Quotes About Effort

Life does not always yield its fruit easily, and when we cannot get to the top branches where the best and juiciest pieces cling, we must shake the tree. Shake it hard,

Are you going to farmer up or just lie there and bleed?

Some gifts of friendship cannot be earned, no matter how hard we try to live up to them.

The United States has poured more moral energy into improving race relations than into anything else in its history. And yet, in November 2008, race was still the American dilemma. The fact that it was still a dilemma despite so much effort fostered something like a yearning for miracles.

The effort whites put into observing racial etiquette has been demonstrated in the laboratory.

Sisyfos optimistina: Vierivä kivi ei sammaloidu.

I'm not a very good sleeper. But you know what? I'm willing to put in a few extra hours every day to get better. That's just the kind of hard worker I am.

The discipline of practice every day is essential. When I skip a day, I notice a difference in my playing. After two days, the critics notice, and after three days, so does the audience.

If we devoted as much effort to investigating the dead as we do to building the weapons that make them dead, we'd know a lot more about life after death." "Dead

In your pursuit of excellence, remember that hard work is often the remedy to feeling ordinary, incapable, and discouraged.  

There is no luck, you work hard and study things intently. If you do that for long and hard enough you're successful.

Think: How many great achievements have you accomplished with little effort? Then why put less effort into the one thing you want most, which is love?

The idea that you'll instantly move needles because you've never tried to move them until now is, well, delusional. Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that's rarely the case. Most conversion work, most business-development work, most sales work is a grind —a lot of effort for a little movement. You pile those little movements into a big one eventually, but that fruit is way up at the top of the tree.

Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work—this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can't be found. Instead, it's just one interruption after another.

Easy is a word that's used to describe other people's jobs. "That should be easy for you to do, right?" But notice how rarely people describe their own tasks as easy. For you, it's "Let me look into it"—but for others, it's "Get it done.

It won't be as easy, but lots of things that are worth doing aren't easy. It just takes commitment, discipline, and, most important, faith that it's all going to work out.

soon you'll see that it's the work—not the clock—that matters.

The problem, as we've learned over time, is that the further away you are from the fruit, the lower it looks. Once you get up close, you see it's quite a bit higher than you thought. We assume that picking it will be easy only because we've never tried to do it before.

If a worker's motivation is slumping, it's probably because the work is weakly defined or appears pointless, or because others on the team are acting like tools.

Promises are easy and cheap to make, actual work is hard and expensive.

Things get harder as you go, not easier. The easiest day is day one. That's the dirty little secret of business.

There are two fundamental ways not to be ignored at work. One is to make noise. The other is to make progress, to do exceptional work.

Algunas veces dejar lo que estás haciendo es la decisión adecuada, incluso si para entonces ya le has dedicado mucho esfuerzo. No insistas en malgastar un tiempo necesario en un trabajo que no lo es.

If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra effort and what's not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired.