The Responsible Entrepreneur Summary

Author: Carol Sanford

Carol Sanford reveals four game-changing archetypes that empower entrepreneurs and leaders to build businesses that create lasting social and environmental impact.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Entrepreneurs as Agents of Systemic Change: Responsible entrepreneurs don’t just build businesses; they aim to transform industries, social systems, cultural paradigms, and foundational agreements that govern society.

2. Different Entrepreneurial Roles Address Different Levels of Change: The Realization, Reconnection, Reciprocity, and Regenerative Entrepreneurs each focus on transforming distinct domains—from industries and social systems to cultural paradigms and foundational agreements—offering multiple pathways to responsible impact.

3. Personal Growth is Core to Impact: Responsible entrepreneurship requires ongoing personal commitment, humility, and development. Entrepreneurs must continuously evolve themselves to manage complexity and drive meaningful change.

4. Cohesion and Complementarity Drive Unity: Regenerative entrepreneurs create unity by fostering connection and balance among seemingly opposing forces, enabling groups to act with shared purpose and resilience.

5. Income Distribution and Social Equity Are Integral: Each entrepreneurial archetype approaches equity differently—from improving internal company practices to reforming legal and institutional structures—highlighting the multi-layered effort required for social justice.

Favorite Quote

“When something keeps showing up in your thinking or in your world that demands that you take action, and you recognize that you really don’t know how to do it but it’s yours to do… that’s a calling. A true calling is both humbling and scary, because it always demands that we become larger than we believe we can be.”

Introduction: The Call for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

• Page 2:

  From a global perspective, business has been a key contributor to this list of ills. It consumes vast resources, drives the flow of capital, and exerts a high degree of control over labor markets and conditions. In other words, we need entrepreneurs who work the edge to change the game. A method to manage the madness: “responsible business development.”

• Page 3:

  When that tenacity yields a breakthrough, the effect can ripple out far beyond the reach of any individual business. Responsible entrepreneurs are a special breed. They start out with the idea of changing the game of business itself, to make business a force for making the world a better place.

• Page 4:

  These entrepreneurs are driven by the realization that society and the planet need something big from them and that, if they don’t rise to the challenge, the work may not get done. Noble Murray, taught me. His heritage and upbringing were Mohawk, and he believed that a healthy tribe could emerge and sustain itself only when four major archetypes— the Warrior, the Clown, the Hunter, and the Headman—were present and working collaboratively. Good role-model businesses strive to be exemplars of social or environmental responsibility.

The Role and Impact of Entrepreneurs

• Page 5:

  Because healthy economies are critical to bringing about change, the business entrepreneur plays a highly leveraged role. I feel it is increasingly important to engage with entrepreneurs, because I observe that far too many of them violate their own values by heedlessly adopting outdated corporate ideas, believing that they have no other choice if they are to succeed. ==Entrepreneurship is everyone’s birthright==. Even the smallest business has an opportunity to contribute to this important work.

• Page 6:

  Responsible Entrepreneurs Rise Above Rugged Individualism. Entrepreneurialism is about [[personal agency]] and the [[development of will]]. In ordinary conversation, the word is also used to describe a person who launches something new and accepts full responsibility for the outcome.

• Page 7:

  Even with regard to those aspects that don’t thrill them, they are tenacious about doing what it takes to get something launched. They work hard to manage their own state and hold a positive attitude. Ride the roller coaster of needing to continually rise to the occasion.

Archetypes and Frameworks for Responsible Entrepreneurs

• Page 8:

  These domains are organized hierarchically into four levels, each of which requires a higher level of commitment and capability than the previous one. Anthropological research into Native American cultures, and because they have turned out to be universal in human experience, they are described as archetypes. I also explore the shadow expression of the archetype in their lives, which they must learn to reconcile in order to succeed.

• Page 11:

  Levers for change: Domains of Leverage—industries, social systems, cultural paradigms, and governance infrastructure. A system of archetypes—for transformational leadership. Roles to take on—how entrepreneurs bring these archetypes into the domains they choose to influence.

• Page 13:

  Entrepreneurship frequently requires courage. This is especially true for responsible entrepreneurs, who are willing to put themselves and their resources on the line to improve the world in a significant way.

