Best mindset quotes

Always follow your dreams, don't let anyone tell you that you can't be something.

Anyone can forget about talent, but if you're a good person, your name will be remembered a long time.

Be respectful. Treat people the way you want to be treated. Respect the lowest rank and the highest rank and you'll never get in trouble.

Enjoy your sweat because hard work doesn't guarantee success, but without it, you don't have a chance.

Getting the contract helped me more than anything. I was concerned around the trading deadline and thought the Mariners would trade me for either (Jaime) Moyer or (Pat) Hentgen.

I'd rather have a Gold Glove (Award) than a Silver Slugger (Award). Defense is so much more of a team game and one of my goals this year was to make fewer than twenty-five errors.

I love the challenge of the game. I love the work. My goal right now is to have a season next year that will make people forget about this one. I'll use things like this for motivation. I'm pumped. I'm hungry.

I'm a terrible singer. I feel lucky to play baseball. You can't be gifted in everything.

I'm excited (after hitting for the cycle), but I guess it hasn't hit me yet. I'm only the second Mariner to do it and the other is Jay Buhner, who can't run.

I'm having a hard time finding a date. I don't trust any women I meet. I'm very skeptical.

I'm not a real vocal guy, but sometimes you need to kick someone in the ass.

I'm not impulsive at all — except about buying clothes. That's my biggest weakness.

I need to make more contact. I struck out more than one-hundred times. I can cut down on my errors and I'd like to steal thirty or forty bags. I made a lot of dumb baserunning mistakes this year.

I want to be known as a good major-leaguer, and good major-leaguers work to become good.

I want to step forward. I don't want to step on anyone's toes doing it. If I do, too bad.

Keep reading books, stay in school. I encourage kids to read as much as they can, I challenge you to read a book every two weeks, like I try to.

Last year I would have paid anything to watch a Major League game. This year I'm playing in one.

Leadership is a role you have to earn in order to be effective.

Like I say, it's almost embarrassing to talk about. I don't know if Michael Jordan or Bill Gates or Alexander the Great or anyone is worth this type of money, but that's the market we're in today. That's what Mr. Hicks decided to pay me, and now it's time to pay him back and win a couple championships.

Looks aren't the number one thing. They have to have class, intelligence, then looks. If I was the ugliest SOB in the world it would be a lot easier.

Some things are meant to be and if it was, you will know it.

The only stage I need is the World Series.

There is a difference between image and reputation. Image is nice, reputation is developed over an entire career. Reputation is what I'm searching for.

This whole year has been a learning experience. There are still a lot of areas in which I think I can improve.

We have a responsibility not just as athletes, but as members of society to treat people well. To do things the right way.

We (Derek Jeter and I) want to kill each other. I think we both drive each other and motivate each other. But, when we're off the field, we're like family. I think the nice thing about it is we became good friends before we even made it to the big leagues. That makes it more of a healthy relationship.

We (Derek Jeter and I) always talk about getting old, gray, and fat when our careers are over and just having a good time. He's like me. He wants to have a good time and be a good person. It's a weird situation for us. It's just like we're looking in the mirror. the only difference is I'm on the West Coast and he's on the East Coast.

What I've learned from Cal is to respect the game, respect the fans. Nothing fancy out there. Just do your job.

Why do people sing Take Me Out to The Ballgame when they're already there?

You can take my cars or my house, just don't mess with my clothes.

Fear of failure is what fuels me, keeps me on edge and sharp. I'm not as good when I'm comfortable.

I have incredible motivation to go out and improve every day.

I only look forward. I can't get all caught up in what I've done. I still have plenty to accomplish in the game. Hopefully, I'm just scratching the surface.

When you think small and up the middle, good things happen.

I just don't see the light. Where is the light? What am I in this for?

I don't care if people like me or not. Respect is more important.

My style is not to challenge anything.

I've played almost 22 years in the major leagues, and I've never sat on the bench.

I've always said I'm a teacher at heart.

I would like to help out in financial literacy for the Hispanic community and the athletic community.

I can't really decide for other people what to think.

I'm part of history.

There are a lot of people who don't like me.

I've had a Ph.D. in saying dumb things over the years.

I've always enjoyed challenges.

I've been humbled by the reception I've received everywhere.

I like Jay Z, Journey, and Kings of Leon.

Meditation: a reboot for your brain and your soul.

The happiest people are the most giving.

We have if we're lucky about 30,000 days to play the game of life. How we play it will be determined by what we value.

So find your place to stand – your place of wisdom and peace and strength. And from that place, lead the third women's revolution.

The soul is who I am. The soul is who you are, and it is one breath away.

Live your life as if everything is rigged in your favor.

Be sleeping more we in fact become more competent and in control of our lives. It gives new meaning to the old canards of thinking. Women have already broken glass ceilings in Congress, space travel, sports, business and the media, imagine what we can do when we're all fully awake.

My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.

Living in a state of gratitude is the gateway to grace.

It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes.

There can be no single thing that can teach us more about life than death.

Rob yourself of sleep and you'll find you do not function at your personal best.

The difference between failure and success is perseverance.

The journey toward self-discovery is life's greatest adventure.

Not only is it harder to be a man, it is also harder to become one.

It's no longer an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species.

But you have to do what you dream of doing even while you're afraid.

The middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse just as surely as AIG was in the fall of 2009 – only this time, it's not just one giant insurance company (and its banking counterparties) facing disaster, it's tens of millions of hardworking Americans who played by the rules.

Liberation is an ever shifting horizon, a total ideology that can never fulfill its promises. It has the therapeutic quality of providing emotionally charged rituals of solidarity in hatred – it is the amphetamine of its believers.

Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.

Mainstream media tends to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left.

I don't look back. I don't look forward. I try to just be here, now.

We're too busy chasing a phantom of the successful life. The difference between what such success looks like and what truly makes us thrive isn't always clear as we're living our lives. But it becomes much more obvious in the rear view mirror. Have you noticed that when we die, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success?

The goal of any true resistance is to affect outcomes, not just to vent. And the only way to affect outcomes and thrive in our lives is to find the eye in the hurricane and act from that place of inner strength.

I can tell you with authority that when I'm exhausted, when I'm running on empty, I'm the worst version of myself.

The land of burnout is not a place I ever want to go back to.

My passion is to help people live lives with less stress.

I used to stay up, stupidly, to work, and I'd just eat to keep my eyes open. I wasn't even hungry - it was just a way to power through.

There's something sacred in all of us that we need to protect, and sleep is a way to connect with it, nourish it, and make it more present in our lives.

Increasingly, staying in the middle class – let alone aspiring to become middle class – is becoming a game of choice.

Take risks. Failure is a stepping stone to success.

Coincidences connect us across time, to one another, to ourselves and to an invisible order in the universe.

Never make decisions from a place of lack.

Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom.

The quest for knowledge is pursued at higher speeds with smarter tools today, but wisdom is found no more readily than it was three thousand years ago in the court of King Solomon.

When we believe in something, we got to stay with it, even when the world tells us no.

Women process stress differently. If we can change the workplace culture to make it more welcoming for women, we're also going to improve behavior, and we're going to improve outcomes.

I declare an end to my day by removing my phone from my bedroom and putting it in a phone charging bed.

When we take care of ourselves, we are more effective, we are more creative, and we are more successful in a broad definition of the word.

The most important thing that we entrepreneurs have is our human capital. If we exhaust it, we make bad decisions.

I think she's the foundation of everything I've done. I think, definitely, my mother's fear of failure helps make me more resilient and helps make me persevere.

Giving is a shortcut to happiness

If I can change, anybody can

By conventional definition of success, which means two metrics: money and power, I was successful. By any sane definition of success, I was not successful if I was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of my office

By helping us keep the world in perspective, sleep gives us a chance to refocus on the essence of who we are. And in that place of connection, it is easier for the fears and concerns of the world to drop away.

I studied, I met with medical doctors, scientists, and I'm here to tell you that the way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is: getting enough sleep.

The current male-dominated model of success - which equates success with burnout, sleep deprivation, and driving yourself into the ground - isn't working for women, and it's not working for men, either.

Discover the great ideas that lie inside you by discovering the power of sleep.

It's time to sleep your way to the top.

About five years ago, I fainted from exhaustion. I hit my head on my desk. I broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye. It started me on this journey of rediscovering sleep and balance and integrating my life. I think everyone should stop and reassess their lives before you hit your head on your desk.

I have one piece of advice for you: sleep your way to the top.

The advice I would give to my younger self is very, very simple: Stop burning the candle at both ends and renew your estranged relationship with sleep. You will be more productive, more effective, more creative, and more likely to enjoy your life.

In many cases, we make sleep a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Sleep difficulties can turn into serious medical problems. For the vast majority of us, however, sleep difficulties are a lifestyle problem. Yet we tend to treat all our sleep-related woes the same way: with a pill.

Everything you do, you'll do better with a good night's sleep.

One of the main reasons I wrote The Sleep Revolution was to examine this ancient, essential, and mysterious phenomenon from all angles and to explore the ways we can use sleep to help regain control over our out-of-kilter lives.

Other people need a full night's sleep in order to function and be healthy and alert. But I'm different.

Our relationship with sleep is currently in crisis, but we're also living in a golden age of sleep science - revealing all the ways in which sleep and dreams play a vital role in our decision-making, emotional intelligence, cognitive function, and creativity. Every week, new research reveals how vital sleep is to our health, happiness, job performance, and relationships.

I had dinner recently with a guy who bragged that he had only gotten four hours of sleep that night. I didn't say it, but I thought to myself 'If you had gotten five, this dinner would have been a lot more interesting'

For far too many people in the world, the vicious cycle of financial deprivation also feeds into the vicious cycle of sleep deprivation. If you're working two or three jobs and struggling to make ends meet, get more sleep is probably not going to be near the top of your priorities list.

Don't just climb the ladder of success - a ladder that leads, after all, to higher and higher levels of stress and burnout - but chart a new path to success, remaking it in a way that includes not just the conventional metrics of money and power, but a third metric that includes well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving, so that the goal is not just to succeed but to thrive.

Don't buy society's definition of success. Because it's not working for anyone. It's not working for women, it's not working for men, it's not working for polar bears, it's not working for the cicadas that are apparently about to emerge and swarm us. It's only truly working for those who make pharmaceuticals for stress, sleeplessness, and high blood pressure.

I think especially as women we need to recognize that feeling pressure is completely self-imposed.

Meditation, yoga, and walks are all ways to regulate our stress and reconnect.

Those who do contemplative retreats in hermitages are far from doing nothing, since they are constantly engaged in training their minds, but there is no 'noise,' no 'waste' to eliminate, no stress to cure, no chaos to reorganize. This means that there is less to repair during sleep and the sleep quality of meditators is deeper.

And during the day, to prevent stress from building up—which makes it harder to fall asleep at night—every few hours take sixty seconds of recovery time the way top tennis players introduce tiny slots of recovery rituals into their game. All you have to do is stop what you are doing, and simply bring your awareness to the palms of your hands or the soles of your feet, or both. Let it stay there for a minute, and feel all tension leaving your body, drifting away from you through your hands and feet.

REM sleep can help us process emotional stress.

As Nicholas Kristof put it in The New York Times: Cues of a hostile or indifferent environment flood an infant, or even a fetus, with stress hormones like cortisol in ways that can disrupt the body's metabolism or the architecture of the brain. The upshot is that children are sometimes permanently undermined. Even many years later, as adults, they are more likely to suffer heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other physical ailments. They are also more likely to struggle in school, have short tempers and tangle with the law.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me.

Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It's the mastery of fear. It's about getting up one more time than we fall down.

We need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions, that we'll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success.

The more fearless we are in our personal lives, the more of that spirit we'll bring to changing our world.

Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident - all of those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.

Since fear is such a primal reaction, making the choice to move forward despite fear is an evolved decision that transcends our animal nature.

Through the stories of women I admire, and, above all, through my own experience with my daughters, again and again, I encounter moments of extraordinary strength, courage, and resilience, when fears are confronted, even overcome, and anything seems possible.

There is nothing that can bring you closer to fearlessness about everything else in the world than being a parent - because of everyday fears like not being approved of pale by comparison to the fears you have about your children.

