Quotes About Performance

Remember, Chiyo, geisha are not courtesans. And we are not wives. We sell our skills, not our bodies. We create another secret world, a place only of beauty. The very word "geisha" means artist and to be a geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art.

The history of cosmic theories, in particular, may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias; and the manner in which some of the most important individual discoveries were arrived at reminds one more of a sleepwalker's performance than an electronic's brain.

The moment attention is focused on a normally automatized part-function such as ennunciating consonants, the matrix breaks down, the needle gets stuck, and the performance is paralyzed-like the centipede who was asked in which order he moved his hundred legs, and could walk no more.

material is the source for everything seen or said or done on the stage.

The use of the word person in every European language to signify a human individual is unintentionally appropriate; persona really means a player's mask, and it is quite certain that no one shows himself as he is, but that each wears a mask and plays a role. In general, the whole of social life is a continual comedy, which the worthy find insipid, whilst the stupid delight in it greatly.

Life is a stage where the worst actor plays the king while the best actor the beggar.

The real meaning of persona is a mask, such as actors were accustomed to wear on the ancient stage; and it is quite true that no one shows himself as he is, but wears his mask and plays his part.

If you'll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation – maybe that's what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.

History in live performance.

The busker glowed with Prime-Time Happiness, and for a few moments, deprivation took a backseat. It had been his dream to sing on the Donahue show, he said, not realizing that he had just been robbed of that too.

There have now been many studies of elite performers—international violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth—and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the cumulative amount of deliberate practice they've had. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself.

People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.... Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.

The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average?

checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized.

Indeed, the scientific effort to improve performance in medicine—an effort that at present gets only a miniscule portion of scientific budgets—can arguably save more lives in the next decade than bench science, more lives than research on the genome, stem cell therapy, cancer vaccines, and all the other laboratory work we hear about in the news.

What is troubling is not just being average but settling for it. Everyone knows that average-ness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain matters—looks, money, tennis—we would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child's pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we want no one to settle for average.

Could a computer outperform an experienced specialist?

top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do.

Yet, in the course of fifty cases, some teams managed to halve their operating time while others failed to improve at all. Practice, it turned out, did not necessarily make perfect.

Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.

With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off--it's more like a recipe.

when problems were identified, the follow-through was abysmal.

about whether the person could safely be kept on the job, and about how things might be turned around.

People often look to great athletes for lessons about performance. ... But success in medicine has dimensions that cannot be found on a playing field.