Life is too short for theatrics, for face time, for jumping through hoops, for excuses, for blaming, for trying too hard to please others, or for chasing society’s illusion of distant riches or fame.
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Yin, Potential, Fame, Jump, Life, Rich, Leadership, Sin, Try
Yes, there are times when the gold medal only goes to the winner. But not in the race of life, where the winners are those who are superior not to others but to their former selves.
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Life, Gold, Potential, Win, Leadership
It’s easy to act as if you are a weathervane, always changing your beliefs and words, trying to please everyone around you. But we were born to be lighthouses, not weathervanes. Imagine a vertical axis running through the center of your heart, from your deepest roots to your highest aspirations. That’s your lighthouse. It anchors you in the world and frees you from having to change directions every time the weather shifts. Inside this lighthouse there is a lens and a light. The light represents who you are when nobody else is looking. That light was meant to keep shining, no matter how dark or stormy it gets outside…when you find that light inside you, you will know it. Don’t let anyone else dim it…and one more thing: remember to look for the light inside others. If at first you can’t see it, look deeper. It’s there.
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Try, Act, Yin, Leadership, Body, Heart, Potential, Light, Belief, Life, Change
Star performers start with a well-defined and concrete “impossible” goal they care deeply about and then they build a through-line that clearly connects here with there.
—Robert K. Cooper
What’s the most exceptional thing you’ve done this week? What’s the most exceptional thing you will do next week?
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Life, Potential, Leadership
Every moment of our lives we are either growing or dying—and it’s largely a choice, not fate. Throughout its life cycle, every one of the body’s trillions of cells is driven to grow and improve its ability to use more of its innate yet untapped capacity. Research biologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who was twice awarded the Nobel Prize, called this syntropy, which he defined as the “innate drive in living matter to perfect itself”. It turns conventional thinking upside down…As living cells—or as people—there is no staying the same. If we aim for some middle ground or status quo, it’s an illusion—beneath the surface what’s actually happening is we’re dying, not growing. And the goal of a lifetime is continued growth, not adulthood. As Rene Dubos put it, “Genius is childhood recaptured”. For this to happen, studies show that we must recapture—or prevent the loss of—such child-like traits as the ability to learn, to love, to laugh about small things, to leap, to wonder, and to explore. It’s time to rescue ourselves from our grown-up ways before it’s too late.
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Love, Body, People, Growth, Life, Zen, Learn, Act, Thinking, War, Yin, Perfect, Win, Dying, Potential, Consequences, Leadership, Fate, Live, Choice, Think, Genius
Aristotle said, ‘Time does not exist except for change.’ The origin of the word change is the Old English cambium, which means “to become”. In other words, time does not exist except for becoming something new. What, exactly, are you choosing to become?
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Life, Potential, New, Change, Act, Sin, Leadership
It takes great goals to lead us out of our everyday limits into accomplishing more than we ever thought we could or would.
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Goals, Leadership, Life, Potential, Great
It is heartening to realize that although we may crave comfort and routine, we nourish the soul’s growth primarily through what is hard. As Darwin saw it, it’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but those who are most responsive to change.
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Growth, Soul, Potential, Heart, Win, Leadership, Change, Life
Are you closer right now to where you want to be than you were a half-hour ago?
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Life, Potential, Leadership
To excel means to reach beyond the best you have ever given because doing so matters to you personally, for its own sake. It means to run your own race—as an individual, team, or organization. To excel is to know your greatest strengths and passions, and to emphasize them while honestly admitting and managing your weaknesses.
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Passion, Weakness, Potential, Persona, Life, Best, Doing, Great, Give, Leadership
We may not be interested in chaos but chaos is interested in us.
—Robert K. Cooper
The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn’t imagine ourselves through a day without it.
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
As Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate, and supporter of the Tibetan people, “We must understand that there can be no life without risk—and when your spirit is strong, everything else is secondary, even the risks.
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Potential, Leadership, Support, People, Spirit, Life, Risk
Say no to the drug of gradualness. It was Martin Luther King, Jr., who spoke out strongly against making slow changes. Either we risk or we don’t, he said. Either we change or we don’t. There’s no acceptable middle ground because it lulls us into complacency. Lasting changes rarely occur when we ease our way into the future. They come when we leap. The leap themselves can be small or large. Once we take action, we see things differently and for many of us there’s no going back.
—Robert K. Cooper
Topics: Rent, Potential, Action, Leadership, Life, Change, Act, Risk, Future
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- V. S. Pritchett British Short Story Writer
- Samuel Johnson British Essayist
- Lytton Strachey British Biographer
- James Anthony Froude British Historian
- Gladys Bronwyn Stern British Writer
- Winston Churchill British Head of State
- Vince Lombardi, Jr. American Football Player, Coach
- Kemmons Wilson American Entrepreneur
- Walt Kelly American Cartoonist
- William Hewlett American Engineer, Businessperson
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