“The ability to concentrate singlemindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life. This key insight is the heart and soul of this book.

“Whenever you face crunch time in your life or business, mentally call a time-out in the game and focus on getting all the information you can about the situation before you make a decision or overreact.”

“Any thought or action that you repeat over and over will eventually become a new habit.”

“When you train yourself, through repetition and practice, to overcome procrastination and get your most important tasks completed quickly, you will move yourself onto the fast track in your life and career and step on the accelerator.”

“It is impossible to succeed without failing.” 

“You perform at your highest potential only when you are focusing on the most valuable use of your time. This is the key to personal and business success. It is the central issue in personal efficiency and time management. You must always be asking yourself, What is the most valuable use of my time right now? Discipline yourself to work exclusively on the one task that, at any given time, is the answer to this question. Keep yourself on track and focused on your most important responsibilities by asking yourself, over and over, What is the most valuable use of my time right now? How you can apply this law immediately: 1. Remember that you can do only one thing at a time. Stop and think before you begin. Be sure that the task you do is the highest-value use of your time. Remind yourself that anything else you do while your most important task remains undone is a relative waste of time. 2. Be clear about the most valuable work that you do for your organization. Whatever it is, resolve to concentrate on doing that specific task before anything else. Why are you on the payroll? What specific, tangible, measurable results are expected of you? And of all the different results you are capable of achieving, which are the most important to your career at this moment? Whatever the answer, this is where you must focus your energies, and nowhere else.”

“In every company which I have done strategic planning, the number-one value people choose is always integrity. The second values may be quality of products and services, caring about people, excellent customer service, profitability , innovation, entrepreneurship, and others. But integrity always comes first.”

“Almost all stress, tension, anxiety, and frustration, both in life and in work, comes from doing one thing while you believe and value something completely different.”

“Whenever you have a problem, take a few minutes to meditate. You’ll be amazed at the renewed clarity that you’ll bring to the issue.”

“The world is full of people who are waiting for someone to come along and motivate them to be the kind of people they wish they could be. The problem is that no one is coming to the rescue. These”

“Josh Billings once wrote, “It ain’t what a man knows what hurts him. It’s what he knows what ain’t true.”

“Practice "zero-based thinking" in every part of your life. Ask yourself continually, "If I were not doing this already, knowing what I now know, would I start doing it again today?" If it is something you would not start again today, knowing what you now know, it is a prime candidate for abandonment or creative procrastination.”

“There are certain things that you can do, or learn to do, that can make you extraordinarily valuable to yourself and to others. Your job is to identify your special areas of uniqueness and then to commit yourself to becoming very, very good in those areas. Increase”

“...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being. ”

“What one skill, if I developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my career?”