A Quote by Alfie Kohn

Strip away all the assumptions about what competition is supposed to do, all the claims in its behalf that we accept and repeat reflexively. What you have left is the essence of the concept: mutually exclusive goal attainment (MEGA). One person succeeds only if another does not. From this uncluttered perspective, it seems clear right away that something is drastically wrong with such an arrangement. How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose--and fearing that they will make us lose?

Alfie Kohn

Quote Topics

About Accept Another Arrangement Assumptions Attainment Away Behalf Best Claims Clear Competition Concept Does Energies Essence Exclusive Goal How Left Lose Make Mega Mutually Mutually Exclusive Only Others Our Person Perspective Repeat Right Right Away Seems Something Spending Strip Succeeds Supposed Trying Us Will Wrong

Quote Author

Alfie Kohn
American - Author
Born: October 15, 1957

How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose?

Alfie Kohn

If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don't tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don't understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

In our lives we will encounter many challenges, and tomorrow we face one together. How we accept the challenge and attack the challenge head on is only about us-no one can touch that. If we win or lose this weekend, it will not make a difference in our lives. But why we play and how we play will make a difference in our lives forever.

Beth Anders

Only you know your circumstances, your energy level, the needs of your children, and the emotional demands of your other obligations. Be wise during intensive seasons of your life. Cherish your agency, and don’t give it away casually. Don’t compare yourself to others — nearly always this will make you despondent. Don’t accept somebody else’s interpretation of how you should be spending your time. Make the best decision you can and then evaluate it to see how it works.

Chieko N. Okazaki

For all its peculiarities and unevenness, the Bible has a simple story. God made man. Man rejected God. God won't give up until he wins him back. God will whisper. He will shout. He will touch and tug. He will take away our burdens; he'll even take away our blessings. If there are a thousand steps between us and him, he will take all but one. But he will leave the final one for us. The choice is ours. Please understand. His goal is not to make you happy. His goal is to make you His. His goal is not to get you what you want; it is to get you what you need.

Max Lucado

We have a tendency to make assumptions about everything! The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are truth. We could swear they are real. We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking-we take it personally-then we blame them and react by sending emotional poison in our word. That is why whenever we make assumptions, we're asking for problems. We make assumptions, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

Leonard Bernstein

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

William Shakespeare

Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products... We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence, we'll make some money. But we're really clear about what our goals are.

Steve Jobs

God will make right all that is wrong, He will take away the lingering effect of sin and what's not right in our lives. He knows how painful life in this world can be.

Joshua Harris

When we can’t marry the person we had in mind, our inability to look beyond may even blind sight us from someone who is in fact better for us. When we don’t get hired, or we lose something dear to us, it’s hard to take a step back and notice the bigger picture. Often Allah takes things away from us, only to replace them with something greater.

Yasmin Mogahed

The combination of the growth of these digital technologies, the ability of the government to conjure up these secret interpretations, plus a very unusual and novel court make for this ever-expanding surveillance state. We so treasure our freedoms; we will regret it if our generation doesn't use this unique time to reform the surveillance laws and make it clear that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can do both.

Ron Wyden

While our sin reaches far, God's grace reaches farther. God came after us not to strip away our freedom but to strip away our slavery to self, that we could become truly free.

Tullian Tchividjian

If you think about it, we love others not for who they are, but for how they make us feel. In order to willingly accept the direction of another individual, it must make you feel good to do so...If you believe what I'm saying, you cannot help but come to the conclusin that those you have followed passionately, gladly, zealously~have made you feel like somebody...This business of making another person feel good in the unspectacular course of his daily comings and goings is, in my view, the very essence of leadership.

Irwin Federman

[Grace] is given not to make us something other than ourselves but to make us radically ourselves. Grace is given not to implant in us a foreign wisdom but to make us alive to the wisdom that was born with us in our mother?s womb. Grace is given not to lead us into another identity but to reconnect us to the beauty of our deepest identity. And grace is given not that we might find some exterior source of strength but that we might be established again in the deep inner security of our being and in learning to lose ourselves in love for one another to truly find ourselves.

John Philip Newell

Let us give up our work, our thoughts, our plans, ourselves, our lives, our loved ones, our influence, our all, right into His hand, and then, when we have given all over to Him, there will be nothing left for us to trouble about, or to make trouble about.

Hudson Taylor

A Quote by Alfie Kohn

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors