“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

“Every next level of your life will require a different you.”

“He had never compromised with quality; his integrity as a man and an artist was the rock on which his life was built. If he split that rock by indifference, by giving less than the exhausting best of himself, if he were content merely to get by, what was left of him?”

“Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it. This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed, or it will die.” 

“The road to hell is paved with the pursuit of volume. Volume leads to marginal products, marginal customers, and greatly increased managerial complexity.

Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we want leads to high returns.

Strive for excellence in few things, rather than good performance in many.

It is not shortage of time that should worry us, but the tendency for the majority of time to be spent in low-quality ways.

The 80/20 principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20 percent of activities, we could work a two-day week and achieve 60 percent more than now.”

“There are literally infinite things I could do to grow my profits by ten percent. The goal isn’t big enough to create focus and specificity.

If, however, you asked, ‘If you wanted to grow your profits by ten times, how would you do it?’ that would be a much better question because there are likely to be very FEW, maybe even only ONE way to create 10x growth.

Indeed, almost nothing you’re currently doing would get you there. To separate the signal from the noise, you need to make the goal big enough to weed out most paths or strategies.

Impossible goals help you identify the ONE or FEW conditions that have the highest possible upside. Those are the areas to focus your scarcest resource - your limited attention on.”

“The only way to make your present better is to make your future bigger.”

“If we didn’t have ambition - some big goal we are after - how would we know what little things, what distractions, to say no to?”

“Nothing happens until after you commit.”

“It’s easier to find one person to pay you $1 million than to find ten people who will pay $100,000. It’s exponentially easier to find one person to pay you $1 million than to find 100 people to pay you $10,000.” 

“To make a goal effective, you’ve got to test its outer-limits. Push it out as far as you can. Only once you make your goal impossible will you stop operating based on your current assumptions and knowledge.”

“Are you living exponentially or linearly?”

“Are you focused on effort or volume, or are you creating something qualitatively different and better than anything else out there?” 

“In a world that relentlessly races to the bottom, you lose if you also race to the bottom. The only way to win is to race to the top…The only way to be indispensable is to be different…Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth…You can train yourself to matter…You are not your resume. You are your work.”

“Eliminate everything that can’t or won’t go 10X with you.”

“Committing to what you want most is the only way to be free.”

“You know internally whether you’re free. You’re free when you choose what you want and you go for it, rather than accepting what you think you need.”

“It’s only after you commit that you know what freedom feels like.” 

“What got you there will keep you there.”

“Mastery is not just the ability to do something well. It’s the ability to do something uniquely well. If it’s not unique, innovative, and uninhibited self-expression, then it’s not true mastery. Mastery and uniqueness are inseparable.”

“No matter where you’re currently at in your 10x process, you’re making gains. You’re making more gains than you actually realize. Regularly referencing your gains enables you to see and feel that progress.

Taking ownership of your experiences also enables you to transform your experiences into more gains. By learning more from every experience you have, you’ll stop repeating needless errors. You’ll never plateau as a person.”

“What is your fitness function - the capabilities and results you want to be able to produce and master?”

“Remember, Frank Sinatra didn’t move his own pianos. Neither should you - whatever that means for you.”

“10x is easier than 2x. 2x is doing the same thing, only more of it. It’s brute force, not intelligent, not transformational, not an upgrade in thinking.

10x is an entirely different way of doing things, based on an entirely different future. To go 10x, you can’t avoid the bottleneck - the 20 percent.

Instead, you fully embrace and transform it, knowing all the while that the bottleneck has always been yourself.”

“Ideals are meant to provide direction, motivation, and meaning to our lives. They are not the measuring stick. Our society has trained us to measure ourselves against our ideals, which by definition are unreachable. Goals, conversely, are reachable.”

“Your happiness as a person is dependent on what you measure yourself against.”

“When you end your day poorly and without a committed plan, you compromise the next 24 hours. Without a clear and committed plan, you become reactive to what’s around you and reactive to your own lack of energy.”

“Your vision must align with who you want to be. Your choices must align with your vision. Your effort must align with the size of your vision. Your behavior must align with your values and principles.”

“A visionary is someone who is not living in the here and now. He or she has already seen at least five moves ahead and is living in that reality.”

“The ability to solve problems well is the ability to take a complex issue you’re facing and break it down into a step-by-step formula that helps you identify the root of the problem.”

“Once you’re committed to the result you want, you’ll find that Who. When you do find that Who, you’ll see how ridiculously simple it was for THEM to produce your desired result, then you’ll begin to see just how small you’ve been playing.

You’ll begin to set bigger and bigger targets, and you’ll commit to those targets faster by getting the Who that is equipped to produce the result.”

“The best way to measure your progress is by noting the amount and quality of collaborations happening in your life.”

“If you work on something important for twenty years, it will transform everything around you.”

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”