I would suggest that excellence occurs in direct proportion to necessary suffering, but in inverse proportion to unnecessary suffering or toxic stress. Connection is the best antidote to unnecessary suffering.

Young people beginning a career need to realize that there are lots of buses in life. More often than not, selecting which one to be on determines success or failure, joy or despair.

We live in a paradox: connected electronically but disconnected interpersonally. However, when you recognize the problem, you can take steps to correct it. You can create an emotionally connected environment anywhere if you try hard enough.

Lack of respect for the worker. This nourishes disconnection, fear, anger, phoniness, and all the bad stuff that impedes excellence.

Modern loneliness is an extraverted loneliness, in which the person is surrounded by many people and partakes of much communication but feels unrecognized and more alone and, although connected technically, isolated and even estranged emotionally.

No work is most important. Or, put differently, all work is important but work done poorly becomes most important.

When we forgive, the slave we free is ourselves.

From the biological standpoint, people deprived of the human moment in their day-to-day business dealings, actually in all domains of their lives, are losing brain cells - literally - while those who cultivate the human moment are growing them.

To create worry humans elongate fear with anticipation and memory, expand it in imagination and fuel it with emotion. The uniquely human mental process called worrying depends upon having a brain that can reason, remember, reflect, feel, and imagine. Only humans have a brain big enough to do this simultaneously and do it well.