Top 100 Jon Gordon Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Failure provides you with a great opportunity to decide how much you really want something. Will you give up? Or will you dig deeper, commit more, work harder, learn, and get better? If you know that this is what you truly want, you will be willing to pay the price that success requires. You will be willing to fail again and again in order to succeed.”

— Jon Gordon

52. “Love is the answer for the team’s success.”

— Jon Gordon

53. “Yes!” the carpenter exclaimed. “When you love, you serve, and when you serve, you sacrifice. Service requires a sacrifice of something. Whether it’s time, energy, money, love, effort, or focus, serving others always costs you something, but with service and sacrifice, you gain so much more.”

— Jon Gordon

54. “You fuel your life with trust and love instead of fear and doubt.”

— Jon Gordon

55. “You win by cultivating the right culture, leadership, expectations, beliefs, mindset, relationships, and habits before you even play the game. You win in the locker room first. Then, you win on the field.”

— Jon Gordon

56. “Positive energy and positive people create positive results. There is certainly a lot of negativity in the world and choosing positive energy helps us deal with the negative people and negative situations that can knock us off course.”

— Jon Gordon

57. “I am not bound to win, I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to the light that I have. – Abraham Lincoln sixteenth.”

— Jon Gordon

58. “Often the difference between success and failure is belief.”

— Jon Gordon

59. “Every problem has a gift for you in its hands as my man Richard Bach says. You can choose to see the curse or the gift. And this one choice will determine if your life is a success story or one big soap opera.”

— Jon Gordon

60. “Everyone wants to do what the great ones do; but very few are willing to do what they did to become great.”

— Jon Gordon

61. “Adversity is not a dead end but a detour to a better outcome than you can imagine!”

— Jon Gordon

62. “The measure of our success will not be determined by how we act during the great times in our life but rather by how we think and respond to the challenges of our most difficult moments.”

— Jon Gordon

63. “Serve Them – A great leader once said, the higher you get in an organization the more it is your duty to serve the people below you rather than having the people below serve you. The key is to serve their growth, their future, their career, and their spirits so they enjoy work, life, and being on your bus.”

— Jon Gordon

64. “Never do anything out of obligation. Do everything with gratitude and love.”

— Jon Gordon

65. “When leaders become focused on the fruit instead of the root and worry about the outcome instead of the process of developing team members, they may survive in the short run, but they will not thrive in the long run.”

— Jon Gordon

66. “He told himself that failure is not a definition. It’s just an event. Just because you fail doesn’t mean you are a failure. It’s just a situation to overcome and transform. And it will make you stronger if you are willing to learn and grow from it.”

— Jon Gordon

67. “As a leader, it is so important that your words equal your actions. It is imperative that you make sure that you go through a self-evaluation process on an almost daily basis to make sure that your actions are in line with your words. You must do what you say and say what you do.”

— Jon Gordon

68. “You can’t be a great leader if all you are serving is yourself.”

— Jon Gordon

69. “It’s about mental toughness. Mental toughness is everything.”

— Jon Gordon

70. “Did you know you can take your bus anywhere you want to go? Say yes three times with me. Yes, yes, yes. You can take it to the movies, the beach or the North Pole. Just say where you want to go and believe that it will be so. Because every journey and ride begins with a desire to go somewhere and do something and if you have a desire then you also have the power to make it happen.”

— Jon Gordon

71. “Strategy is important. Execution is imperative. However, the most overlooked aspect in team sports, and what most coaches and leaders fail to grasp, is the fact that it is your culture that will determine whether your strategy works and is sustainable. It is the culture you create that is going to determine whether your players perform and execute.”

— Jon Gordon

72. “Never do anything out of obligation. Do everything with gratitude and love. It’s much more powerful that way.”

— Jon Gordon

73. “Negative people often tend to create negative cultures whereas positive corporate cultures are created by positive people.”

— Jon Gordon

74. “I don’t want my children to be what I want them to be. I want them to become everything God created them to be.”

