Quotes About Achievement

There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.

You did the impossible, because you didn't realize it was impossible.

Okay, it's not easy, but that's why we're no Einstein and he was.

Here is a selection from her portfolio.

The satisfaction of getting paid and saving up for something, that was very exciting.

A Benjamin Franklin Reader Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kissinger: A Biography

It was a self-fulfilling distortion," she claimed. "You did the impossible, because you didn't realize it was impossible.

Walter Isaacson

Let the perfect be the enemy of the good. When Leonardo could not make the perspective in the Battle of Anghiari or the interaction in the Adoration of the Magi work perfectly, he abandoned them rather than produce a work that was merely good enough. He carried around masterpieces such as his Saint Anne and the Mona Lisa to the end, knowing there would always be a new stroke he could add.

By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don't like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.

Einstein would not, as it turned out, ever win a Nobel for his work on relativity and gravitation, nor for anything other than the photoelectric effect.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure.

As he approached his thirtieth birthday, Leonardo had established his genius but had remarkably little to show for it publicly. His only known artistic accomplishments were some brilliant but peripheral contributions to two Verrocchio paintings, a couple of devotional Madonnas that were hard to distinguish from others being produced in the workshop, a portrait of a young woman that he had not delivered, and two unfinished would-be masterpieces.

It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

Hacer lo imposible es bastante divertido, declaró en una ocasión Walt Disney.

But what truly devastated Jobs was that he was not, after all, chosen as the Man of the Year.

in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish.

Thomas Carlyle afirmaba que «la historia del mundo no es sino la biografía de grandes hombres»

Kilby displayed his awshucks humility. "When I hear that kind of thing," he responded, "it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: 'No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine.

his thirties or forties able to really contribute something amazing," Jobs declared as he was about to turn thirty. That held true for Jobs in his thirties, during the decade that began with his ouster from Apple in 1985. But after turning forty in 1995, he flourished.

published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction

the son not of a lawyer but of a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a bookkeeper. Paul and Clara named their new

It made me cringe, but dammit, it got things done.