Best life quotes

I've been Michael Jordan in Latin countries for years. I know what I mean to all Latinos and what this game means to them. Baseball is in their blood.

I'm focussing on what I haven't attained, not what I have. A lot has come to me early. I don't want to get consumed with that. Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now. My goal is to play one full game in the now, but I haven't even gotten past the first inning yet. I start thinking about where my mom is or if my dogs have been fed. The average human has 2,000 thoughts a day. The really accomplished have 1,500 because you can focus longer. I need to learn how to focus longer.

Whether I hit .260 or .320, the bottom line here is to win.

I've never experienced- besides the birth of my two daughters-the feeling of winning a world championship in New York in the new stadium. It's something I'll never forget.

Eventually, my W-2 income will wind down, and my investments can actually make that up.

If my team could win and I hit .240, I wouldn't care. The only thing I want to do is win. That's what I play the game for.

Now I just have an opportunity to come out and play baseball and have fun, really continue to focus on what I did in '09—divorce myself of personal achievements and really buy into the whole team concept of winning ballgames. What can I do today to help the team win? It was the greatest year of my baseball career.

I feel like I owe the Yankee fan base my A-game.

I just want to be able to communicate with my fan base.

I'm fighting for my life, I have to defend myself. If I don't defend myself, no one else will.

I've done a lot of growing up and realized a lot of things.

Back then it was a different culture. It was very loose. I was young. I was stupid.

I just hope that as I get older, I calm down and enjoy the moment, enjoy the great gifts that God has given me.

I'm grateful for every day.

I never like to think about going back; I only look forward.

I'm guilty for a lot of things.

You get to a point where you get tired of being stupid and selfish and not being honest with yourself.

I have a big scar on my thigh from a dog bite by my German shepherd. His name was Ripper. He was trying to get in a fight with another dog, and I tried to break it up, and he got me pretty good.

I'm not giving up. I have tremendous faith, and hopefully there's a couple more chapters to this book. And hopefully there's a happy ending somewhere. I have faith.

My daughters think I am a terrible cook, but I try really hard. I would really like to be a better cook.

The births of my two daughters were the two greatest moments of my life.

My mother's the most special person in my life ... I consider her my MVP: Most Valuable Parent.

I kept thinking my father would come back, But he never did.

If my life depended on it - if my daughter's life depended on it - I'd want Mariano Rivera closing. Wouldn't you?

I don't like talking about my relationships.

I don't trust anyone except a very, very few people.

I had a very complex childhood, and when I met my wife, because she has a master's in psychology, she promoted me into getting help. It really has helped. I'm not healed yet, but I'm working on some issues I had as a child.

My girls are great at making fun of Dad. They're never impressed with anything I do. I love that. I hope that never changes.

Having the respect of your peers means the world to me.

I've waited for a long time. The championship is back where it belongs—in New York City.

I've been humbled. I've been through a lot. And I can't be happier with the way the Steinbrenner family, the coaches and players and the city of New York has supported me.

I love New York.

Walking the streets of New York, a lot of people are cheering me on. It feels good.

There's no place like New York. And I found out that until you go through it for a season, you really don't know it.

I think it's just getting comfortable in New York City, comfortable in your own skin.

Alex is going to be among the elite. If he comes even close to the season he had last year, he'll be in his own league. You try to compare him to somebody, but you can't. He is the only one who has done what he has done.

Alex is playful, enthusiastic, and cheerful. He's fun to have around.

He is what baseball needs right now. He respects the game, has a lot of class and image most people would pay for. I wish my daughter could marry him, but she's only two years old.

He learned in one or two years what it took me ten years to learn. He uses the whole field, foul line to foul line.

I'm Alex's biggest fan. I brag on him so much that my teammates are sick and tired of me talking about him. Last year we talked all the time, especially early in the season. We both knew if we didn't get off to a good start, we might be shipped out.

Last season, Alex probably did Edgar (Martinez) better than Edgar did. It's amazing. With Alex, success comes with his strength, with his timing, with his weight shift, with his hands. Another year of two like that, kids will all be copying Alex. A lot of them probably are now.

Money and fame are like dust. You aren't worth anything if you don't stay the same person you were before you had them. – Lourdes Navarro (Alex Rodriguez's mother)

Of course I voted for him as Player of the Year; who wouldn't? He took some inside-out swings against us that landed ten rows deep in right-center. He has done some amazing things at the most demanding position other than catcher. And he's what, only twenty-one? When I was twenty-one, I was sitting in class thinking I was going to be a high school teacher. He's out winning a batting title.

The great thing is that he's always looking to improve. How good can he be? Well, we're talking about a guy who is Hall of Fame caliber.

The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly - indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.

The more we refuse to buy into our inner critics - and our external ones too - the easier it will get to have confidence in our choices, and to feel comfortable with who we are.

I think while all mothers deal with feelings of guilt, working mothers are plagued by guilt on steroids!

You need to be able to nurture yourself in order to be a good mother, good at your job, good at servicing your community. I really believe women can do it all, but they can't do it all at the expense of their health, their sleep, and their sense of well-being.

Fearlessness is the mother of reinvention.

My mother was a continual source of wisdom and great advice...she taught me that there is always a way around a problem-you've just got to find it. Keep trying doors; one will eventually open. She also taught me to accept failure as part and parcel of life. It's not the opposite of success; it's an integral part of success. I talk a lot about learning to become fearless in your approach to life. But fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It's the mastery of fear. It's all about getting up one more time than you fall down.

I was lucky in that I had a mother that was full of this colloquial wisdom and she used to say to me 'You know, failure is not the opposite of success, it's the stepping stone to success. There is nobody who has not failed along the way.' So I think its very important for young women, especially as they are starting in life, to recognize that because otherwise, they only see people's success. So, when I speak, I speak of my failures.

Being a mother is the role I'm most proud of.

The first and most important step is to realize that, as my mother used to say, fearlessness isn't the absence of fear, but the mastery of fear. It's not that you never have fear, but that you don't let your fears stop you.

Often, you'll fail. But, as my mother also taught me, failure isn't the opposite of success - it's a stepping stone to success.

I come from a Greek household. My mother wouldn't let the FedEx man come in without eating.

The most effective means for restoring the integrity of our electoral process, and repairing the public's tattered faith in its elected representatives, is through the full public financing of political campaigns. It's the mother of all reforms: the one reform that makes all other reforms possible. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune. If someone's going to own the politicians, it might as well be the American people.

Trying to be Supermom is as futile as trying to be Perfect Mom. Not going to happen.

There is nothing like becoming a mom to fill you with fear.

My mother would constantly say to me: 'Don't miss the moment', because really that is all we have. And so often our minds take us to the future, either worrying about the future or judging our past

The time-famine we are talking about is really what drains us, because it means we are not here. We are somewhere else with our minds

I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.

It's not 'What do I want to do?', it's 'What kind of life do I want to have?'

Have you notices that when we die, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success?

We forget we're mostly water till the rain falls and every atom in our body starts to go home.

Just change the channel. You are in control of the clicker. Don't replay the bad, scary movie.

Today we often use deadlines—real and imaginary—to imprison ourselves.

Imagine how our culture, how our lives, will change when we begin valuing go-givers as much as we value go-getters.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Treat people like family, and they will be loyal and give their all.

Never let life's Iagos—flatterers, dissemblers—onto your train.

And yet we spend so much time and effort and energy on those resume entries—entries that lose all significance as soon as our heart stops beating.

Why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things that our eulogies will never cover?

We are not on this earth to accumulate victories, things, and experiences, but to be whittled and sandpapered until what's left is who we truly are.

Too many of us leave our lives—and, in fact, our souls—behind when we go to work.

Being connected in a shallow way to the entire world can prevent us from being deeply connected to those closest to us—including ourselves.

Countless things in our daily lives can awaken the almost constant state of wonder we knew as children. But sometimes to see them we must look through a different set of eyes.

In our daily lives, moving from struggle to grace requires practice and commitment.

Moving ourselves to the background and others to the foreground is evidence that the (spiritual) search is achieving its purpose.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.

Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

The gods too are fond of a joke.

What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good.

It concerns us to know the purposes we seek in life, for then, like archers aiming at a definite mark, we shall be more likely to attain what we want.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.

The quality of life is determined by its activities.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Exempt are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.

The actuality of thought is life.

And the best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies indicate, is to make it into a habit.

As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.

But to change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.

Champions don't do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they've learned.

Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

Companies aren't families. They're battlefields in a civil war.

Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self-discipline they brought to their jobs.

Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits.

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.

How are you going to study tonight? What are you going to do tomorrow? How do you know you're ready for your test?' It trained me to set goals.

I think I'm smart, and I know I was a good mom. But there wasn't a lot I could point to and say, that's why I'm special.

If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real.

If you want to do something that requires willpower—like going for a run after work—you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day.

It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.

Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

Simply giving employees a sense of agency- a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority – can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.

Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.

So at most companies, an unspoken compact emerges: It's okay to be ambitious, but if you play too rough, your peers will unite against you. On the other hand, if you focus on boosting your own department, rather than undermining your rival, you'll probably get taken care of over time.

Someday soon, say predictive analytics experts, it will be possible for companies to know our tastes and predict our habits better than we know ourselves.

Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence.

The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.

The key to victory was creating the right routines.

There's nothing you can't do if you get the habits right.

There's a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly.

This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.

This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.

Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.

When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically.

Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it's easier for the public to accept it.

Willpower isn't just a skill. It's a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there's less power left over for other things.

A habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: When I see a cue, I will do a routine in order to get a reward. To re-engineer that formula, we need to begin making choices again.

How we eat and sleep and talk to our kids, how we unthinkingly spend our time, attention and money — those are habits that we know exist. And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp and the only option left is to get to work.

If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you'll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head.

The problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: the habit loop.

Habit Change Framework: Identify the routine, Experiment with rewards, Isolate the cue.

Even though it's hard to learn how to back your car out the driveway at first, once it becomes a habit, you can do it almost automatically and think about something else, like the meeting that you need to go to today or what's on the radio.

Grit, which they defined as the tendency to work strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.

But conserving mental effort is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, such as a predator hiding in the bushes or a speeding car as we pull onto the street. So our basal ganglia have devised a clever system to determine when to let habits take over. It's something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends.

The only way to reduce errors by 70 percent was to make every single employee, in effect, a quality assurance auditor. Everyone had to take responsibility for catching mistakes. But most factory workers didn't know enough about the engines to identify every small defect as it occurred. The only solution, managers decided, was a massive retraining effort. Except

You can't suddenly say, 'I want a brand new habit tomorrow,' and expect it to be easy and effortless.

General Atomics, the progenitor of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, started life in 1955 when a major military contractor, General Dynamics, feared that the military hardware market might dry up. It began exploring peacetime uses of atomic energy, but abandoned the effort when cold-war military spending took off.

There's something really powerful about groups and shared experiences. People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they're by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.

Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

The same process that makes AA so effective—the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe—happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine. At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there's one other ingredient that's necessary: belief.

Later, he would famously write that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change.

We call it 'psychological safety,'  she said. Psychological safety is a shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks.

habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted. But that's not enough. For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group.

Belief seems critical. You don't have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.

I wouldn't have said this a year ago—that's how fast our understanding is changing, said Tonigan, the University of New Mexico researcher, but belief seems critical. You don't have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.

The evidence is clear: If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group. Belief is essential, and it grows out of a communal experience, even if that community is only as large as two people.

It wasn't God that mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself that made a difference. Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.

For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group.

Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they're not. They're habits.

Between calculated risk and reckless decision-making lies the dividing line between profit and loss.

However, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits' routines, and find alternatives. You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it - and every chapter in this book is devoted to illustrating a different aspect of why that control is real.