• Page 14:

  Four Domains for Changing the Game:

The Four Timeless Leadership Archetypes

• Page 15:

  1. The Warrior protects the values of a community, constantly calling people to remember what gives their lives meaning. In the world of business, this work takes place within the domain of industry.
  2. The Clown pokes fun at collective self-centeredness and unconsciousness, opening space for humility and heartfelt appreciation of others. The Clown is therefore naturally called to work within the domain of social systems.
  3. The Hunter perpetuates life by strengthening the mutual exchange between the tribe and the natural world. In the modern world, the Hunter’s domain is cultural paradigms.
  4. The Headman (or Headwoman in increasingly many cases) awakens individuals to their potential and inspires them to work with others in order to contribute to something larger than themselves. The domain of the Headman is the reorientation of people to the deeper meaning of their foundational agreements. If any one of them is missing, society becomes vulnerable.

Archetypes as Conscious Roles and Growth Paths

• Page 16:

  An archetype is something that one can aspire to live up to and that offers a cohesive set of beliefs about how things should or could be.

• Page 17:

  In order to advance and evolve, societies need members who are willing to extend themselves beyond existing norms and patterns of behavior.

• Page 20:

  Accessing an Archetype Gives You More Choices and Power.

Personal Commitment and the Path of the Responsible Entrepreneur

• Page 21-23:

  Cultural paradigms is the Hunter or reciprocity entrepreneur. The Four Entrepreneurial Roles Do Different Work. Regenerative entrepreneurs demonstrate that humans can beneficially disrupt and evolve their social and ecological systems to be more deeply supportive of life itself.

• Page 28-29:

  A Reconnection Entrepreneur Promises to Transform Social Systems That Define Behaviors. A Reciprocity Entrepreneur Promises to Transform Culture. In practice, the reciprocity entrepreneur seeks to avoid conversations about right and wrong, true and false. Instead, she evokes reflection on the effect and impact of cultural beliefs and assumptions. She goes right out to the edge of current boundaries and asks what is beyond them. Her new message was, “We need you for who you are. You matter with regard to what we need to change.”

• Page 30:

  A Regenerative Entrepreneur Promises to Transform Our Understanding of the Foundational Agreements by Which We Govern Ourselves. The U.S. federal court system, which operates both within and upon precedent, is an example of how the systemic transformation of founding agreements can be created.

• Page 178-179:

  When something keeps showing up in your thinking or in your world that demands that you take action, and you recognize that you really don’t know how to do it but it’s yours to do, and you keep pushing it away because it’s so annoying—that’s a calling. A true calling is both humbling and scary, because it always demands that we become larger than we believe we can be. But we pursue this kind of work without humility. At the same time, there is an experience of inner necessity that prompts us to accept our limitations and do it anyway, because it must be done, and if we don’t do it, maybe no one else will. You have to see your business as an instrument, not an end in itself. You have to recognize the kind of person you will need to become and commit to the dogged work required. The archetypes laid out in this book can be particularly useful for this purpose. They provide patterns that you can explore and grow into, patterns that have been discovered, deepened, and imbued with meaning over many generations. Adopting an archetypal role enables you to engage in self-improvement and development with a sense of direction and purpose. It focuses your attention on who you choose to become rather than on who you’ve been. You have to rigorously and continuously develop your thinking to manage increasing levels of complexity. To be able to work on something complex, most people need order. This is why so many people make lists or sort information into categories as ways to manage chaos. Lists and categories are simple frameworks that can be useful for managing what is already known. They are less useful for stimulating creativity or discovering new potential. The responsible entrepreneur tetrads are examples of frameworks designed to develop the thinking needed to work with change and complexity. They support your ability to discern where and how to place your attention strategically in order to accomplish large-scale transformation.

Key Qualities of the Regenerative Entrepreneur

• Cohesion — Where wholes become unified:

• The regenerative entrepreneur builds unity and cohesion.
  • When something is cohesive, it’s difficult to pull apart.
  • It may flex and adapt, but its integrity is maintained.
  • It can withstand external forces and even be strengthened by them.
  • Without cohesion in society, it’s hard to maintain order and function.
  • Everyday life becomes difficult when we don’t feel like we’re all in it together.
  • It’s also difficult to elevate society, to make it better, when we don’t agree on what we’re unified around.
  • When you have cohesion, you get a multiplier effect because all of the energy is going in the same direction.
  • All parties have their shoulder to the same wheel, pushing together.
  • For example, ==community cohesion often increases after a natural disaster or in preparation for a shared celebration==.

• Complementarity — Polarities completing one another:

• The regenerative entrepreneur takes what seems divided, unrelated, contradictory, or oppositional and reframes it as necessary for wholeness.
  • People often experience the world dualistically—right and wrong, good and bad, insider and outsider, true and false—and are clear about which side they accept and which they repudiate.
  • ==The regenerative entrepreneur can stand above this dualistic experience and help others see how the two sides are actually two halves of a whole==.
  • This is what the yin-yang symbol represents: two opposites nested in each other, each containing a part of the other.

• Creativity — Moving beyond the ordinary:

• The regenerative entrepreneur enables individuals and groups to believe in themselves as people with agency, freeing them to see possibilities that had previously been hidden.
  • They are less a source of creative ideas themselves and more an illuminator of the process that ==brings people together to lift themselves into an exciting future==.
  • When a group can do this, its members become originators and owners of their ideas, very different from having someone else’s creative idea to work on.

• Connection — Linked through an overall direction:

• For a community to be healthy and viable, all members need to exercise their individual creativity in ways that move the whole forward.
  • The regenerative entrepreneur helps people feel connected to an overall direction, enabling them to see how their work intersects with others’.
  • When people are connected through a shared direction, they can assess when communication is necessary and what is meaningful to communicate.
  • This allows them to work independently without losing touch with collaboration’s purpose.
  • Jim Collins’ idea of “hedgehog concepts” is an example, where a goal is big and meaningful enough that everyone must pull together to achieve it.

• Capability — Enabling a developmental life:

• The regenerative entrepreneur starts from the premise that all people are inherently capable of growth.
  • They support people’s ability to work on themselves and contribute more to the collective.
  • One method is inviting people into roles beyond their current capability, affirming belief in them, and working to develop themselves.
  • This is more than acquiring skills and knowledge; it involves learning to self-manage and self-motivate.
  • This increases each person’s competence.
  • This process is not supervisory but engaging individuals to discover roles that advance their capability while fitting the company’s overall direction, creating a culture where people willingly pursue tougher challenges.

• Coalescence — Reciprocity with one’s environment:

• ==Growth and nourishment depend on reciprocal exchange with our environment==.
  • The regenerative entrepreneur bonds with the growth and success of stakeholders.
  • Instead of viewing stakeholders as resources to extract from, they enable stakeholders to realize more potential (a [[value-adding mindset]]).
  • This shift builds momentum as each party is enriched by the exchange and can contribute more over time.

• Change-ability — From pattern follower to pattern generator:

• Humans tend to get stuck in ruts, projecting past experience into the future.
  • However, humans uniquely have the capacity to imagine a different, better future and move towards it.
  • One primary role of the regenerative entrepreneur is to engage people in imagining new patterns of living that promote viability and vitality for all stakeholders.
  • Unlike visioning rooted in past experience, this imaging is unifying, making change less divisive and more inspiring.
  • Powerful images can bypass resistance and fear, motivating people to overcome what holds them back.
  • ==Because images are fragile, they must be regenerated periodically==.
  • The regenerative entrepreneur helps people break out of ruts by realigning them to possible futures and new behaviors.
  • Some businesses develop adaptability by rotating managers or assigning unprecedented large-scale challenges, as Google has done.

• Correlate-ability — Linking internal and external effects:

• Regenerative entrepreneurs recognize strong correlations between their internal states (and their businesses’ states) and the external effects they create.
  • They maintain continuous personal development and invite others to do the same, fostering reflective thinking within their company culture.
  • ==This is challenging, especially in Western business culture, where reflection is undervalued==.
  • Developing a reflective culture takes time and commitment but yields business benefits.

How each entrepreneurial archetype approaches the challenge of income distribution and social equity

Highlights

• Page #13:

  I have recognized the power that we have to change virtually anything and everything in our lives.
  It’s not the conditions or the “externals” of your life that will determine your destiny.
  What matters is the decisions you make about how your life is going to be—the decisions that will write the story of your destiny.

