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by Phil Knight

Knight on the idea that became Nike: “That morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy…just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where ‘there’ is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.…Half a century later, I believe it’s the best advice—maybe the only advice—any of us should ever give.”

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Grit
by Angela Duckworth

Duckworth on the qualities of a leader: “No matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways. First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction . It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit.”

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Never Split the Difference
by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

Voss on lessons learned as an FBI hostage negotiator: “Without a deep understanding of human psychology, without the acceptance that we are all crazy, irrational, impulsive, emotionally driven animals, all the raw intelligence and mathematical logic in the world is little help in the fraught, shifting interplay of two people negotiating.”

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Thank You for Being Late
by Thomas L. Friedman

Friedman on discovering the value of pausing: “Because he was late, I explained, I had minted time for myself. I had ‘found’ a few minutes to just sit and think. I was having fun eavesdropping on the couple at the next table (fascinating!) and people-watching in the lobby (outrageous!). And, most important, in the pause, I had connected a couple of ideas I had been struggling with for days.”

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Unfinished Business
by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Slaughter on the feminist challenge of the 21st century: “Advancing women means breaking free of a new set of stereotypes and assumptions, not only for women, but also for men. It means challenging a much wider range of conventional wisdom about what we value and why, about measures of success, about the wellsprings of human nature and what equality really means. It means rethinking everything.”

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Stretch
by Scott Sonenshein

Sonenshein on recognizing your abilities: “We routinely overestimate the importance of acquiring resources but even more significantly underestimate our ability to make more out of those we have….Stretching is a learned set of attitudes and skills that comes from a simple but powerful shift from wanting more resources to embracing and acting on the possibilities of our resources already in hand.”

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The Hard Thing about Hard Things
by Ben Horowitz

Horowitz on perception: “I was the only kid on the football team who was also on the highest academic track in math….As a result, I ended up moving in multiple social circles and hanging out with kids with very different outlooks on the world….Looking at the world through such different prisms helped me separate facts from perception.”

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Marketing director (and parent) Justin Mayer (MBA 2005)
Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
by Dr. Seuss

Seuss on choices: “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.”

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