Top 90 Jocelyn K. Glei Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To make great ideas a reality, we must act, experiment, fail, adapt, and learn on a daily basis.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

2. “Genius is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent perspiration.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

3. “Nothing truly innovative, nothing that has advanced art, business, design, or humanity, was ever created in the face of genuine certainty or perfect information. Because the only way to be certain before you begin is if the thing you seek to do has already been done. In which case, you’re no longer creating, you’re replicating. And that’s not why we’re here.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

4. “It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.” Frequently.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

5. “Here’s how it works for Stephen King: There are certain things I do if I sit down to write. I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning. I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.1.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

6. “The world is random and unpredictable, which means that it is close to impossible to outline exactly what your next best move is. But you can explore it – by doing and trying. Just make sure you don’t go all in before you’ve figured out that it works.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

7. “Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours. Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

8. “Whether it’s intelligence, creativity, self-control, charm, or athleticism – the science shows our abilities to be profoundly malleable. When it comes to mastering any skill, your experience, effort, and persistence matter a lot. Change really is always possible – there is no ability that can’t be developed with effort. So the next time you find yourself thinking, “But I’m just not good at this,” remember: you’re just not good at it yet.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

9. “Thought, if not written down and shared with others, changes nothing. Does it matter?”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

10. “The idea is that one day a week, you need to get your mind in a different mode, you need to not work. Every week, your brain – and your soul – needs to be reset.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

11. “At the end of the day – or, really, from the beginning – building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

12. “Yet there wasn’t a single day when I sat down to write an article, blog post, or book chapter without a string of people waiting for me to get back to them. It.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

13. “What is a professional, anyway? A professional is someone who can keep working at a high level of effort and ethics, no matter what is going on – for good or ill – around him or inside him. A professional shows up every day. A professional plays hurt. A professional takes neither success nor failure personally.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

14. “Treat your work as a refuge – an oasis of control and creative satisfaction in the midst of the bad stuff. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not on fire creatively every day – give yourself credit if you show up for work and make even a small amount of progress. When you put down your tools for the day, you may even see your personal situation with a fresh eye. POVERTY.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

15. “After high school, kids know everything, after their bachelor’s degree, they know something, and after a PhD, they now know that they know nothing.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

16. “The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It’s the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you’re constantly awake work-wise you don’t allow that to happen.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

17. “We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

18. “Establish hard edges in your day. Set a start time and a finish time for your workday – even if you work alone. Dedicate different times of day to different activities: creative work, meetings, correspondence, administrative work, and so on. These hard edges keep tasks from taking longer than they need to and encroaching on your other important work.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

19. “In short, lucky people are open-minded, upbeat, proactive, and always willing to try something new. While it’s good to be directed in your career, you’ll want to stay open and alert to unexpected possibilities. And when they show up, act on them. You never know what the outcome might be.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

20. “In other words, if you’re not motivated to be nice because of the good karma, be motivated to be nice because ultimately it saves time.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

21. “Want to change the world? Push everyone you know to work within their ISO. Mentor people to help them realize their genuine interests and skills and capitalize on even the smallest opportunities around them. When it comes to your own career, make every decision with a constant eye toward your own intersection. A career of “work with intention” is the kind that moves industries forward. Do it for yourself and for the rest of us.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

22. “With focus and consistency you can change your habits. By changing your habits, you reprogram the behaviors that control most of your life and ultimately determine your success.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

23. “To “know thyself” is hard work. Harder still is to believe that you, with all your flaws, are enough – without checking in, tweeting an update, or sharing a photo as proof of your existence for the approval of your 719 followers.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

24. “When you make choices that will affect your career, aim for the intersection of your genuine interests, skills, and opportunities.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

25. “To truly excel, you must also continue to create for the most important audience of all: yourself.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

26. “Frank Lloyd Wright insisted that constraints historically have resulted in a flowering of the imagination: “The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest and, therefore, when most was required of imagination in order to build at all.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

27. “Every time you’re doing something, you’re not doing something else. But you don’t really see what it is that you’re giving up. Especially when it comes to, let’s say, e-mail versus doing something that takes fifty hours.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

28. “Like it or not, we are constantly forced to juggle tasks and battle unwanted distractions – to truly set ourselves apart, we must learn to be creative amidst chaos.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

29. “If you’re feeling frustrated with your progress toward your goals, it’s tempting to focus on what you lack that other people seem to have, to obsess over followers, engagement, traffic, or any other benchmark. The reality is that numbers don’t necessarily measure success, and they’re certainly not a requirement for fulfillment.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

30. “The challenge is that the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

31. “At first meditation will be uncomfortable, but you’ll get better at it. You’ll learn a lot about yourself, and you’ll get better at being mindful, and being comfortable in solitude. You’ll also learn to watch your thoughts and not be controlled by them. As you do, you’ll have learned a key skill for focus: how to notice the urge to switch tasks and not act on that urge, but just return your attention to the task at hand. This is what you learn in solitude, and it is everything.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

32. “Reaching for greatness without a genuine interest in the field is like running a marathon after fasting. Remarkable achievements are fueled by genuine interest.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

33. “How does being tethered to our devices impact our physical bodies – and even our imaginations?”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

34. “When we are working with intention, we toil away endlessly – often through the wee hours of the morning – on projects we care about deeply. Whether it’s building an intricate model of an ancient ship, writing a song, or mapping out an idea for your first business, you do it out of genuine interest and love.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

35. “Whatever your strengths are, they will likely lead straight into your weaknesses.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

36. “Pick a vision that is ambitious and far-reaching enough to last decades, not years. Commit.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

37. “Be aware of the cost of constant connection. If your focus is always on others – and quenching your appetite for information and external validation – you will miss out on the opportunity to mine the potential of your own mind. Recognize.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

38. “Consumers don’t need many things from your brand – they just need one thing from your brand. You.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

39. “Deep and regular breathing, also referred to as diaphragmatic breathing, helps to quiet the sympathetic nervous system and allows the parasympathetic nervous system – which governs our sense of hunger and satiety, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function – to become more dominant.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

40. “Nothing should resonate more loudly than your own intuition.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

41. “Now, I think that’s pretty much Planning 101. You put the things that you really want do into your calendar.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

42. “I think we need that self-awareness. That we don’t have time because it’s convenient not to have the time, because maybe we don’t want to challenge ourselves.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

43. “I have a long list of “Secrets of Adulthood,” the lessons I’ve learned as I’ve grown up, such as: “It’s the task that’s never started that’s more tiresome,” “The days are long, but the years are short,” and “Always leave plenty of room in the suitcase.” One of my most helpful Secrets is, “What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.” Day by day, we build our lives, and day by day, we can take steps toward making real the magnificent creations of our imaginations.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

44. “Creative minds are highly susceptible to distraction, and our newfound connectivity poses a powerful temptation for all of us to drift off focus.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

45. “We’ve been sold on the false idea that working from home or, worse, on vacation to help a harried client is a good thing. We are expected to be on call and available to everyone all the time. We’ve been fitted with an electronic leash for bad bosses, demanding clients, and bored friends. The.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

46. “What would it mean to approach e-mail and social media mindfully?”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

47. “To make an impact with creativity, you must love what you do. Otherwise, don’t bother. It requires too many hours of hardship, self-doubt, and pain to conceive of something new and birth it into the world. It takes struggle that you genuinely believe is worth the pain. You must do it as a labor of love.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

48. “But unlike traditional measures of success – like money, titles, or status – the creative mind is driven by a desire to see creativity come to life. Success is making an impact in what matters most to you.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

49. “Whatever the future of technology may hold, the greatest leaders will be those most capable of tuning in to themselves and harnessing the full power of their own minds.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei

50. “Maybe we can’t carve out whole days for ourselves like Bezos did, but preserving pockets of time to unplug – perhaps a couple of hours in the morning a few days a week – can be transformative.”

— Jocelyn K. Glei