Quotes About Effort

One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life.

I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand.

A lot of film people are like that– especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them. It's not about art or ideas. It's about working at something and making it come out right.

The demands of words are too great for that; one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success.

Afterwards, walking to the car with my father, he told me I had played a nice game. No I hadn't, I said, it was terrible. Well, you did your best, he answered. You can't do well everytime.

Find yourself drowning in a sea of trouble, and hard work can become the raft that ends up keeping you afloat.

It's not just that things vanish--but once they vanish, the memory of them vanishes as well. Dark areas form in the brain, and unless you make a constant effort to summon up the things that are gone, they will quickly be lost to you forever...try to remember it, try to memorise all the beautiful things you are seeing, and in that way they will always be with you, even when you can't see them anymore... I wanted everything to belong to me, for all that beauty to be a part of what I was.

one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success.

Una cosa scompare e se aspetti troppo prima di ripensarla non c'è sforzo che possa farla riapparire. Dopo tutto, la memoria non è un atto di volontà. È qualcosa che accade tuo malgrado, e quando i cambiamenti sono troppo frequenti, la mente è destinata a vacillare e le cose destinate a eclissarsi in essa.

It'd taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.

I'd stand still for a few seconds, vainly snapping my fingers with as much hope of catching the beat as a quadriplegic hobo latching on to a moving boxcar.

effort becomes enjoyable when it's seen as play, or as a game.

has long been known that effort can be the secret sauce that makes things better. One of the classic findings in psychology is that the more effort you put into something, the more you value it. This is the logic of Benjamin Franklin's classic advice on how to turn a rival into a friend—ask him or her to do you a favor. Having worked to help you, they'll like you more.

Mastery. The right game establishes an optimal level of difficulty.

One of the benefits of certain activities is the respect and admiration you get from others. This relates to difficulty and risk and ability in an obvious way. If climbing Everest were pleasant and easy, nobody would be impressed that you did it.

Cleaning the bathroom for thirty minutes is unpleasant, but wouldn't it be worse to spend a half hour cleaning a Sisyphean bathroom, one that stayed dirty no matter how much you scrubbed it?

Greater Effort Increases Perceived Value in an Invertebrate," Journal of Comparative Psychology

Roy Baumeister and his colleagues. They posit that mental effort (or self-control, willpower, or grit) actually is a lot like a muscle. Like a muscle, it can work for only so long before it gets tired; like a muscle, it can be strengthened through exercise.

But, again, since there aren't muscles in the brain, why do we get mentally tired? Perhaps, like muscles, brains feed off a limited resource. Baumeister and his colleagues suggest that this is glucose (sugar). This theory is supported by the fact that sugar does seem to have an energizing effect. Running out of steam? Have a candy bar.

what really drops glucose is exercise—but, contrary to the predictions of the glucose hypothesis, exercise tends to make you better at subsequent tasks requiring mental effort, not worse.

When you bring your car into the shop, you're charged for "parts and labor," and you've never questioned for a second that the more labor it takes, the more you have to pay. Indeed, the relationship between effort and financial cost is so tight that we often talk about our everyday efforts in economic terms

This is a theory of why effort is often unpleasant. The phenomenology of getting tired doesn't reflect a diminishing resource; rather, it is about growing opportunity cost. This feeling of difficulty is a signal that there are better things to do elsewhere.

We will often choose to do something rather than nothing, even if the something is effortful and provides no tangible benefits. Effort itself can be a source of pleasure.

Effort sweetens the value of the products of labor.