Quotes About Achievement

In the words of one high-hope individual, "All the steps involved in getting there are as much fun as actually finishing a project." Consistent with this sentiment, I have found that high-hope people are quite patient with experiencing the course of unfolding events.

subalterns, when Sebastian bought his first commission

What we do not earn ourselves," he said, "is never truly ours. It can always be taken away. But even if we lose everything we work for, the achievement is ours forever.

Since fortune was dragging its heels, I would lure it out with my hard work.

There are many ways to obtain our desires, ma petite. Remember that, for it will serve you well.

What we do not earn ourselves," he said, "is never truly ours.

But even if we lose everything we work for, the achievement is ours forever.

Carl Spackler IT'S IN THE HOLE.

Well, she respected that. That, she understood. She would have done as many squat-thrusts as it took. They threw you in together at these colleges because you were smart, got good grades, took BC calc, got a 5 on the AP Chem exam. No one warned you. No one told you what the expectations of your views were going to be.

If you don't produce, you won't thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won't be easy.

If your goal is to love what you do, you must first build up "career capital" by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the traits that define great work.

Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.

All the people I ever admired and respected led balanced lives—studying hard, partying hard, as well as being involved in activities and getting a decent amount of sleep each night. I really think this is the only logically defensible way of doing things." Chris, a straight-A college student

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title).

Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said

In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it's not commonplace; it's instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard—the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives. The

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish." They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of "wildly important goals." This

Sertillanges seems to have been ahead of his time, arguing in The Intellectual Life, "Men of genius themselves were great only by bringing all their power to bear on the point on which they had decided to show their full measure." Ericsson couldn't have said it better.)

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you

None of these students was interested in achieving solely for achieving's sake; rather, they had a natural hunger for intellectual challenge and a flair for transforming their personal interests into exciting projects

locus of control theory, a subfield of personality psychology that argues that motivation is closely connected to whether people feel like they have control over their ultimate success in an endeavor.

Getting to the cutting edge of a field can be understood in these terms: This process builds up rare and valuable skills and therefore builds up your store of career capital. Similarly, identifying a compelling mission once you get to the cutting edge can be seen as investing your career capital to acquire a desirable trait in your career. In other words, mission is yet another example of career capital theory in action. If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital.