Quotes About Dedication

You don't play, you can't win.

He reached up, caught her hand, pressed it to his lips, and on a resigned breath, murmured, "Emma, dear, sweet, Emma . . . what would I do without you?" "You'd get on just fine," she joked, "for you are Nelson. Now be still—we 'ave much to do before Sir Graham and 'is bride-to-be arrive!

It would be many years before I began to understand that all of life is practice: writing, driving, hiking, brushing teeth, packing lunch boxes, making beds, cooking dinner, making love, walking dogs, even sleeping. We are always practicing. Only practicing.

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

We don't do things we aren't good at by nature. I wouldn't play basketball because I'm only 5' 1". Find what you enjoy - whether it's racing, flying a helicopter, being a doctor, or stitching clothes together. Once you've done that, you have the passion you need.

In my spiritual and academic journeys, I have learned that it is imperative for Christians to pursue truth at all costs.

That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

Inspiration is for amateurs.

If you were to visit a dozen talent hotbeds tomorrow, you would be struck by how much time the learners spend observing top performers.

Practice on the days that you eat.

People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work. That might be true in some cases, but in mine, as with many riders I knew, it was precisely the opposite. EPO granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you'd ever imagined, in both training and racing.

After all, you aren't built to be transformed in a single day. You are built to improve little by little, connection by connection, rep by rep. As Wooden also said, "Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.

One does not become a master coach by accident.

The truth is, when you are starting out, you do not "play" tennis; you struggle and fight and pay attention and slowly get better. The truth is, we learn in staggering-baby steps. Effort-based language works because it speaks directly to the core of the learning experience, and when it comes to ignition, there's nothing more powerful.

deep practice is assisted by the attainment of a primal state, one where we are attentive, hungry, and focused, even desperate.

is for amateurs.

As Wooden also said, "Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.

Q: Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement. Q: Why are passion and persistence key ingredients of talent? A: Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don't love it, you'll never work hard enough to be great.

Growing skill, as we've seen, requires deep practice. But deep practice isn't a piece of cake: it requires energy, passion, and commitment. In a word, it requires motivational fuel, the second element of the talent code.

We usually think of passion as an inner quality. But the more I visited hotbeds, the more I saw it as something that came first from the outside world. In the hotbeds the right butterfly wingflap was causing talent hurricanes. "I

As Vladimir Horowitz, the virtuoso pianist who kept performing into his eighties, put it, "If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices.

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.

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.