Quotes about Development

Every child has to raise itself." Parents can only advise their children or point them in the right direction. Ultimately, people shape their own characters.

Jesus is big on people evolving. And all organisms have an innate tendency to evolve toward improvement. I seem to be the outlier.

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't—and, in fact, you're not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.

The secret of being wrong isn't to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn't fatal. The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.

For many of us, the happiest future is one that's precisely like the past, except a little better

If you're not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it's almost certain you're not reaching your potential as a leader.

Think for a second about the people you know who are engaged, satisfied, eager to get to work. Most of them, I'll bet, make change.

There's a practice available to each of us—the practice of embracing the process of creation in service of better. The practice is not the means to the output, the practice is the output

Things that grow don't grow forever—but that's okay, because the experiences we collect stick with us, and we get to take those experiences wherever we go.

Customer development is the act of gaining traction with customers, of finding a fit between what you make and what they want. This traction is worth far more than fancy technology or expensive marketing.

Initiative is a little like creativity in that both require curiosity. Not the search for the "right" answer, as much as an insatiable desire to understand how something works and how it might work better.

Becoming a linchpin is a stepwise process, a path in which you develop the attributes that make you indispensable. You can train yourself to matter. The first step is the most difficult, the step where you acknowledge that this is a skill, and like all skills, you can (and will) get better at it. Every day, if you focus on the gifts, art, and connections that characterize the linchpin, you'll become a little more indispensable.