“It’s a special kind of terrorism. The unrelenting, sometimes violent assault on your time, from all directions, every waking minute, even when you sleep! These desperate times demand extreme measures."

“It’s generally a bad idea to hire an advice-giver and then choose only the advice you like.”

“The passing of time has stiffened my resolve about safeguarding it, wisely investing it, enjoying it, and bringing wrath upon any who would steal it, waste it, or abuse it.”

“Nothing is worth more than this day.”

“That which is not worth doing at all is not worth doing well.”

“What is ‘entrepreneurship’ if not the conversion of your knowledge, talent, guts, etc. - through investments of your time - into money?”

“I have nothing against Starbucks. At different times, I’ve owned the company’s stock. If I’m at the mall, I might stop in for a cup. But the person who stops there every morning easily surrenders at least a half-hour every day, 110 hours per work year; about two full work weeks to parking and standing in line.

At the $340.92 number, $37,501.20 has been spent plus the price of the coffee! Get a Keurig and buy Starbucks K-cups, and do something more valuable with those two weeks! Heck, even take a two-week vacation. Almost anything beats this very expensive Starbucks habit.”

“The purpose of a business is to make its owner rich. Time must be invested accordingly.”

“If you don’t know what your time is worth, you can’t expect the world to know it either.”

“Every one of my working hours has to be worth a certain amount of money; I do everything I can to create and protect that value and anybody screwing that up had better watch out.”

“Deciding what you shouldn’t be doing - this moment, or at all - is at least as important as deciding what to invest your time in.”

“The more creative and adept you get at OPM, OPR, and OPC (other people’s money, resources, and customers), the less direct time and capital investment is required of you to grow your business.”

“I largely prevent this bad behavior by refusing to be personally connected to the internet, use email, own a cell phone, or text at all. My time fortress is free of these holes in its wall.”

“If you are going to hold a meeting, there are several stakes you can use to stop the vampires from making it an endless ‘blood klatch.’ (Time Vampires love meetings because a bunch of blood-rich victims gather in one place at one time. It’s like a buffet.) 

1. Set the meeting for immediately before lunch or at the end of the day so the vampires are eager to get it done and over with, turn into bats, and fly out of there.

2. Don’t serve refreshments.

3. Circulate a written agenda in advance.

4. Have and communicate a clear, achievable objective for the meeting.”

“Before you can win, you have to hate to lose.”

“Before a team can consistently win, its players must truly, deeply, viscerally, violently hate losing.”

“If you want to coach, you have three rules to follow to win.

One, surround yourself with people who can’t live without winning - who hate losing.

Two, be able to recognize winners. Not just talent or ability. Anybody can identify that - a will to win.

Three, plan for everything. Have a plan for practice, a plan for the game, a plan for being behind 20 to 0 at the half with your quarterback hurt and the phones dead, with it raining cats and dogs and no rain gear because the equipment man left it at home.

Oh, and when that is over, fire the equipment man.”

“Letting Time Vampires steal even a spoonful of your blood has to be looked at as losing, and you have to truly hate it before you can win at safeguarding and maximizing the gains and benefits from your time.”

“I have not mellowed at this. In fact, the older I get, and the less time I know I have before The End, the more I hate, and I mean hate, having my time wasted."

“These Time Vampires are evil. Often, they know full well what they are doing and that fact says they have disdain and disrespect for you. They are declared enemies. Thieves. If their bad behavior is thoughtless, the damage is the same, and their thoughtlessness is the evil.”

“You don’t have to be an impossible diva, but you do have to be okay with being thought of as one.”

“When you show up on time or before and the other person does not, you do have an upper hand.

What I learned is that an appointment is a contract, and when you are late you are in violation of the contract, and when you do that it shatters trust, destroys your credibility, and you have to ‘spin’ to get back on track.

On the other hand, when you are on time or slightly early, everyone is calm and there is an establishment of trust, respect, and peace that becomes an excellent environment to have a conversation.”

“We are able to get a lot done in a short period of time when nothing else matters.”

“An oath to peak productivity you swore. But mail, faxes, emails, texts, tweets, calls, and more, and a parade of people at the door at all hours, uncontrolled, in they pour! Your intentions, your agenda in tatters on the floor. In your pantry, but a meager store. Close the door!”

“I have seen no reason to expand the range of ways people can gain access to me - and plenty of reasons not to.”

“If they can’t find you, they can’t interrupt you.”

“For the first time ever, he’s taking an entire month of vacation, at a rented beach cottage several states away from his business. For the first time in 30 years, he’s really becoming a business owner instead of being owned by a business.”

“Let me offer a bit of philosophy: you have absolutely no legal, moral, or other responsibility to answer the phone or take a call unless you want to.”

“There’s nothing - and I mean nothing - happening on earth that can’t or won’t wait an hour. Or two.”

“If you take inbound calls as they come, you are constantly stopping work on a task of known priority in favor of something or someone of unknown priority. You are turning control of your day over to the unknown.”

“If the matter requires conversation with me, a phone appointment is set, for a specific number of minutes, with an end time, often with a delay of at least days to weeks before it occurs. Guess what? Occasionally, somebody’s irritated - which is their problem, not mine - but I have yet to notice this approach costing me any money.”

“In my business (and in many), being somewhat difficult to get to actually helps rather than hinders securing new clients and having those clients appreciate and respect my time and assistance. Rightly or wrongly, most folks don’t put a lot of value on getting to the wise man at the bottom of the mountain.”

“There should be a little glass room here and there, like the smokers are stuck in at airports, where everybody who has to yap into their phone can go and be wedged in and annoy each other, leaving those of us with our lives under control and some sense of civility in peace. The pay phone in a booth was a wonderfully civilized thing.”

“In my seminars, by the way, we assess a $100 fine any time a cell phone erupts and confiscate the offending phone for the duration.

Often, the offenders have paid $2,000 to $5,000 to be in the room. Many are also very good clients. I don’t care. I will not tolerate it. I warn everybody, I put some big, beefy bruiser in charge of collecting, and I take the money.

If you can’t have your life sufficiently in order to pay uninterrupted attention and be courteous to others, I’d prefer you stay home and annoy someone else.”

“And a word to business owners, salespeople, and my pathetically desperate and paranoid speaking colleagues who devoutly believe they must be instantly accessible at any and every moment to every client and prospective client to prevent that client from dialing the next number and doing business with whomever answers instantly: if you are that interchangeable, that mundane and ordinary a commodity, you’ve got big, big problems.”

“Every exception is a hole that weakens your entire defense system.”

“I’ve looked at the emails people get and compared them to the faxes I get. More thought goes into the faxes. People tend to cluster multiple items into one fax vs. a stream of single-item emails. They are more inclined to resolve some things themselves when they must put them into a memo to be faxed than when they can email. The email is more casual, and you really don’t want people feeling too casual about consuming your time.”

“Come to your own conclusions about it all - fax, email, text, and cell phone. But be the master - not the slave.”

“Getting and being rich is behavioral. You can’t seek the goal but opt for incongruent behavior different than that of those who achieve the goal any more than you can claim sobriety but still get drunk every once in a while.”

“I even have a clock that looks like just six sticks of dynamite wired together, with a timer on it, and the timer has a flashing red light. This gets a lot of attention plunked down in the center of the conference table. If you’re not going to do this physically, you at least want to do it verbally.”

“Be busy and be obvious about it.”

“You cannot accept and engage in any attitudes and behaviors of the mediocre and reasonably expect to be anything other than mediocre.”

“Being punctual gives you the right - the positioning - to expect and demand that others treat your time with utmost respect. You cannot reasonably hope to have others treat your time with respect if you show little or no respect for theirs.

So, if you are not punctual, you have no leverage, no moral authority. But the punctual person gains that advantage over staff, associates, vendors, clients, everybody.”

“Punctuality provides personal power.”

“People who can’t be punctual can’t be trusted.”

“One of my earliest business mentors said that there were only two good reasons for being late for a meeting with him: one, you’re dead; two, you want to be.”

“Self-discipline is the magic power that makes you virtually unstoppable.”

“Having and commanding the respect of others is a tremendous advantage in life. That edge comes from having self-discipline. Having a (preferably private) sense of superiority over others is another power-producing edge. That, too, comes from self-discipline.

The highly disciplined individual does not have to point a gun at anyone to take what he wants; people ‘sense’ his power and cheerfully give him everything they’ve got.”

“The meeting of deadlines and commitments alone causes a person to stand out from the crowd like an alien spaceship parked in an Iowa cornfield.”

“When you focus your self-discipline on a single purpose, like sunlight through a magnifying glass on a single object, look out! The whole world will scramble to get out of your way, hold the doors open for you, and salute as you walk by.”

“Eliminate the time between the idea and the act, and your dreams will become realities.”

“Each minute separating Decision from Action worsens the odds of any action ever occurring.”

“There are three kinds of action: starting things or implementation, follow-through, and completion. When you have a decision, you have to start doing things about it.”

“An environment has to be created in which high self-discipline is supported. But self-discipline is required and rewarded.”

“The world only moves for you when you act.”

“If you refuse to limit and control access to you, the war is lost even if you win a few battles here or there.”

“If you aren’t making lists, you’re probably making a lot of money either.”

“I insist that the only real reason more people aren’t much, much more productive is that they don’t have enough reasons to be. A secret to greater personal productivity is more reasons to be more productive. That’s why you have to fight to link everything you do (and choose not to do) to your goals.”

“If you’re going to achieve peak personal productivity, you’ve got to define peak personal productivity.”

“Focus is everything and nothing forces focus like intense time pressure.”

“Deadlines refine the mind.”

“The best way to get something done is to have to. The best way to get a lot of things done is to be under a lot of pressure to pull them off.”

“Both your conscious and subconscious minds are capable of much more than you now ask of them, and they and you can be conditioned to thrive under intense deadline pressure.”

“You can use YouTube for something other than watching kittens water ski.”

“You can turn your car into a classroom.”

“You can condition your subconscious with spaced repetition learning most easily with audio; 7 to 21 repetitions of the same messages automatically embeds. Few will read the same book seven times.”

“Disciplined use of the time everybody else wastes can give you an edge.”

“When you say to yourself, ‘It’s only ten minutes,’ you miss the entire point of time.”

“A strong fortress must be constructed around the goal and the linked activities and responsibilities - with snipers in the towers atop the wall, an alligator-filled moat around it, and land mines in the ground for miles around it.

People who negatively interfere with no negative intent or malice aforethought are just as dangerous to you as those deliberately trying to stop your forward progress or upward mobility.”

“Decisiveness saves a lot of time.”

“What takes others weeks should take days, what takes others days should take hours, and what takes others hours should take minutes. That’s the level of decisiveness you want to cultivate and develop. It will save you a lot of time.”

“We only get paid for DONE.”

“We’re overpaying him, but he’s worth it.”

“Liberation is the ultimate entrepreneurial achievement.”

“If you’re looking for the answer that turns your time into the most money and wealth possible, then turn your attention to marketing. Get free from as many other aspects of your business as you can, get passionately interested in and good at marketing, and invest your time there. Why?

Because it is infinitely easier to find or train someone to take care of a business’s operations than it is to get someone to do its marketing. Marketing is the highest-paid profession and most valuable part of a business.

The person who can create systems for acquiring customers, clients, or patients effectively and profitably is the ‘money person.’ He is the equivalent of a ‘high impact’ or ‘franchise’ player in sports.”

“People who want things from you - cooperation, favors, money - can reasonably be required not to ask you to fetch for them.”

“The people around you rarely have a neutral effect. They either facilitate your accomplishment, undermine it, or they outright sabotage it.”

“Each minute of your time is made more or less valuable by the condition of your mind, and it is constantly being conditioned by association.”

“You want to deliberately increase the amount of your time directed at chosen thinking, input, and constructive, productive association. You want to associate with strivers and achievers - with winners and champions. This is an uplifting force that translates into peak performance, which makes all your time more valuable.”

“If you can’t control your thoughts and manage your mind, you can’t control or manage your time.”

“I have come to really, deeply, vehemently, and violently resent having my time wasted. I place a very, very high value on my time, and I believe that the value you really, honestly place on your time will control the way others value it and you.”

“Discipline doesn’t get made up as you go along.”

“Ninety percent of my phone appointments with clients, would-be clients, and people doing work for me are booked in 20-minute increments. In my experience, 20 minutes is enough if both parties are properly prepared for the call. If not, no call should occur.”

“You really have to get that it is all your time. All of it. Every minute of it. Yours.”

“When you permit people to take 30 minutes for a business phone conversation that could have been accomplished in 20, you let them take - and waste - 10 minutes of your time. Let that happen twice a day 250 workdays a year and it’s 5,000 minutes. In 5 years, 25,000 minutes. 416 hours. 52 eight-hour days. In a 40-year career, 200,000 minutes. 3,334 hours. 416 days. Now, what is it you said you don’t have the time to do?” 

“The entrepreneur must raise himself above these ordinary concerns.

An entrepreneur seeks income and financial rewards, independence and autonomy, and other outcomes that are profoundly different, apart from, and superior to those ever achieved or experienced by 95% of the people around you.

That requires you to think in profoundly different and superior ways. You can’t have one without the other. Success is a conceit. If you are to have it, it will be at an intellectual, emotional, and behavioral distance from most others.”

“Most time management training, books, courses, and lecturers focus almost entirely on mechanical methods and on tools: a better appointment book, a better software program, color stickers, and one kind of list or another. But these are no better than guns: useless without the will to use them.”

“There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement, for an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove that we are as good today as we were today. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything, we are fixed, so to speak, for life.

Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book and not painting a picture and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture.

Small wonder that the effort expended and the punishment endured in obtaining a good alibi often exceed the effort and grief requisite for the attainment of a most marked achievement.”

“No one who is good at making excuses is also good at making money. The skills are mutually exclusive.”

“It never ceases to amaze me how people can manage to focus their time, energy, and resources on everything but the few vital things in their business that really have to do with directly making money.”

“What on earth had he been doing every hour of every day for a year that was more important than enhancing his business’ ability to attract and acquire new customers?”

“The opposite of being in control is being addicted.”

“There is no good excuse for addiction, and, no, you do not have to be in it to utilize it for marketing or other business purposes. I’ve made millions with direct mail but have never cut down a tree or even visited a paper mill, run a printing press, or worked inside a post office.”

“World-class scientists, behavioral scientists, neurologists, psychologists, computer scientists, and others have invested all their combined knowledge into creating and promoting a collection of activities we think of as social media, purposed to hijack more and more of your time, to provide incentives and rewards more significant and stimulating to you than all other activities, and to ultimately rewire your brain to be incapable of participating in other activities.

If something not so masterfully engineered can addict us - like my speaking on stages or driving in horse races - imagine how susceptible we are to something deliberately designed for that purpose!”

“By keeping people in this state of hyper-flux, they are rendered incapable of critical or rational thought, propelled into decisions, and made easier to manipulate, influence, control, and monetize. The more you permit yourself to be constantly stimulated, provoked, and sped up by this, the less control you retain over not just your time but over every aspect of your business and your life.”

“If you are negligent at making value decisions for yourself (and imposing them on the world), other people will be glad to make your value decisions for you and impose them on you.”

“Time and attention are the new currency being taken in a myriad of new ways - a situation that demands new vigilance and new strategy.

How effective you are at keeping control of your time and investing it wisely in and against this new conspiracy to take it away from you will absolutely determine your success as an entrepreneur.

Fail at this, fail at everything. Take this lightly, all will be taken from you.”

“It’s never too late. You can rescue yourself. Reverse your loss of capabilities. Take back control of your time, your business, and your life. Turn back from the slippery slope into the abyss. Recover from growing addictions.

It will require you to abandon the popular behaviors of the masses of addicts all around you - to be an Odd Man Out. This will be uncomfortable and taxing. But the alternative has to be - to you, the entrepreneur - unacceptable.”

“There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.”

“I want you to keep in mind that your time is your life, no one else’s, and you should ignore criticism and needling, guilt-mongering, emotional manipulation, or obligation about the conscious, thoughtful choices you make about what you do - and don’t do - with it.”

“The entrepreneur simply cannot afford weakness or timidity. He needs an iron will. He is challenged minute by minute with temptations, distractions, interruptions, others’ emergencies and crises, competing and conflicting agendas, and on and on and on.

All of his successes - business, career, and professional; financial; civic and philanthropic; with relationships and family leadership; and with physical health and well-being - will be defined and determined by his success (or failure) with his time. It is everything.”

“It has been my privilege to write about time, here, for your benefit. May the remainder of yours be more firmly held.”

“I am passionately pro-education. There are few things I care more about than reading and learning constantly. Yet, the lives of the people profiled in this book show conclusively that education is most certainly not the same thing as academic excellence. We’ve conflated them, at great cost to ourselves, our children, our economy, and our culture.”

“You are a reflection of the 20 or 30 people that give you the best advice.”

“The wealthiest people are not the ones who are hoarding the most value – they’re the ones who have the most value flowing in and out of their lives.”

"When life or a plan feels ultimately unsatisfying, I find it's because I've forgotten to find the intersection of all three: what makes me happy, what's smart, and what's useful to others."

“We do so many things for the attention, to feel important or praised. But what if you had so much attention and so much praise that you couldn’t possibly want any more? What would you do then? What would you stop doing?”

“Empty time has the potential to be filled with great things. Time filled with little things has little potential.”

“The first and most fundamental threat to your Future Self is not having hope in your future. Without hope, the present loses meaning. Without hope, you don't have clear goals or a sense of purpose for your life. Without hope, there is no way. Without hope, you decay."

“You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat your future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you will give up trying to master it."

“Anything that isn’t taking you toward your Future Self is a lesser goal."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

#1: "How conscious are you of the constant, never-ending passage of time?"

#2: "What personal criteria do you have for determining whether a specific activity or course of action is a good use of your time?"

#3: "How can you structure your environment to help you remain focused on your priorities and hyper-conscious of where your time is being spent?"

#4: “This gives you a very simple standard for determining, minute by minute, task by task, choice by choice, whether you are being productive or unproductive: Is what I am doing, this minute, moving me measurably closer to my goals?”

#5: “What plan are you working on to reduce your business’s and income’s dependency on your own time and effort?”

#6: “If it’s not important enough to do properly, why are you doing it at all?”

#7: "If you don't have enough time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to do it over?"

#8: "How easy is it to get in touch with you? What barriers do you have in place to make sure that you safeguard as much time as possible against the predations of others who would waste it?"

#9: “How tough are you on those who would undervalue your time? How tough are you on yourself?”

#10: "If you saved several hours of productive time and each and every day, how would you invest that time from here on out? Would you throw it away again, or would you hold onto it for dear life?"

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."

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