A goal is created three times. First as a mental picture. Second, when written down to add clarity and dimension. And third, when you take action towards its achievement.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Goals
Do more than is required. What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives and careers merely following? The extra mile. Advancement only comes with habitually doing more than you are asked.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Success
Discipline is based on pride, on meticulous attention to details, and on mutual respect and confidence. Discipline must be a habit so ingrained that it is stronger than the excitement of the goal or the fear of failure.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Excitement, Discipline, Pride
Know the limits of what you can expect from yourself and those around you. Be willing to push those limits, but understand that pushing beyond them is subject to one of the few absolute laws that govern human nature: the law of diminishing returns. Pushed beyond limits, people work inefficiently, poorly, and even counterproductively.
—Gary Ryan Blair
You cannot afford to wait for perfect conditions. Goal setting is often a matter of balancing timing against available resources. Opportunities are easily lost while waiting for perfect conditions.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Perfectionism, Opportunity
Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Risk-taking
When one begins to purposefully perform acts of kindness, the spirit changes and soon doing good deeds becomes a focal point for our life; doing good begins to be the same as feeling good. The periods of emptiness when we search for the “meaning of it all” begin to fill with acts of kindness.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Kindness
Everyone fails. But that doesn’t mean you must identify yourself as a failure. Failure applies to a situation, a particular time and place. If you don’t let it devastate you, failure can be an opportunity: for learning, for recovery, for the creation and demonstration of character. No one wins all the time. Learn to take your losses, learn from them if possible, and move on.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Failure
Your mind, while blessed with permanent memory, is cursed with lousy recall. Written goals provide clarity. By documenting your dreams, you must think about the process of achieving them.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Memory, Goals
Everyone has the right to believe and accept what he or she wants, but reality doesn’t discriminate. Reality is not different for different people. Not once has reality excused anyone for good intentions ignorance or stubbornness. Reality shows no mercy, accepts no excuses, and issues no pardons. Reality does not “turn the other cheek.” This does not mean that reality is cruel, it just means that reality is.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Realism
Learning is about more than simply acquiring new knowledge and insights; it is also crucial to unlearn old knowledge that has outlive its relevance. Thus, forgetting is probably at least as important as learning.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Memory, Learning
When it comes to practicing good ethics, saying no to a vice is not good enough. A quality life is never achieved by focusing on the elimination of what is wrong. True success requires you to focus your mental, emotional, and spiritual energies on pursuing that which is right and good. Trying to become virtuous merely by excluding vice is as unrealistic as trying to cultivate roses simply by eliminating weeds.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Ethics
Your future takes precedence over your past. Focus on your future, rather than on the past.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Future
Innovation is a lot like excellence in any endeavor. Difficult but manageable to do once, infinitely harder to produce consistently. Think about all those one-hit wonders that had a single record or very possibly a single song. They disappear without a trace. What distinguishes a true star from his or her contemporaries is an ability to pull off feats of brilliance repeatedly. And it’s no accident!
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Perseverance
Self-discipline is an act of cultivation. It require you to connect today’s actions to tomorrow’s results. There’s a season for sowing a season for reaping. Self-discipline helps you know which is which.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Discipline, Balance
Success demands focus. It is the hallmark of all truly great people. Your ability to get and remain focused or lack thereof is perhaps the key determinant of your success.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Success
Long-term planning is not about making long-term decisions, it is about understanding the future consequences of today’s decisions.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Consequences
We only live once, but once is enough if we do it right. Live your life with class, dignity, and style so that an exclamation, rather than a question mark signifies it!
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Living
Money is always on its way somewhere. What you do with it while it is in your keeping and the direction you send it in say much about you. Your treatment of and respect for money, how you make it, and how you spend it, reflect your character.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Wealth
Let there be no doubt: as long as you continue to blame others instead of assuming your responsibilities, you will make no meaningful and enduring change for the better. What kind of people are we, if we don’t have the character to own up to our own shortcomings and responsibilities? To have and enjoy certain liberties requires us to hold each other and ourselves accountable for our actions.
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Responsibility
Every choice carries a consequence. For better or worse, each choice is the unavoidable consequence of its predecessor. There are not exceptions. If you can accept that a bad choice carries the seed of its own punishment, why not accept the fact that a good choice yields desirable fruit?
—Gary Ryan Blair
Topics: Consequences