Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

Whether it's Mount Sinai, a pasture, a library, the creek down the road, aliveness (or whatever you want to call it) the song is above us, around us, within us. We transcend the incessant and wearying yammer of bullshit. Transcendence means you go from judgment, separation from life and yourself, to feeling at one-ish with the universe. We hook into something bigger than we are, truer than the self-serving stories we make up about life and ourselves.

Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.

The relentless pursuit of mass will make you boring, because mass means average, it means the center of the curve, it requires you to offend no one and satisfy everyone.

You don't become indispensable merely because you are different. But the only way to be indispensable is to be different. That's because if you're the same, so are plenty of other people.

Whatever the status quo is, changing it gives you the opportunity to be remarkable.

No one has a transparent view of the world. In fact, we all carry around a personal worldview—the biases and experiences and expectations that color the way we perceive the world.

You will never become a category of one if you run with the pack.

Think for a second about the people you know who are engaged, satisfied, eager to get to work. Most of them, I'll bet, make change.

The status quo doesn't shift because you're right. It shifts because the culture changes. And the engine of culture is status.

only a tiny portion of the audience is looking for the brand-new thing. Most people are waiting for the tested, the authenticated, and the proven.

Deep change is difficult, and worth it