personal development on Incompetence

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, once visited the Great Pyramid of Giza as part of an official state visit. When visiting the Great Pyramid of Giza, he was told it had taken twen...

Many of us struggle to know exactly what to pack when we go on our various travels. The Pilgrims in their voyage to the new world were no different. As Bill Bryson describes in his book Made in Americ...

Mistakes were quite possibly made by the administrations in which I served.

A leader's failure is never isolated, involving only the leader. Usually the failure of a leader involves basic patterns of hiding and blaming throughout the whole organization, patterns that must...

The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. . . . We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance—and choo...

As somebody once said, there’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership; it underscores the need for leadership.… The nature of leadership demands that there always be an element of uncertainty. The temptation is to thin...

If you have no opposition in the place you serve, you're serving in the wrong place.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

If you wish to improve be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

If your idleness is a complete slump, that is, indecision, fretting, worry, or due to over-feeding and physical mugginess, that is bad, terrible and utterly sterile. Or if it is that idleness which so...

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a p...

Ability involves responsibility; power, to its last particle, is duty.

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.

"How could this happen? I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?"

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

He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the test of greatness.

Immaturity talks when it should listen, and is silent when it should speak.

Unable to value, unable to enjoy.

Whenever I have encountered any kind of deep problem with civilization anywhere in the world—be it the logging of rain forests, ethnic or religious intolerance or the brutal destruction of a cultural ...

Since failure is our unforgivable sin, we are willing to ignore all forms of deviance in people if they just achieve the success symbols which we worship.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.

Like so many people, I once associated excellence with flawlessness. The excellent person never makes mistakes, is always consistent and confident, and is continuously applauded by scores of imperfect...

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.