are just ordinary folks who have developed belief in themselves and what they do. Never—yes, never—sell yourself short.

Perfection is highly desirable. But nothing man-made or man-designed is, or can be, absolutely perfect. So to wait for the perfect set of conditions is to wait forever.

It isn’t what one has that’s important. Rather, it’s how much one is planning to get that counts.

the only thing that counts about one’s vocabulary, is the effect his words and phrases have on his own and others’ thinking.

Remember: People who tell you it cannot be done almost always are unsuccessful people, are strictly average or mediocre at best in terms of accomplishment.

Where success is concerned, people are not measured in inches, or pounds, or college degrees, or family background; they are measured by the size of their thinking.” —DAVID SCHWARTZ

must have persistence. But persistence is only one of the ingredients of victory. We can try and try, and try and try and try again, and still fail, unless we combine persistence with experimentation.

And, please, as you visualize your future, don’t be afraid to be blue sky. People these days are measured by the size of their dreams. No one accomplishes more than he sets out to accomplish. So visualize a big future.

The “Okay-I’ll-give-it-a-try-but-I-don’t-think-it-will-work” attitude produces failures.

As a general rule, the more interest you show in a person, the more he will produce for you. And his production is what carries you forward to greater and greater success.

every extra effort they put forth. Praise is the greatest single incentive you can give people, and it costs you nothing.

When you boil it all down, the big cause of stress is negative feelings toward other people.

Tell yourself, “I’m in condition right now to begin. I can’t gain a thing by putting it off. I’ll use the ‘get ready’ time and energy to get going instead.

The person determined to achieve maximum success learns the principle that progress is made one step at a time.

In the words of Publilius Syrus: A wise man will be master of his mind, A fool will be its slave.

Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing a solution paves the way to solution

Remind yourself several times daily, “My attitudes are more important than my intelligence.

Make everything about you say, “I’m confident, really confident.

So think positive toward people and discover how wonderful, really wonderful this world is.

The only real basis other people have for judging your abilities is your actions. And your actions are controlled by your thoughts.

The way we think toward our jobs determines how our subordinates think toward their jobs.

People naturally pay more for acreage and an idea than they do for just acreage.

And when you put life in your talk, you automatically put more life in you.

you would be surprised how many really big people have a clear, definite, even written plan for liking people.

Pay twice as much and buy half as many.

Put service first, and money takes care of itself.

basic principle of successful living: To activate others, you must first activate yourself.

action cures fear. Indecision, postponement, on the other hand, fertilize fear.

Those who believe they can move mountains, do. Those who believe they can’t, cannot. Belief triggers the power to do.

Initiative is a special kind of action. It’s doing something worthwhile without being told to do it. The person with initiative has a standing invitation to join the high income brackets in every business and profession.

Believe Big. The size of your success is determined by the size of your belief. Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success. Remember this, too! Big ideas and big plans are often easier—certainly no more difficult—than small ideas and small plans. Mr.

Be extra, extra cautious about this: don’t let negative-thinking people—“negators”—destroy your plan to think yourself to success. Negators are everywhere, and they seem to delight in sabotaging the positive progress of others.

Do this: Start marching toward your ultimate goal by making the next task you perform, regardless of how unimportant it may seem, a step in the right direction. Commit this question to memory and use it to evaluate everything you do: “Will this help take me where I want to go?” If the answer is no, back off; if yes, press ahead.

These books are Coloring the News by William McGowan, Bias by Bernard Goldberg, and It Ain't Necessarily So by David Murray, Joel Schwartz and S. Robert Lichter.

Once I heard a young paratrooper instructor explain, “The jump really isn’t so bad. It’s the waiting to jump that gets a fellow.

Instead view your mistakes as “Here’s another way to make me a bigger winner.

The right attitude and one arm will beat the wrong attitude and two arms every time.

As you move higher and higher in the world of success, more and more of your job becomes “people development.

You are what you think you are. Think more of yourself and there is more of you.

A wise man will be master of his mind, A fool will be its slave.

the body reflects the food you feed it.

there is a cause for everything.

Look your best and you will think and act your best.

Once you’ve mastered the technique of thinking only good thoughts about people, greater success is guaranteed.

Be a front seater. Make eye contact. Walk 25 percent faster. Speak up. Smile big.

