Quotes about Clarity

But you have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically—to say "no" to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger "yes" burning inside. The enemy of the "best" is often the "good.

"Begin with the end in mind" is to begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined.

You might work on your behavior—you could try harder, be more diligent, double your speed. But your efforts would only succeed in getting you to the wrong place faster.

If you visualize the wrong thing, you'll produce the wrong thing.

We're into managing with efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.

We create many negative situations by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly understood and shared by other people.

When Gates first met Warren Buffett at a dinner, the host asked all those at the table what they saw as the single most important factor in their journey through life. As Alice Schroeder related in her book The Snowball, both Gates and Buffett gave the same one-word answer: "Focus" (Habit 3: Put First Things First

We're often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don't even realize we're in the wrong jungle.

The deposit is to make the expectations clear and explicit in the beginning.

That's why it's so important whenever you come into a new situation to get all the expectations out on the table. People will begin to judge each other through those expectations. And if they feel like their basic expectations have been violated, the reserve of trust is diminished. We create many negative situations by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly understood and shared by other people. The

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind®. Another Quadrant II activity is to take the time and initiative to develop a mission statement based on principles. A good mission statement is the key that effective people use to discern which things are important—

came into focus. Through continued calm, respectful, and specific communication, each of us in the room was finally able to see the other point of view. But when we looked away and then back, most of us would immediately see the image we had been conditioned to see in the ten-second period of time. I frequently use this perception demonstration in working with people and organizations because