Top 35 Stephen Guise Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Pomodoro Technique: Work 25 minutes, rest five minutes. Repeat.”

— Stephen Guise

2. “Rumination is a desperate, futile attempt to change the past by thinking about it. It’s a form of denial, and acceptance is the antidote. Acceptance means that you’ll be hit with the full force of the pain – and it will hurt if it’s something serious – but once you do it, you give yourself the best chance to move beyond it. Acceptance of your humanity is equally paramount. You’re allowed to make mistakes – even horrific ones – because you’re human.”

— Stephen Guise

3. “It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It’s what we do consistently.” – Anthony Robbins.”

— Stephen Guise

4. “There is no perfect plan and no perfect scenario, because life happens. As helpful it is to be able to plan, it’s equally important to adapt to changing circumstances and problems. It’s important to understand that you will be significantly and continually impacted by imperfection – from yourself, the world, and others.”

— Stephen Guise

5. “Darkness is not something that exists on its own – it’s the name we give for the absence of light. Perhaps people have bad habits because they lack the light of good habits, which permits a dark void in their life. When you add good habits into your life, it illuminates another possible path, restores your confidence, and gives you hope. It also serves as a brilliant foundation from which to build.”

— Stephen Guise

6. “Having no energy usually means you have zero motivation.”

— Stephen Guise

7. “If you find yourself ruminating about something, come back and go through this process. As you move through it, the subsequent steps become easier. For example, it may be extremely difficult to focus on the present moment right away when you catch yourself ruminating, but if you first accept the past, consider chance and failure, and adjust your self-talk, it will become much easier.”

— Stephen Guise

8. “In addition, school teaches us that ‘A efforts’ bring ‘A results.’ Real life shows us that ‘A efforts’ only give us a chance at ‘A results.’ Students can go out into the job market, do all the right things, and still get a real-life ‘F’ when they aren’t selected for a job.”

— Stephen Guise

9. “We make the grave error of redefining partial success as “failure.”

— Stephen Guise

10. “Be the person with embarrassing goals and impressive results instead of one of the many people with impressive goals and embarrassing results.”

— Stephen Guise

11. “The primary benefits of becoming an imperfectionist are reduced stress and greater results by taking positive action in more situations. The more fearless, confident, and free a person is, the more they embrace imperfection in their life.”

— Stephen Guise

12. “It’s not that belief increases your ability to do things – it increases your willingness to try.”

— Stephen Guise

13. “If you don’t manage to reframe perfectionism as a damaging and inferior mindset, the illusion of its superiority will thwart your desired changes.”

— Stephen Guise

14. “A common, false assumption is that aiming for perfection gets you closer to it. The opposite is true: Embracing imperfection will bring you closer to perfection than a perfectionist mindset will.”

— Stephen Guise

15. “Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.” – Dalai Lama XIV.”

— Stephen Guise

16. “When you repeat a behavior over time, your brain learns to automate the process. It’s more energy efficient to automatically do something than to manually weigh your options and decide to act the same way every time. When you make a decision very quickly, it is probably from habit, even if you think you’re actively deciding. In a way, you made the decision a while ago.”

— Stephen Guise

17. “True self-discipline is not when you have someone ordering you to do push-ups, it’s when you decide on your own to do them.”

— Stephen Guise

18. “The perfect team in personal development is small steps and willpower.”

— Stephen Guise

19. “Perfectionism makes you stay home, not take chances, and procrastinate on projects; it makes you think your life is worse than it is; it keeps you from being yourself; it stresses you out; it tells you that good is bad; and it ignores the natural way in which things work.”

— Stephen Guise

20. “The key to building powerful confidence is to decide specifically what you can be confident about right now, and build from there.”

— Stephen Guise

21. “We’re quick to blame ourselves for lack of progress, but slow to blame our strategies. Then we repeat them over and over again, trying to make them work. But here’s the thing – if you fail using a particular strategy more than a few times, you need to try another one. It doesn’t matter if it works for everyone else if it doesn’t work for you! This is a lesson I wish I had learned years ago.”

— Stephen Guise

22. “Emotions will either serve or master, depending on who is in charge.” – Jim Rohn.”

— Stephen Guise

23. “The common myth is that you can establish a habit in 21 or 30 days. Some books are wholly based around this false concept. The truth is a bit uglier and harder to predict – 18 to 254 days until habit formation, depending on the habit and the person.”

— Stephen Guise

24. “We want to be in motion in the direction of our goals as much and as frequently as possible.”

— Stephen Guise

25. “People gain weight in the same way that people successfully lose weight: small and seemingly insignificant lifestyle choices accumulate over time into bigger changes. No matter what those “fast weight loss” books tell you, real change doesn’t happen from a huge and sudden shift in behavior.”

— Stephen Guise

26. “Never use guilt as motivation.”

— Stephen Guise

27. “The habit of rising one hour earlier each morning to read would give you 365 extra hours more per year. At the average reading speed of 300 words per minute, this extra time would allow you to read 6,570,000 words, or 131 more 50,000-word books per year.”

— Stephen Guise

28. “Never enough” is rooted in general discontent, malaise, and hopelessness. It implies that satisfaction and contentment are out of reach no matter what one does. Because there is no end in sight, there is no satisfaction – only guilt and shame. Perfectionists continue to look for satisfaction in what they do when it can only be found in what they think about what they do.”

— Stephen Guise

29. “Happiness decreases your ability to perform concrete goals, but since the concrete part of mini habits is, for example, just one push-up, it’s still easy to do while in an abstract state of mind. It’s so small that it requires very little mental energy and attention. And since happiness increases performance and focus on abstract goals, after your concrete goal, you can rely on your abstract goal of “being fit” to make you want to exercise more.”

— Stephen Guise

30. “When you invest in yourself in key areas like fitness and learning, you tend to do it in other areas too.”

— Stephen Guise

31. “Since a good behavior change strategy must be able to succeed in the worst circumstances, it’s best to design a strategy that works in low willpower situations.”

— Stephen Guise

32. “Make a mental note to flag anytime you think of what you “should” have done. When you catch yourself doing this, reevaluate the situation and replace it with “could.”

— Stephen Guise

33. “The problem with refined grains is once again the processing, which basically “takes the life out” of the food. It strips out the nutrients and breaks down the food, making it more like an injection of glucose than something you need to digest.”

— Stephen Guise

34. “Unlike motivation, willpower can be strengthened like a muscle.”

— Stephen Guise

35. “When you say you want to lose weight, what you really mean is that you want to play with your kids without getting winded, you want to look in the mirror and feel good about what you see, you want to impress someone, you want to live a long and healthy life, you want to improve your overall quality of life, or you want to look good in spandex. These are all fine reasons to lose weight as long as they come from you.”

— Stephen Guise

36. “A destructive habit to have is believing that you have to be motivated to act.”

— Stephen Guise

37. “To show you what I mean, here is an example of a positive chain of a healthy lifestyle: better nutrition leads to better sleep, which leads to fewer cravings, which leads to better eating habits, all of which lead to more energy, which leads to a more active lifestyle, which leads to improved physical and mental performance, which leads to more confidence and success, which leads to more money, which leads to a Ferrari. Better nutrition leads to a Ferrari?”

— Stephen Guise

38. “Contentment isn’t passivity.”

— Stephen Guise