No one is born with confidence. People who radiate confidence have conquered fear and worry. They’ve done so through action as action does cure fear. Hesitation only increases fear so take action promptly and be decisive. To conquer your fear do the following: Isolate your fear and determine exactly what you are afraid of. Identify the action that can overcome the fear.

He believes he is worth little, so he receives little. He believes he can’t do big things, and he doesn’t. He believes he is unimportant, so everything he does has an unimportant mark. As times goes by, lack of belief in himself shows through in the way the fellow talks, walks, acts.

It’s not too wild a guess that, of all living creatures, probably not more than one in ten million is a human being. A person is a biological rarity. He is important in God’s scheme of things.

3. Remember that the ability to think is of much greater value than the ability to memorize facts. Use your mind to create and develop ideas, to find new and better ways to do things. Ask yourself, “Am I using my mental ability to make history, or am I using it merely to record history made by others?

Taking an ax and chopping your neighbor’s furniture to pieces won’t make your furniture look one bit better; and using verbal axes and grenades on another person doesn’t do one thing to make you a better you or me a better me.

Ideas are fruits of your thinking. But they've got to be harnessed and put to work to have value. Each year an oak tree produces enough acorns to populate a good-size forest. Yet from these bushels of seeds perhaps only one or two acorns will become a tree. The Squirrels destroy most of them, and the hard ground beneath the tree doesn't give the few remaining seeds much chance for a start. So it is with ideas. Very few bear fruit. Ideas are highly perishable. If we're not on guard, the squirrels (negative-thinking people) will destroy most of them. Ideas require special handling from the time they are born until they're transformed into practical ways for doing things better.

First identified by academic psychologist Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance occurs when we are confronted with empirical data at odds with the way we “know” the world to work. To resolve this discrepancy, we choose to ignore data or try to fit the data into our preconceived belief structure. Sometimes, there is a crisis and the belief structure eventually crumbles.

control.” “Well, sir,” he said, “I really can’t get mad at a fellow like that. You see, he really isn’t mad at me. I was just the scapegoat. The poor fellow may be in bad trouble with his wife, or his business may be off, or maybe he feels inferior and this was his golden chance to feel like a wheel. I’m just the guy who gave him a chance to get something out of his system.

Losing even a single night’s sleep can precipitate a manic episode in people with bipolar disorder who have otherwise been stable (Malkoff-Schwartz et al. 1998). In parallel, sleep deprivation can improve the mood of a person with depression, although only briefly (Harvey, 2008).

When you beat down your fears of age limitations, you add years to your life as well as success.

Every big accomplishment is a series of little accomplishments.

A wise man is the master of his own mind” “A fool is a slave to his” - Publilius Syrus

It’s clear. We do not make one big jump to success. We get there one step at a time. An excellent plan is to set monthly quotas for accomplishment.

But Mr. Success reacted differently when he got knocked down. He bounced up, learned a lesson, forgot the beating, and moved upward.

Expect to be sniped at. It’s proof you’re growing.

A person is a product of his own thoughts.

I remember,” Fermi replied, “my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

It’s better to wear out than rust out.

Big people monopolize the listening. Small people monopolize the talking.

Persisting in one way is not a guarantee of victory. But persistence blended with experimentation does guarantee success.

Right then I decided, ‘I’m through feeling second-class. From here on in I’m not going to sell myself short.

But on the positive side, the more you speak up, the more you add to your confidence, and the easier it is to speak up the next time. Speak up. It’s a confidence-building vitamin.

When you believe you can do it, the how-to-do-it will follow. The how-to-do-it always comes to the person who believes he can do

Big achievements are reserved for people who continually set higher standards for themselves and others.

Stimulate your creative thinking by associating with people who are creative and successful themselves. Associate with people who can help you think and see in different ways.

People see in us what we see in ourselves so we attract the treatment we think we deserve.

Say you feel wonderful at every possible opportunity, and you will begin to feel wonderful—and bigger, too.

Defeat is only a state of mind, and nothing more.

The combination of persistence and experimentation is a winning formula for success. Stay the course, but try new approaches to figure out what works best.

Money seeds, of course, grow money. Plant service and harvest money.

Practice calling people by their names.

Think Big about Everything.

Do something special for your family often. It

WANT TO MAKE MONEY? THEN GET THE PUT-SERVICE-FIRST ATTITUDE

Give them encouragement, compliment them at every opportunity. Tell

Remember, a mind that feeds only on itself soon is undernourished, becoming weak and incapable of creative progressive thought. Stimulation from others is excellent mind food.

