“The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.”

A very small shift in direction can lead to a very meaningful change in destination.

Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.

Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death.

WHY IS IT so easy to repeat bad habits and so hard to form good ones?

People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.

Put another way, the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.

With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become.

When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy.

Perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

Motivation is overrated, environment often matters more.

You get what you repeat.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?

In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption

What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become?

Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

I don’t really like talking. I like to execute. I’m not a talking person. I’m an action person.

Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. No man is free who cannot control himself.

I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. But many others were also in the same place. The difference was that I took action.

We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

The weakest man is the one who is able to correct his moral defects, but doesn’t take action.

Poetry is an act of peace.

We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.