THE TOP 90 LEADERSHIP QUOTES OF 2024

PART 1

Aggregated by Brian Dodd of

Brian Dodd On Leadership
Introduction
There comes a time in the life of every leader when they must stand up and
declare, “Follow me!”

Therefore, the use of language is a BIG deal for leaders. Words matter. They can
mobilize people, inspire enormous change, and move others to life-changing
action. Therefore, when a leader speaks, the quotes they give, matter.

Quotes are powerful. A good quote synthesizes something with deep meaning
into an easy-to-understand statement. Good quotes are pithy, repeatable, and
memorable. When someone delivers a great quote, they capture in language
what we all feel intuitively.

This is why I created this resource. The following are 90 quotes I captured
during the first half of 2024. These will take 15 minutes to read and a lifetime
to apply.

Let’s get started. You’re about to get smarter and better as a leader!
This resource has been created by Brian Dodd of Brian Dodd On Leadership.
Brian is the content creator of one of the most widely read leadership sites on
the internet. He is also the author of Amazon best-selling books Mighty: 7
Skills You Need to Move from Pandemic to Progress and 2021: The Year In
Leadership. The following are additional resources from Brian. Click the
hotlinks to learn more and order.

Coaching Courses

The Timeless Leadership Masterclass

The 2-Minute Leader Coaching Course

Books

Mighty: 7 Skills You Need to Move from Pandemic to Progress

2021 The Year In Leadership: The Stories of Faith, Athletics, and Business
Which Inspired Us All

Timeless: 10 Enduring Practices of Apex Leaders

Table of Contents Page
Failure 5

Courage 5

Focus 6

Gratitude 6

Time Management 7

Success 7

Resilience 9

Production 9

Decision-Making 10

Coaching 10

Legacy 11

Character 11

Culture 12

Creativity 12

Relationships 12

Money 12

Thinking 13
Failure
• "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." - Herman
Melville
• “When the archer misses the mark, he turns and looks for the fault within
himself. Failure to hit the bull's eye is never the fault of the target. To
improve your aim -- improve yourself.” — Gilbert Arland
• “You’re only as good as you’re willing to be bad…The fact that you’re not
going to be good at something or that you’re going to fail at something—
that’s OK. Because you’re never going to get good unless you’re willing to
be bad.” — Randall Stutman
• “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because
only in that way can we find progress." - Richard Feyman
• “The first step on the ladder of success is always failure. Immature people
don’t deal well with failure and immature people don’t understand that there
is going to be failure.” - University of Houston head basketball coach Kelvin
Sampson
• “Physics is a process of getting stuck. Blackboards are the best tool for
getting unstuck. You do most of your calculations on paper. Then, when
you reach a dead end, you go to the blackboard and share the problem with a
colleague. But here’s the funny thing. You often solve the problem yourself
in the process of writing it out.” - London Institute director Thomas Fink
• "I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300
games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot
and missed. I’ve failed over andover and over again in my life. And that is
why I succeed." - Michael Jordan
• “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail
conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” - John Maynard Keynes
from The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

Courage
• "In Africa, lions hunt in packs. And when they go out to hunt, they take with
them the oldest female of the pride. By this point, she’s old and [infirm] and
toothless, can no longer catch her own prey, a little bit like me. But she has
the deepest roar. And what the lionesses do—and it’s the lionesses who do
the hunting—the lionesses position this old lion in the middle of a field
facing the bush. The bush could be a mile away. And the prey are between
the old lion and the bush, and all the lionesses hide in the bush. And when
 this old lady roars, the prey run away from the roar to their death. And so the
concept is “go at the problem.” Go at what you perceive to be the problem.
And what you’ll invariably find is [that] it’s a toothless old lady." -
Paul Assaiante