Being fearless doesn't mean living a life devoid of fear, but living a life in which our fears don't hold us back

Don't wait until you're not afraid of something to do it. Do it despite the fear and you'll start to develop a 'fearlessness muscle'.

We have created a democracy that links us all, and with it come not only opportunities but obligations. There are no gates or walls high enough. There are no bank accounts large enough to buy you and your family and your friends protection from the fear and hunger of those left behind or to isolate you from the consequences of growing social inequities. We are all in this boat together. And the fact that there isn't a hole at your end of the boat doesn't mean you are safe.

So great becomes the fear of losing what we have that many of us rush back to hide under the temporary shelter of convention rather than follow the path of self-discovery wherever it might lead. Given adequate time and sufficient fear, we may hide so long that we hardly notice we're slowly suffocating.

If you look at the best research on parenting, it comes down to one thing and one thing only. Not what you teach your children or how much time you spend with them, or if you read to them or not. What it comes down to is who you are, because we teach who we are. You read, your child will read. You watch too much TV, your child will. You do service in the world, your child will do service in the world. So the best way to get past all the worries is to be the best you that you can be. And forgive yourself when you are not. And not to hold unrealistic expectations of your children when you are in no way showing them the behavior you demand from them. Be an example to yourself that your child can be proud of.

Our most meaningful relationships are based on a longing for expansion rather than a preoccupation with comfort and security. To live exuberantly—to fully know and be fully known by another—we must be prepared to illuminate the dark spots in our most intimate relationships and in our selves.

THE MOST INTIMATE relationship we'll ever have is with our own body. It's the headquarters of our fears and anxieties. It's also the cause of many of them. Which is why we can never really be fearless until we stop judging our looks and accept them. I've

We have a choice when we face difficult decisions: We can act with faith or we can act with fear. There are no guarantees except this one: If we dwell on our fears, we will definitely miss the joys of the unexpected.

But do not pretend that people become great by doing great things. They do great things because they are great, if the great things come along. But they are great just the same when the great things do not come along.

We master our fears by embracing them, not by subduing them.

It's nice to be nice, but it can be extremely draining and self-destructive when it mutes our voice, holds us back, and undermines our authenticity.

Worry is a form of atheism. And so is most fear.

More money, Etcoff writes, is spent on beauty than on education or social services. FEARS

If you take care of your mind, you take care of the world.

We all have within us the ability to move from struggle to grace.

Meditation is not about stopping thoughts, but recognizing that we are more than our thoughts and our feelings.

The average smartphone user checks his or her device every six and a half minutes.

The quest for knowledge may be pursued at higher speeds with smarter tools today, but wisdom is found no more readily than it was three thousand years ago in the court of King Solomon.

A study funded by the National Institutes of Health showed a 23 percent decrease in mortality in people who meditated versus those who did not.

Taoist philosophy, Rest is prior to motion and stillness prior to action.

In December 2013, a tourist in Melbourne fell off a pier and plunged into the sea while checking Facebook on her phone. She still had it in her hand when she was rescued.

Music can reach those places where words alone can't go.

I want to look at how we can build a path forward for our lives, which is more sustainable and less fueled by burnouts, sleep deprivation, exhaustion

Now you have unequivocal scientific evidence of the importance of sleep and the dangers of sleep deprivation

We are wired for giving. When we give, all the biological inflammation-markers, the precursors of disease, go down

Right now, we are at a kind of tipping point, where a lot of people realize that fundamental changes have to happen. Starting at the individual level, but a lot of companies are recognizing that the wellbeing of their employees is not separate from the bottom line of the company

Personally, I'm much more interesting in an 'inner space project' than an 'outer space project'

If we completely identify ourselves with our jobs, however magnificent our jobs may be, we are missing out on the fullness, and grandeur of what a human being is

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes.

The virtue as the art consecrates itself constantly to what's difficult to do, and the harder the task, the shinier the success.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.

But the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

All art, all education, can be merely a supplement to nature.

The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents the true reality, not external aspects.

It is clear that those constitutions which aim at the common good are right, as being in accord with absolute justice; while those which aim only at the good of the rulers are wrong.

People become house builders through building houses, harp players through playing the harp. We grow to be just by doing things which are just.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

They who are to be judges must also be performers.

When couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.

Equity is that idea of justice which contravenes the written law.

To be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls.

And, speaking generally, passion seems not to be amenable to reason, but only to force.

Once you know a habit exists, you have the responsibility to change it.

Changing any habit requires determination.

Habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.

If you choose pressure-release moments ahead of time—if, in other words, you plan for failure, and then plan for recovery—you're more likely to snap back faster.

Sometimes it looks like people with great self-control aren't working hard—but that's because they've made it automatic.

Stretch goals serve as jolting events that disrupt complacency and promote new ways of thinking,

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,

Change occurs among other people,

The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.

This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.

In the age of automation, knowing how to manage your focus is more critical than ever before.

Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.

If you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they'll prove you right.

At some point, if you're changing a really deep-seated behavior, you're going to have a moment of weakness.

The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child, because all of your old routines go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new things.

The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.

The waste from power plants is essentially what is left over when you burn coal. And as we all know, coal is a relatively dirty mineral.

Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels.

Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.

Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals.

Exercise spills over. There's something about it that makes other good habits easier.

Alcoholics crave a drink because it offers escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release.

If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you'll encode those experiences deeper in your brain.

Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings.

No one can predict tomorrow with absolute confidence. But the mistake some people make is trying to avoid making any predictions because their thirst for certainty is so strong and their fear of doubt too overwhelming.

We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we're doing it or not.

Creativity is just connecting things.

People who are most creative are the ones who have learned that feeling scared is a good sign.

Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.

If you dress a new something in old habits, it's easier for the public to accept it.

Duke University found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren't actual decisions, but habits.

Small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.

Shampoo doesn't have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair.

The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants.

Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.

Goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans.

See the future as multiple possibilities rather than one predetermined outcome.

People who believe they have authority over themselves often live longer than their peers. This instinct for control is so central to how our brains develop that infants, once they learn to feed themselves, will resist adults' attempts at control even if submission is more likely to get food into their mouths.

Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.

Want to exercise more? Choose a cue, such as going to the gym as soon as you wake up, and a reward, such as a smoothie after each workout. Then think about that smoothie, or about the endorphin rush you'll feel. Allow yourself to anticipate the reward. Eventually, that craving will make it easier to push through the gym doors every day.

Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.

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

Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings. But we ́re often not conscious of the cravings that drive our behaviors.

Calling out people for not voting, what experts term 'public shaming,' can prod someone to cast a ballot.

For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures.

Even if consumer confidence hit rock bottom, that most likely would not be enough, by itself, to cause a depression.

You're much better off creating positive rewards, complimenting people for acting correctly, rather than punishing them when they act incorrectly.

We love to receive praise, but usually we're not certain what message, precisely, we should take from it. On the other hand, when someone points out our flaws, we realize immediately that something needs to change.

Entrepreneurs do not try and create new types of smartphone technologies now because they know it's pointless: They're going to get sued almost immediately.

Patents are being used to wage war in the digital world, and as a result, patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation.

Everyone dies, and before that, most people eventually lose some of their faculties. So some people worry that as marketers get better at targeting the elderly, the line between advertising and unscrupulous manipulation will be harder to discern.

Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.

You have to actually believe in your capacity to change for habits to permanently change.

Her stillness defeated his storm.

Every time he came back, apologetic, contrite, he'd start off being real nice. But he was as predictable as rain. Nobody knew when he'd go off, but at some point everybody knew he would.

As long as you have a plan for how you'll live, don't let jealous people turn their insecurities into yours.

We can all learn something from people we admire.

Just remember, you're never too old to have a hero.

Your net worth can fluctuate, but your self-worth should only appreciate.

You're never too old to do something new.

When someone says, 'You can't,' what it really means is that they can't - so why should you get to?

You can blame outside factors or make excuses about why things didn't work out, but that doesn't change anything.

Nine times out of 10, extenuating circumstances aside, I believe that people are where they are by some kind of choice on their part. You need to acknowledge that, 'Hey, I'm here because I steered my horse in this direction.'

I was Chris Gardner, father of a son who deserved better than what my daddy could do for me, son of Betty Jean Gardner who said that if I wanted to win I could win.