• Page #15: “Nothing, absolutely nothing, is absolute.”

• Page #15: “Change what happens in your head, and the universe changes.”

• Page #16:

  “If he can be successful, I can.”
  Nonetheless, whatever you want, you can achieve it, just as I have.
  In fact, one of the secrets I reveal is that being pushy and generally obnoxious at the right times has been fundamental to my success.

• Page #3:

  In 1971, if you were burned over seventy-five percent of your body, you were definitely dead. I was burned over sixty-five percent of my body, which put my chances around fifty-fifty.

• Page #7:

  There, I was in hot water almost immediately. For one, I had been smoking since I was twelve, and at Perkiomen, they were less than thrilled with that habit. Again, academically, I was a disaster. I spent most of that year receiving lectures from the headmaster and was eventually expelled.

• Page #9:

  And that December, I got married. My bride was Carol Kaleiwahea, who, at twenty-eight, was seven years older than me, and whom I had pursued with great vigor.
  After we had been married about six months, I decided we needed to get divorced.

• Page #12:

  I was always swimming in girlfriends, thanks to the cheap, shameless ploys for female attention that never failed.

• Page #13: “Many of us fruitlessly aspire to be a”

• Page #14:

  cool, flawless, constantly happy, totally in-control person, but that is an idiotic aspiration that creates a lot of misery.
  Real people get sad, angry, feel grief, and say things they regret.
  If you cannot accept your negative aspects—if you dwell on them, wallowing in regret—you are actually reinforcing them, and you might never succeed in getting past them.
  Second, there is no absolute relationship between any two variables. In other words, being rich, famous, and surrounded by friends does not automatically equal happiness; being poor, unknown, and alone does not automatically equal misery.

• Page #15: “The point is to take charge of your situation.”

• Page #15: “Third, you are responsible for your life.”

• Page #15:

  There is never any point in looking for the bad guy, the rotten “other” upon whom you can heap blame for your wretched situation.
  No matter how guiltless you may seem to be, no matter how carefully you document the unjust abuses heaped upon you, you are the only one who can turn your life around.
  So you’ll do better if you adopt the belief, or at least explore the possibility, that at some level, you brought it on yourself.
  Seeking the villain who ruined you is a pointless pursuit; it robs you of the energy you could be using to improve your life.
  But the kernel of truth was here: you can only heal your experience.
  If you wish to extricate yourself from the experience and get on with your life, you must use your energy in a productive way, and you can only do this if you take responsibility.
  Hunting down folks to blame is not productive. Taking whatever lessons this experience taught you and moving on from there is productive. It is the only course that makes sense.

• Page #17:

  I have heard that visitors, including tough guys with whom I had worked on the cable cars, would faint upon

• Page #18:

  Hearing the warm voices of friends through the midst of semiconsciousness was probably the main thing that kept me going at that stage.

• Page #19:

  This, in fact, is what makes the pain of being burned so extreme: you will die from fluid loss or infection if you are left alone, so you are never left alone. Something terribly painful is being done to you virtually every hour of the day, day after day.

• Page #21:

  Nurses who accept burn cases are a special breed, because it is so extraordinarily painful to care for the patient, and the patients often die. Even among these exceptional people, June and Nualan were among the best. During the four months that they took care of me, Nualan took six days off, and June took three days.

• Page #22:

  The normal, expected, even encouraged reaction would be to moan, wail, cry, curse God, sink into a funk, maybe even commit suicide.
  But like the bumper sticker says, “Why be normal?” I thought of the support of my family and friends. I thought of my Marine Corps training. I thought about Morehouse and how there is no absolute relationship between any two variables. Once, I had fingers. Now, I didn’t. Whatever meaning this change had would be the meaning I gave it. I could see it as a catastrophe or as a challenge. I chose the latter.

• Page #23:

  She did not know, but I knew, even then: the secret to survival was consciously not realizing how terrible it was. More than two decades later, I am proud to say that I still refuse to “know” how terrible it was. In other words, to adopt the social definition of what being so horribly burned “should” mean.
  If you have a difficult situation in your life, I suggest you refuse to realize how terrible it is, too. How about realizing what can be salvaged? How about realizing what you have learned? How about realizing that the worst is behind you?
  After a month of weakness and passivity, I decided to take control of my situation. I cannot overemphasize how important it is to do this. Numerous studies have shown that people will forego food, sleep, sex, and almost any other hunger you can imagine before they will give up control. Control and well-being are so intimately related.

