Top 70 Marshall Goldsmith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What got you here won’t get you there.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

Featured in: Goal Quotes, Change Quotes, Personal Development Quotes, Career Development Quotes, Growth Quotes

2. “Those who lead by example and demonstrate passion for what they do make it much easier for their followers to do the same.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

Featured in: Influence Quotes, Boss Quotes

3. “Great leaders encourage leadership development by openly developing themselves.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

Featured in: Professional Growth Quotes

4. “Leadership is providing inspiration and vision, then developing and empowering others to achieve this vision.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

Featured in: Friday Quotes for Work

5. “To help others develop, start with yourself.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

6. “Successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to others.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

7. “Structure not only increases our chance of success, it makes us more efficient at it.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

8. “To help others develop, start with yourself! When the boss acts like a little god and tells everyone else they need to improve, that behavior can be copied at every level of management. Every level then points out how the level below it needs to change. The end result: No one gets much better.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

Featured in: Boss Quotes

9. “When we do what we have to do we are compliant. When we do what we choose to do we are committed.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

10. “Every decision that affects our lives will be made by the person who has the power to make that decision, not the ‘right’ person or the ‘smartest’ person or the ‘best’ person. Make peace with this fact.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

11. “The best knowledge workers are working for more than money.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

12. “Never confuse acquiring degrees with wisdom.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

13. “Peter Drucker, who said, “Our mission in life should be to make a positive difference, not to prove how smart or right we are.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

14. “After living with their dysfunctional behavior for so many years, people become invested in defending their dysfunctions rather than changing them.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

15. “Anybody can change, but they have to want to change.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

16. “If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

17. “People who believe they can succeed see opportunities where others see threats.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

18. “The major challenge of most executives is not understanding the practice of leadership – it is practicing their understanding of leadership.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

19. “The only way to find happiness is to understand that happiness is not out there. It’s in here. And happiness is not next week. It’s now.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

20. “Never wrestle with a pig – because you both get dirty but the pig loves it.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

21. “The greatest challenge in behavioral change is not knowing what to do – the greatest challenge is doing it!”

— Marshall Goldsmith

22. “Change is not a one-way street- it involves two parties: the person who is changing and the people who notice it.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

23. “Successful people never drink from a glass that’s half empty.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

24. “The best way that we can begin to produce positive change is to make peace with what is in ourselves and others, and then work to move forward and make life even better.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

25. “Leadership is not about me. It is all about them.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

26. “If you want to change anything about yourself, the best time to start is now. Ask yourself, “What am I willing to change now?” Just do that. That’s more than enough. For now.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

27. “If you know what matters to you, it’s easier to commit to change. If you can’t identify what matters to you, you won’t know when it’s being threatened. And in my experience, people only change their ways when what they truly value is threatened.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

28. “Fate is the hand of cards we’ve been dealt. Choice is how we play the hand.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

29. “The simplest tool I know to finding fulfillment is being open to fulfillment.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

30. “We can’t admit that we need to change – either because we’re unaware that a change is desirable, or, more likely, we’re aware but have reasoned our way into elaborate excuses that deny our need for change.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

31. “People don’t get better without follow-up. So let’s get better at following up with our people.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

32. “Every decision in the world is made by the person who has the power to make the decision. Make peace with that.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

33. “It works because helping people be “right” is more productive than proving them “wrong.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

34. “If you aren’t opening doors for people, you are closing them!”

— Marshall Goldsmith

35. “Improvement is hard. If it were easy, we’d already be better.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

36. “Almost everyone I meet is successful because of doing a lot of things right, and almost everyone I meet is successful in spite of some behavior that defies common sense.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

37. “The only way to cure the disease is to find happiness and meaning now.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

38. “When you start a sentence with “no,” “but,” “however,” or any variation thereof, no matter how friendly your tone or how many cute mollifying phrases you throw in to acknowledge the other person’s feelings, the message to the other person is You are wrong.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

39. “The more aware we are, the less likely any trigger, even in the most mundane circumstances, will prompt hasty unthinking behavior that leads to undesirable consequences.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

40. “You can continue doing what you’re doing for a long time. But you’ll never become the person you want to be.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

41. “The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

42. “But the higher up you go in the organization, the more you need to make other people winners and not make it about winning yourself.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

43. “People will do something – including changing their behavior – only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

44. “Getting better is its own reward. If we do that, we can never feel cheated.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

45. “The most reliable predictor of what you will be doing five minutes from now is what you are doing now.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

46. “To avoid undesirable behavior, avoid the environments where it is most likely to occur.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

47. “When we presume that we are better than people who need structure and guidance, we lack one of the most crucial ingredients for change: humility.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

48. “But for some reason, many people enjoy living in the past, especially if going back there lets them blame someone else for anything that’s gone wrong in their lives. That’s when clinging to the past becomes an interpersonal problem. We use the past as a weapon against others.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

49. “In her zeal to be a professional negotiator, she behaved like an amateur human being.”

— Marshall Goldsmith

50. “Peter Drucker famously said, “Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.”

— Marshall Goldsmith