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Leadership Quotes: Language is a BIG deal for leaders. Words matter. They can inspire enormous change and move people to life-changing action. Therefore, when a leader speaks, the quotes they give, have a significant impact.

Quotes have power. They take what we are feeling intuitively and put words to it. Quotes are an invaluable resource when crafting a speech because the quote’s originator adds validity to our message. Quotes are an invaluable resource for leaders.

The following are 75 quotes captured during the first half of 2023. These will take 15 minutes to read and a lifetime to apply.

Let’s get started. You’re about to get smarter and better as a leader.

This resource has been created by Brian Dodd of Brian Dodd On Leadership. Brian is the content coordinator of one of the most widely read leadership sites on the internet. He is also the author of the Amazon best-selling book Mighty: 7 Skills You Need to move from Pandemic to Progress.

Generosity

“If you don’t think money can bring happiness, you just haven’t given enough of it away.” – Brian Dodd

“The best measure of wealth is what you have minus what you want. (By this measure, some billionaires are broke.)” – Morgan Housel

“The thing that is least perceived about wealth is that all pleasure in money ends at the point where economy becomes unnecessary. The man who can buy anything he covets values nothing that he buys. There is a subtle pleasure in the extravagance that contests with prudence; in the anxious debates which we hold with ourselves about whether we can or cannot afford a certain thing; in our attempts to justify our wisdom; in the risk and recklessness of our operations; in the long-deferred and final joy of our possession; but this is a kind of pleasure which the man of boundless means never knows.”- William Dawson, The Quest of the Simple Life

Self-Awareness

“Ambition is when you close the gap between your circumstances and your expectations. Entitlement is when you expect others to close the gap between your circumstances and your expectations.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

“When you win, it takes an incredible amount of awareness and discipline to stay curious about how you can close the gap between where you are and what the ultimate team could look like.” – Sue Enquist, Founder and CEO of One Softball

“Most people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it is, with the world as they think about it, and talk about it, and describe it.” – Alan Watts

“My life is one long obstacle course with me as the chief obstacle.” – Jack Parr

“Life is not fair, it never was and it isn’t now and it won’t ever be. Do not fall into the trap. The entitlement trap, of feeling like you’re a victim. You are not.” – Matthew McConaughey

“There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, the responsibility lies with you.” – J.K. Rowling

“Vacation won’t make things better. Changing jobs won’t make things better. Getting the recognition you deserve won’t make things better. Drugs won’t make things better. The only thing that will make things better is your relationship with yourself.” – Farnam Street

“The greatest cost you are going to pay as a leader is paying attention.” – Dr. Sam Chand

Decision-Making

“One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

“You have to learn to quit being right all the time and quit being smart all the time, and quit thinking this is a contest about how smart you are and how right you are, and realize that you are here to make a positive difference in the world. And being smart and being right is probably no longer the way to do that. See when you’re in school, you take test after test, after test, after test. You have to prove you’re smart over and over. Thousands of times, you have to prove you’re smart. It’s very difficult to stop. We are programmed to prove we’re smart.” – Marshall Goldsmith

“One of the difficult things about making decisions is it reduces opportunity in the short-term, but that’s the only thing that really creates great opportunity in the long-term.” – Reid Hoffman

“I place more value on decision speed. If you can make twice as many decisions at half the precision, that’s actually often better. And then, given the fact that the rate of improvement of decision-making with additional time almost necessarily tends to flatten out, I think that most people should be operating earlier in that curve. Make more decisions with less confidence but in significantly less time. And just recognize that in most cases, you can course-correct and treat fast decisions as a kind of asset and capability in their own right. It’s quite striking to me how some of the organizations that I hold in the highest regard tend to do this. The second thing is to not treat all decisions uniformly. I think the most obvious axis to break them down on are the degree of reversibility and magnitude. Things with low reversibility and great impact and magnitude, those ones you do want to really deliberate over and try to get right.” – Farnam Street

“A large part of the difference between the experienced decision maker and the novice in these situations is not any particular intangible like “judgment” or “intuition.” If one could open the lid, so to speak, and see what was in the head of the experienced decision maker, one would find that he had at his disposal repertoires of possible actions; that he had checklists of things to think about before he acted; and that he had mechanisms in his mind to evoke these, and bring these to his conscious attention when the situations for decisions arose.” – Herbert Simon

