Quotes About Progress

Evil is only imperfection, that which is not complete, which is becoming, but has not yet found its end.

As civilisation advances, the deities lessen in number, the divine powers become concentrated more and more in one Being, and God rules over the whole earth.

Someone ought to do it, but why should I? Someone ought to do it, so why not I? Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.

There was a time when any idea of voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of recognising that Providence works through the common sense of individual brains.

The Lord comes forth to restore that which had been disturbed of the balanced interworking of the three gunas and to make again such balance between them as shall enable evolution to go forward smoothly and not be checked in its progress.

Were everything around us smooth and easy, we would remain supine, lethargic, indifferent. It is the whip of pain, of suffering, of disappointment, that drives us onward and brings out the forces of our internal life which otherwise would remain undeveloped.

By not quitting, you are missing out on the opportunity to switch to something that will create more progress toward your goals. Anytime you stay mired in a losing endeavor, that is when you are slowing your progress. Anytime you stick to something when there are better opportunities out there, that is when you are slowing your progress.

Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.

A common, simple way to develop kill criteria is with "states and dates:" "If by (date), I have/haven't (reached a particular state), I'll quit.

To pursue radical ideas, he has to be a radical loss-cutter. Every dollar they save by getting to no quickly is a dollar they can spend on something that could change the world.

If we find the Achilles' heel," Teller told me, "thank God we found the Achilles' heel after $2 million instead of after $20 million.

One of Teller's valuable insights is that pedestal-building creates the illusion of progress rather than actual progress itself.

Monkeys and pedestals boils down to some very good advice: Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.

Charles Duhigg, in The Power of Habit, offers the golden rule of habit change—that the best way to deal with a habit is to respect the habit loop: "To change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

Switching to something, like a new job or a new major or a new relationship or a new business strategy, is perceived as a new decision, and an active one. In contrast, we don't really view the choice to stick with the status quo as a decision at all.

The benefits of recognizing just a few extra learning opportunities compound over time. The cumulative effect of being a little better at decision-making, like compounding interest, can have huge effects in the long run on everything that we do.

You know that Chinese proverb, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step"? Turns out, if we were contemplating a thousand-mile walk, we'd be better off imagining ourselves looking back from the destination and figuring how we got there. When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.

Exacerbating the pass-fail problem is that once we establish a goal, we rarely revisit it. Goals tend to be set-it-and-forget-it. The finish line doesn't move.

I think that we all share the intuition that the latter case would feel worse, even though that version of you trained for distance running and actually ran 16 miles of a 26.2-mile race, compared with the version of you that never got off the couch. The reason it feels worse is that if you don't try, if you never start the race, there is no failing to reach the finish line because you never set that as a goal for yourself in the first place.

I'm certainly not knocking these books. But whether you say "pivot" or "moving on to the next chapter" or "strategic redeployment," all of these things are, by definition, quitting. After all, stripped of its negative connotation, quitting is merely the choice to stop something that you have started.

I'm going to keep developing this product unless I fail to hit clear benchmarks within the next two months that I've set with my quitting coach.

Success means following a good decision process, not just crossing a finish line, especially if it is the wrong one to cross. That means appropriately following kill criteria, listening to our quitting coaches, and recognizing that the progress we've made along the way counts for a lot.

Finish lines are funny things. You either reach them or you don't. You either succeed or you fail. There is no in between. Progress along the way matters very little.

Being in the losses is as much a state of mind as anything else. We don't see ourselves as being in the gains, even though we've gone farther than where we started, because we're not measuring ourselves by how far we are past the starting line. We're measuring ourselves by whether we're short of the finish line.