Quotes About Achievement

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.

For some it is harder to write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.

The world is not interested in the storms you encountered, but did you bring the ship in?

I am sure that no man can derive more pleasure from money or power than I do from seeing a pair of basketball goals in some out of the way place.

The world is blessed most by men who do things, not by those who merely talk about them.

What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly an afterlife but an afterworld, not continuing existence but continuing recognition of their titles.

To be fully compensated for what one gave of oneself in the struggle for a title is to be restored to the condition one was in prior to competition.

We display the success of what we have done by not having to do anything.

If wealth and might are to be performed, great wealth and great might must be performed brilliantly.

Victories occur in time, but the titles won in them are timeless. Titles neither age nor die.

Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make they must make.

Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others?

The Master Player in us tolerates this indifference scarcely at all. Indeed, we respond to it as a challenge, an invitation to confrontation and struggle. If nature will offer us no home, offer us nothing at all, we will then clear and arrange a space for ourselves. We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization. We count among the highest achievements of modern society the development of a technology that allows us to master nature's vagaries.

What the winner of a finite game wins is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. I cannot entitle myself. Titles are theatrical, requiring an audience to bestow and respect them.

a finite game is to be won by someone it must come to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone has won. We know that someone has won the game when all the players have agreed who among them is the winner. No other condition than the agreement of the players is absolutely required in determining who has won the game.

What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. Titles are public. They are for others to notice. I expect others to address me according to my titles, but I do not address myself with them—unless, of course, I address myself as an other. The effectiveness of a title depends on its visibility, its noticeability to others.

School is often based not on problem solving, which perforce involves actions and goals, but on learning information, facts, and formulas that one has read about in texts or heard about in lectures. It is not surprising, then, that research has long shown that a student's doing well in school, in terms of grades and tests, does not correlate with being able to solve problems in the areas in which the student has been taught (e.g., math, civics, physics).

The economy that leads the world will be the one with the most millionaires and billionaires.

Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.

No member of the human race stepping out onto another heavenly body could possibly have represented the best of humanity more than Neil Armstrong did.

It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that a man is never more a man than when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp. -James Ramsey Ullman

BLOODY HELL, HE JUST PUNCHED THE MOON!

For in this world, one life was enough for any man.

thousand years ago the average life expectancy of mankind was only twenty-five years. It took another nine hundred years to extend that to thirty-seven. Today the average is seventy-eight. So, in the past hundred years, we more than doubled life expectancy. That