Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Steve Pavlina - Page 2

Fail your way forward. Recognize that Ready, fire, aim is superior to ready, aim, aim, aim. Straightforward trial and error produces better results than endless vacillating. If you're afraid to make decisions and act on them in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, get a job. Failure's lessons are essential to success.

Are you one of those people who notices the problems of the world and says ... somebody ought to do something about that? Why not you? If you feel a strong urge to see a problem fixed, then why not act on it?

Risk the stuff. It's worthless anyway. But don't make the insane choice of sacrificing your happiness for stuff.

Side effect of overemphasizing the importance of personal security in your life is that it can cause you to live reactively.

You must give before you can get.

If something is important enough to you that you feel the urge to donate your money or time to it, I think it's best to try to express that form of giving through your career, not just as something you do on the side. If you enjoy your volunteering and charitable activities more than your career, it means your career is in serious need of an upgrade. In my opinion your career should be your best outlet for giving.

Productivity = creating value and delivering it to people. All other busywork is unproductive fluff and should be minimized.

You are too free and untamable to be labeled.

Think for yourself. Unplug yourself from follow-the-follower groupthink, and virtually ignore what everyone else in your industry is saying (except the ones everyone agrees is crazy). Do your own research, draw your own conclusions, set your own course, and stick to your guns. When you're just starting out, people will tell you you're wrong. After you've blown past them, they'll tell you you're crazy. A few years after that, they'll (privately) ask you to mentor them.

It's been said that the first hour is the rudder of the day. I've found this to be very true in my own life. If I'm lazy or haphazard in my actions during the first hour after I wake up, I tend to have a fairly lazy and unfocused day.

The momentum of continuous action fuels motivation, while procrastination kills motivation.

I believe we can proactively choose to believe whatever we want instead of merely letting our beliefs coalesce as reactions to events.

One of the fundamental choices you face in every encounter is the choice to approach or avoid.

Treat your business relationships like friendships (or potential friendships). Formality puts up walls, and walls don't foster good business relationships. No one is loyal to a wall... except the one in China.

We primarily grow as human beings by discovering new truths about ourselves and our reality.

If you really believe something, you will act in accordance with that belief - always. If you believe in gravity, you will never attempt to defy it. If you claim to hold a belief but act incongruently, then you don't actually believe it. You're only kidding yourself. Casual faith isn't.

One of my core beliefs is that belief itself is a choice that can be made of our own free will.

I believe the ultimate goal of living and refining your values is to identify and achieve congruence with universal principles.

Hard work pays off. When someone tells you otherwise, beware the sales pitch for something "fast and easy" that's about to come next. The greater your capacity for hard work, the more rewards fall within your grasp. The deeper you can dig, the more treasure you can potentially find.

People often overestimate what they can reasonably achieve in a year. But they vastly underestimate what they can achieve in 5 years.

Tackling challenges that are too big for you is what makes you grow as a human being. Why do you think this problem keeps coming up in your life, staring you in the face? Do you think you're supposed to ignore it and hide from it and wait for someone else to solve it for you? If you notice it, you own it.

To abandon a comfortable lifestyle that isn't deeply fulfilling is to abandon nothing.

Courageous people are still afraid, but they don't let the fear paralyze them.

Whatever happens to me during the course of my life - physically, socially, or financially - I can always choose to focus on giving. When I'm in that state, nothing else matters. I cease to exist as a separate being and merge into an expression of divine oneness.

Imaginary testing is unreliable, and in many cases, it's a huge waste of time and energy. In truth you just don't know what will happen until you try. You may start a business, and it could take off in ways no one could predict. Or it could be a complete failure. You could ask for a date and end up with the partner of your dreams. Or you could be rejected cold. It's great to visualize what you want, but you never really know what's going to happen until you act.

If you want to express your creativity, then don't choose a path where someone else tells you what to do and how to do it. Choose a path where creativity is rewarded, not punished.

When in doubt, act boldly, as if it were impossible to fail. In essence it is.

Network selectively. Nothing says "business newbie" like shotgun networking. "You never know when someone might say yes" is marketing for dummies. Take the time to build a profile of your ideal customers, and target your networking activities to reach them. Speak to those who are already predisposed to want what you offer. Almost any profile is better than "anyone with a pulse."

It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog - you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it.

The stuff that?s most important to me in life can?t be bought ? it can only be earned.

Thought and action can be perceived as two different dimensions of who you are: the mental you and the physical you

Security is worthless if you have to sacrifice growth to get it

People in their early 20s are invariably weird.

Your beliefs about reality become your beliefs about yourself.

If you try to impress an alarm clock, it will simply tell you the time.

It's funny that when people reach a certain age, such as after graduating college, they assume it's time to go out and get a job. But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

It's important to note that you don't have to earn money from all of your interests. If you just dive in and pursue what you enjoy, you may be surprised to find out which interests help you generate income and which don't.

Separate yourself from your ideas and your work and see them as something separate from yourself, you’ll feel you truly have the right to be wrong. If an idea fails, why not let it be the idea’s fault instead of your own? Allow your ideas to fail without turning them into personal defeat. When you fail you discover your boundaries. You map out the edges of your capabilities. And this allows you to eventually move beyond them. Being wrong eventually leads to being right. And even where it doesn’t, it’s still a more interesting path than being nothing.

I learned that accepting others and accepting myself are two sides of the same coin; you can't love and accept yourself without doing the same for others.

Curiosity is more flexible and practical than belief.

If you want to experience abundance, then don't choose a path that ensures scarcity or limitation. Choose a path that has a shot of leading to prosperity. Say no to non-prosperous choices like a job with a fixed paycheck.

Replace "Have to" with "Want to."

Spiritual development requires the freedom to connect with different parts of reality in order to understand them more fully. The more you're able to explore, the more connections you can form, and the greater your spiritual growth will be. When you feel a strong desire to connect with something in your reality, listen to your intuitive guidance, and make the connection.