Quotes About Discipline

Purposeful practice requires getting out of one's comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice.

So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation. This recipe is an excellent start for anyone who

The key thing is to take that general goal—get better—and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.

Call it "the New Year's resolution effect"— it's why gyms that were crowded in January are only half full in July and why so many slightly used guitars are available on Craigslist. So

abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve. So

Steve's performance illustrates a key insight from the study of effective practice: You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.

So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation. This recipe is an excellent start for anyone who wishes to improve—but it is still just a start.

If all you want to do is to safely drive your car from point A to point B or to play the piano well enough to plink out "Für Elise," then this approach to learning is all you need.

Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call "naive practice," which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one's performance.

TEACHER: How many times did you play it? STUDENT: Ten or twenty. TEACHER: How many times did you play it correctly? STUDENT: Umm, I dunno . . . Once or twice . . . TEACHER: Hmm . . . How did you practice it? STUDENT: I dunno. I just played it. This is naive practice in a nutshell: I just played it. I just swung the bat and tried to hit the ball. I just listened to the numbers and tried to remember them. I just read the math problems and tried to solve them.

You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.

Imagine a world in which doctors, teachers, engineers, pilots, computer programmers, and many other professionals honed their skills in the same way that violinists, chess players, and ballerinas do now. Imagine a world in which 50 percent of the people

I made it a point to recruit only subjects who had trained extensively as athletes, dancers, musicians, or singers. None of them ever quit on me. So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.

Man proposes and dispose. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy.

Guitarists spend half their time tuning and the other half playing out of tune.

I have my own virtue, which I am constantly cultivating and refining by teaching myself not to tolerate in me or my surroundings anything but the exquisite.

My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I'll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I'll have hit nearly one million balls. He believes in math. Numbers, he says, don't lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.

Sex doesn't interfere with your tennis; it's staying out all night trying to find it that affects your tennis.

Weak legs command, Gil says. Strong legs obey.

All of us, from time to time, need a plunge into freedom and novelty, after which routine and discipline will seem delightful by contrast.

Park rangers, including those at the highest ranks, have been disciplined, frivolously indicted, and even fired because they told the truth about living, working, and dying in a national park.

There is nothing like routine, which leads to consistency and persistency. Both are needed for success." Andreas Simic

If you don't get enough time-outs as a child, you get them as a grownup.

Concentration is my motto - first honesty, then industry, then concentration.