There is a woman named Wendy Wood, who did a study when she was at Duke, and she followed around college students to try to figure out how much of their day was decision-making versus how much was habit. And what she found was that about 45 percent of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit.

The discovery of the habit loop is important because it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks.

Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.

The paradox of learning how to make better decisions is that it requires developing a comfort with doubt. There

Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.

Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear the values that, in the heat of a difficult decision or a moment of uncertainty, we might otherwise forget.

We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention.

Bureaucrats and politicians, rather than making decisions, were responding to cues with automatic routines in order to get rewards such as promotions or reelection.

Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react.

All we can do is learn how to make the best decisions that are in front of us, and trust that, over time, the odds will be in our favor.

The Agile methodology, as it came to be known, emphasized collaboration, frequent testing, rapid iteration, and pushing decision making to whoever was closest to a problem.

Many of our most important decisions are, in fact, attempts to forecast the future.

Good decision making is contingent on a basic ability to envision what happens next.

How do we learn to make better decisions? In part, by training ourselves to think probabilistically. To do that, we must force ourselves to envision various futures—to hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously—and then expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of successes and failures to develop an intuition about which forecasts are more or less likely to come true.

This, ultimately, is one of the most important secrets to learning how to make better decisions. Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.

Every choice we make in life is an experiment. Every day offers fresh opportunities to find better decision-making frames.

If you can become more motivated, more focused, better at setting goals and making good decisions, then you're a long way down the path to becoming more productive.

Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It's about making certain decisions in certain ways.

You're helping us understand how a decision becomes an automatic behavior.

If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do.

Determined and focused people tend to work harder and get tasks done more promptly. They stay married longer and have deeper networks of friends. They often have higher-paying jobs. But this questionnaire is not intended to test personal organization. Rather, it's designed to measure a personality.

If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause widespread shifts. However, identifying keystone habits is tricky. To find them, you have to know where to look.

Giving everyone new habits has become a focus of the church.

At the core of that education is an intense focus on an all-important habit: willpower. Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.

If you want to do a better job of paying attention to what really matters, of not getting overwhelmed and distracted by the constant flow of emails and conversations and interruptions that are part of every day, of knowing where to focus and what to ignore, get into the habit of telling yourself stories.

They learn how to distract themselves from temptations. And once you've gotten into that willpower groove, your brain is practiced at helping you focus on a goal.

They focused on the craving for that reward when temptations arose, cultivated the craving into a mild obsession. And their cravings for that reward, researchers found, crowded out the temptation to drop the diet. The craving drove the habit loop.

It's not just individuals who are capable of such shifts. When companies focus on changing habits, whole organizations can transform. Firms such as Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Alcoa, and Target

By focusing on one pattern—what is known as a keystone habit—Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well. It's not

A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.

The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.

Every habit is made of three parts... a cue, a routine and a habit. Most people focus on the routine and behavior, but these cues and rewards are really the way you make something into a habit.

What studies say the number one best way to start an exercise habit is to give yourself a reward that you genuinely enjoy.

Often in companies, you'll see tensions between sales and marketing. Sales people will want to give discounts to clients because they often get paid a commission based on how much they sell. So they're always pushing to give discounts because that will increase sales. Marketing, however, is judged by overall profitability.

Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.

In a flash order transaction, buy or sell orders are shown to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds before they are routed to everyone else. They are widely considered to give the few investors with access to the technology an unfair advantage, even by some of the marketplaces that offer the flash orders for a fee.

We know there are certain chemicals that are designed to give us a rush of pleasure. But, one of the most amazing things about being human is our capacity to override that pleasure. To either say, 'I don't need that pleasure right now. I'm going to ignore the craving.' Or to find something else that we find a deeper sense of reward from.

Our brain is essentially programmed to enjoy carbohydrates because they give us a sense of fullness and a rush of pleasure. When people go on low-carb diets, they start to almost subconsciously experience distress from eating carbohydrates.

A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together. And it endures because a movement's leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.

