Excellence Quotes

Start planning from your internal or spiritual view of things. The external view always has a way of distorting, discouraging and limiting your dream.

~ Archibald Marwizi

When you have pictured and defined your desired legacy, allow your present life activities and efforts to begin reflecting the future you desire. Begin to do what you want to see, become involved in the causes you want to be a part of. Show your legatees how you want and expect things to be done after you are gone. This will enable them to fit the vision into their own as they make their own individual unique mark.

~ Archibald Marwizi

A leader, who divides his own people, contaminates his platform and begins to destroy his own territory.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Consider your will to be the vision of your influence on earth after you cease to be a part of it. Crafting a lasting legacy means you start planning and making it possible now.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Release children as part of your delegated leadership influence - this will enable you to leave a legacy worth noting. Realise the risk in delegation and bestowing this trust - if you sacrifice a rib, you expose your heart to possible pain, hurt or pride, fulfilment and joy. When these come – it’s not the end of the world, be brave enough to face the challenge with a positive attitude.

~ Archibald Marwizi

There are batons that you will obviously choose to pass on, upon your death, but there are others that would be advisable you pass on whilst you are still alive. Implement as practicable as possible, all succession elements that can be done whilst you are still alive so that you can ensure they are done according to your will/desire.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Do not do everything for your children – teach them personal responsibility and accountability. This includes using your home environment – the kitchen, the garden, making their room/bed, chores – as training platforms. Prepare them to be independent.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Open the door for communication and interact with your children. Provide the answers (if you don’t know, look for them or get expert advice). Guide them on how to deal with other sources of information – friends, TV, other media, society or the internet. Coaching empowers them to make their own informed, quality decisions.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Timing is a critical issue when it comes to succession. Passing the baton too early or too late could both cause irreparable damage. The timing just has to be right, but again you are responsible for creating or influencing the right conditions over the course of your leadership tenure.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Teach faith as a non-negotiable - What should your family be aware of? Why should they be aware of these things? How will they become aware? When and at what stages must they become aware?

~ Archibald Marwizi

It’s about teamwork, realizing we are on the same side and complementing each other. The family is at its best when exposed to and engaged in high-quality environments, interactions, and relationships. This is not technological or economic quality – it is leadership and effectiveness quality. Children mature best when the adults in their life work in partnership with one another. There must exist important aligning of mission, beliefs, values and behaviours within the family unit.

~ Archibald Marwizi

A leader must produce other leaders. Why do you want to produce followers, when by being called a leader the assumption is that you already have followers? Influence those who follow to birth their kind and develop others to lead.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Begin to invest in productive capacity, and the ability to see people flying or shining on the platform you have set for them in support of your vision. You need to draw the best out of them so that the reach and impact of your vision becomes phenomenal. See them as your extension, the multiplication of the tentacles of your vision and mission – sometimes when they shine, they are not trying to replace you at all, they are trying to be a “little you” somewhere you cannot be, as you focus on other key strategic issues elsewhere.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Alignment of vision, mission, values and attitudes need to be matched between you and those you choose to surround yourself with. The cost of training or replacing will be very minimal and less painful if recruitment, selection and positioning are done well. This applies even to general employment processes, whether at leadership or staff levels.

~ Archibald Marwizi

It is the challenge for every leader to develop and invest in those he depends on, to ensure his or her vision is realized in the way it has been put upon the leader’s heart. These key people will enhance the success or taint the leadership image and brand of the visionary.

~ Archibald Marwizi

You choose the leaders and place them strategically around the table of your vision and mission. They are already around you because of some degree of loyalty, so if you continue putting 80% effort in enhancing loyalty that already exists, you will end up going into overkill and igniting a toxic level of internal office politics that was not originally existent in your organisation.

~ Archibald Marwizi

Change in leadership brands must be influenced and proactively effected at a personal level, it can never be forced from outside with sustainable effectiveness. Saddam Hussein, Muammar al Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak are all political trophies, yet the effects of the military or “civil” initiatives that toppled them, are nothing to be proud of considering what continues to happen in countries like Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria, after the use of force to bring political change.

