The 50 best motivational leadership quotes

When it comes to achieving big bold goals, we all need a little inspiration once in a while.

Our team have scoured the web, books and spoken to many inspirational leaders to distill down this collection. Feel free to use them!

We’ve also distilled them into a short compilation book if you’d like that to send to anyone who needs a shot on inspiration on their journey to achieving bigger and bolder goals. Message us and we will send you a copy? Or if you want it immediatately , just copy and paste or send a link to this page

Are you going after audacious goals? Get inspired with 50 quotes from people who’s ideas have changed the world.

1) Whatever you dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now – Goethe

2) The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow. William Pollard 

3) If you plan to be in the business that you’re in today in 5 years time, you won’t be in business - Dan Kennedy.

4) “The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalise on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.” Clayton Christensen

5) Your margin is my opportunity - Jeff Bezos 

6) “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark. ― Michelangelo

7) The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.” Peter H. Diamandis

8) If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. Unknown.

9) “If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.” Jeff Bezos

10) “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” Albert Einstein

11) I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.” Steve Jobs

12) “If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.”

Clayton Christensen

13) “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Sir Ken Robinson

14) “You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Christopher Columbus

15) “The road to bold is paved with failure.” Peter H. Diamandis

16) The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out. Aaron Levie

17) “If it really matters, you will find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.” Unknown

18) “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin

19) “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.” Warren Buffett

20) “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there will be no hope for it.” Albert Einstein

21) “It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.” Jeff Bezos

22) Disruption is about risk-taking. But then you become a Fortune 500 company, which is about risk mitigation. Steve Case

23) “I am still learning.”― Michelangelo

24) Constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself. Elon Musk

25) Pain + Reflection = Progess - Ray Dalio

26) “It’s only by being bold that you get anywhere.” Richard Branson

27) “People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs

28) “If you’re trying to disrupt the status quo and beat bigger competitors, you’re not going to do it by playing their game.” Dharmesh Shah

29) Status quo, you know, is Latin for, ‘The mess we’re in.’”
Ronald Reagan

30)  “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” Steve Jobs

31) “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” Theodore Levitt

32)  Regret weighs heavier that doubt. Unknown

33) “I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think you have failed—but that won't be true unless you give up.” Ray Dalio

34) True disruption means threatening your existing product line and your past investments. Breakthrough products disrupt current lines of businesses. Peter Diamandis

35)Times of crisis, of disruption or constructive change, are not only predictable, but desirable. They mean growth. Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most. Dostoevsky

36) As a company, one of our greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you’re going to invent, you’re going to disrupt. Bezos

37) “The first ingredient to being wrong is to claim that you are right. Geniuses have a knack for raising new questions. ― Criss Jami

38) He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

39) Magic happens when you step outside your comfort zone. Unknown

40) “Once you become an expert at something, you become an incrementalist," he says. "It takes a disruptor, someone from outside the industry looking in.”― Naveen Jain

41) You either find a way or you make a way. Unknown.

42) “Skype demonetized long-distance telephony; Craigslist demonetized classified advertising; Napster demonetized the music industry. This list goes on and on. More critically, because demonetization is also deceptive, almost no one within those industries was prepared for such radical change. Diamandis,

43) ”I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. None of those things are fun, but also they don't matter. What matters is companies that don't continue to experiment or embrace failure eventually get in the position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence. I don't believe in bet-the-company bets.”Jeff Bezos

44) If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.”  Jeff Bezos

45) “Innovation is the unrelenting drive to break the status quo and develop anew where few have dared to go.“ — Steven Jeffes

46) The value of an idea lies in the using of it. “ — Thomas Edison

47) “Innovation is taking two things that exist and putting them together in a new way. “- Tom Freston, Co-founder of MTV

48) You can either disrupt or be disrupted. Unknown.

49) Imagine the world in 5 years. Imagine it without what you do today. What does it look like? Where are the trends pointing. Who are the players? Now imagine where you’d like to be and orient your model to that. Professor Kamal Munir.

50) Don’t look for ideas that will confirm your thinking; rather look for trends that will disrupt your thoughts. Rich Simmonds

What would you add?

Do you have your own motivational leadership talk that you give to your team? We’d love to hear your ideas and add to them to the list!

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