This is the basis for the most important critique of microfinance. The poor are not entrepreneurs. The idea that more than a few will turn tiny loans into a viable business is simply unrealistic.
For all the largesse of my mind’s colony where a vividly enflamed man would take off each of the precious stones and melt away the cast, his success ultimately lay in being nice to me, being nice to himself irrespective of the behavior of each; of ...
A sad truth is that we don't know what we really believe! We don't know how we operate. We don't know what is holding us back. We don't know why we do what we do.
Success has always been the greatest liar - and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the "work," whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents ...
If you commit to giving more time than you have to spend, you will constantly be running from time debt collectors.
People who violate your boundaries are thieves. They steal time that doesn’t belong to them.
Time is not a means to keep or prove your worth in the world, but a means to experience the richness of all that is.
Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next with perfect authority. The enchanted world shimm...
It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that "eighty percent of suc...
Friendship is the most important thing in my life. It's rare to have friends like I've got. If I had as great a taste in husbands as I have in friends, what an even better life I would have had!
The reality for teachers is we don’t know if we’ve been successful or not. It takes years to see how a kid turns out, and it’s impossible to know what role we’ve played, for better or worse. It’s why so many teachers burn out—our successe...
It is easy to forget, not that we ever should, that everything in this world is an accident, including the origin of life itself, plus the accumulation of riches. We should show more respect for nature, not less. An accident isn't necessarily ever ov...
Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.
We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.
Although science is not easy in complex human systems, we cannot afford to throw our hands in the air and give up. It may take decades, but it is a game worth playing and winning.
Pop leadership abuts pop psychology, and is very destructive. In no other serious domain of human endeavor (surgery, playing the violin) is the subject distilled down to nice-sounding aphorisms that mean nothing.
Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.
We are travelers on a cosmic journey,stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little p...
Successful continual learning means maintaining a balance and variety of success-oriented attributes, the most prominent being awareness, confidence, persistence, determination, courage, and focus. But curiosity, ingenuity, and creativity may be even...
I'm resourceful," she called after him. Resourceful, he thought, rinsing his hands with the ladle she'd left in the bucket. "A euphemism commonly used by successful criminals," he called out to her. "If I were so successful," she called back, "I woul...
If you criticize others’ ideas, they will almost never use yours no matter how good they are.
