Quotes About Performance

Think of your windshield as an energy source for your brain. Use pictures (the walls of many talent hotbeds are cluttered with photos and posters of their stars) or, better, video. One idea: Bookmark a few YouTube videos, and watch them before you practice, or at night before you go to bed.

One of the best measures of any group's culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.

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

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

The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way. They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts.

The pattern seemed to hold: the youngest kids were frequently the fastest runners. It became more interesting when I broadened the sample group slightly.

They demonstrated that a series of small, humble exchanges—Anybody have any ideas? Tell me what you want, and I'll help you—can unlock a group's ability to perform. The key, as we're about to learn, involves the willingness to perform a certain behavior that goes against our every instinct: sharing vulnerability.

Relatedly, it's important to avoid interruptions. The smoothness of turn taking, as we've seen, is a powerful indicator of cohesive group performance. Interruptions shatter the smooth interactions at the core of belonging.

group's performance by 30 to 40 percent. The drop-off is consistent whether he plays the Jerk, the Slacker, or the Downer.

Be Painstaking in the Hiring Process: Deciding who's in and who's out is the most powerful signal any group sends, and successful groups approach their hiring accordingly. Most have built lengthy, demanding processes that seek to assess fit, contribution (through deep background research and extensive interactions with a large number of people in the group), and performance (increasingly measured by tests).

It's possible to predict performance by ignoring all the informational content in the exchange and focusing on a handful of belonging cues.

participants look at the task as a whole—as one big chunk, the megacircuit. Second, they divide it into its smallest possible chunks. Third, they play with time, slowing the action down, then speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture

High-proficiency environments help a group deliver a well-defined, reliable performance, while high-creativity environments help a group create something new.

Traditional theory said that hardware was a limit," Ericsson said. "But if people are able to transform the mechanism that mediates performance by training, then we're in an entirely new space. This is a biological system, not a computer. It can construct itself.

Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they'll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they'll find a way to make it better.

I guess you could say I've been in my share of violent movies.

I know what I like in other actors: truth. That's the best. It makes you say, 'OK, I'll go with you on this.'

I don't mind what the role is at all I just want to play cool characters.

The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.

When you feel better, have better recall, and sleep better, you are more likely to be on top of your game, and that makes you happier.

When I went on to write my next book, Working With Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to make a business case that the best performers were those people strong in these skills.

People's beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.

elite performers have something in common: They're really good at taking breaks

High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes.