Inspirational quotes just deliver so much great knowledge to think on without taking too much time out of our daily schedule (no offense to books)! But remember, quotes are just plain old words if they aren't acted upon - so really take some time to apply these quotes to your daily life this week. The results will come.

Here are 20 quotes to inspire you into an amazing week, enjoy!

1. "Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection." -Mark Twain

2. "In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first." -Harry S. Truman

3. "If you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own." -Stephen Covey

4. "The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." -Michelangelo

5. "Nothing will work unless you do." -Maya Angelou

6. "The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." -Steve Jobs

7. "With self-discipline most anything is possible." -Theodore Roosevelt

8. "The best way to predict the future is to create it." -Abraham Lincoln

9. "The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." -Eleanor Roosevelt

10. "Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life." -Confucius

11. "At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want." -Lao Tzu

12. "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." -Thomas Jefferson

13. "Your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing." -Abraham Lincoln

14. "Life without risks is not worth living." -Charles A. Lindbergh

15. "Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes." -Benjamin Disraeli

16. "It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time." -Sir Winston Churchill​

17. "The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for." -Oscar Wilde

18. "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." -Mahatma Gandhi

19. "I am only one; but I am still one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do." -Helen Keller

20. "Take a chance! All life is a chance. The person who goes the furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare." -Dale Carnegie


**At The Mindful Tech Lab, we develop and market apps that are easily ingrained into your daily routine to deliver positive results. We are most known for our Facebook Messenger chatbots that help you live your best life, you can check them each out by clicking on their links: MotivateBot, MeditateBot, Daily FitBot, HealthyBot, Eat Clean Bot, StoicBot**

Here at The Mindful Tech Lab we love quotes, if that wasn't already obvious ;), because they are such simple and quick ways to help improve our mindset. Below are 10 quotes handpicked to help motivate you today, enjoy!
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1. "Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right'. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along." - Napoleon Hill

2. "An enterprising person is one who sees opportunity in all areas of life." - Jim Rohn

3. "First say to yourself what you would be, then do what you have to do." - Epictetus

4. "The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience." - Eleanor Roosevelt

5. "You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action." - Tony Robbins

6. "When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." - Marcus Aurelius

7. "Your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing." - Abraham Lincoln

8. "Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment." - Buddha

9. "It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, It is because we do not dare that they are difficult." - Seneca

10. "A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before we changed." - Earl Nightingale​

**At The Mindful Tech Lab, we develop and market apps that are easily ingrained into your daily routine to deliver positive results. We are most known for our Facebook Messenger chatbots that help you live your best life, you can check them each out by clicking on their links: MotivateBot, MeditateBot, Daily FitBot, HealthyBot, Eat Clean Bot, StoicBot**

Whether you’re a seasoned Software Engineer, bright-eyed Product Manager, or have never even heard of the term Agile Software Development, you too can live a more productive and happy life by leveraging some of the same Agile principles that are used to build most of the software products we use today (think Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Uber).

By just quickly looking at a few of the basic tenants that Agile software development promotes, it is easy to see that it resembles much of what the self-improvement gurus of today preach:

Simplicity, adaptive planning, reflection, continuous improvement, regular adaptation to changing circumstance, face-to-face conversation

I spend my day building tangible products for a wide range of users, but it’s the time I spend away from my work where I continue to build the most important product of all — my personal life. Without actively meaning to over the past few years, I’ve managed to adopt many of the same Agile principles I use to build software products to now live a better life. I hope you benefit from at least one (if not all) of these simple to adopt concepts…

Product Backlog
​In Software Development: 
The product backlog is considered the “playbook”, or master to-do list, of all the features for the product you plan to build. Without the product backlog, you have just an idea for a product, but no actionable list of what needs to be delivered by the development team (I wrote more on this concept here).

Since the product backlog is used by developers to turn the idea into actual code, and ultimately a tangible product, specificity is key. You can’t just say “Press a button and users can order food”…this would leave thousands of open questions from the developers.

Generally, the most important features appear at the top of the product backlog so the team knows what to deliver first, though items are often refined and re-prioritized over time — this is referred to as “backlog grooming”.

In Life: 
We all have a running to-do list of what we’d like to accomplish in the next hour, day, month, year, etc. (from “sending rent” this afternoon to “get a new job” sometime in the future…), but often lacking detail and prioritization of what needs to be done.

How many times have you said you want to get a new job? Or start working out at the gym? These are two common examples of vague and weak tasks/goals. Just as software developers can’t execute poorly described features, you too can’t action on these vague requirements.
Put your to-do list in an actionable state and the results will come.

1. Sign up for a gym membership
2. Go to gym every Monday, Wednesday and Friday
3. Lose 5lbs by the end of March

Sprints
In Software Development: 
Here is where the prioritization of the backlog comes into play. Since your development team is limited by both time and # of developers (we call this capacity), it is important to deliver the most desired, and value added features first.

In software development we refer to these as “sprints” — normally two to four week periods of time where a development team tackles a series of features from the product backlog.

In Life: 
This is simply taking items from the highest priority on your ever-growing to-do list and actually completing them. Our “sprints” in life often come in the form of weekends because there tends to be little time during the week to tackle to-do list items.

There will always be some low hanging fruit (i.e. take out trash, wash clothes, etc.), but be sure to mix in some of the more larger and difficult items (i.e. refine my resume, look for a new apt) during your sprint.

Stand-Ups
In Software Development: 
Stand-up meetings are daily, time-boxed (normally 15 minutes), meetings that take place during a sprint. The concise nature of this meeting ensures fast, but relevant discussion between team members. During the daily stand-up, each team member answers the following three questions:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are there any impediments in your way?

In Life: 
Ask yourself these very same questions every morning to keep you honest. You’re probably familiar with this Steve Jobs quote:

“I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

These simple questions will help you verbalize (or in your head; on paper/in phone) your daily activities and help you draw in on how you are actually spending these finite days on Earth.

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are there any impediments in your way?

Retrospectives
In Software Development: 
Retrospectives are meetings that take place at the end of a sprint (defined period of work) where the team all sits together to talk about what’s working, what isn’t, what opportunities people are seeing, and which challenges they are facing.

It’s about constantly checking in and questioning whether the team’s approach is still making sense given everything new it learned.

On my products, we use the terms ‘Highlights’ and ‘Lowlights’ to list out what we thought to be the good and bad of the last iteration.

In Life: 
Unlike the daily check ins (stand-ups), the retrospective can be more thought of as a longer term review (think weeks or months) of what is working and what isn’t in your life. If you have a significant other it’s great to include them in your “retro” — these conversations can range from your job to living situation to travel to really anything.

A simple way to approach this is take each major category of your life — 1. Career 2. Dating (or Marriage) 3. Health, etc. then talk or list out your ‘Highlights’ and ‘Lowlights’ of each.
Career

Highlights

• Promoted to Vice President
• Delivered a successful presentation to the board of directors
• A junior team member thanked me for spending time working with her to develop her skills

Lowlights

• Been working longer hours
• Tight timeline to deliver the current project
• Change in organizational structure is causing problems with colleagues

Utilize tools where needed
In Software: 
It’s virtually impossible to build complex software without leveraging tools such as Jira, Rally, Trello, etc. These tools allow you to collaborate, organize and effectively track progressive during the development process.

​In Life: 
Life is complex…even more complex than code. So why are you keeping everything you need to do, want to do, have done, in your head (or even a running list in Apple Notes)?

I use the free application Trello (both the web and iOS app versions), which is also often used in software development. I’ve been using Trello as my personal to-do list for a while now, and most recently my fiancee and I have started using it to plan our wedding.

Trello makes it easy to create actionable to-do list items and move them to the ‘done’ folder once completed. Not only does this help you track your progress, but also gives you a nice jolt of joy when you drag and drop from ‘To-Do’ into ‘Done’.

These are just a few examples of how you can leverage Agile, a technique widely used in the software development community which took an extremely complex subject (software) and simplified/improved upon it, to improve various aspects of your life.

Eric Rems
Co-founder, The Mindful Tech Lab - Check out all of our amazing apps to help improve your life here

Being stuck behind a computer for the better part of the day my mind tends to effortlessly navigate from one thought to the next, guiding me to tackle many different tasks at a time, and in turn forcing me to open up a new browser tab about once every few minutes.

Most of the time I don’t even realize how much I’m “multi-tasking” until the text that normally appears on the browser tab is no longer even displayed, thus causing an extremely hard time to navigate between each — something I refer to as “Tab Roulette” (pictured above).

Why so many browser tabs? Science explains.
As someone interested in the human condition as a whole, as well as my own self-growth, I started looking for an answer to this multi-tasking behavior. Many, many browser tabs opened later, research showed that we as humans are biologically programmed to be rewarded each time we complete tasks (no matter how simple they really are).

What is actually happening there is that each time we complete a task, our brain gets a “hit” of dopamine (the pleasure chemical). We love dopamine, which makes it addictive to get rewarded for even the most menial tasks.
Checking email → Dopamine
Booking dinner reservations → Dopamine
Responding to a chat message → Dopamine

But I have bigger goals.
Understanding the science of why I’d multi-task, it was obvious that throughout my day I’d get so caught up in the wormhole of completing tasks that I’d often forget to step back and think of the big picture. This was frustrating to me because I had much bigger goals than these small tasks, but they often seemed to slip my mind — something like a “motivation blackout”.

Maybe even worse than not being reminded of these goals was the fact that I’d feel drained (a side-effect of multi-tasking) by the end of the day and lack the motivation to work towards them. As someone looking to be a high performer at work and on my own projects, I needed to find a way to keep my motivation level high even when I’m stuck in the task wormhole that often comes with the 9–5.

Don’t argue with Science, hack it.
Knowing that my body was likely not to change in the near term, I instead decided to hack the process and inject a subtle hint of motivation into my day to day. What I’d often find myself doing when I lacked motivation was searching for inspiring quotes by known leaders, something that is apparently common practice. The problem was, doing this required me to be proactive and realize that I was running low on motivation, something that I often overlooked.

So by putting some of my (basic) coding skills to work, I built an incredibly simple Google Chrome Extension that delivers a motivational quote each time I open a new tab and appropriately called it New Tab Motivation.

New Tab Motivation
So now, whenever I’m attempting to complete various tasks, I’m delivered a low-touch jolt of motivation in my browser. This boost didn’t require me to download an app, pull out my phone and check Instagram for a motivational post, or even search for inspiring quotes to get me through the day, but instead was right there seamlessly into my daily routine.
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In developing technology products over the years, one of the major themes I’ve realized is that creating an entirely new behavior for people is incredibly hard to do. Instead, building something that is already part of a routine (i.e. opening browser tabs) is the best way to engage and create a useful tool that people will actually use daily.

**Check out New Tab Motivation (free) for Chrome**

Eric Rems
Co-founder, The Mindful Tech Lab - Check out all of our amazing apps to help improve your life here

​Life is a challenge that we all each take on daily. Here are 33 quotes, powered by MotivateBot, to help you win at the game of life and become the best person you can be!
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Don't forget to share your favorite quote and help motivate your friends!

Here are our favorite quotes to help us get into that motivated mindset! Be sure to share your favorite one that helps motivate you!
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