Quotes About Perseverance

We think of effortless performance as desirable, but it's really a terrible way to learn

Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains. And as with building muscle, the first key is to approach the process with a plan.

But the message from Dweck and the hotbeds is clear: high motivation is not the kind of language that ignites people. What works is precisely the opposite: not reaching up but reaching down, speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle. Dweck's research shows that phrases like "Wow, you really tried hard," or "Good job, dude," motivate far better than what she calls empty praise.

All our movies suck at first," Catmull says. "The BrainTrust is where we figure out why they suck, and it's also where they start to not suck.

Things that appear to be obstacles turn out to be desirable in the long haul

When you're making movies you've got to get obsessive.

I genuinely believe that if you want to get in the film business, get in the film business.

Self-destruction is the effect of cowardice in the highest extreme.

There she stood. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Her face was pale, almost snow-white. She probably hadn't slept, either. She was still wearing the same dress. Her hair looked like a bomb had gone off. She was beautiful.

longer in extended bad weather. For passengers in steerage—scores

I've never read anywhere that you have to understand everything before you take a feeble step in the right direction.

It was the conclusion that the secret to living a long life had nothing to do with happiness, a lack of stress, or avoiding hard work. They found that the secret was living conscientiously and using forethought, planning, and perseverance in all aspects of one's life. Conscientiousness was the number-one predictor of longevity. Friedman offers a number of reasons

The statistics may seem grim, but you deserve to be happy, and you can cultivate happiness even when it seems like the world is crumbling around you.

When a fruit salad, a lover, or a jazz trio is just too imperfect for our tastes, we stop eating, kissing, and listening. But the law of large numbers suggests that when a measurement is too imperfect for our tastes, we should not stop measuring. Quite the opposite - we should measure again and again until niggling imperfections yield to the onslaught of data.

will not tremble," Cicero wrote in the first century BC, "however much it is tortured.

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

goal-directed self-imposed delay of gratification" is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. His finding underscores the role of emotional intelligence as a meta-ability, determining how well or how poorly people are able to use their other mental capacities.

no matter what happens to our bodies o our minds, our souls remain whole.

Being a professional," Julius Erving once said, "is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.

innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles BY STEVEN PRESSFIELD   Pressfield's

As they explained, "Whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance of working longer without switching objectives may be less perceptible . . . in every field, grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment."14

The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets' ratings on a noncognitive, non-physical trait known as "grit"—defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals."10 The experience of these army officers-in-training confirms the second law of mastery: Mastery is a pain.

One of the most enduring scenes in American literature offers an important lesson in human motivation. In Chapter 2 of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom faces the dreary task of whitewashing Aunt Polly's 810-square-foot fence. He's not