Quotes About Effort

The good news about deliberate practice is that it will push you past this plateau and into a realm where you have little competition.

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title).

the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain." American

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that's exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it "deliberate," as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

The best students understood the role intensity plays in productivity and therefore went out of their way to maximize their concentration—radically reducing the time required to prepare for tests or write papers, without diminishing the quality of their results.

There is a middle ground, and if you're interested in developing a deep work habit, you must fight to get there.

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. I like the term "stretch" for describing what deliberate practice feels like,

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you

Working right trumps finding the right work. He didn't need to have a perfect job to find occupational happiness—he needed instead a better approach to the work already available to him. I

I felt like I was stretching to convince the world that my work was interesting, yet no one cared.

Humans are naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the short term, even if it's more harmful in the long term—so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend's new baby instead of stopping by to visit.

It is a lifetime accumulation of deliberate practice that again and again ends up explaining excellence.

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable.

When experts exhibit their superior performance in public their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to attribute it to special talents," Ericsson notes.

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that's exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands…. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it "deliberate," as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. If

we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.

The two core abilities just described depend on your ability to perform deep work. If

Si queremos triunfar, debemos producir lo mejor que nuestras capacidades nos permitan producir: se trata de una labor que requiere trabajo profundo.

Hours spent in serious study of the game was not just the most important factor in predicting chess skill, it dominated the other factors.

1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. In

People play differently when they're keeping score," the 4DX authors explain.