• Page #24:

  Again, he briskly told me he knew what was best and that I would not miss them at all.
  The loss of control and the loss of two people who had become so important to me could have been fatal. I am a survivor, but at that moment, I did not need another test.

• Page #25:

  I laughed. It hurt like hell, but I laughed. For the first time in two months, I found some humor in my life. At that moment, I began to gain some perspective. It may be that, at that moment, the seeds were planted of the message that I share with so many people around the world today: it’s not what happens to you; it’s what you do about it.

• Page #26:

  “Woooo,” I said softly. “That’s an interesting-looking guy.” Naturally, I was shocked.
  But, somehow, I wasn’t horrified by it. I had my bedrock of information—that I would decide what to do about this, not society—and that held me together. Under it all, I had the strong sense that I would get through this.

• Page #27:

  But without those doctors, nurses, relatives, and friends giving me their skill and their love, I am sure that even the most elegant, self-contained philosophical system could not have saved me. In particular, I was aided all along by Rita’s mother.
  So, to the ideas I’ve already mentioned about coping and growing through adversity, let me add a crucial factor: support. We all need people who care. Almost anything can be borne if one feels surrounded by a network of friends and family, whereas a minor setback can derail a person who is trying to muscle through life alone.
  And friendships don’t just happen; they must be actively started and actively maintained, or they wither. It took my utter helplessness to let me see this clearly, but we all have areas in which we are helpless. Whatever you are going through, do what you can on your own, but don’t be afraid to reach out for help. Putting both inner and outer resources together is an unbeatable combination.

• Page #31:

  This was going to be my fate for the rest of my life. I had gotten somewhat used to it.
  Now it was the world that was changing. For example, on the night of the accident, when my leather jacket was cut off my body, a book spilled out.
  It was a book I had planned to give to a new lady I had met, and the odds had been high that we were going to spend the night together.

• Page #32:

  By the time the awful sensitivity of the fresh burns passed, our sex life eventually returned to normal, but it was difficult. I felt completely impotent in general around women. At worst, I felt repulsive; at best, emasculated. But, because of Rita, that fear slowly passed.

• Page #34:

  When I said nothing, he got more abusive as he realized I was not going to fight back.
  At that moment, we have more options than we can imagine; one good thing that comes from handicaps is that it opens one’s eyes to the reality of that.

• Page #35:

  (I might add that it’s not pure coincidence that the man was poor and Hispanic. I have found since that it is Blacks, Hispanics, and the down-and-out who generally make eye contact with me on the street; perhaps out of some intuitive sense of sharing a position on the fringes of society. In the worst ghetto in America, I am not only without fear, but I feel welcomed.)
  But I had an overwhelming desire to show them a vital truth: that someone who looks monstrous on the outside can be good, warm, funny, and caring on the inside—someone you might like as much as your best friend.

• Page #36:

  I wanted to tell them something that a wonderful speaker and good friend shared with me much later—that the wrapping might have been damaged, but the gift inside was still in good shape.
  I think at that moment I subconsciously resolved to share that message with people for the rest of my life.

• Page #37:

  Almost immediately, I started ground school, aiming to fly again. I couldn’t feed myself, but I refused to focus on just surviving. I planned to thrive, and for me, that meant flying.

• Page #38:

  Again, the only solution is simply to take charge.

• Page #42:

  This highlights the strangeness of our legal system, which rewards helplessness and penalizes success. I had no problem with suing.

• Page #43: “He got $450,000, thanks to Pat Coyle, from the company.”

• Page #44:

  He was convinced he had all the answers, and his therapy-group participants knew nothing.
  These people were clearly addicted to the idea that they were sick.
  You can spend your whole life focusing on the worst aspects of your life if you choose to. Do you want to spend all your time focusing on how bad your relationship, job, or appearance is, or do you want to focus on how good it can become?
  The idea of self-help groups should be just that—to help people understand that the decision is up to them.
  But wallowing in angst is not my thing, and that’s what these sessions were all about.

