Quotes About Achievement

Raise your sail one foot and you get ten feet of wind.

Challenge your limitations for the pure joy of challenge.

This is not a feel-good book. (But I am confident you will feel good after reading it.) It is not a motivational book. (But I promise you will be motivated once you are done.)

In his long evolutionary history, man has scored few greater successes than his creation of human society. For it is on that primeval achievement that he has built those special qualities of mind and of behaviour which, in his own view at least, separate him from lower forms of life. If we sometimes tend to overlook this fact it is only because we have lived so long under the protective ambience of society that we have come to take its benefits for granted.

Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.

In life, we can work so hard to get the kinks out that we forget to put the peaks in.

One way to motivate action, then, is to make people feel as though they're already closer to the finish line than they might have thought.

Rather than focusing solely on what's new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what's already been conquered.

To experience more defining moments, we need to rethink the way we set goals.

Some powerful defining moments contain all four elements. Think of YES Prep's Senior Signing Day: the ELEVATION of students having their moment onstage, the INSIGHT of a sixth grader thinking That could be me, the PRIDE of being accepted to college, and the CONNECTION of sharing the day with an arena full of thousands of supportive people. (See the footnote for a mnemonic to remember this framework for defining moments.)

Make the change small enough that they can't help but score a victory.

The other advantage of scaling the miracle is that it demystifies the journey. Let

The value of the miracle scale is that it focuses attention on small milestones that are attainable and visible rather than on the eventual destination, which may seem very remote.

By using Kamb's level-up strategy, we multiply the number of motivating milestones we encounter en route to a goal. That's a forward-looking strategy: We're anticipating moments of pride ahead.

should not be "losing 10 pounds," it should be something intrinsically motivating, such as "Fitting into my sexy black pants (without gastrointestinal distress)." Suddenly, your weight-loss mission starts looking more like a playful quest, with frequent victories along the way, and less like a daily weigh-in on the bathroom scale

SMART goals presume the emotion; they don't generate it.

People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one.

the pop-psychology literature is full of gurus urging you to visualize success. It turns out that a positive mental attitude isn't quite enough to get the job done. Maybe financial gurus shouldn't be telling us to imagine that we're filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.

Transitions should be marked, milestones commemorated, and pits filled.

Fill pits, then build peaks.

Smart enough to get into Yale. Economists studied students who had been admitted to two schools of higher and lower prestige but decided to attend the school with lower prestige. Estimated sacrifice in lifetime earnings from attending the less prestigious school: none.

her successes came despite a lack of authority and resources.

Once people are on the path and making progress, it's important to make their advances visible. With

When you've celebrated moving from 1 to 2, and then from 2 to 3, you gain confidence that you can make the next advance.