Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It's about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others' success, and then standing back and letting them shine.
— Chris Hadfield
Sentimental Groundwork quotations
The groundwork of all happiness is health.
It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people.
The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.
The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.
Your identity, self-esteem, and awareness of your ego lay the groundwork for your life. How you conduct yourself with others, and whether you have the strength to make your way without needing to ask for another's permission, depends on how well you succeed at the many challenges that awaken your need to take charge of who you are.
Darwinism has laid the groundwork for Hitler's and Mussolini's fascism and Stalin's communism.
Everybody makes money when times are good.
It's when times are not so good that the groundwork is laid for the next generation.
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love.
I was raised by two women, and that laid the groundwork for the way I treat 'em: with the utmost respect and admiration.
The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.
She [Hillary Clinton] and Bill [Clinton] supported the NAFTA, the adoption of NAFTA that sent our jobs overseas, and they both supported Wall Street deregulation, which laid the groundwork for the disappearance of 9 million jobs and the theft of 5 million homes.
To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be not a virtue, but the groundwork of virtue.
Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination;
it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.
But if you want to be a songwriter-based musician, whether you play punk or rock or country or jazz, whatever, you have to work on your songwriting and you have to work on being able to play in front of people, I think. That performance is how you create the groundwork for a lasting career.
We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication .
Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions.
We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
A writer's work often reflects what he or she has been exposed to in life;
experiences which are the groundwork of a poem or a story.
I dribbled by the hour with my left hand when I was young.
I didn't have full control, but I got so I could move the ball back and forth from one hand to the other without breaking the cadence of my dribble. I wasn't dribbling behind my back or setting up any trick stuff, but I was laying the groundwork for it.
Acceptance of the power of God in one's life lays the groundwork for personal commitment to both science and Christianity, which so often have been in conflict.
Before I had decided to get into politics, I was laying the groundwork to have a career in the law, but that was really to lay the foundation to teach, either at the college level or law school level after my federal clerkships.
I'm honored to be on this list for the official beginning of the College Baseball Hall of Fame. The coaches on the list laid the groundwork for what college baseball is today. Being mentioned with those men means a lot to me.
It seems whenever I've had a method or what I perceived to be an intellectual groundwork of some sort - a kind of game plan - it's always been the most morbid failure.
I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge.
When I was seven years old, I was leading a quartet and trio, and that really laid the groundwork for me as a musician.
We all know Reagan's legacy, from the Iran-Contra affair to the funding of the Nicaraguan military in which over 200,000 people died. The groundwork for the move steadily to the right happened with the Reagan administration. People want to elevate him to some mythic level; they have their own reason for doing that.
We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.
This ought to be a season for cooperation in terms of pushing our economy forward, job creation, steadying the middle class, and laying the groundwork for a better future. And that's what we want to work on with Republicans and Democrats.
From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.
Acceptance of the power of God in one's life lays the groundwork for personal commitment to both science and Christianity, which so often have been in conflict.
I started in the law; and the study of law, when it precedes the study of economics, gives you a set of foundation principles about how human beings interact. Economics is very useful, and I studied economics in graduate school. But without understanding the social and organizational context of economics, it becomes a theory without any groundwork.
If we want to be respected and honored when we're older, then we must lay the groundwork by respecting and honoring the elders we meet in our lives today. How we treat them today is the way we'll be treated later.
We also wanted to change the story - change the approach to the 21st century on energy, on education, on transportation, on infrastructure, generally, and it laid the groundwork for that. And one of the reasons I'm doing this trip is not only to say what we did worked, but to say we should do more of this.
The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting.
They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady.