Inspirational quotes

What can we do today to make everyone want to come back tomorrow?

Any leader who cannot endure profound levels of loneliness will not last long.

Successful change requires effective and widespread professional learning and development.

Quick fixes slow down real improvement.

School should prepare students for the tests of life, not a life of tests.

The most impactful leaders get involved on an instructional level.

Culture is strategy.

Learning is about the “why” not “what.”

Engagement is about being in the driver’s seat.

Those who tell stories, rule society.

Diversity is a reality, Equity is a choice, Inclusion is an action. Justice is the outcome.

The language we use creates the reality we experience.

With each new stage of life, we outgrow the strategies that worked for us at an earlier stage. We find ourselves in an environment that pelts us with more challenges than our current self can manage. If we don’t grow bigger, we can become bitter. When our problems become too big for us, our healthiest response is to expand our capacities. That growth is qualitative.

Effective leadership requires clarity of purpose and intentional decision making. Leaders must pursue high-leverage strategies that address root causes of systemic challenges. Improvement science and professional learning communities offer frameworks for collaborative problem-solving.

The best thing about being a teacher is that it matters. The hardest thing about being a teacher is that it matters every day.

What is honored will be cultivated.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

One who aims at nothing hits it every time.

. . . shift their line of sight from looking out the rearview mirror (where they’ve been and what they’ve experienced lately) to looking out the windshield (where they desire to go). Where you look is where you go!

The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system’s weaknesses irrelevant. Peter Drucker

As Ericsson puts it, learning is not a way of reaching your potential; it is a way of developing it.

You can’t choose your potential, but you can choose to fulfill it.

The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low and achieving our work.

It takes far more strength for leaders to collaborate with their people than to micromanage them.

As a leader . . . your principal job is to create an operating environment where others can do great things.

You can go from job to career to calling—all without changing your occupation.

Great leaders . . . are able to inspire people to act. Those who are able to inspire give people a sense of purpose, or belonging . . . are able to create a following of people who act not because they were swayed, but because they were inspired.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

Culture drives strategy.

Don’t treat people according to their behavior; treat them according to their potential.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

I rent my title . . . I own my character.

People close their ears to advice and open their eyes to example.

The essence of learning is the ability of learners to create meaning by making connections among the various experiences they’ve encountered and retell the story.

Books are indispensable because they are absent teachers.

Much of the job of the leader is to become a curator of talent.

Making connections between disparate things is a key to creative thinking.

Einstein’s approach? He’d spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and five minutes solving it.

A leader is a person who takes responsibility for the impact they make on the world.

Every day the clock resets. Your wins don’t matter. Your failures don’t matter. Don’t stress on what was, fight for what could be.

The underlying architecture of our success . . . is the knowledge that everything connects.

Those who know do not tell; those who tell do not know.

He that thinks most, will say least.

The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of the leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.

Isolation is the number one enemy of excellence.

. . . described our life as a basket woven from many different strands, each essential for a strong container. Each of the demands of our life is one strand in this basket. It is impossible to weave multiple strands at the same time; we need to attend to the strand that requires our attention without losing awareness of the others. Every strand will get our attention, just not all at the same time.

There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.

Education systems generally remain rooted in the past. The answer is not simply to do more of what has always been done. The solutions we require are not in the rearview mirror. The challenge is not to reform our systems but to transform them.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

Shifting culture requires learning together.

Children are born with whirlwinds, forest fires and comets inside them . . . able to sing to birds and read the clouds . . . this is the blueprint of the mind.

A rich child who possesses many resources at birth and with an extraordinary potential which has never ceased to amaze us . . . this is a gifted child for whom we need a gifted teacher.

Time devoted to building the capacity of teachers to work in teams is far better spent than time devoted to observing individual teachers. DuFour & Marzano, Educational Leadership, 2009

Hire people not to fall in line; hire people that will form new lines.

We live in a world that is overmanaged and underled.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.

Instead of time being the constant and learning the variable, make learning the constant and time the variable.

Rules direct us to average behaviors. If we’re aiming to create works that are exceptional, most rules don’t apply. Average is nothing to aspire to.

If you want to make a sustainable change at work, you are more likely to succeed if you approach your change as a gardener, not a mechanic.

The things we fear most in organizations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity.

The relationship between Steve Jobs and ‘useless’ humanities programs such as calligraphy should not be ignored.

Have we raised a generation of people for whom learning has come down to passing a test? Learning should prepare a student for both life and a career.

The most common disconnection between rhetoric and the reality of failure is the institutionalized use of the average, in which students are regularly punished at the end of the semester for the mistakes that they made months earlier.

Radical change is not made overnight but in thousands of choices pointed in the same direction. These choices push us further and further until one day we find we are strong. We are immovable. And when we look at the horizon and see the next storm moving in, we need not find shelter. Nothing can displace us with the strength of these roots.

Structural change that is not supported by cultural change will eventually be overwhelmed by the culture, for it is in the culture that any organization finds meaning and stability.

The smaller the number of priorities, the higher the probability of impact.

We don’t need schools that make kids memorize the names of planets. We need schools that inspire kids to find new planets.

Once you jump outside of the box, there’s endless running room.

Good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of thinking.

We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions.

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting.

Definition of wisdom: Using your knowledge while doubting what you know.

Whereas today’s schools teach children to remember known answers to known problems, students need to come up with innovative solutions to uncertain problems.

What we know today doesn’t make yesterday wrong, it makes tomorrow better.

Education is a conversation, not a transfusion.

. . . for every complex problem, there are solutions that are clear, simple, and wrong.

Equipped with the skills to monitor their own learning, discipline-specific methods of inquiry, and basic knowledge of key information, processes, and ideas in the traditional subject matters, students can truly become the much-touted “lifelong learners” who are featured in 21st-century skills literature.

The less we know about a topic, the more we may believe we know.

Give children toys without batteries.

The future of education is to move from seat time to mastery. Currently, a transcript is a certificate of seat time.

Strive to make both yourself and your team feel safe, but not comfortable.

Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation, and Stanford Research Center conducted a study that shows 85% of job success comes from having well-developed soft skills and people skills, while only 15% of job success comes from technical skills and knowledge (or hard skills).

Powerful learning is the result of deliberate design.

Thirty spokes join together at one hub, but it is the hole in the center that makes it operable. Clay is molded into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that makes it useful. Doors and windows are cut to make a room; it is the empty spaces that we use. Therefore, existence is what we have, but non-existence is what we use.

Many renowned scholars know that the most important discoveries are the result of long and in-depth study of a very specific topic. By doing so, you develop a method that can be applied to any subject.

Through learning we re-create ourselves . . . [and] . . . we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life . . . There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning.

All of our knowledge results from questions, which is another way of saying that question asking is our most important intellectual tool.

The most creative and successful people tend to be expert questioners.

With regard to the knowledge we learn in breadth, we rely always on the expertise of others; when learning in depth, we develop our own expertise.

I think people who have only the sketchiest sense of knowledge, because they know nothing in depth, easily confuse their wishes, needs, and opinions with knowledge, and in so doing create many of our most serious social and political problems.

Change must be timely to adapt to a world that is rapidly changing. But change must also be anchored in something timeless so that one is not lost in the waves of change.

Education is investment, not expenditure.

Singapore changes when it is still successful. One should not wait until one has a problem before one is forced to change. One changes before one has a problem. This is the essence of timely change. Timely change occurs in anticipation of the future. It is change launched from a position of strength rather than one of desperation.

Good ideas fail due to poor implementation.

Go slow to go fast.

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.