Teacher

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.

Every moment of our lives we are either growing or dying…

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.

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.

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?

Say no to the drug of gradualness.

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.

It takes great goals to lead us out of our everyday limits into accomplishing more than we ever thought we could or would.

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.

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.

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.