Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity.

Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them.

Some of the strongest resistance to necessary change is the result of what Jim O'Toole has so aptly characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

If you're the leader, you've got to give up your omniscient and omnipotent fantasies - that you know and must do everything. Learn how to abandon your ego to the talents of others.

Think of a crucible as an occasion for real magic, the creation of something more valuable than an alchemist could possibly imagine. In it, the individual is transformed, changed, created anew. He or she grows in ways that change his or her definition of self.

Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.

The crucible is a dividing line, a turning point, and those who have gone through it feel they are very different from the way they were before. Believing that they have been transformed or have transformed themselves, those who survive the crucible (and many don't) are more confident, more willing to take future risks. That new self-confidence is grounded in the belief that he or she has done something hard and done it well.