Focus
• "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on.
But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other
good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud
of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. Innovation is
saying no to 1,000 things." - Steve Jobs
• "The biggest decision you make daily is what to focus on." - Shane Parrish
• "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man
who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee
• "A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere,
but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get
dinner." – Seth Godin, The Dip
• "It's about eliminating external distractions... and just focusing on the
process itself, and enjoying every single day. Chopping wood, carrying
water. Greatness is not meant for a few chosen people. It's meant for those
who persistently pursue their dreams every day and make that choice when
they wake up." - Kyrie Irving
• “I will admit it overwhelms me sometimes. I have this weird thing in my
head where if I focus on the numbers, I’ll lose whatever it is that made Rare
Beauty Rare Beauty.” - Selena Gomez on her beauty brand now reportedly
valued at $2 billion
• “If, like most, you rarely go more than 10–15 minutes without a just check,
you have effectively put yourself in a persistent state of self-imposed
cognitive handicap." - Cal Newport on email or social media
• "For 37 years I practiced 14 hours a day, and now they call me a genuis." -
violinist Pable De Sarasate

Gratitude
• "The ability to express happiness for somebody else’s excellence. Not every
team has that. Every good team I was on did, though. I was on some teams
where when I hit a home run, I was the only one happy, The great teams
have it where even if you’re not playing, you’re involved in the dugout and
 being engaged. The teams that play well really pull for one another and
celebrate each others’ successes. It’s not magic. It’s a selflessness." - Clint
Hurdle
• "The worst time to make a major decision is when you are anxious,
frustrated or angry. The best time to make decisions is after you count your
blessings. Gratitude is the best segue into decision making." - Keith Madison

Time Management
• “He is extremely meticulous. He says, ‘I’m efficient with your time, so you
will be efficient with my time.’ We are all sacrificing to be here." - Water
Polo superstar Ryann Neushul on legendary coach John Tanner
• "Time is the friend of the consistent and the enemy of the inconsistent." -
Shane Parrish
• "It’s not that we don’t have time. It’s that we don’t have time for the things
that are really important. There’s always enough time to do what’s really
important, but we get caught up doing things that aren’t important." — Larry
Winget

Success
• "The amateur does not know what to do. The master knows what not to do."
- James Clear
• "Success is a project that's always under construction." - Pat Summitt
• "You understand there’s a lot of randomness and luck to being a really good
team. To take any credit for your luck is probably irresponsible. It’s how you
run with your luck, how you accept the responsibility for it and making it the
spirit for how you live." - Vanderbilt head baseball coach Tim Corbin
• “Most great leaders I have been associated with did not care about the credit
for anything. They wanted to share, they wanted others to get the credit, but
all of them would take responsibility, and they would stand up and be
counted when the chips were down.” - General Alfred M. Gray Jr.
• “I’ve heard variations of the phrase, ‘I’m grateful for what I went through
because it made me who I am today.’ Despite what I’m proud to have
accomplished, I strongly disagree with this sentiment. The tradeoff isn’t
worth it. Given the choice, I would swap my position in the top 1 percent of
educational attainment to have never been in the top 1 percent of childhood
instability... As far as professional accomplishments, I guess I've pretty
much done more than I would have expected, actually. So I've exceeded on
 that measure, but you know, I never had a dad. And that's something that I
would like to be one day.” - Author Rob Henderson
• "When you know what needs to be done, inaction increases stress. You feel
a lot less stress when you do the things within your control that move you
closer to your objective. Action reduces stress." - Shane Parrish
• “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more
you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it
must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s
dedication…In the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow
you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.” - Viktor Frankl
• "When going for trophies, big teams play big." - Commentator Conor
McNamara
• "If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's." - Joseph
Campbell
• "To laugh often and much: To win the respect of intelligent people and the
affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the
betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to
leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a
redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier
because you lived. This is to have succeeded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "People like you more when you are working towards something, not when
you have it." - Drake
• "The person who said, 'Nice guys finish last' doesn't know where the finish
line is." - Garry Shandling
• "The arrogance of success is to think what you did yesterday will be good
enough for tomorrow." - Buzz Williams
• “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more
you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it
must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s
dedication…In the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow
you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.” - Viktor Frankl
• “To be successful at anything, the truth is you don’t have to be special. You
just have to be what most people aren’t: consistent, determined and willing
to work for it.” – Tom Brady
• "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go
to war first and then seek to win." — Sun Tzu
• “You can’t get to where you want to be in one day, just like you don’t sail
around the world in a day. You just look at the horizon and say, ‘I can sail
that far.’ Sailing around the world is just sailing to the horizon over and
 over again. Writing a novel is just writing a paragraph over and over again.”
- novelist Hugh Howey
• "Everyone is jealous of what you've got, no one is jealous of how you got
it." - Jimmy Carr
• "Work is paid tuition." - Erika Ayers
• "Life gives you a few big waves. When they do, grab your surfboard." -
Colin Cowherd

Resilience
• "Assuming stability is one of the ways ruins get made. Resilience
accommodates the unexpected." - John Lewis Gaddis
• "World: When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang
on. Scripture: When you’re at the end of your rope, Let go . . . and let God."
- Rusty Stroupe
• "The notoriety of the coach is directly proportional to his team's execution
under pressure." - Hubie Brown
• "I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind
as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even
nature." - John D. Rockefeller

Production
• “Men of genius are sometimes producing most when they seem least to
labor, for their minds are then occupied in the shaping of those conceptions
to which they afterward give form.” - a Duke who observed Leonardo da
Vinci
• "The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of
holding meetings." - Thomas Sowell
• "You don't try to build a wall...You don’t start by saying, I’m going to build
the biggest, baddest wall that’s ever been built. You say, I’m going to lay
this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid...you do that every single day,
and soon you have a wall." - Will Smith
• "There is room up in organizations to boost performance by amping up the
pace and intensity. Considerable slack naturally exists in organizations to
perform at much higher levels. The role of leadership is to convert that
lingering potential into superlative results." - Frank Slootman
• "To clean up your city, sweep your doorstep first." - Kevin Kelly
Decision-Making
• "Until we know we are wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right." -
David McRainey
• "It's easier to get a smart person to do something hard than to get them to do
something easy that doesn't matter." - Shane Parrish
• "A lack of routine causes more problems than poor choices. Routines turn
desired behavior into default behavior." - Shane Parrish
• "The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices tells us
more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high
school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who
happens to be around at the right time in life. On the other hand, the small
decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not
very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits." -
Harvard psychologist Amos Tversky
• "An optimistic mind finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem
that the pessimists regards as incurable." - Robert Anton Wilson

Coaching
• "I have the best staff... Like Moses, I will die leaning on my staff." -
Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh
• "Coach them to be their best and when the game starts, expect them to play
their worst." - Rick Robinson on coaching with patience.
• “There are two types of managers: those that do nothing and those that do a
lot of damage. The game belongs to the players. You can tell them a
strategy to follow, but they have to be convinced they can do it. What a
coach can do is ensure the players understand well what the team has to do.
All (top-level) teams have quality players, the difference is how they use that
quality.” - Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti
• “We cannot be a great, great, elite leader if we don’t lead from a place of
compassion and empathy. And we don’t have empathy if we don’t
understand.” - Indiana Pacers assistant coach Jenny Boucek
• "Leadership is what you do on the court." - Stan Van Gundy
• "They're not going to get some guy that's going to rest on his laurels after
winning one, and he's just going to go and ring the bell at the stock exchange
and go hang out with [President Joe] Biden, and then he's going to take a
year off and do the honeymoon [things]. I'm an obsessed coach, and I'm
going to be more of a maniac the next couple of days than I was leading up
 to this. I promise you. And then when this season's over, it's going to be
worse." - UConn head basketball coach Dan Hurley

