A person who limits his or her potential success will limit what he or she will do to create it and keep it.

I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.

The Ordeal can be defined as the moment the hero faces his greatest fear. For most people this is death, but in many stories it's just whatever the hero is most afraid of: facing up to a phobia, challenging a rival, or roughing out a storm or a political crisis.

Good VCs get a hit about five times out of ten at bats (a .500 batting average). A VC “hit” means that the investment returns more than the original amount the VC invested in a company. Luckily, we still have 10–20 percent of our investments left—and these are our home runs. These are the investments where the VC is expecting to return ten to one hundred times her money.

That complete faith in what others will do, how they will react, and what decisions they will make is the key ingredient in the success of Decentralized Command.

1. What is our mission? 2. Who is our customer? 3. What does the customer value? 4. What are our results? 5. What is our plan?

From the intimate give-and-take of the attachment bond children learn that other people have feelings and thoughts that are both similar to and different from theirs.

The challenges you face will test and strengthen you. If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.

A powerful shared vision has a profound effect on quality of life—in the family, in the organization, in any situation where we work with others. We become contributing parts of a greater whole.

The Third Way is all about ensuring that we’re continually putting tension into the system, so that we’re continually reinforcing habits and improving something. Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.