Productivity

“Do the work. That’s all the productivity advice you need, and the only useful productivity advice you’re ever going to get. You can direct your attention to a million optimizations – email, meetings, notes, calendar, time tracking, goals, to-do lists, time estimates, prioritization frameworks, quantified self-sensors, analytics, apps, documents, journaling. But don’t. Ignore all this, and do the work. When you do the work, everything else optimizes itself.” – Farnam Street

“Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the only thing they can’t afford to lose.” –Thomas Edison

“In general, I think everyone’s bars are just a little bit too low, and that we should raise the bar for ourselves. We should go after the thing that sounds a little bit crazy or sounds a little bit too difficult and just see, because, why not?” – Ultramarathoner Courtney Dauwalter

“A year from now, you will wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb

“‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.” – Tim Ferriss

Success

“Most successful people are just an anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.” – Andrew Wilkinson

“Commitment separates those who live their dreams from those who live their lives regretting the opportunities they have squandered.” – Bill Russell

“The first time you quit it’s hard. The second time, it gets easier. The third time, you don’t even have to think about it.” – Paul “Bear” Bryant

“Who you are as a person is going to have more to do with your success in whatever you’re choosing to do than anything else.” – Alan Mulally

“The ultimate goal of every smart hitter in baseball is not only to get on base but to make it home.” – Keith Madison

“In war, the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won.” – Sun Tzu

“I’ve always had this view that success is not a straight lineup. If you read the stories of successful people, almost every successful person has had to deal with some degree of hardship, whether that hardship is personal hardship, health-related hardship, or a business issue. I’ve always had the view that how successful you are is really a function of how you deal with failure. If you deal with failure well and you persist, you have a high probability of being successful.” – Bill Ackman

“You are not going to find true happiness on the hedonic treadmill of your professional life. You’ll find it in things that are deeply ordinary: enjoying a walk or a conversation with a loved one, instead of working that extra hour, for example.” – Arthur Blank

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” – Steve Jobs

Excellence

“Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, add up over time.” – Daniel F. Chambliss

“The hallmark of greatness is consistency.” – Tony Gonzalez

“One sign that determination matters more than talent: there are lots of talented people who never achieve anything, but not that many determined people who don’t.” – Paul Graham

Hubris

“None are as empty as those who are full of themselves.” – Benjamin Whichcote

“Many people say I’m the best women’s soccer player in the world. I don’t think so. And because of that, someday I just might be.” – Mia Hamm

“Most people write to sound smart when they should write to be useful. Communicating to sound smart lowers your potential for impact. The harder people have to work to understand you, the less they want your input. Writing to be useful means writing what you would want to read. Simple, but not easy.” – Farnam Street

Entertainment

“If everybody claims to be a victim, then nobody will hear the real victims. Even I getting smacked by Suge Smith… I went to work the next day, I got kids.” – Chris Rock

“Success doesn’t change you. Fame does.” – Whitney Houston

“The person who helps others simply because it should or must be done, and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero.” – Stan Lee

“You know what? I made Titanic. This building that we’re meeting in right now, this new half-billion-dollar complex on your lot? Titanic paid for that, so I get to do this.” – James Cameron

Change

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it’s faced.” – James Baldwin

Sacrifice

“To develop physical and mental toughness, you have to be able to deny yourself pleasures that others are indulging in, that you could indulge in, other than the simple fact that you decided that you’re going to work at this time.” – Jim Zorn

“I know for all those of you who lost someone, 21 years is both a lifetime and no time at all… Grief is the price we pay for love.” – President Joe Biden at the 9/11 Pentagon Memorial anniversary

“On the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that on other days, on other fields will bear the fruits of victory.” – General Douglas MacArthur

Coaching

“I never wanted a coach that was a know it all. What was common with the best coaches I worked for was that it was a collaborative effort…. It’s a group effort, I think players appreciate that. They see strength when coaches do that.” – Steve Kerr

