“In short: genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.”

When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.

Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.

A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.

We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement

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. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.

You need to know who you want to be.

You do it because it’s who you are and it feels good to be you. The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through.

The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.

We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits

You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.

Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.

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

Your culture sets your expectation for what is normal. Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself.

Gun violence in Chicago is unacceptable. It threatens everything we have done together and all of the progress we have made in other areas.

The more we pray, the more we think to pray, and as we see the results of prayer-the responses of our Father to our requests-our confidence in God’s power spills over into other areas of our life.

The lowest and most level land areas show us, especially when we dig there to very great depths, nothing but horizontal layers of material more or less varied, which almost all contain innumerable products of the sea.

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

Luxury goods are the only area in which it is possible to make luxury margins.

I swear there are things you can do to work on problem areas without having to think about plastic surgery.

God transforms us one area at a time.

An extraordinary life is all about daily, continuous improvements in the areas that matter most.