“An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot and makes wonderful plans but gets very little done.”

“If there is an effect in your life that you want more of, you merely need to trace it back to the causes and repeat the causes. If there is an effect in your life that you do not enjoy, you need to trace it back to the causes and get rid of them.”

“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.”

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

“Every minute you spend in planning saves 10 minutes in execution; this gives  you a 1,000 percent Return on Energy!”

“There is a special way that you can accelerate your progress toward becoming the highly productive, effective, efficient person that you want to be.”

“Imagine no limitations; decide what's right and desirable before you decide  what's possible.”

“The only real limitation on your abilities is the level of your desires. If you  want it badly enough, there are no limits on what you can achieve.  ”

“Communication is a skill that you can learn. It's like riding a bicycle or typing.  If you're willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of very part of your life.”

“There is more to life than just increasing its speed.”

“The highest paid Americans read an average of two to three hours per day. The lowest paid Americans don't read at all... ...58% of adults never read another book after they leave high school—including 42% of university graduates... ...43.6% of American adults read below the 7th grade level... they are functionally illiterate... fully 50% of high school graduates cannot read their graduation diplomas, nor fill out an application form for a job at McDonald’s...”

“In 80 percent or more of cases, people have three goals in common: first, a financial and career goal; second, a family or personal relationship goal; and third, a health or a fitness goal. And this is as it should be. These are the three most important areas of life. If you give yourself a grade on a scale of one to ten in each of these three areas, you can immediately identify where you are doing well in life and where you need some improvement.”

“As Pat Riley, the basketball coach, said, "Anytime you stop striving to get better, you're bound to get worse.”

“Refuse to complain about your problems. Keep them to yourself. As speaker-humorist Ed Foreman says, "You should never share your problems with others because 80 percent of people don't care about them anyway, and the other 20 percent are kind of glad that you've got them in the first place.”

“Your life only gets better when you get better.”