“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.”

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.

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

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.

I will always be as difficult as necessary to achieve the best.

But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.

I aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.

Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.

Big things are built one brick at a time. Victories are achieved one choice at a time. A life well lived is chosen one day at a time.

It was a dream to arrive at Liverpool but I never wanted to just settle for what I had achieved. I wanted more.

We’re so used to presenting ourselves and getting approval according to our achievements that it’s difficult to be authentic and trust that we’ll be accepted just as we are.

Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.