A Quote by James C. Collins

Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, or a community organization, or a class you teach. Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.
And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.
Perhaps you're not the next Buddha. Perhaps you're not the Maitreya. Perhaps that's not your job in this incarnation. Perhaps you have to enjoy life and learn about life through whatever way that you find yourself going.
If you are too busy in your church activities to take care of your family, then perhaps we had better find something else for you to do.
Read the editorial page of your local paper. It introduces you to opinion and can be terrifically provocative and perhaps a great motivating force for you to get involved in your community, regardless of your political ideology.
Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it. All anyone can do is to point out ways and means which have been helpful to others. Perhaps they will serve as suggestions to stimulate your own thinking until you know what it is that will fulfill you, will help you to find out what you want to do with your life.
You get one chance to do something about native title. You get perhaps one chance in your life to do something about a republic. You get one chance, your chance, to build a piece of the political architecture in the Pacific. I wasn't going to give those up.
If you want to be a slave in life, then continue going around asking others to do for you. They will oblige, but you will find the price is your choices, your freedom, your life itself. They will do for you, and as a result you will be in bondage to them forever, having given your identity away for a paltry price. Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so.
Not the challenges necessarily, but the way in which you get ready because your technique has improved over the years and you perhaps know how to be more economical than perhaps you used to be when you tried to work perhaps too hard.
Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point everyone looks back – she will hear her heart saying, “What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage; the certainty that you wasted your life.
I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.
We're all called. If you're here breathing, you have a contribution to make to our human community. The real work of your life is to figure out your function-your part in the whole-as soon as possible, and then get about the business of fulfilling it as only you can.
Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.
When you've done something for more than a third of your life, your whole adult life, and then all of a sudden you're going to have to switch off and say, 'No more,' you want to grasp as much of it and enjoy the last few years of it as much as you can. Because you can't get those years back.
Once you become a mother, your relationships in your own life change. Perhaps with your own mother, and perhaps with your sister. Perhaps with your baby-daddy.
If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself.
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