Quotes About Achievement

There's nothing better than excelling at a game you love. There's nothing worse than thinking your accomplishments as a player outweigh your responsibilities as a person.

Eventually, with success, I started to feel more and more isolated - like I didn't have a community of artists.

No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent.

The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.

Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. Much of happiness is hope, no

Michelangelo's great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: "You could be more than you are.

But we can aim too high. Or too low. Or too chaotically. So we fail and live in disappointment, even when we appear to others to be living well.

We assume that rules will irremediably inhibit what would otherwise be the boundless and intrinsic creativity of our children, even though the scientific literature clearly indicates, first, that creativity beyond the trivial is shockingly rare96 and, second, that strict limitations facilitate rather than inhibit creative achievement.

Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.

Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.

Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that's magic. That's compound interest. Do that for three years and your life will be entirely different

We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value.

Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.

Finished beats perfect.

Competence beats obedience.

That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain—indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists.

But winning at everything might only mean that you're not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you're not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?

Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them.

The successful among us delay gratification and bargain with the future.

Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal—an ambition, and a purpose—to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life.

I would like to thank Sally Harding, my agent, and the fine people she works with at CookeMcDermid. Without Sally, this book would have never been written.

Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?

That's the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price's law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more.

Quizá la felicidad se encuentra en el viaje de subida y no en el efímero sentimiento de satisfacción que aguarda en la próxima cumbre. Una gran parte de la felicidad está compuesta de esperanza, por muy profundo que fuera el submundo en el que dicha esperanza se f