Nothing grows in ice. If we let tradition freeze our minds, new ideas can’t sprout.

A person who thinks his job is important Receives mental signals on how to do his job better; And a better job means More promotions, more money, more prestige, more happiness.

We do not think in words and phrases. We think only in pictures and/or images. Words are the raw materials of thought.

See what can be, not just what is.

This incident, familiar to thousands of former Navy men, illustrates just one point: action cures fear. Indecision, postponement, on the other hand, fertilize fear.

Believe in yourself, and good things do start happening.

There’s an old saying worth repeating often: “I felt sorry for myself because I had ragged shoes until I met a man who had no feet.

personal copy of Fifty Years with the Golden Rule, and said, “Paul, read this book and return it. See how, in J. C. Penney’s own words, just doing what’s right made him one of America’s richest men.

The trainees also discovered something else that is tremendously significant. They discovered that decisions and observations made alone in managed solitude have an uncanny way of being 100 percent right!

In hundreds of interviews with people at all levels I’ve made this discovery: The bigger the person, the more apt he is to encourage you to talk; the smaller the person, the more apt he is to preach to you.

Be objective. Put yourself in a glass tube and look at yourself as a disinterested third party would look at the situation. See if you have a weakness that you’ve never noticed before. If you have, take action to correct it.

Whoever is under a man’s power is under his protection, too. We never should have hired this man in the first place because he’s not cut out for this kind of work. But since we did, the least I could do was help him to relocate.

The point is this: the successful person in any field takes time out to confer with himself or herself. Leaders use solitude to put the pieces of a problem together, to work out solutions, to plan, and, in one phrase, to do their superthinking.

Successful people, like successful businesses, live with these questions: “How can I improve the quality of my performance? How can I do better?” Absolute perfection in all human undertakings from building missiles to rearing children is unattainable. This means there is endless room for improvement. Successful people know this, and they are always searching for a better way. (Note: The successful person doesn’t ask, “Can I do it better?” He knows he can. So he phrases the question: “How can I do it better?”)

I'm going to live until I die and I'm not going to get life and death confused. While I'm on this earth I'm going to LIVE. Why only be half alive? Every minute a person spends worrying about dying is just one minute that fellow might as well have been dead.

Around 1900 a sales executive discovered a “scientific” principle of sales management. It received a lot of publicity and even found its way into textbooks. The principle was this: There is one best way to sell a product. Find the best way. Then never deviate from it.

Mark this point well. A person is not pulled up to a higher-level job. Rather, he is lifted up. In this day and age nobody has time or patience to pull another up the job ladder, degree by painful degree. The individual is chosen whose record makes him stand higher than the rest.

people to make money, the great minister Russel H. Conwell, author of Acres of Diamonds, said, “Money printed your Bible, money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, and money pays your preachers, and you would not have many of them, either, if you did not pay them.

You are a product of your environment so your mind and goals are influenced by your environment. Association to negative and petty people yields negative thinking and petty habits. On the flip side, association to positive and ambitious people yields positive thinking and great results.

In reaching creative decisions, the raw materials are the ideas and suggestions of others. Don’t, of course, expect other people to give you ready-made solutions. That’s not the primary reason for asking and listening. Ideas of others help to spark your own ideas so your mind is more creative.

Remember that the ability to think is of much greater value than the ability to memorize facts.Use your mind to create and develop ideas,to find new and better ways to do things.Ask yourself ''Am I using my mental ability to make history or am I using it merely to record history made by others?

How can I do more?” Capacity is a state of mind. Asking yourself this question puts your mind to work to find intelligent shortcuts. The success combination in business is: Do what you do better (improve the quality of your output), and: Do more of what you do (increase the quantity of your output). 5.

Anybody,” John continued, “can hire a man. But the test of leadership is how one handles the dismissal. By helping that employee relocate before he left us built up a feeling of job security in everyone in my department. I let them know by example that no one gets dumped on the street as long as I’m here.

Knowledge is power-when you use it constructively. Closely allied to intelligence excusitis is some incorrect thinking about knowledge. We often hear that knowledge is power. But this statement is only .a half-truth. Knowledge is only potential power. Knowledge is power only when put to use—and then only when the use made of it is constructive.

psychologists Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: “Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y.…There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.

Psychologist and mindfulness expert David Richo, Ph.D., has focused on how these healthy connections are formed and what is needed to keep them alive. He describes the “5 A’s” as the qualities and gifts we all naturally seek out from the important people in our lives, including family, friends, and especially partners. What are these 5 A’s? • Attention—genuine interest in you, what you like and dislike, what inspires and motivates you without being overbearing or intrusive. You experience being heard and noticed. • Acceptance—genuinely embracing your interests, desires, activities, and preferences as they are without trying to alter or change them in any way. • Affection—physical comforting as well as compassion. • Appreciation—encouragement and gratitude for who you are, as you are. • Allowing—it is safe to be yourself and express all that you feel, even if it is not entirely polite or socially acceptable. What Richo is describing, in essence, are those genuine needs we have that form the basis of secure, healthy relationships. The 5 A’s are what we all should have received most of the time from our caregivers when we were growing up. They are also what we want in our adult relationships today. In his book How to Be an Adult in Relationships, Richo compares and contrasts the 5 A’s with what happens in unhealthy or unequal relationships.

GROW THE ACTION HABIT Practice these key points: 1. Be an activationist. Be someone who does things. Be a doer, not a don’t-er. 2. Don’t wait until conditions are perfect. They never will be. Expect future obstacles and difficulties and solve them as they arise. 3. Remember, ideas alone won’t bring success. Ideas have value only when you act upon them. 4. Use action to cure fear and gain confidence. Do what you fear, and fear disappears. Just try it and see. 5. Start your mental engine mechanically. Don’t wait for the spirit to move you. Take action, dig in, and you move the spirit. 6. Think in terms of now. Tomorrow, next week, later, and similar words often are synonymous with the failure word, never. Be an “I’m starting right now” kind of person. 7. Get down to business—pronto. Don’t waste time getting ready to act. Start acting instead. 8. Seize the initiative. Be a crusader. Pick up the ball and run. Be a volunteer. Show that you have the ability and ambition to do. Get in gear and go!

Why some brilliant people are failures. I’ve been close for many years to a person who qualifies as a genius, has high abstract intelligence, and is Phi Beta Kappa. Despite this very high native intelligence, he is one of the most unsuccessful people I know. He has a very mediocre job (he’s afraid of responsibility). He has never married (lots of marriages end in divorce). He has few friends (people bore him). He’s never invested in property of any kind (he might lose his money). This man uses his great brainpower to prove why things won’t work rather than directing his mental power to searching for ways to succeed.

Talking on a cell phone makes us four times as likely to have an accident—the same as a driver who has a blood alcohol content of .08 percent, which qualifies as intoxicated in most states. The risk is equal for drivers holding their phones to their ears and for those speaking through a hands-free device. In both cases, researchers suggest, the drivers generate mental images of the unseen person at the other end of the line, which conflicts with their capacity for spatial processing. “It’s not that your hands aren’t on the wheel,” says David Strayer, the director of the Applied Cognition Laboratory at the University of Utah, “it’s that your mind is not on the road.

The great psychologist Dr. George W. Crane said in his famous book Applied Psychology, “Remember, motions are the precursors of emotions. You can’t control the latter directly but only through your choice of motions or actions. . . . To avoid this all too common tragedy (marital difficulties and misunderstandings) become aware of the true psychological facts. Go through the proper motions each day and you’ll soon begin to feel the corresponding emotions! Just be sure you and your mate go through those motions of dates and kisses, the phrasing of sincere daily compliments, plus the many other little courtesies, and you need not worry about the emotion of love. You can’t act devoted for very long without feeling devoted.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrated a similar, learned inflexibility among experienced practitioners when he gave college students a logic puzzle that involved hitting switches to turn light bulbs on and off in sequence, and that they could play over and over. It could be solved in seventy different ways, with a tiny money reward for each success. The students were not given any rules, and so had to proceed by trial and error.* If a student found a solution, they repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked. Later on, new students were added, and all were now asked to discover the general rule of all solutions. Incredibly, every student who was brand-new to the puzzle discovered the rule for all seventy solutions, while only one of the students who had been getting rewarded for a single solution did. The subtitle of Schwartz’s paper: “How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules

Every day all over the nation young people start working in new jobs. Each of them “wishes” that someday he could enjoy the success that goes with reaching the top. But the majority of these young people simply don’t have the belief that it takes to reach the top rungs. And they don’t reach the top. Believing it’s impossible to climb high, they do not discover the steps that lead to great heights. Their behavior remains that of the “average” person. But a small number of these young people really believe they will succeed. They approach their work with the “I’m-going-to-the-top” attitude. And with substantial belief they reach the top. Believing they will succeed—and that it’s not impossible—these folks study and observe the behavior of senior executives. They learn how successful people approach problems and make decisions. They observe the attitudes of successful people. The how-to-do-it always comes to the person who believes he can do it.

The erosion of trust in public school systems has had catastrophic consequences, and will take decades to put right. As we’ve seen, attempts to make schools ‘more accountable’ for their test scores leave teachers torn between what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls ‘doing the right thing and doing the required thing’. The right thing is to teach students through personalised, flexible methods, according to their needs, interests and aspirations; the required thing is to ‘turnaround’ test scores, by ‘teaching to the test’ or, worse, ‘gaming’ the system.  Successive US federal administrations have sought to improve school standards through high accountability. The pressure this puts upon schools at risk of closure and teachers – with test scores linked to pay rates – is intense. During 2011/12 a series of allegations emerged of inner-city schools in New York, Washington DC, Atlanta and Philadelphia ‘cheating’ on student test scores in order to hit accountability targets. Undoubtedly a case of fear producing wrong figures. The result of doing the required thing, above the right thing, is what Schwartz describes as a ‘de-moral-ised’ profession. The double tragedy is that, in addition to the pressure put on teachers – 50 percent of new teachers in the US leave the profession within their first five years – there’s growing evidence that the over-reliance on standardised testing fails to improve academic learning anyway.

These four leadership rules or principles are: 1. Trade minds with the people you want to influence. 2. Think: What is the human way to handle this? 3. Think progress, believe in progress, push for progress. 4. Take time out to confer with yourself and develop your supreme thinking power.

First, I talk to them privately. “Second, I praise them for what they are doing well. “Third, I point out the one thing at the moment that they could do better and I help them find the way. “Fourth, I praise them again on their good points.

LET’S TAKE ACTION Now in a quick recap, put these success-building principles to work: 1. Get a clear fix on where you want to go. Create an image of yourself ten years from now. 2. Write out your ten-year plan. Your life is too important to be left to chance. Put down on paper what you want to accomplish in your work, your home, and your social departments. 3. Surrender yourself to your desires. Set goals to get more energy. Set goals to get things done. Set goals and discover the real enjoyment of living. 4. Let your major goal be your automatic pilot. When you let your goal absorb you, you’ll find yourself making the right decisions to reach your goal. 5. Achieve your goal one step at a time. Regard each task you perform, regardless of how small it may seem, as a step toward your goal. 6. Build thirty-day goals. Day-by-day effort pays off. 7. Take detours in stride. A detour simply means another route. It should never mean surrendering the goal. 8. Invest in yourself. Purchase those things that build mental power and efficiency. Invest in education. Invest in idea starters.

felt sorry for myself because I had ragged shoes until I met a man who had no feet.

the thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than how much intelligence you have. Not

Belief, strong belief, triggers the mind to figure ways and means and how-to. And believing you can succeed makes others place confidence in you.

others see in us what we see in ourselves,

Mr. Ralph J. Cordiner, chairman of the board of the General Electric Company, said this to a leadership conference: “We need from every man who aspires to leadership—for himself and his company—a determination to undertake a personal program of self-development. Nobody is going to order a man to develop. . . . Whether a man lags behind or moves ahead in his specialty is a matter of his own personal application. This is something which takes time, work, and sacrifice. Nobody can do it for you.

Believe, and you’ll start thinking—constructively.

Creative thinking is simply finding new, improved ways to do anything.

WHEN YOU BELIEVE, YOUR MIND FINDS WAYS TO DO.

The difference in the very successful and the very unsuccessful finally reduced to differences in attitudes, or difference in thought management. The top group worried less, was more enthusiastic, had a sincere liking for people.

Henry Ford was never interested in miscellaneous information. He knew what every major executive knows: that the ability to know how to get information is more important than using the mind as a garage for facts.

Am I using my mental ability to make history, or am I using it merely to record history made by others?