For many of us the days are starting to get a bit darker and colder. The urge to stay in bed a bit longer is getting stronger with each passing autumn rain. Sure we have our fancy fall coffee drinks (this year with REAL pumpkin!) to keep us going, but those will only take us so far.
Sometimes all it takes is a slight shift in mindset to make us forget our evolutionary desire to hibernate around this time of year. I’m not promoting filling your co-working space with motivational posters of kittens hanging from trees, but it’s amazing what a few inspirational words from those who’ve gone before us can do to get us back on track.
Here are a few quotes that help kick my ass back into gear when I’m feeling less than motivated. So read them, memorize your favorites, maybe even turn one into your personal mantra, and get back to the business of changing worlds and turning dreams into realities. Okay, that’s about as motivational as I get, so you’re on your own from here.
- “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” James Cameron
- “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” Henry David Thoreau
- “Entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before final success. What sets the successful ones apart is their amazing persistence.” Lisa M. Amos
- “Stop chasing the money and start chasing the passion.” Tony Hsieh
- “All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.” Walt Disney
- “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill
- “Whenever you see a successful person, you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them.” Vaibhav Shah
- “Opportunities don’t happen. You create them.” Chris Grosser
- “Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.” Albert Einstein
- “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin
- “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Thomas Edison
- “What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.” Oscar Wilde
- “The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.” Bruce Feirstein
- “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” John D. Rockefeller
- “There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed.” Ray Goforth
- “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” Arthur Ashe
- “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” Thomas Jefferson
- “The starting point of all achievement is desire.” Napoleon Hill
- “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out.” Robert Collier
- “If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.” Thomas J. Watson
- “All progress takes place outside the comfort zone.” Michael John Bobak
- “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear.” Mark Twain
- “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” VidalSassoon
- “Though no one can go back and make a brand-new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand-new ending.” Carl Bard
- “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”Mark Twain
- “Rarely have I seen a situation where doing less than the other guy is a good strategy.” Jimmy Spithill
- “If you genuinely want something, don’t wait for it–teach yourself to be impatient.” Gurbaksh Chahal
- “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” Steve Jobs
- “Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.” Jim Rohn
- “Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.” George Bernard Shaw
- “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” Diane Ackerman
- “To be successful you must accept all challenges that come your way. You can’t just accept the ones you like.” Mike Gafka
- “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” Margaret Thatcher
- “I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.” G. K. Chesterton
- “Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential.” John Maxwell
- “Success is just a war of attrition. Sure, there’s an element of talent you should probably possess. But if you just stick around long enough, eventually something is going to happen.” Dax Shepard
And because kittens…