This is a work of nonfiction. I have rendered the events faithfully and truthfully just as I have recalled them. Some names and descriptions of individuals have been changed in order to respect their privacy.

I had never gone to college. I was not from a politically connected family. I had no money of my own. Who is going to do business with you?

Probably the hardest question I get asked is, 'How do I choose between passion and practicality?' I can't answer that. I had to do both. I was passionate about pursuing a career in financial services. But I was also passionate about feeding my child.

Baby steps count, too, as long as you're moving forward.

Will Smith played Chris Gardner better than Chris Gardner ever did.

I cut grass, I did yard work, I did roofing, I cleaned basements to take care of my family.

I didn't grow up in a household where dinner conversation was, 'How did the market do today?'

I had spent years in the United States military. Specifically in the U.S. Navy.

No matter what you accomplish, when you're doing something you're truly passionate about... the opportunities are always going to be bigger.

Passion is the thing that won't let you sleep at night because you want to get up in the morning and go do your thing.

If you're passionate about something, you can develop the abilities.

I've never been big on sports coats and pants. I'm a suit guy. It makes it clear who's in charge.

I'm a Levi's guy.

I do one thing - I don't do it on purpose - but I always make other guys look underdressed.

One time, I was going to be in L.A. for 10 days for a business conference, and I took eight different pairs of sandals.

The people who care the most about the folks in your community are living in the community. They don't live in Washington, D.C.

Salespeople are the most important people in any organization. Until a salesperson gets an order, nobody in the company has a job.

I've never considered selling anything other than profession, but it's more than that. It's one of the highest callings that you can aspire to. Not everyone can do it.

Business school professors don't take selling seriously because they don't know how to sell. It's easy to talk about business theory and production time and just-in-time development. Selling is much more difficult.

I've been talking to a lot of young people, especially here in America. I let them know that the people who they're competing with for opportunities live all over the place. They're probably not in your city, state, or country; they are hungry, and they are grinding! Some of the things that a lot of us take for granted, these people don't.

You want to be young and have fun, that's great. But while you're having fun, someone you don't see is studying and preparing. You might end up working for that person. No one wants to hear that! But I try to tell young people: You want to be the one signing the front of the check, not the back.

I am very, very conscious of time. I always wear two watches. People ask me, 'Why do you do that?' Because I was late once,and it cost me a huge opportunity.

I'm known to be aggressively early.

I made a decision as a five-year-old boy that my kids will know who their father is.

I went through pain as a child so my children wouldn't have to.

I have one of those old-fashioned mothers who told me every single day, 'Son, you can do or be anything that you want to do or be.' And I believed it. I bought into it 100%.

I've said that if you're not doing something that you're passionate about, you're compromising yourself every single day.

So many men have holes in their souls the shape of their fathers. You can pass that on to your kid, or you can do something about it, and I'm seeing a lot of men doing something about it.

I'm encouraged by what I see of men trying to be there for their children.

Finding gainful employment to pay for housing is hard for any veteran experiencing homelessness. It's even more difficult for veterans who've also had encounters with police and stints in jail.

Passion is everything. In fact, you've got to be borderline fanatical about what you do.

Be bold enough to find the one thing that you are passionate about. It might not be what you were trained to do. But be bold enough to do the one thing. Nobody needs to dig it but you.

Passion is not something you have to talk about. People feel it.

I say to people all the time, it is OK to fail. Some of the greatest successes in the history of America started out as failures.

Sometimes we are so busy helping others that we forget about ourselves. Remember, it's okay to say no and to ask others to carry their own weight.

I also often hear people say that the deck is stacked against them because of racism, sexism, or other oppressive 'isms.' But once you let go of the blame and excuses, you'll see that you can alter your position on your own.

Veterans who are homeless may not have a home, but that doesn't mean they don't have diverse skills that could be put to use to meet the needs of an expanding job market.

Long before I achieved financial success and became the subject of a Hollywood film, I was a veteran, a single father, and a working person who was homeless.

Too many veterans are poor or near poor and homeless because of it.

I initially moved to San Francisco to become a research associate for one of the top young heart surgeons in the country. Everything that I learned in that position is that skills, talent, and expertise are transferable.