And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world. A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

Hope without a strategy doesn’t generate leadership. Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there. People won’t follow you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going.

The real problem when working with a consultant, a therapist or a coach isn’t that we don’t know what to do. The real problem is that we don’t want to change our mind.

Expectations are the engines of our perceptions.

My life is mine and I form it. Tell yourself this often. Create your own life now, using your beliefs as an artist uses color.

If you become so frightened of realities that are not your own, if you take upon yourselves tragedies that do not exist in your reality, in your moment, then you weaken your position and weaken the position, of those you think you are helping. You look about you and you see only hopelessness and helplessness. You organize your reality according to the tragedies of the newspapers!

The best way to honor someone who has said something smart and useful is to say something back that is smart and useful. The other way to honor them is to go do something with what you learned.