12 Disciplines of Leadership Excellence: How Leaders Achieve Sustainable High Performance

CHAPTER TWELVETHE DISCIPLINE OF PERSONAL EXCELLENCE

“The starting point of all achievement is desire. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.”

—Napoleon Hill

Two hundred years ago, when the industrial revolution began, most of the world was poor. Over the past 200 years, we’ve gone through a technological revolution with the advent of the steam engine and electricity right up to our current amazing technologies. High technology has vastly reduced poverty in most of the Western world and has created more wealth for more people than has ever been dreamed possible in all of human history.

But the fact is that it’s not technology alone that has brought about these changes. It has not been just a technological ...