• Page #45:

  I call that my tipping point moment. I realized that there was nothing I could not do.
  I had conquered my last limitation. I still could not do buttons—I suppose I could not be one hundred percent independent—but psychologically, I was one hundred percent. I had finished the cycle of being burned.

• Page #46:

  I believe in the healing power of love, but beyond that, I don’t know.

• Page #47:

  Crested Butte, Colorado, is an old coal-mining town nestled at an altitude of 8,885 feet in a sparsely populated valley. It’s twenty-five miles as the Cessna flies from Aspen, but 217 miles by paved roads, which illustrates its remoteness.

• Page #49:

  I bought a house, one of the nicest in town that had been built in 1886.
  I bought a few house lots which promptly tripled in value, built a huge log building with apartments in it, and generally became a successful entrepreneur.

• Page #50:

  I did it all on gut feeling, and it was the smartest move, financially, I’ve ever made.
  As the energy crisis continued to intensify, the company could barely keep up with demand. It became the second-largest private employer in the state of Vermont, with dealerships in all fifty states (yes, even Hawaii). My life was far better than it had been before I was burned. Suddenly, I was a millionaire.
  The lesson? How many things do we say no to because they are not guaranteed? How many of us are not willing to risk our time, energy, or money for success?

• Page #50: “The idea”

• Page #51:

  The idea of being a risk-taker applies to more than just financial wealth. It applies to emotional wealth as well. Many people ask for sure things and wind up with no things.
  Almost everyone who has become a great success in our society has been willing to take risks, and when they failed, were willing to try again, and again, and again.

• Page #53:

  “Adversity reveals genius.” —Horace

• Page #57:

  But now I had little time to mope. My support system was far bigger than it had been when I was burned. Literally hundreds of folks from Crested Butte made the five-hour drive to see me. They came just to tell me they cared and to encourage me.

• Page #57: “I came to see, more than”

• Page #58:

  ever before, how friendships are investments that offer protection in a crisis that no insurance policy can give.
  But maybe I had known what I was talking about. Being burned to a crisp had not ruined my life. In many ways, it had made me grow, change, and improve in ways which I could not have dreamed.
  If there was no absolute relationship between being burned and being miserable, then it followed that there was no absolute link between being paralyzed and being doubly miserable. This experience would be what I made of it; not what others thought I should make of it.
  I decided to take charge again. Taking charge had literally saved my life after I was burned.
  There are no absolutes in the world. If you build a barricade of absolutes, even likely pieces of happiness can be walled out. Much more so, the unlikely pieces.

• Page #59: “This is denial and does no one any good.”

• Page #59:

  Lying in bed wishing for recovery simply atrophies muscles, angers therapists, and boosts already astronomical hospital bills.
  Third, I would take the best counsel I could get, but I would make the decisions. By now, I was a firm believer in control and its role in a healthy life. No one would do anything to me unless they had explained the need for it and I had agreed.

• Page #61:

  “Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.” —William Jennings Bryan
  It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.

• Page #63:

  I chose to get on with my life.

• Page #66:

  It’s advice that applies to everyone. For all of the things we cannot do because we’re not gorgeous, rich, or adored, there are infinitely more things waiting for us to do, most of which we’ve never even considered—far more than you could do in a thousand lifetimes.
  If, in one lifetime, you did five hundred of them, you’d be an Edison or an Einstein.
  So often, we do nothing because we feel that we cannot do enough. That’s the greatest fallacy in life, because the big things are, in fact, usually a series of little things.

• Page #69:

  So, I was back. While parts of life were good, there were multiple frustrations.
  The old freedom I’d had to ski when I felt like it, carry in wood, shovel the walk, and be completely independent was no longer available.
  But my friends were still there, and they helped to reduce the frustration.
  I bought myself a motorhome and had another friend, Gordon Roberts, outfit it for me. After he learned that I had broken my back, he left school in San Francisco and hitchhiked to Denver to be with me in the hospital simply because he was a friend and wanted to help.

• Page #69: “I”

• Page #70:

  Within six months of returning, I flew again with a friend, just to see if I was afraid. I wasn’t. It wasn’t the airplane that had bitten me, after all, but my poor judgment.

• Page #70: “I had learned a basic truth: nothing is absolutely safe.”

• Page #71:

  Live your life, take all necessary precautions, but follow your heart.
  Sally Jesse Raphael, on her television program, once asked me if I ever wished I had exercised a little more caution in my life. I told her, “In my office, I’ve got a poster on my wall that lists the BE-Attitudes. There are things such as Be Loving, Be Warm—but nowhere does it say, ‘Be Careful.’
  I’m not a reckless person. I believe in the value of life. But you can’t spend your life in a cave, keeping safe from risk.
  The greatest risk, in my opinion, is taking no risk at all.”

• Page #73:

  For the next three months, I devoted every ounce of energy to running for the job. I studied the sewer system, the garbage system—did we need our first traffic light?

• Page #76:

  And we fought on legal fronts. We dug up an obscure, one-hundred-year-old state law that gave cities the right to control their watersheds. We set up the Crested Butte Municipal Watershed and began writing restrictive regulations, even inventing a permitting process, because the mine would be smack in the middle of that watershed. If there is one thing that the powers-that-be respect in the West, even above mining, it is water. The town was behind me, too; I won reelection in 1980, capturing ninety percent of the vote.

• Page #77: “By the time they quit, we had barely started.”

• Page #78:

  The planet, I remain convinced, has too few defenders, and I often wonder why that is. Is it because no one taught us to care? Is it because saving it, even a piece of it, seems so hopeless against all the forces arrayed against it—against all of the incantations and incarnations of that hideous philosophy, “bigger is better?”
  Someday, I hope we find out. The planet can no longer afford to have its most potent and influential information technologies controlled by forces that put the bottom line above all other values.
  The real issue in the AMAX fight was, as Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado is fond of saying, “You’ve got to stand for something, or you are going to fall for everything.”

• Page #83:

  I am, by nature, a sensual person—a toucher, a holder, a cuddler. While paralysis cancels physical sensation below the waist, the real sex organ—the brain—is above it.

• Page #87:

  I decided to do it because of a basic rule I used to govern my life: the only way you can really fail in life is never to try.

• Page #90:

  But I tell people today that I didn’t lose that race in 1984. I tell them that, yes, my opponent got a few more votes than I did, and that hurt, but the wonderful lesson I learned is that the only losers are the ones who don’t get in the race.
  I love to quote Theodore Roosevelt, who said that the only real losers in life are those people who end their lives “having tasted neither victory nor defeat.”

• Page #94:

  The whole idea behind this is that if you can walk on fire, you prove to yourself that you can do damn near anything, that any limitations in your life are probably self-imposed.
  I had already figured that, but in my own way, so who needed this?
  I firmly believe that most barriers are self-imposed. We first get them from society—you can’t do that, that’s immoral, that’s crazy, no one in our family does that, and so on—but we forget that we have the power to accept or reject these barriers.
  We treat them as if they are immovable, immutable, when, in fact, they may be silly, cause unnecessary misery, or just be plain nonexistent.

• Page #97:

  He still wasn’t impressed. He wasn’t satisfied because I wasn’t doing it in the only way that he had learned it should be done.
  I was not playing by the established rules. I was not solving the problem the way everyone else had solved it.

• Page #100:

  But I wasn’t stuck long. I had two things going for me: One, I had committed myself to becoming a public speaker. Commitment is the first move of anything we wish to accomplish. A friend, guide, and hero don’t have to

• Page #101:

  The second was that, coupled with my commitment, I understood how important it was to act—to do something even if I was not sure it was the right thing.
  Watt Anderson, the editor of Parade Magazine and a good friend of mine, has written a book called The Greatest Mistake of All, in which he says the greatest risk is to take action. Looking back on my life, I saw that this had been the key to my success.

• Page #102:

  Another way of looking at it is described by Ken Blanchard, of One-Minute Manager fame. He talks about people who go through life as if they are playing a tennis game by watching only the scoreboard and never the court.
  He often asks the question: “When you take your last breath, are you going to be sorry you haven’t made more money?”

• Page #103:

  Today, Annie and I are good friends and are groping for a new way to relate to each other after our divorce.

• Page #143:

  Join a group that’s already doing something. Don’t just join—participate. Think about what you care about—such as the environment or people who haven’t had the opportunities you’ve had—there is a lot to do.