Great Throughts Treasury

"Trivial art isn?t worth the trouble it takes to produce it."

"Trying and failing is better than merely failing, because trying makes you an artist and gives you the right to try again."

"Twice as much polishing is not twice as good. Ten times as much polishing is definitely not ten times as good. Whether you?re polishing a piece of furniture or an idea, the benefits diminish quickly."

"Turn strangers into friends. Turn friends into donors And then... do the most important job: Turn your donors into fundraisers."

"Try is the opposite of hiding."

"Two different things: A crowd is a tribe without a leader. A crowd is a tribe without communication. Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe."

"Ultimately, people are most easily lead where they want to go anyway."

"Very few of us set out to be average or to be typical."

"We are all special in our own way the moment we choose to be."

"Understanding that your job is to make something happen changes what you do all day."

"We are surrounded by bureaucrats, note takers, literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees."

"Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress."

"Walking in circles Dr. Jan Souman, of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, studied what happens to us when we have no map, no compass, no way to determine landmarks. I?m not talking about a metaphor?he researched what happens to people lost in the woods or stumbling around the Sahara, with no north star, no setting sun to guide them. It turns out we walk in circles. Try as we might to walk in a straight line, to get out of the forest or the desert, we end up back where we started. Our instincts aren?t enough. In the words of Dr. Souman, Don?t trust your senses because even though you might think you are walking in a straight line when you?re not. Human nature is to need a map. If you?re brave enough to draw one, people will follow."

"We believe what we want to believe, and once we believe something, it becomes a self-fulfilling truth."

"We can?t rely on others to be our teachers anymore?the future belongs to individuals who decide to become great bosses (and teachers)."

"We can schedule for it. Thursday, April 3rd, 3:05? start something. We can train for it, plan for it, announce it, and even hire for it. If initiating is as essential to the modern organization as it appears, we better be doing all of that and more."

"We can?t profitably get more average."

"We cannot switch the mission (of education), unless we also switch the method."

"We don't need more stuff; we need more humanity."

"We can't suddenly quit a job and then race to find a form of art that will pay off before the next mortgage payment is due. Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it."

"We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo."

"We have little choice but to move beyond quality and seek remarkable, connected, and new. Remarkable, as you've already figured out, demands initiative."

"We have embraced the industrial propaganda with such enthusiasm that we have changed the very nature of our dreams."

"We happily give up our freedom and our income in exchange for having someone else take responsibility for telling us what to do next."

"We have been brainwashed by school, indoctrinated by industrial propaganda, and mesmerized by the popular media into believing that compliance is not only safe but right and necessary."

"We have no good way to measure a connection or even talk about it."

"We invest thousands of hours exposing millions of students to fiction and literature, but end up training most of them to never again read for fun."

"We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime."

"We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference. Some organizations haven?t realized this yet, or haven?t articulated it, but we need artists."

"We see what we believe, not the other way around."

"We notice what we choose to notice."

"We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen."

"We need you to stand up and be remarkable. Be human. Contribute. Interact."

"We trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability."

"We spend time and energy trying to perfect our craft, but we don?t focus on the skills and interactions that will allow us to stand out and become indispensable to our organization."

"We?re all obsessed with ideas because ideas, not products, are the engine of our new economy."

"We?re extremely adroit at hiding our fear. Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we?re afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason."

"We used to live in an industrial age, a Smithian-Marxist world where the worker sought to do as little as possible and the boss tried to get the worker to do as much as possible. In our self-serve economy, though, that?s just not true. All sorts of roads, but you have to supply your own locomotion."

"We?re entering a revolution of ideas while producing a generation that wants instructions instead."

"We?ve been raised with a false belief. We mistakenly believe that criticism leads to failure. From the time we get to school, we?re taught that being noticed is almost always bad. It gets us sent to the principal?s office, not to Harvard."

"We?ve been trained to prefer being right to learning something, to prefer passing the test to making a difference, and most of all to prefer fitting in with the right people?"

"We?ve been teaching, cajoling, and yes, forcing people to hide their empathy and their creativity and pretend that they are fast-moving automatons, machines designed to do the company?s bidding."

"We?ve been trained to believe that mediocre obedience is a genetic fact for most of the population, but it?s interesting to note that this trait doesn?t show up until after a few years of schooling."

"We?ve gone against our true nature and corporatized, anonymized, and dehumanized as many of our systems as we possibly can."

"We're not going to outgrow our need for information."

"Well, if you don?t have time to do it right, what makes you think you?ll have time to do it over?"

"We're insatiable consumers of connection."

"What could you measure? What would that cost? How fast could you get the results? If you can afford it, try it. If you measure it, it will improve."

"What Every Good Marketer Knows: Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk."

"What does a leader look like? I?ve met leaders all over the world, on several continents, and in every profession. I?ve met young leaders and old ones, leaders with big tribes and tiny ones. I can tell you this: leaders have nothing in common. They don?t share gender or income level or geography. There?s no gene, no schooling, no parentage, no profession. In other words, leaders aren?t born. I?m sure of it. Actually, they do have one thing in common. Every tribe leader I?ve met shares one thing: the decision to lead."