Todd Henry Quotes

it's easy to confuse progress with effectiveness. All progress is not true progress. It's possible to gain ground for many days, weeks, months, or even years but be going in a completely wrong direction. That's

Don't go to the grave with your best work still inside of you. Die empty.

A strong, authentic, compelling voice is the expression of identity, guided by vision, and achieved through mastery.

Waiting for permission to act is the easy way out.

Acquiring new skills and adapting to complex, uncertain environments isn't easy, though. It requires persistent attention and near-constant effort to maintain a trajectory of growth. As such, it's easy to grow tired or lose your drive. However, when you stop growing, you start dying. In much the same way that an organization needs to be persistently innovative in order to maintain market share, individuals must make a personal commitment to lifelong personal innovation through skill development, risk-taking, and experimentation in order to avoid stagnation. The seeds of tomorrow's brilliance are planted in the soil of today's activity.

Someone who operates from a place of wishful thinking is - in essence - a closet pessimist.

Don't go to your grave with your best work inside of you. Choose to die empty.

perpetual inbox obsession wasn't an organizational expectation; rather, it was fueled by a deep insecurity that something important was going to happen and that he wouldn't respond in time to contribute meaningfully to the conversation.

we show enough of ourselves to differentiate us from the competition, but not so much as to isolate us.

pay attention to that little voice inside your head that sends you prompts, insights, and hunches. Note things that you don't understand, and rather than shying away from them, turn them into questions to pursue.

Our relationships will eventually grow stale unless we are diligent about directing and cultivating them.

one path toward unlocking our latent abilities is returning to a simple practice that came so naturally to us as children: We need to rekindle our ability to emulate the positive attributes of those we admire in others, and apply those same attributes to our life and work. When we are conscious of the qualities we want to emulate, they become points of traction to help us coordinate our daily activities around a set of principles rather than reacting spontaneously to circumstances throughout the day. They comprise the operating system that guides how we engage our work, how we interact with others, and how we make decisions with our focus, time, and energy.

it can be beneficial to disconnect from certain sources of information and streams of content so that you can cultivate a more curated flow of inspiration.

Principle: To counter aimlessness, you must define your battles wisely, and build your life around winning them.

The key to cultivating creatively stimulating relationships is threefold: you need relationships in your life in which you can be real, you need relationships in your life in which you can learn to risk, and you need relationships in your life in which you can learn to submit to the wisdom of others.

Remember that common sense is not common practice, and that people who succeed are often those who do the little, everyday things that others won't.

Make sure that you're nurturing your process. It's the only thing you can truly control, and it's the thing you'll always have regardless of where you end up.

The great problems we see in the world today will not be solved by people functioning at half capacity cranking out work they don't care about in order to buy more things that will eventually rust and rot.

Your work tells tales.

Give yourself permission to not know things. Some people see ignorance as a point of failure, but successful people see it as acknowledgment of reality and an opportunity for growth.

Overtime we learn the art of compromise. The problem is we often compromise the most valuable thing: the fire that drives our best work.

Emptying yourself of your best work isn't just about checking off tasks on your to-do list; it's about making steady, critical progress each day on the projects that matter, in all areas of life.

The most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. In the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, never-launched businesses, unreconciled relationships, and all of the other things that people thought, 'I'll get around to that tomorrow.' One day, however, their tomorrows ran out.

Two things will paralyze our creativity faster than anything else: 1. We haven't defined success. 2. We haven't defined failure.

Nachmanovitch writes, "It's great to sit on the shoulders of giants, but don't let the giants sit on your shoulders. There's no room for their legs to dangle!

some of the best ideas I've had in my life and in my work, they often occurred in the spaces "in between" my commitments. They materialized when I least expected, during a moment of downtime, and typically when I was doing something in no way related to the project.

It's all part of the process, and it's never ending. However, the key is to remain focused on your vision and embrace the journey.