Quotes About Achievement

I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.

In three decades of working with patients, I have found that when you tell your brain what you want, your brain will help you make it happen.

In short, if we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavors, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album.

Emotional self-control-- delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness- underlies accomplishment of every sort

Why reach for something you can never fully attain? But it's also a source of allure. Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.

The science shows that the secret to high performance isn't our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to make a contribution.

if-then" rewards usually do more harm than good. By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—they limit what each of us can achieve.

The most successful people, the evidence shows, often aren't directly pursuing conventional notions of success. They're working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.

The most fulfilling jobs share a common trait: They prod us to work at our highest level but in a way that we, not someone else, control.

Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.

Report cards are not a potential prize, but a way to offer students useful feedback on their progress. And Type I students understand that a great way to get feedback is to evaluate their own progress.

If you believed in the "mediocrity of the masses," as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve.

By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—they limit what each of us can achieve.

The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged. By creating conditions for people to make progress, shining a light on that progress, recognizing and celebrating progress, organizations can help their own cause and enrich people's lives.

Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one's sights and pushing toward the horizon.

single largest motivator was making progress in meaningful work.

Type I behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizes learning goals over performance goals, and welcomes effort as a way to improve at something that matters.

Sawyer Effect: A weird behavioral alchemy inspired by the scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Tom and friends whitewash Aunt Polly's fence. This effect has two aspects. The negative: Rewards can turn play into work. The positive: Focusing on mastery can turn work into play.

In other words, where "if-then" rewards are a mistake, shift to "now that" rewards—as in "Now that you've finished the poster and it turned out so well, I'd like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch.

next time you're selling yourself, don't fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow. - 141

In several studies, Dweck found that giving children a performance goal (say, getting a high mark on a test) was effective for relatively straightforward problems but often inhibited children's ability to apply the concepts to new situations.

Instead, they spent considerable time accomplishing almost nothing—until they experienced a surge of activity that always came at "the temporal midpoint" of a project.14

mastery—the desire to get better and better at something that matters.

later start time high school graduation rates increased by more than 11 percent