Top 80 Daniel Coyle Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You know the phrase ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?” Edmondson says. “In fact, it’s not enough to not shoot them. You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.”

— Daniel Coyle

2. “A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. – Thomas Carruthers.”

— Daniel Coyle

3. “The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.”

— Daniel Coyle

4. “When you ask people inside highly successful groups to describe their relationship with one another, they all tend to choose the same word. This word is not friends or team or tribe or any other equally plausible term. The word they use is family.”

— Daniel Coyle

5. “While successful culture can look and feel like magic, the truth is that it’s not. Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.”

— Daniel Coyle

6. “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”

— Daniel Coyle

7. “Struggle is not an option: it’s a biological requirement.”

— Daniel Coyle

8. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better. – Samuel Beckett.”

— Daniel Coyle

9. “You can’t prevent mistakes, but you can solve problems graciously.”

— Daniel Coyle

10. “Skills of proficiency are about doing a task the same way, every single time.”

— Daniel Coyle

11. “Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust – it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.”

— Daniel Coyle

12. “One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be.”

— Daniel Coyle

13. “The solution is to ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.”

— Daniel Coyle

14. “The real courage is seeing the truth and speaking the truth to each other.”

— Daniel Coyle

15. “Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.”

— Daniel Coyle

16. “Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.”

— Daniel Coyle

17. “Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time.”

— Daniel Coyle

18. “Hire people smarter than you. Fail early, fail often. Listen to everyone’s ideas. Face toward the problems. B-level work is bad for your soul. It’s more important to invest in good people than in good ideas.”

— Daniel Coyle

19. “Feeling stupid is no fun. But being willing to be stupid – in other words, being willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes – is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections.”

— Daniel Coyle

20. “You will become clever through your mistakes. – German proverb.”

— Daniel Coyle

21. “We are all paid to solve problems. Make sure to pick fun people to solve problems with.”

— Daniel Coyle

22. “As Albert Einstein said, “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”

— Daniel Coyle

23. “We have a place in our brain that’s always worried about what people think of us, especially higher-ups. As far as our brain is concerned, if our social system rejects us, we could die. Given that our sense of danger is so natural and automatic, organizations have to do some pretty special things to overcome that natural trigger.”

— Daniel Coyle

24. “Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices. This is why Catmull has learned to focus less on the ideas than on people – specifically, on providing teams with tools and support to locate paths, make hard choices, and navigate the arduous process together.”

— Daniel Coyle

25. “Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it’s a biological requirement.”

— Daniel Coyle

26. “When we hear a fact, a few isolated areas of our brain light up, translating words and meanings. When we hear a story, however, our brain lights up like Las Vegas, tracing the chains of cause, effect, and meaning. Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.”

— Daniel Coyle

27. “This is a different way of thinking about human beings,” Pentland says. “Individuals aren’t really individuals. They’re more like musicians in a jazz quartet, forming a web of unconscious actions and reactions to complement others in the group. You don’t look at the informational content of the messages; you look at patterns that show how the message is being sent. Those patterns contain many signals that tell us about the relationship and what’s really going on beneath the surface.”

— Daniel Coyle

28. “Things that appear to be obstacles turn out to be desirable in the long haul,” Bjork said. “One real encounter, even for a few seconds, is far more useful than several hundred observations.”

— Daniel Coyle

29. “To sum up: it’s time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.”

— Daniel Coyle

30. “If you have early success, do your best to ignore the praise and keep pushing yourself to the edges of your ability, where improvement happens. If you don’t have early success, don’t quit. Instead, treat your early efforts as experiments, not as verdicts. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.”

— Daniel Coyle

31. “There’s a tendency in our business, as in all businesses, to value the idea as opposed to the person or a team of people,” he says. “But that’s not accurate. Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.”

— Daniel Coyle

32. “Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus fix them.”

— Daniel Coyle

33. “Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces:.”

— Daniel Coyle

34. “I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work. – Charles Darwin.”

— Daniel Coyle

35. “One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together.”

— Daniel Coyle

36. “Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.”

— Daniel Coyle

37. “In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions. Skilled listeners do not interrupt with phrases like Hey, here’s an idea or Let me tell you what worked for me in a similar situation because they understand that it’s not about them.”

— Daniel Coyle

38. “Envision a reachable goal, and envision the obstacles. The thing is, as Oettingen discovered, this method works, triggering significant changes in behavior and motivation.”

— Daniel Coyle

39. “Capitalize on Threshold Moments: When we enter a new group, our brains decide quickly whether to connect. So successful cultures treat these threshold moments as more important than any other.”

— Daniel Coyle

40. “The staggering babies embody the deepest truth about deep practice: to get good, it’s helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill.”

— Daniel Coyle

41. “One does not become a master coach by accident.”

— Daniel Coyle

42. “After all, you aren’t built to be transformed in a single day. You are built to improve little by little, connection by connection, rep by rep. As Wooden also said, “Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens – and when it happens, it lasts.”

— Daniel Coyle

43. “Aim for Candor; Avoid Brutal Honesty: Giving honest feedback is tricky, because it can easily result in people feeling hurt or demoralized. One useful distinction, made most clearly at Pixar, is to aim for candor and avoid brutal honesty. By aiming for candor – feedback that is smaller, more targeted, less personal, less judgmental, and equally impactful – it’s easier to maintain a sense of safety and belonging in the group.”

— Daniel Coyle

44. “When you practice a soft skill, focus on making a high number of varied reps, and on getting clear feedback. Don’t worry too much about making errors – the important thing is to explore. Soft skills are often more fun to practice, but they’re also tougher because they demand that you coach yourself. After each session ask yourself, What worked? What didn’t? And why?”

— Daniel Coyle

45. “No shortcuts,” “Work hard, be nice,” “Don’t eat the marshmallow,” “Team and family,” “If there’s a problem, we look for the solution,” “Read, baby, read,” “All of us will learn,” “KIPPsters do the right thing when no one is watching,” “Everything is earned,” “Be the constant, not the variable,” “If a teammate needs help, we give; if we need help, we ask,” “No robots,” and “Prove the doubters wrong.”

— Daniel Coyle

46. “We’re prewired to imitate,” Anders Ericsson says. “When you put yourself in the same situation as an outstanding person and attack a task that they took on, it has a big effect on your skill.”

— Daniel Coyle

47. “In other words, a small thank-you caused people to behave far more generously to a completely different person. This is because thank-yous aren’t only expressions of gratitude; they’re crucial belonging cues that generate a contagious sense of safety, connection, and motivation.”

— Daniel Coyle

48. “Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways – operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes – makes you smarter. Or.”

— Daniel Coyle

49. “Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains.”

— Daniel Coyle

50. “As Dave Cooper says, I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say.”

— Daniel Coyle