All promise outruns performance.
Interpretation
Promises often exceed what can be delivered in reality.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the tendency of individuals to make grand promises or commitments that are often unrealistic or unattainable. It serves as a reminder that the expectation set by a promise can frequently be greater than what is actually achieved, emphasizing the importance of aligning one's words with capability and action.
In practice
During a team meeting, to emphasize the importance of realistic goals when setting deadlines.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.
Fear, in evolution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any other emotion it is crucial for survival.
Essentialism is not about how to get more things done, it's about how to the get the right things done. It doesn't mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.
When words are both true and kind, they can change the world.
Read books, listen to tapes, attend seminars-they are decades of wisdom reduced to invaluable hours.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
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