“Real Dreams don’t require you to abandon your family, quit your job, and move to Tahiti with your paintbrush. They just require that you search your soul for that deep dream you put aside-and go for it. And watch your life light up.”

Action helps you think and raises your self-esteem. Good luck happens when you’re in action. Ask yourself, “Does this go toward or away from what I want?” There’s an animal in us, and it has great instincts. Scan for a desire and follow it. Set a goal, any goal, and start doing everything you can think of to achieve it.

You don’t have to get it right the first time.

When you start using senses you’ve neglected, your reward is to see the world with completely fresh eyes.

Originality is genius. If you respect and care for it, it will take you on the ride of your life.

What you want is what you need. Your dearest wish comes straight from your core, loaded with vital information about who you are and who you can become.

Thinking about swimming isn’t much like actually getting in the water. Actually getting in the water can take your breath away.

Isolation is the dream killer.

Each destination you reach only opens out into wider horizons, new and undiscovered countries for you to explore.

Irreverence is a declaration of independence.

It’s essential to distinguish between events that are really beyond your control and events you caused yourself.

Whenever you do what you really love, your heart lifts, your mind opens, and everything changes. You wake up. That’s what true adventure really is.

What you love is as unique to you as your fingerprints. You need to know that because nothing will make you really happy but doing what you love.

In the days before automobiles, people in horse-drawn wagons used to sleep if they were tired. They didn’t worry about getting lost, because the horse knew the way home. Your heart knows the way to your gifts. You can trust it to take you to them.

I believe you can have whatever you really want in this life, in one form or another, sooner or later. All you have to do is take care of your health and be lucky enough to live for a while. But you can’t have it all at once and you can’t have it forever. No life has the room for everything in it, not on the same day.

You can learn new things at any time in your life if you’re willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you.

A goal is the basic unit of life design.

By the time I got to Harvard, I feel like I knew who I was, and my job there was to throw as much against the wall as possible, to see what would stick.

I didn’t know how we were going to get jobs out of NAFTA, but I tend to be suspicious of these things, like NAFTAs and WTOs and so on.

While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April, the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery, and the projections of the Bush Administration.

Once you do lose a job, there are not a lot of social supports for you. You lose health insurance because we have this absurd system in America where health insurance is usually tied to employment. Your income dips. And that’s when you get into selling the house.

Happiness does not come from football awards. It’s terrible to correlate happiness with football. Happiness comes from a good job, being able to feed your wife and kids. I don’t dream football, I dream the American dream – two cars in a garage, be a happy father.

No one wanted a job. No one could hold a job. You tend to see those going hand in hand.

If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.

Diamonds are only lumps of coal that stuck to their jobs.