Careers

“People who are already successful became so precisely because they were unwilling to tolerate certain aspects of their job they didn’t like. Their intolerance caused their success…

The point here is simply that you will contribute the most, as either an individual performer or a team member, when your role closely matches your strengths, and that it’s your responsibility to try to arrange your world so that it does…

…the moment you are spending less than 70% of your time on the things you love to do, identify the activities getting in the way and take action to remove them.”

-Marcus Buckingham, The One Thing You Need to Know

Sales

Matsushita learned a very important lesson in terms of growing a company while he was trying to introduce his bicycle lamp to wholesalers. He realized that even if he had a product that was superior to anything out in the market it would not matter if he could not sell the product.

As a result, Matsushita began devising ways to create sales channels for his products by concentrating less on manufacturing and more on building a sales force, which led to a retail store network and finally placed Matsushita's company on the map in Japan's electrical manufacturing and retail industry.

- Founder of Panasonic, Konosuke Matsushita

Meriwether Lewis

“This day I completed my thirty first year… I reflected that I had yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation.

I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended.”

He resolved: ”In future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”

We Hold the Key

“Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, ‘This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow.’”

Louis L'Amour