Don't wait for perfection, praise progress.

The awkward truth is that while failure may teach a company how to succeed, success often teaches a company to fail, by misleading it into thinking that it knows more than it does.

High performance isn’t just about achieving “greatness” or “excellence,” concepts that are far too static. Nor is it just about ensuring long-term survival by building a company that will last. High performance is about outperforming rivals again and again, even as the basis of competition in an industry or market changes.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

The biggest obstacle in performance isn’t not knowing what to do; it’s not doing what we already know.

Human beings have this thing I call the “Pissed Off Gene.” Itʼs that bit of our psyche that makes us utterly dissatisfied with our lot, no matter how kindly fortune smiles upon us.

If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

If you're remarkable, then it's likely that some people won't like you. That's part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise -- ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.

Trying to implant a goal that is incongruent with the self-image is like trying to plant a grain by dropping seeds on rock-hard, bone-dry ground. No one can consistently out perform his or her self-image. No one can overcome it with willpower. No one can sneak past it and perform in an incongruent manner. The bottom line is that you cannot "do" things without "being" the kind of person who does those things. You must "be" to "do"."

Progress is not created by contented people.

Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme, there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck).

Somehow I can't believe there are many heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret can be summarized in four C's. They are curiosity, confidence, courage and constancy, and the greatest of these is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way. Have confidence in your ability to do it right. And work hard to do the best possible job.

The GMAT is a surrogate of IQ because it measures analytic abilities. Getting in the 90th percentile positions you for a career platform that starts out at a very high level. But, everyone else on that career platform has similar cognitive aptitudes. There’s very little to distinguish you on an intellectual basis. The other aptitudes turn out to matter more for real-world success, because there was no selection pressure for them, and there’s more variation among your peers.

Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. TALENT will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. GENIUS will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. EDUCATION will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On,” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Although the cost of excessive caution is harder to measure than that of recklessness, it is no less real.

True greatness has never been achieved in 8 hours a day, five days a week, with a four week vacation per year.

Talent only matures when harnessed within a personality that is capable of self-improvement. And talent, ironically, has a nasty knack of protecting the talented from the urge to self-improve.

The opposite of success is not failure, but mediocrity. To achieve big successes, you need to take big risks; if you take little or no risks, mediocrity is guaranteed.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

Excellent performers judge themselves differently than most people do. They're more specific, just as they are when they set goals and strategies. Average performers are content to tell themselves that they did great or poorly or okay.

By contrast, the best performers judge themselves against a standard that's relevant for what they're trying to achieve. Sometimes they compare their performance with their own personal best; sometimes they compare it with the performance of competitors they're facing or expect to face; sometimes they compare it with the best known performance by anyone in the field.

Any of those can make sense; the key, as in all deliberate practice, is to choose a comparison that stretches you just beyond your current limits. Research confirms what common sense tells us, that too high a standard is discouraging and not very instructive, while too low a standard produces no advancement.

Opportunists are humble enough to realize that the random forces of nature are more powerful than themselves. That these random forces often conspire to make things ridiculously easy just as often as they conspire to create hurricanes and earthquakes. Most people realize that a lot depends on being in the right place at the right time. Very few realize that this situation is not the outcome of hard work or trying to identify and move to hotspots. It is the outcome of a cultivated ability at recognizing when you are randomly in the right place at the right time (which also implies that there must be a certain amount of deliberate randomness in your wandering through life).

He who have never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers – it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small.