Quotes About Success

Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion.

Don't follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become, in the words of my favorite Steve Martin quote, "so good that they can't ignore you.

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title).

Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.

Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

How to study wisely: (1) don't skip classes; (2) study early in the day; (3) study in isolation; (4) keep your energy levels high; (5) actively recall the material and quiz yourself until you're completely satisfied.

To succeed with digital minimalism, you have to confront this rebalancing between conversation & connection in a way that makes sense to you.

The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don't attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you're unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work. This

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts. Notice

Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, "the superpower of the 21st century.

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you

Working right trumps finding the right work. He didn't need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness—he needed instead a better approach to the work already available to him. I

locus of control theory, a subfield of personality psychology that argues that motivation is closely connected to whether people feel like they have control over their ultimate success in an endeavor.

This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle—one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.

If you're not focusing on becoming so good they can't ignore you, you're going to be left behind.

Here's a case where someone successfully followed their passion," they say, "therefore 'follow your passion' must be good advice." This is faulty logic. Observing a few instances of a strategy working does not make it universally effective.

How do people end up loving what they do?

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution,

The superstar effect, in other words, has a broader application today than Rosen could have predicted thirty years ago. An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors.

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

People ask me how I funded my business," he said. "I tell them first I sold one CD, which gave me enough money to sell two." It grew from there.