10 Posts found for Author: John Gardner

The world loves talent, but pays off on character.

Author: John Gardner | Source: PBS | Subjects: Character, Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs.

Author: John Gardner | Source: PBS | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Be interested. Everyone wants to be interesting, but the vitalizing thing is to be interested… As the proverb says, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

Author: John Gardner | Source: Harvard Business Review (HBR) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Personal Improvement

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the … [ Read more ]

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Insight, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

For many this life is a vale of tears; for no one is it free of pain. But we are so designed that we can cope with it if we can live in some context of meaning. […] In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can’t count on … [ Read more ]

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Someone defined horse sense as the good judgment horses have that prevents them from betting on people. But we have to bet on people — and I place my bets more often on high motivation than on any other quality except judgment. There is no perfection of techniques that will substitute for the lift of spirit and heightened performance that comes from strong motivation. The … [ Read more ]

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Business, Life & Society, Motivation, Psychology | Behavior

It’s interesting that even in the first year of life you learn the impact that a variety of others have on you, but as late as middle age many people have a very imperfect understanding of the impact they themselves have on others.

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Learn all your life. Learn from your failures. Learn from your successes, When you hit a spell of trouble, ask “What is it trying to teach me?” The lessons aren’t always happy ones, but they keep coming. It isn’t a bad idea to pause occasionally for an inward look. By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement

I said in my book, “Self-Renewal,” that we build our own prisons and serve as our own jail-keepers. I no longer completely agree with that. I still think we’re our own jailkeepers, but I’ve concluded that our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us — and self-images — that hold us captive for a … [ Read more ]

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel that we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we’ve piled up enough points to count ourselves … [ Read more ]

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Motivation, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior