Todd Henry > Quotes

“No matter what you say about your priorities, where you spend money and your time will prove them out.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“We need to fall in love with the process, not just the end product of our work.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“A lifetime of mediocrity is a high price to pay for safety.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“Passion” has its roots in the Latin word pati, which means “to suffer or endure.” Therefore, at the root of passion is suffering. This is a far cry from the way we casually toss around the word in our day-to-day conversations. Instead of asking “What would bring me enjoyment?” which is how many people think about following their passion, we should instead ask “What work am I willing to suffer for today?” Great work requires suffering for something beyond yourself. It’s created when you bend your life around a mission and spend yourself on something you deem worthy of your best effort. What is your worthwhile cause?”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“If you want to thrive, you need to systematically engage with other people, in part to be reminded that life is bigger than your immediate problems.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“You must get comfortable with eliminating things in your life that are getting in the way of clarity and focus.”
― Todd Henry

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” —Dr. Seuss”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“You need to create space for your creative process to thrive rather than expect it to operate in the cracks of your frenetic schedule.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“The most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. In the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, never-launched businesses, unreconciled relationships, and all of the other things that people thought, ‘I’ll get around to that tomorrow.’ One day, however, their tomorrows ran”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Our relationships will eventually grow stale unless we are diligent about directing and cultivating them.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“You need to go beyond hacks and quick fixes, and instead develop practices.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“Make sure that you’re nurturing your process. It’s the only thing you can truly control, and it’s the thing you’ll always have regardless of where you end up.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Great work results when you stop doing only what you know you can do and instead begin pursuing what you believe you might be able to do with a little focused effort.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“There is a persistent myth in the workplace that creativity is a mystical and elusive force that sits somewhere between prayer and the U.S. tax code on the ambiguity scale.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“The great problems we see in the world today will not be solved by people functioning at half capacity cranking out work they don't care about in order to buy more things that will eventually rust and rot.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“By acting, we make things concrete; action breeds motivation, not the other way around.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“When people begin to experience the lull of mediocrity, they often question whether they are in the right job. They wonder if there might be another one out there that would better suit them, and that might give them the thrill they once experienced before things went south. They may even act on that impulse, hopping to another job or company, and subsequently find that everything is better for a while. The newness is back, and that craved-for sense of challenge has returned. Problem solved? Actually, no. In many of these situations the job hopper is right back in crisis within a matter of months. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with their new job; it’s because they changed their external situation without changing their mind-set and methods. They were trying to solve an internal problem by changing their external circumstances, which rarely works. You have to begin by finding alignment internally, then question your work environment.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Emptying yourself of your best work isn’t just about checking off tasks on your to-do list; it’s about making steady, critical progress each day on the projects that matter, in all areas of life.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Overtime we learn the art of compromise. The problem is we often compromise the most valuable thing: the fire that drives our best work.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Intellectual growth results not from the accumulation of tidbits of information, but from considering and integrating it.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“No matter how successful you are, or how skillful you may be, stretching beyond your comfort zone will mean feeling “less than” for a time.”
― Todd Henry, Louder than Words: Harness the Power of Your Authentic Voice

“Nobody wins when you shape the truth to make it more palatable.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“creative people appear to be difficult because the expectations for a project keep changing midstream, after they’ve done a tremendous amount of conceptual work that will have to be rehashed just to get back to the starting line. Is it possible that what comes across as ego is merely a response to their craft’s— which they’ve spent years mastering and cultivating—being challenged at a moment’s notice by someone who has given their hard work a total of ten seconds of distracted consideration before scrapping it?”
― Todd Henry, Herding Tigers: Be the Leader That Creative People Need

“Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, THE VOICELESS”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“A lifetime of mediocrity is a high price to pay for safety. Paranoia undoes greatness.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“Knowing does nothing for you—it’s doing that matters.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“Die Empty. I want to know that if I lay my head down tonight and don’t wake up tomorrow, I have emptied myself of whatever creativity is lingering inside, with minimal regrets about how I spent my focus, time, and energy. This doesn’t happen by accident; it takes intentional and sustained effort. But I can say with confidence from my own experience and the experiences of others I’ve worked with that the effort is well worth it.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“Remember that common sense is not common practice, and that people who succeed are often those who do the little, everyday things that others won’t.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“Of course, it’s easy to confuse progress with effectiveness. All progress is not true progress. It’s possible to gain ground for many days, weeks, months, or even years but be going in a completely wrong direction. That’s why it’s important to have mechanisms in your life to help you decide whether your efforts are, in fact, helping you advance on your goals, or just feeding your need for forward motion.”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet. —JAMES OPPENHEIM”
― Todd Henry, Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day