The higher you want to climb, the more you need leadership. The greater the impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be. Whatever you will accomplish is restricted by your ability to lead others.

If you wouldn't follow yourself, why should anyone else?

If you are a leader, the true measure of your success is not getting people to work. It's not getting people to work hard. It is getting people to work hard together. That takes commitment.

I tell a person, "If I could go home with you tomorrow and you and I could spend the day together from maybe 8:00 to 6:00, and we went out to a restaurant at 6:30, I could tell you with a high degree of accuracy how successful you're going to be." That's huge because I'm just going to look and see, what kind of attitude do you have, how do you relate to people, how well do you prioritize your life? I'm going to see all of those things in the process of a day.

Every person has a longing to be significant; to make a contribution; to be a part of something noble and purposeful.

The first order of things to be changed is me, the leader. After I consider how hard it is to change myself, then I will understand the challenge of trying to change others. This is the ultimate test of leadership.

Few things build a person up like affirmation. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition (Simon and Schuster, 1991), the word affirm comes from ad firmare, which means “to make firm.” So when you affirm people, you make firm within them the things you see about them. Do that often enough, and the belief that solidifies within them will become stronger than the doubts they have about themselves.