“I don’t coach baseball. I coach baseball players.” – Keith Madison

“You cry in practice, you laugh in competition… A sword is made strong by putting it through fire. I try to create that sword.” – Coach Paul Assaiante, 17-time national champion men’s Squash coach at Trinity College

“Most people think of demanding and supportive as opposite ends of a spectrum. You can either be tough or you can be nice. But the best leaders don’t choose. They are both highly demanding and highly supportive. They push you to new heights and they also have your back.” – Ravi Gupta

Wisdom and Learning

“I always say that I’m a sponge: At night I go to bed and I squeeze myself out so that the next day I can take up as much new information as I can.” – Serena Williams

“What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.” – Warren Buffett

“To be a good manager, you want things to run smoothly. And insights are not ways of running smoothly. Insights are disorganizing and disruptive. And so, that’s a major reason that organizations, without even intending to, block the insights that come their way.” – Gary Klein

“Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that’s unthinkable.” – Paul Graham

“Long days in the company of someone I had never met but would come to know better than anyone else in the world.” – Biographer James Atlas

“In sports, one of the primary sources of advantage is choosing how to play the game. In life, one of the primary sources of advantage is choosing which game to play.” – James Clear

“Whatever age you are today, your future self would love to be it. Most people do not consider 65 to be a young age, but when you’re 75 you’d love to rewind to 65 and regain those years. Few people would describe 35 as your youth, but in your mid-50s your mid-30s will seem like the “young you.” Today is a great opportunity, no matter your age. Looking back in a few years, today will seem like the time when you were young and full of potential or the moment when you could have started early or the turning point when you made a choice that benefited your future. The moment in front of you right now is a good one. Make the most of it.” – James Clear

“The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” – Historian Niall Ferguson

“Over time, the person who approaches life with an openness to being wrong and a willingness to learn outperforms the person who doesn’t.” – Farnam Street

“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.” – Nassim Taleb

“Stress is any deviation from homeostasis or our neutral baseline position. So every time we tilt that pleasure, pain, balance to the side of pleasure or pain, we’re also setting off our own endogenous adrenaline or stress hormone. That is the definition of stress, a deviation from homeostasis. So I think that in many ways the source of our stress in modern life is the constant stimulation, the constant hits of pleasure from reaching for our phone in the morning to our morning cup of Joe to the donuts, to the Netflix binges at night, to the hookup, you name it. We’re actually experiencing stress as a result of overabundance.” – Dr. Anna Lembke

Business

“Since focus requires saying no, it also means really smart people and good competitors are saying no to really good ideas. If you’re a person trying to find your way in an organization, it’s worth thinking about the most focused people around you and the best idea they’re not working on. If you’re a company, it’s worth thinking about what your best competition is not doing. You can often figure this out by interviewing smart focused people from another company.” – Farnam Street

“Your customer service never exceeds the culture you created.” – Kevin Scott

“Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active – of those who can correct their mistakes and put them right.” – Ingvar Komprad, founder of IKEA

“The culture you have in your organization is the sum of all the wanted behaviors that you celebrate minus all the unwanted behaviors that you tolerate.” – Danny Meyer

Failure and Opposition

“Criticism is something you can easily avoid – by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” – Aristotle

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” – Johnny Cash

“One lesson I’ve learned is that if the job I do were easy, I wouldn’t derive so much satisfaction from it. The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. That is how you win championships, that is what separates the great player from the merely good player. The difference lies in how well you’ve prepared.” – Rafael Nadal

“The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go.” – Richard Hamming

“It’s not a failure; it’s steps to success. There’s no failure in sports. There are good days, bad days. Some days you’re able to be successful. Some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn. Some days it’s not your turn.” – Giannis Antetokounmpo

“Life is a series of commas, not periods.” – Matthew McConaughey

Loyalty

“When we are debating an issue, loyalty means giving me your honest opinion, whether you think I’ll like it or not. Disagreement, at this stage, stimulates me. But once a decision has been made, the debate ends. From that point on, loyalty means executing the decision as if it were your own.” – Former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell

Passion

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“To each, there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.” – Winston Churchill

“They very best don’t have to turn it on. It’s always on. They have to turn it off.” – Farnam Street

For more 2023 leadership lessons from Brian Dodd On Leadership read the following:

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Leadership Quotes