Legacy
• “Someday, when they throw dirt over the top of me or if somebody is
eulogizing me … if they would simply say, ‘He was a Michigan man,’ that
would mean everything to me.” - Jim Harbaugh
• “Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in
life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love
you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial
dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that
nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody
thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a
disaster.” - Warren Buffett
• "If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn
more, do more and become more, then you are an excellent leader." - Dolly
Parton
• "Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." -
Benjamin Franklin
• "I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It's not. The
worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone." -
Robin Williams
• "20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked
late are your kids." - Software engineer David Clarke

Character
• "The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of
honor." - George Bernard Shaw
• "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility
lies in being superior to your former self." - Ernest Hemingway
• "For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear the world is going
to hell." - Historian Deirdre McCloskey
• "How to find a good spouse? The best single way is to deserve a good
spouse...To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want." -
Charlie Munger
• "The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his
integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively." - Bob Marley
 • "Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single person. Their
character determines the character of the organization." — Ralph Waldo
Emerson
• "Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character. And
character isn’t formed out of smart people, it’s formed out of people who
suffered." - Jensen Huang

Culture
• "At Chelsea, we've created a no-excuse culture. After every game, we have
to get our mirrors out and ask ourselves, 'What could we have done better?'
We have to own that. We have to put ourselves in a position where, if we do
everything we're supposed to do as a staff, the players are then in a position
to perform... We don't always perform, but at least we can't turn around and
say, 'Yeah, but it was your fault.' That, for me, has become one of the most
powerful lessons I've learned from my coaching career." - U.S. Women's
National Soccer coach Emma Hayes
• "We like to tear down monuments." - current GE CEO Larry Culp

Creativity
• "The quality of any creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of
whoever is in charge." - John Gruber from The Auteur of Design
• "I've been banging away at this thing for 30 years. I think the simple math
is, some projects work and some don't. There's no reason to belabor either
one. Just get on to the next." - Brad Pitt

Relationships
• "You can't hate someone when you know their story." - Mike Linch
• "If you want to be offended, you can be offended... Look for things which
encourage you... People who are easily offended become bitter people." -
Coach Keith Madison

Money
• "Debt defines your future, and when your future is defined, hope begins to
die." - Kent Nerburn
 • "In order to make more money, you have to have more skill. In order to have
more skill, you have to develop that skill and that's done in low-pressure,
low-emotion situations." - Booger McFarland
• “No matter what anyone tells you, they’re always playing for next year.
They’re trying to play for the scoreboard and the statistics, trying to be
financially compensated and find a job next year. I’m playing for nothing
except the pure joy... I’m pushing myself to the boundaries of what I can do.
I’m not worried about one or two at-bats. Am I going to be in the lineup
tomorrow? What’s next year look like? Where am I going to be? Am I going
to make money? I’m just playing free... I wish I could have learned it
younger.” - California Angels Kevin Pillar
• “The test of a businessman is not whether he can make money in one or two
boom years, or can make money through the luck of getting into the field
first, but whether in a highly competitive field, without having any initial
advantage over his competitors, he can outdistance them in a perfect
honourable way and keep the respect of himself and of his community.” -
Harvey Firestone

Thinking
• “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if
he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be
made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he
knows already.” — Tolstoy
• “People spend too much time on the last 24 hours and not enough time on
the last 6,000 years.” — Will Durant
• “The object of education is not to fill a man’s mind with facts; it is to teach
him how to use his mind in thinking.”— Henry Ford
• “That’s the beauty of it: there’s just no way we’ll learn everything about
everything. It’s too vast. So if you are interested and you are curious, you
have an opportunity to learn forever. That’s exciting to me. That’s what’s
always driven me.” - renowned chef Wylie Dufresne
• "The test of a student is not how much he knows, but how much he wants to
know." - Alice Wellington Rollins
Like these quotes and want more? Then purchase Brian’s latest Amazon best-
selling book Mighty: 7 Skills You Need to Move from Pandemic to Progress by
clicking HERE or on the image above.
For more 2024 leadership articles from Brian Dodd On Leadership read the
following:

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• The 4 Levels of Performance For Those on Your Team
• 13 Characteristics of Winning Cultures
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