Quotes About Persistence

Be focused on work or focused on something else, never in-between.

A lot of professions assume that you're going to take eight to ten years just to achieve the minimum level of competence necessary to start to practice. That's been a good grounding force when doing projects, because a lot of things go wrong here and there, but if you just assume that anything worthwhile is going to take five to ten years, they don't feel as severe.

Real work and real satisfaction come from the opposite of what the web provides. They come from going deep into something—the book you're writing, the album, the movie—and staying there for a long, long time.

El hombre razonable se adapta al mundo; el irrazonable persiste en intentar adaptar el mundo a él. Por consiguiente, todo progreso depende del hombre irrazonable.»

If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way.

No idea is so big that you can't take the first step. If the first step seems too hard, make it simpler. And don't worry again if the idea is bad. This is all practice.

Narzu? sobie niemo?liwie krótkie terminy, by zmusi? si? do natychmiastowych dzia?a? i odrzucenia drobiazgów.

As Pico Iyer pointed out, the act of quitting "means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn't agree with you, but because you don't agree with something. It's not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one's journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting—whether a job or a habit—means taking a turn so as to be sure you're still moving in the direction of your dreams.

I look at every failure as a learning experience and try to spend time with my failures. I stew on them for a while until I pick out some nugget from them that I can take forward.

Occasionally, a good idea comes to you first, if you're lucky. Usually, it only comes after a lot of bad ideas.

I'm old-fashioned. Where I come from, people like to succeed. . . . When I was a founder, when I first started out, we didn't have the word 'pivot.' We didn't have a fancy word for it. We just called it a fuck-up.

Lo que hay que tener (Anagrama, 2010), de Tom Wolfe

It's not giving up to put your current path on indefinite pause.

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life.

The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up all the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.

Neal Gabler's biography of Walt Disney.

Uno es recalcar que realizarás ochenta mil horas de trabajo a lo largo de tu vida.

Like Chuck Close says, 'Inspiration is for amateurs—the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will—through work—bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great 'art idea.

Don't let someone knock you off course before you reach your destination. Trust the work. Always trust the work.

The antithesis of mastery is the pursuit of quick fixes.

So I thought, 'I'm always on time, and I always show up to things, so why don't I do that for myself?' So I put a handwritten note next to my bed that said—and it has three exclamation points—'Mike!!! You have a meeting at Café Pedlar [where I was writing] at 7 a.m. with your mind,' which is so stupid. It's so embarrassing to admit, but it worked!

The best way I can describe the feeling is a Finnish word, "sisu"—the mental strength to continue to try even after you feel you've reached the limits of your abilities. I don't think failure is sometimes part of the process—it always is. When you feel you can't go on, know that you're just getting started.

Realistic goals, goals restricted to the average ambition level, are uninspiring and will only fuel you through the first or second problem, at which point you throw in the towel.

I manage to go jobless until three months after graduation, when I pull out my trump card and send one start-up CEO 32 consecutive e-mails. He finally gives in and puts me in sales.