Quotes About Growth

it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt.

It is time to reverse this prejudice against conscious effort and to see the powers we gain through practice and discipline as eminently inspiring and even miraculous.

Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; and if it is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach. —MARCUS AURELIUS

Without a worthy opponent a man or group cannot grow stronger.

Commit harmless mistakes that will not hurt you in the long run but will give you the chance to ask for his help. Masters adore such requests. A master who cannot bestow on you the gifts of his experience may direct rancor and ill will at you instead.

One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

At your birth a seed is planted. That seed is your uniqueness. It wants to grow, transform itself, and flower to its full potential. It has a natural, assertive energy to it. Your Life's Task is to bring that seed to flower, to express your uniqueness through your work. You have a destiny to fulfill. The stronger you feel and maintain it—as a force, a voice, or in whatever form—the greater your chance for fulfilling this Life's Task and achieving mastery.

The best way to neutralize our natural impatience is to cultivate a kind of pleasure in pain—like an athlete, you come to enjoy rigorous practice, pushing past your limits, and resisting the easy way out.

What limits individuals as well as nations is the inability to confront reality, to see things for what they are. As we grow older, we become more rooted in the past. Habit takes over. Something that has worked for us before becomes a doctrine, a shell to protect us from reality. Repetition replaces creativity.

You must value learning above everything else.

Establishing your differences with the mentor is an important part of your self-development, whether he is of the good or bad parent type.

Read more books than those who have a formal education, developing this into a lifelong habit.

Years later, a Japanese visitor tried to apologize to Mao for his country's invasion of China. Mao interrupted, "Should I not thank you instead?" Without a worthy opponent, he explained, a man or group cannot grow stronger. Mao's

You see, you keep learning. People are always looking for a single magic turning point. There isn't one. It's much more of a gradual getting better and better and better and better.

If we keep practicing, we gain fluency; basic skills are mastered, allowing us to take on newer and more exciting challenges.

never spend so much time on your studies that you neglect your social skills.

Moving towards mastery will naturally bring you a more global outlook, but it is always wise to expedite the process by training yourself early on to continually enlarge your perspective.

Finally, you must see your career or vocational path more as a journey with twists and turns rather than a straight line.

cultivate profound dissatisfaction with your work and the need to constantly improve your ideas, along with a sense of uncertainty—you are not exactly sure where to go next, and this uncertainty drives the creative urge and keeps it fresh.

Eventually, the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up with you, and the fall will be painful.

Do not be afraid to bring out the more sensitive or ambitious sides to your character. These repressed parts of you are yearning to be let out. In the theater of life, expand the roles that you play. Don't worry about people's reactions to any changes in you they sense. You are not so easy to categorize, which will fascinate them and give you the power to play with their perceptions of you, altering them at will.

Clearing your head of everything you thought you knew, even your most cherished ideas, will give you the mental space to be educated by your present experience--the best school of all. You will develop your own strategic muscles instead of depending on other people's theories and books.

it is always best to choose a task that is slightly above you, one that might be considered ambitious on your part. This is a corollary of the Law of the Creative Dynamic—the higher the goal, the more energy you will call up from deep within. You will rise to the challenge because you have to, and will discover creative powers in yourself that you never suspected.

Practical knowledge is the ultimate commodity, and is what will pay you dividends for decades to come—far more than the paltry increase in pay you might receive at some seemingly lucrative position that offers fewer learning opportunities