The secret to making that happen, he says, is giving everyone a voice and finding people willing to be sensitive enough to listen to one another

Because there's no craving that has made sunscreen into a daily habit. Some companies are trying to fix that by giving sunscreens a tingling sensation or something that lets people know they've applied it to their skin.

When people come together in a group, sometimes we need to give control to others. That's ultimately what team norms are: individuals willingly giving a measure of control to their teammates. But that works only when people feel like they can trust one another. It only succeeds when we feel psychologically safe.

For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling. And the surest way to achieve that is to give people new habits that help them figure out where to go on their own.

That's how our mind learns and remembers how good it feels to be in control. And unless we practice self-determination and give ourselves emotional rewards for subversive assertiveness, our capacity for self-motivation can fade.

Motivation becomes easier when we transform a chore into a choice. Doing so gives us a sense of control.

Even if you give people better habits, it doesn't repair why they started drinking in the first place. Eventually they'll have a bad day, and no new routine is going to make everything seem okay. What can make a difference is believing that they can cope with that stress without alcohol.

Understanding the cues and cravings driving your habits won't make them suddenly disappear—but it will give you a way to plan how to change the pattern.

Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.

What we know from lab studies is that it's never too late to break a habit. Habits are malleable throughout your entire life. But we also know that the best way to change a habit is to understand its structure - that once you tell people about the cue and the reward and you force them to recognize what those factors are in a behavior, it becomes much, much easier to change.

Habits are malleable throughout your entire life.

Hiding what you know is sometimes as important as knowing it.

Hank Paulson, the happy capitalist warrior who spent his life pursuing and defending free markets, is now the biggest interventionist Treasury secretary we've had since the Great Depression.

The Great Bailout is mostly over for the banks. But for those troubled behemoths of the nation's housing bust, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lifeline from Washington just keeps getting longer.

It's easy to forget, given her scandal-tinged life and tragic death, how incredibly talented Whitney Houston was. She holds the world record as the most-awarded female act of all time, with over 415 major recognitions during her career. She is the only artist to chart seven consecutive number one songs.

A huge amount of success in life comes from learning as a child how to make good habits. It's good to help kids understand that when they do certain things habitually, they're reinforcing patterns.

And what's the biggest life event for most people? What causes the greatest disruption and vulnerability to marketing interventions? Having a baby. There's almost no greater upheaval for most customers than the arrival of a child. As a result, new parents' habits are more flexible at that moment than at almost any other period in an adult's life.

you have to be comfortable not knowing exactly where life is going. That's how I've learned to keep the anxiety away.

We can develop this intuition by studying statistics, playing games like poker, thinking through life's potential pitfalls and successes, or helping our kids work through their anxieties by writing them down and patiently calculating the odds.

Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you'll encode those experiences deeper in your brain.

For most people who overhaul their lives, there are no seminal moments or life-altering disasters.

Researchers began finding that habit replacement worked pretty well for many people until the stresses of life—such as finding out your mom has cancer, or your marriage is coming apart—got too high, at which point alcoholics often fell off the wagon.

If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you'll be more likely to apply them in your life.

People's buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event.

Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort.

People who know how to self-motivate, according to studies, earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and see they are more satisfied with their families, jobs, and lives.

When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more.

Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control.

Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span, a team of psychologists wrote in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management in 2012.

We praise people for doing things that are hard. That's how they learn to believe they can do them.

If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier.

To teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals.

These small acts of defiance were, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor. But they are psychologically powerful because the subversives saw the rebellions as evidence that they were still in control of their own lives.

The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation are decisions that do two things: They convince us we're in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning.

We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules.

Self-motivation is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing.

Saturday Night Live has been held up as a model of great team dynamics. It is cited in college textbooks as an example of what groups can achieve when the right conditions are in place and a team intensely bonds. The group that created Saturday Night Live came together so successfully, this theory goes, because a communal culture replaced individual needs.

For psychological safety to emerge among a group, teammates don't have to be friends. They do, however, need to be socially sensitive and ensure everyone feels heard.

Teams success when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.

People who know how to manage their attention and who habitually build robust mental models tend to earn more money and get better grades. Moreover, experience shows that anyone can learn to habitually construct mental models. By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what's going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes.

Narrate your life as it's occurring, and then when your boss suddenly asks a question or an urgent note arrives and you have only minutes to reply, the spotlight in your head will be ready to shine the right way.

To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention, we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you're driving to work, force yourself to envision your day. While you're sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you're seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what's next.

Numerous academic studies have examined the impact of stretch goals, and have consistently found that forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsized jumps in innovation and productivity.

Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.

If you're confronted with a list of only far-reaching objectives, you're more likely to get discouraged and turn away.

No one goes to work wanting to suck. If you put people in a position to succeed, they will.

The only culture that was a consistent winner were the commitment firms. Hands down, a commitment culture outperformed every other type of management style in almost every meaningful way.

Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decision-making authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success.

To become better at predicting the future - at making good decisions - we need to know the difference between what we hope will happen and what is more and less likely to occur.

What matters is committing to odds that pay off in the long run.

Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.

My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

When people have a willpower failure, it's because they haven't anticipated a situation that's going to come along.

Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the same way kids learn to do math and say 'thank you.'

There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.

Sizing up succinctly his lack of formal education compared with his determination to learn from others, the author writes, I went to college with every person I ever met.

I was late once and it cost me $50,000. I figure it was cheaper to wear two watches.

Find something that you love. Something that gets you so excited you can't wait to get out of bed in the morning. Forget about money. Be happy.

Walk that walk and go forward all the time. Don't just talk that talk, walk it and go forward. Also, the walk didn't have to be long strides; baby steps counted too. Go forward.

I just wanted to make a million dollars. But I couldn't sing and I couldn't play ball, so I said to my mother, 'How am I going to make a million dollars?' And she said to me, 'Son, if you believe you can do it, you will.'

Do something that you love. Whatever you're going to do is going to be tough enough. Find something that gets you so excited that the sun can't come up early enough in the morning because you want to go do your thing.

The money thing will come. I know so many people who have so much more money than I. They are miserable. It is so important to be happy.

Do something that makes you feel your work is significant and meaningful. If you just want to make money, that's a whole different trip. I can't help you with that.

Hunker down, strap in, and hold on. Hold on baby!

We all understand genetics. You get your eyes from your dad, your mom's nose, there's nothing you can do about that. But your spiritual genetics you can choose, pick, embrace and commit to. That's what I did.

This is your worth, who you really are, your degree that can go with you wherever you go, that you bring with you the moment you come into a room, that can't be manipulated or shaken.

You have to be bold because there will be folks who will say, You can't or You shouldn't or Why? There is a certain boldness to saying, Well, I really don't want to be a high-powered corporate lawyer. I'm really passionate about painting.

When you tell your kids they can be anything, you've got to be careful. I told my kids that, and I ended up with a music producer and an interior designer. But they're doing it.

Unfortunately, some of the best fathers are mothers.

I grew up without a father.

The hardest thing that I had to do every day as a working single parent was child care, to have to leave my child with people that I did not know and hope everything was OK, that was the most painful part of every day.

A father is everything in the world.

My stepfather was fond of letting me know, quote, 'I ain't your... damn daddy.' That was something that was painful, to put it mildly.

We can all look to our friends, family, and those we admire for inspiration.

My biggest hero was my mother. She told me every day that I could do or be anything. I knew it, I believed it, and I embraced it.

My mom had to be resourceful. She grew up dirt poor in rural Louisiana.

I hold one thing dearer than all else: my commitment to my son.

Strong people stand up for themselves. Stronger people stand up for others. The irony is that while sleep sometimes brings nightmares, it's the reality of my waking hours that can cause me the greater fear.

Everything that I learned in the Navy, I took it with me into the next phase of my life.

My first ambition in life, I made up my mind I was going to become Miles Davis. I studied music, music theory. I played trumpet for nine years. One day, my mother explained, 'You can't be Miles Davis. There's one, and he's got that job.'

What can we be in life? Few figures in history have answered this question with as much clarity and moral authority as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.