— Jon Gordon

75. “Make sure you have the right team members to strengthen your culture instead of people who suck the energy out of it. You can do everything right as a leader and coach, but if you don’t have positive mentors and team members in the locker room your culture and team will fall apart.”

— Jon Gordon

76. “The past has to be viewed as a springboard to the future.”

— Jon Gordon

77. “Enthusiasm attracts more passengers and energizes them during the ride.”

— Jon Gordon

78. “When you experience resistance, you find the lessons that you are meant to learn.”

— Jon Gordon

79. “You want to be a passionate leader who makes decisions that are based on belief and principle over those that are based on feeling.”

— Jon Gordon

80. “Remember, life gives us warnings for a reason. Learn from this. Do things differently.”

— Jon Gordon

81. “Every crisis offers an opportunity to grow stronger and wiser; to reach deep within and discover a better you that will create a better outcome.”

— Jon Gordon

82. “You must spend more time on building your culture than on everything else. Culture is what produces wins over time.”

— Jon Gordon

83. “We often have to lose what we thought we wanted to find what God wants for us.”

— Jon Gordon

84. “I see you resting and learning. I see you getting stronger. I see you preparing for greater things so you can take your life and business to a higher level. Always remember that our biggest battle comes before our greatest victory.”

— Jon Gordon

85. “If you are looking to build a new culture or transform the one you have, the first questions you should ask yourself are, “What do we stand for?” and “What do we want to be known for?”

— Jon Gordon

86. “Letting people share their gifts and strengths is real love.”

— Jon Gordon

87. “I’m an over-believer.”

— Jon Gordon

88. “In the face of all this, it is your culture that will be the driving force to create the resiliency, toughness, passion, and attitude to overcome the obstacles in your way.”

— Jon Gordon

89. “I knew the biggest priority was to create a winning culture in which every member could thrive and excel. This meant we would not only have to create the right culture for the team but also for the rest of the organization.”

— Jon Gordon

90. “Great leaders are great because people trust and respect them, not because they have power.”

— Jon Gordon

91. “To run a successful organization,” I say, “you must learn to manage people’s energy, including your own.”

— Jon Gordon

92. “Throughout the day, anytime you find yourself feeling stressed or wanting to complain, stop for 10 seconds and breathe. Count your breaths and your blessings.”

— Jon Gordon

93. “Critics write words but they don’t write the future.”

— Jon Gordon

94. “It is the culture you create that is going to determine whether your players perform and execute.”

— Jon Gordon

95. “To build a winning team, you must help your players and staff have amnesia about past outcomes and remember all the little things they did to get better.”

— Jon Gordon

96. “She decided that the greatest gift she could give her children would not be wealth or material things, but rather the gifts she could leave in them. In their hearts, in their minds, in their attitudes toward life.”

— Jon Gordon

97. “Hi, I’m not answering my phone right now because I’m building kitchen cabinets at 111 Main Street. I’m putting my heart and soul into these cabinets so I won’t be returning calls until I’m finished with the job. Please know I will give the same attention and care to your work, as well. If you need to talk to me feel free to come by 111 Main Street during my lunch break at noon.”

— Jon Gordon

98. “A man goes to the village to visit the wise man and he says to the wise man, “I feel like there are two dogs inside me. One dog is this positive, loving, kind, and gentle dog and then I have this angry, mean-spirited, and negative dog and they fight all the time. I don’t know which is going to win.” The wise man thinks for a moment and he says, “I know which is going to win. The one you feed the most, so feed the positive dog.”

— Jon Gordon

99. “So be confident that victory is yours and yet walk humbly each day, relying on God to receive this victory.”

— Jon Gordon

100. “I once heard this saying that God keeps breaking your heart until it opens. And ain’t that the truth. Think about it. Every struggle, every challenge, every adversity brings you closer to your heart, to your true self, to who you really are. Sometimes you got to be broken down to the point where you feel powerless to discover your ultimate and true power.”

— Jon Gordon