Jeff Haden > Quotes

“Be “unrealistic” when you set a goal, and then be realistic about how you will achieve that goal.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“One of the best quotes I’ve ever heard says that if you want to increase the level of success, you need to increase the level of failure. There’s a difference between quitting and failing. I’m okay with failing a thousand times. As long as you just keep going and don’t quit, you haven’t really failed.” Embrace that mind-set and you will never fail. You just won’t have succeeded—yet.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“That’s why the power of routine, something we’ll look at in detail later, is so important. When you create a routine, embrace that routine, and see the results of that routine, you stop negotiating with yourself. You see your routine as a task, in the best possible way: Your routine isn’t something you choose to do; it’s just what you do. And you stop making choices that don’t support your goals.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“Ideas without action aren’t ideas. They’re regrets.”
― Jeff Haden, TransForm: Dramatically Improve Your Career, Business, Relationships, and Life: One Simple Step at a Time

“Failure isn’t defeating; failure is motivating. Failure provides a healthy dose of perspective, makes us more tolerant and patient, and makes us realize we’re a lot like the people around us. When you realize you aren’t so different or special after all, it’s a lot easier to be happy with the people around you—and with yourself.”
― Jeff Haden, TransForm: Dramatically Improve Your Career, Business, Relationships, and Life: One Simple Step at a Time

“You feel motivated because you took action. Motivation is a result, not a precondition. You don’t need motivation to break a sweat. Break a sweat and you’ll feel motivated.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“None of us receives enough positive feedback. Each of us is our own worst critic.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“Your head is for having ideas, not holding ideas, and it’s certainly not for filing them away. Without exception you will feel better if you get stuff out of your head.”
― Jeff Haden, TransForm: Dramatically Improve Your Career, Business, Relationships, and Life: One Simple Step at a Time

“Motivation is the pride you take in work you have already done—which fuels your willingness to do even more.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“No matter how it looks from the outside, no one is given opportunities they don’t deserve. Opportunities are earned.”
― Jeff Haden, TransForm: Dramatically Improve Your Career, Business, Relationships, and Life: One Simple Step at a Time

“Yet all those imaginings are worthless without a process to help us achieve them. A dream, once born, quickly dies without a process to support it.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“The anxiety you feel—the lack of confidence you feel—comes from feeling unprepared. Once you realize that you can prepare yourself, that you can develop techniques to do whatever you seek to do well, that whatever you hope to achieve is ultimately a craft that you can learn to do better and better and better, and that any skills you currently lack you can learn, you naturally become more confident as you become more prepared.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“Acceptance and camaraderie is earned by effort, not granted by title.”
― Jeff Haden

“Success is based on people first and strategy second. Build a great team and you will accomplish things beyond your wildest dreams.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“In the dictionary the word “idea” is categorized as a noun. But “idea” should really be a verb, because an idea does not actually exist until you turn your inspiration into action. I should know. I’ve had plenty of ideas but acted on few of them.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“When you consistently do the right things, success is predictable. Success is inevitable. You just can’t think about it too much. No obsessing allowed.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“Losses come in a variety of forms, but the worst thing we can lose is faith in ourselves: in our ideas, in our skills and talents, and in our willingness and ability to overcome challenges and achieve our dreams.”
― Jeff Haden, TransForm: Dramatically Improve Your Career, Business, Relationships, and Life: One Simple Step at a Time

“TO REACH A GOAL, DON’T FOCUS ON THE GOAL”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“To accomplish anything worthwhile, and especially to achieve a goal others say is impossible, you have to work your ass off. There are no shortcuts. The only way is the hard way.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“Pick one source of frustration and decide what you will do differently, including, possibly, walking away.”
― Jeff Haden, TransForm: Dramatically Improve Your Career, Business, Relationships, and Life: One Simple Step at a Time

“The Greater Your Focus, the Lower Your Chances of Success”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“Yes, you can help a few people who really need help—just like, somewhere along the way, someone went out of his way to help you. You remember how that felt. Pass it on.”
― Jeff Haden, TransForm: Dramatically Improve Your Career, Business, Relationships, and Life: One Simple Step at a Time

“Pick a worthwhile mission and excel at that mission.”
― Jeff Haden, TransForm: Dramatically Improve Your Career, Business, Relationships, and Life: One Simple Step at a Time

“The key is to set a goal, use it as a target that helps you create a plan for achieving it . . . and then do your best to forget all about that goal.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“You just need yourself and a willingness to put in a tremendous amount of hard work, effort, and perseverance, because that is where talent comes from.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“forgot about my huge goal. I focused on what I could control: what I did every day. After a little experimentation and a lot of thought, I settled on a process. Because the Internet never sleeps, here’s what I did every day: Write a new post. Without fail. No excuses. Build relationships. I contacted three people who tweeted my posts that day, choosing the three who seemed most influential, the most noteworthy, the most “something” (even if that “something” was just “thoughtful comment”). Then I sent an e-mail—not a tweet—and said thanks. My goal was to make a genuine connection. Build my network. I contacted one person who might be a great source for a future post. I aimed high: CEOs, founders, entrepreneur-celebrities . . . people with instant credibility and engaged followings. Many didn’t respond. But some did. And some have become friends and appear in this book. Add three more items to my “list of great headlines.” Headlines make or break posts: A great post with a terrible headline will not get read. So I worked hard to learn what worked for other people—and to adapt their techniques for my own use. Evaluate recent results. I looked at page views. I looked at shares and likes and tweets. I tried to figure out what readers responded to, what readers cared about. Writing for a big audience has little to do with pleasing yourself and everything to do with pleasing an audience, and the only way to know what worked was to know the audience. Ignore my editor. I liked my editor. But I didn’t want her input because she knew only what worked for columnists who were read by a maximum of 300,000 people each month. My goal was to triple that, which meant I needed to do things differently. We occasionally disagreed, and early on I lost some of those battles. Once my numbers started to climb, I won a lot more often, until eventually I was able to do my own thing. Sounds simple, right? In a way it was, because I followed a self-reinforcing process:”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“But you also may have fallen prey to the myth of focus, which says that the only way to be a high achiever is to regularly remind, coerce, and torture yourself into putting forth effort.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“Talent typically reveals itself only in hindsight.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“(Remember, the main purpose of a goal is to establish the right process and routine to achieve that goal.)”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

“motivation isn’t something you have. Motivation is something you get, from yourself, automatically, from feeling good about achieving small successes.”
― Jeff Haden, The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win