~ Archibald Marwizi

The African Challenge - We must end conflict in Africa. We must lead to allow the Africans to enjoy the benefits from their natural resources. We must end poverty in Africa. Every African must be educated, have access to health care and a fair chance to fulfil their dream. Preventable sickness and disease must not reduce life expectancy or rob pregnant women of a chance to continue living. Africa must develop. Africa must not depend on foreign aid. Africa must be united and governed more effectively. Africa must customize her leadership culture and philosophy in a way that gives her global relevance and respect but still remain true and authentic to herself. Will you accept the challenge? Will you be that Africa?

~ Archibald Marwizi

If in this generation, you still consider yourself the only one who knows or who has the capacity to make a difference, it’s a shame because you are delaying this leadership excellence train from reaching its destination. Make a decision to change your leadership philosophy and agenda today!

~ Archibald Marwizi

Every leader must be challenged to educate their followers and capacitate them with knowledge, tools and a voice to champion their own causes and become actively involved in setting the agenda for citizen participation in social transformation. Don’t create a dependent constituency; develop and lead other leaders who demonstrate a growing personal responsibility for their own success as well as for those around them.

~ Archibald Marwizi

The lack of knowledge on the part of followers perpetuates a culture of abuse by bad leadership. Every day, issues are being endorsed in the name of standing for the ignorant masses, only to benefit those who sponsor the agendas. Priorities are set and resources allocated, never to benefit or reach those cited as the underlying justification for sourcing the funds or setting the priorities.

~ Archibald Marwizi

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

~ Thomas Mann

He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity—proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive—a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

~ Thomas Mann

I assert that the art of sculpture, among all the arts connected with design, is at least seven times greater than any other, for the following reason: why, sir, a statue of true sculpture ought to have seven points of view, which ought all to boast equal excellence.

~ Benvenuto Cellini

All you need is a little hope in order cope in times of failure, and be able to try again with a better intelligence for excellence!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

He, who fails to acknowledge and appreciate the real courage of our fathers, fails to appreciate the real lessons that the courage of our fathers teaches us today! The courage and the wisdom that propelled our fathers to move unrelentingly in their days must be nothing to us, but, a real reason for us to be more than courageous enough to do the undone distinctively in our days.

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.(pg. 44, The Unsettling of America)

~ Wendell Berry

If you have to do the work, do it well, with all your heart.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

If it is worthy doing, it worth doing so well.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

To become a better you, be diligent and never let the charms of procrastination and excuses seduce you to fall for mediocrity.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Excellence is not an event but a habit.

~ Debasish Mridha

Trademark yourself with the mark of excellence.

~ Mark F. Lamoure

Excellent people are those, who choose to separate themselves from mediocrity.

~ Mark F. Lamoure

Excellence is a journey and a constant process. It is never a final destination. Have fun and enjoy it as a lifetime self-improvement program. Polish yourself for excellence. Glitter and sparkle for success.

~ Mark F. Lamoure

You ought to dare impossible things. These will be possible by ceaseless reliance on a higher power.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

Stay upbeat and keep your head held high. There is no end to the power of positive thinking. I AM looking forward to all the wealth, success, and abundance speeding my way!

~ Ron Barrow

Procrastination causes pressure that zaps creativity and excellence.

~ Todd Stocker

You are all too rich to be happy, child. For must not each of you be the constitutions of your family marry to be still richer? People who know in what their main excellence consists are not to be blamed (are they?) for cultivating and improving what they think most valuable? Is true happiness any part of your family-view?—So far from it, that none of your family but yourself could be happy were they not rich. So let them fret on, grumble and grudge, and accumulate; and wondering what ails them that they have not happiness when they have riches, think the cause is want of more; and so go on heaping up till Death, as greedy an accumulator as themselves, gathers them into his garner!

~ Samuel Richardson

She who has the excellence of home virtues, and can expend within the means of her husband, is a help in the domestic state

~ Thiruvalluvar