Vision is seeing a future state with the mind’s eye. Vision is applied imagination. All things are created twice: first, a mental creation; second, a physical creation. The first creation, vision, is the beginning of the process
of reinventing oneself or of an organization reinventing itself. It represents desire, dreams, hopes, goals and plans. But these dreams or visions are not just fantasies. They are reality not yet brought into the physical sphere, like the blueprint of a house before it’s built or musical notes in a score just waiting to be played.

You must choose your own speech.
You must govern your own tongue.
Your real life is your thoughts.
Your thoughts are of your own making.
Your character is your own handiwork.
You alone can select the materials that go into it.
You alone can reject what is not fit to go into it.
You are the creator of your own personality.
You can be disgraced by no man’s hand but your own
You can be elevated and sustained by no man save yourself.
You have to write your own record.
You have to build your own monument—or dig your own pit.
Which are you doing?

Most people think in terms of weeks. But most third-generation planning tools focus on daily planning. While they may help you prioritize your activities, they basically only help you organize crises and busywork. The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. And this can best be done in the context of the week.

You come into the world alone.
You go to the grave alone.
You are alone with your inner thoughts during the journey between.
You must make your own decisions.
You must abide by the consequences of your acts.
“I cannot make you well unless you make yourself well,” an eminent doctor often tells his patients.
You alone can regulate your habits and make or unmake your health.
You alone can assimilate things mental and things material.

"Seek first to understand" involves a very deep shift in paradigm. We typically seek first to be understood. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They're either speaking or preparing to speak. They're filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people's lives.

Your success depends upon you.
Your happiness depends upon you.
You have to steer your own course.
You have to shape your own fortune.
You have to educate yourself.
You have to do your own thinking.
You have to live with your own conscience.
Your mind is yours and can be used only by you.

The stated strategy is what is communicated; the real strategy is what people do every day. To achieve
goals you’ve never achieved before, you need to start doing things you’ve never done before. Just because the leaders may know what the goals are doesn’t mean that the people on the front line, where the real action takes place, know what to do. Goals will never be achieved until everyone on the team knows exactly what they’re supposed to do about them. In the last analysis, the front line produces the bottom line. They are the creative knowledge workers. Leadership, remember, is a choice, not a position; it can be distributed everywhere—at all levels of the organization. Also remember, you cannot hold people responsible for results if you supervise their methods. You then become responsible for results and rules replace human
judgment, creativity and responsibility.

Education is not merely “a” key to success; it could almost be called “the” key to success.
No uneducated, uncultured person is really successful, for true success consists less of money than of
mentality, an inward thing, not an outward thing. Education is both a means to an end and an end in itself.
Without education, no man or woman can reach the highest pinnacle of success. But education does not consist of school learning. Our education comprises the sum total of what Our education comes, or should come, from our daily experiences in life. Education is observation rather than perspiration. Books form the groundwork of one’s education. Without well-directed, diligent reading, few persons can hope to become really educated or cultured. But all wisdom is not contained between the covers of books. We can learn daily from all sorts and conditions of men and women and children, from what we see going on around us, from what we hear. Self-education can become one of the pleasantest of habits, and certainly it is of all habits the most profitable. Education—knowledge—means power. It begets ability, and ability means advancement.

Lord, make me a channel of Thy peace,
That where there is hatred I may bring love;
That where there is wrong I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;
That where there is discord I may bring truth;
That where there is doubt I may bring faith;
That where there is despair I may bring hope;
And where there are shadows I may bring Thy light;
That where there is sadness I may bring joy;
Lord grant that I may seek rather to comfort than be comforted,
To understand than be understood,
To love than be loved;
For it is by giving that one receives,
It is by self-forgetting that one finds,
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven,
It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.

But effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction. For, as Socrates told us, "If a man does not know to what port he is sailing, no wind is favorable." But today we Democrats know to what port we are sailing - we have mapped our destination and we know what kind of America we want the Sixties to bring.

The mind can be trained to become as a magnet which attracts true steel but ignores dross. The mind must be disciplined to absorb useful, helpful valuable information, and to ignore whatever is not helpful or valuable.
Education is really a matter of selection—a matter of selecting what we shall become interested in, selecting how we shall employ our time, selecting things that will increase our knowledge and wisdom and power, or the reverse.

But plenty of us have made the choice to act, only to find that we made poor choices—choices that turned out to be of no value to ourselves or to others, some perhaps even harmful. So, alone, the choice to act is not sufficient. And so the second choice we make each and every day is of great significance: To what ends, or purposes, will our daily choices lead? We each want to be of value—to know our life matters.We do not want to just be busy, we want to be busy pursuing worthwhile purposes. But, in today’s rush, rush world, it is easy to pass through each day without even thinking about the purposes we are pursuing, much less pausing long enough to reflect on the purposes we would most like to pursue. And thus we see so many people hurriedly running from place to place, yet really going nowhere.

If there is one unchanging theme that runs throughout these separate stories, it is that everything changes but change itself. We live in an age of movement and change, both evolutionary and revolutionary, both good and evil--and in such an age a university has a special obligation to hold fast to the best of the past and move fast to the best of the future.

The first choice we make each and every day is, Will we act upon life, or will we merely be acted upon?
Clearly we cannot control everything that happens to us. Life hits like the waves of the ocean as one event rolls in after another. Some events are incidental, causing us little or no impact. Others virtually pummel us. But each day we make the choice: Will we be as driftwood that passively floats with the tides and currents of the day, or will we instead take proactive responsibility for determining our actions and destinations?
On the surface, the choice is an easy one. After all, who would not prefer to act upon life rather than be acted upon? But at the end of the day, only our actions provide the truest answers. For many people say they want to be in charge of their life, but then they turn their evening schedules over to their television sets to determine when and what they will do. Others say they have lofty career dreams and goals, but then they turn responsibility for their skill development over to their employers. Still others say they want to stand by firm values, but then they let their integrity shrivel under the slightest bit of opposition. So, yes, many people say they want to act upon life, but at the end of the day it appears more that life is acting upon them.