Leadership Motivation

When you think of a NASA astronaut, the image that probably comes to mind is one of the All-American hero. But former NASA astronaut turned business speaker and bestselling author Mike Massimino was pretty much the opposite. He was the underdog, one of the weakest swimmers during NASA training and a “gangly, scrawny, working-class kid from Long Island with bad eyesight and a fear of heights." Still, after working hard and working smart, Massimino had a successful career as an astronaut. Moonshot shares Massimino’s hard-earned lessons and how to apply them in work and life.

Low performance and high turnover is not the result of lazy, apathetic workers. It's not about decreasing budgets. And it's not about a terrible economy. It's about leadership that doesn't engage employees. In Nine Minutes on Monday, leadership guru James Robbins argues that employee engagement comes down to one thing: a constant dedication to meeting the universal needs that drive performance excellence.

What if the smartest people in the world understand something that the rest of us don't? (They do.) What if they know that in order to achieve success, they will sometimes have to do things that others may initially perceive as stupid? The fact of the matter is that the smartest people in the world don't run from stupid, they lean into it (in a smart way). In The Power of Starting Something Stupid, Richie Norton redefines stupid as we know it, demonstrating that life-changing ideas are often tragically mislabeled stupid.

Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, the school teacher next door who amassed a million-dollar fortune.... Did these people succeed because they were more motivated or because they were more disciplined? The answer to both questions is yes - but not in the ways you might think. Anyone can achieve extraordinary things. The secret is setting goals that test the very limits of your abilities. In Hard Goals, Mark Murphy, the acclaimed author of Hundred Percenters, explains the science behind getting from where you are to where you want to be in your career, business, and life.

Leading with heart, authenticity, and purpose, Thomas Vozzo provides a clear path to a new bottom line—including 55 rules to break—bringing The Homeboy Way to life as the perfect antidote to the massive tidal currents of social injustice and inequities. By every traditional measurement of success, Vozzo was a clear winner. Then, through a series of fateful events, Vozzo landed as CEO of Homeboy Industries, the most successful gang intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program in the country, founded by Jesuit priest Greg Boyle.

As a top-level sport psychologist and performance consultant, Dr. Stan Beeham knows what it takes to succeed - on the playing field, in the board room, and in all aspects of life. This award-winning book takes you inside the minds of major-league athletes, Olympic medal winners, and world-class business leaders to reveal the key motivators and mental processes that drive people to victory.

Our individualistic society has created an environment of fear, division, and domination, which has crushed our ability to relate meaningfully to each other and diminished our capacity to innovate and collaborate. Jean Oelwang, president and founding CEO of Virgin Unite, has been on a decade-long exploration to find out how to nurture relationships with depth and purpose. Deep connections shape who we are and have a profound ripple effect on everything we do, supporting us to achieve more, withstand anything, and amplify impact.

Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone were two of the most inspiring, motivating figures of the 20th century personal development movement. In this, their legendary collaboration, these two icons present a formula for successful living that is unsurpassed in its simplicity, practicality, and power.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you combat new competitors and define the best strategy for your company. With insights from leading experts including Michael E. Porter, A. G. Lafley, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book will inspire you to: choose a strategy that meets the demands of your competitive environment; identify the signals of disruption and take steps to avoid it; understand lean methodology and how it is changing business; and more.

Great managing, great leading, career success - Marcus Buckingham draws on a wealth of examples to reveal the single controlling insight that lies at the heart of each. Lose sight of this "one thing", and even your best efforts will be diminished or compromised. Success comes to those who remain mindful of the core insight, understand all of its ramifications, and orient their decisions around it.

Koch shows how to maximize success in your career and life by using the proven principle that 80 percent of changes in the world result from the most powerful 20 percent of actions and ideas. He'll show how to use your own powerful "20 percent spike" - your most creative ideas and unique skills - to measure the amount of value you bring to your employer, clients, or customers. For most people, there is a huge disparity between their intrinsic value and the compensation they receive for their efforts.

Want to be on top of your sales career? Are you versatile, strong willed, organized, enthusiastic, motivated, and have a great attitude? These characteristics will fall into place only if you possess the most important quality of all: a willingness to grow.

In our world of incessant change, we are all threatened by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity-at the individual and organizational levels. Undisruptable will give you a new lens through which to consider change as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. You'll be inspired to consider the big questions of today.

What do astronauts, Olympic champions, and Nobel laureates do differently that allows them to achieve at such a high level? High achievers share the same four attributes: intrinsic motivation, perseverance, strong foundation, constantly learning through informal means. The key to their success is that they do all four of these things at the same time. Based on research and in-person interviews with astronauts, Nobel Prize winners, and Olympic champions, The Success Factor outlines the approach that individuals aspiring to improve their performance can adopt.

In More Time to Think, Nancy Kline demonstrates that the quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. The leaders, entrepreneurs and business people who understand this are at the top of their fields and inspire some of the most successful and innovative practices and businesses in the world. In this audiobook, Nancy Kline shares 10 effective ways to help people think innovatively, and with rigour.

Drawing on forty years as a world-class motivational speaker and author, Ziglar identifies and outlines in his best-selling Over the Top precisely how to achieve what people desire most from life—to be happy, healthy, and reasonably prosperous and secure. As Ziglar delves into the hows and whys of living life with values, character, honesty, integrity, and sensitivity, you’ll learn to be more at peace with yourself and accomplish more with your skills and abilities.

Robin Dreeke is a 28-year veteran of federal service, including the United States Naval Academy, United States Marine Corps. He served most recently as a senior agent in the FBI, with 20 years of experience. He was, until recently, the head of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program, where his primary mission was to thwart the efforts of foreign spies, and to recruit American spies. His core approach in this mission was to inspire reasonable, well-founded trust among people who could provide valuable information.

The influential New York Times best-selling authors - the “apostles of appreciation” Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick - provide managers and executives with easy ways to add more gratitude to the everyday work environment to help bolster moral, efficiency, and profitability.

By the time we become adults, most of us have joined the religion of suffering, which preaches that unless circumstances are controlled, life will be a mess. We compare ourselves to others and speculate about an impossible-to-know future, holding out hope for an improved life through getting ahead, fulfilling passion, or finding true love. But the idea that happiness comes from putting effort toward altering one’s circumstances is harmful and backward. What if we instead learned to understand that circumstances can rarely be controlled, and that life is, and always will be, messy?

From the arenas of professional sports to the boardrooms of major businesses, a thin slice of peak performers dominate every field. What is their secret to success? Few people know what drives these world-leaders like sports agent Molly Fletcher. Not only has Fletcher herself risen to the top of a tough, male-dominated field - CNN dubbed her "the female Jerry Maguire" - but she has also represented hundreds of successful athletes, coaches, and broadcasters in baseball, golf, basketball, and football. Her experience reveals exactly what it takes to play like "the best".