Quotes About Progress

On reflection, this makes sense. If you have many years' experience, then you've had time to get better at what you do and develop a feeling of efficacy. It also gives you time to develop strong relationships with your coworkers and to see many examples of your work benefiting others.

Thoreau's new economics was developed in an industrial age, but his basic insights apply just as well to our current digital context.

if you're not careful to keep pushing forward, your improvement can taper off to what the performance scientist Anders Ericsson called an "acceptable level," where you then remain stuck.

The important thing about little bets is that they're bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This approach stands in contrast to the idea of choosing a bold plan and making one big bet on its success.

It was the glacial writing progress during this year that drove Chappell to embrace the rhythmic method. He made a rule that he would wake up and start working by five thirty every morning. He would then work until seven thirty, make breakfast, and go to work already done with his dissertation obligations for the day. Pleased by early progress, he soon pushed his wake-up time to four forty-five to squeeze out even more morning depth.

focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.

It's divided into five columns: plan, ready, blocked, work, and done.

craft-centric." Getting better and better at what I did became what mattered most, and getting better required the strain of deliberate practice. This is a different way of thinking about work, but once you embrace it, the changes to your career trajectory can be profound.

The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you've become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.

The killer app is making calls,

taking on projects that were beyond his current comfort zone;

Strain, I now accepted, was good. Instead of seeing this discomfort as a sensation to avoid, I began to understand it the same way that a body builder understands muscle burn: a sign that you're doing something right. Inspired by this insight, I accompanied a promise to do more large-scale paper deconstructions of this type with a trio of smaller habits designed to inject even more deliberate practice into my daily routine. I describe these new routines below: My

Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance," he writes, "they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins" [emphasis mine]. This rapid and frequent feedback, Sims argues, "allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.

regularly read and understand the cutting-edge results in my field.

Every week, I expose myself to something new about my field. I can read a paper, attend a talk, or schedule a meeting. To ensure that I really understand the new idea, I require myself to add a summary, in my own words, to my growing "research bible

the problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior:

lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.

little bet, in the setting of mission exploration, has the following characteristics: It's a project small enough to be completed in less than a month. It forces you to create new value (e.g., master a new skill and produce new results that didn't exist before). It produces a concrete result that you can use to gather concrete feedback.

Glass emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to the point where he had interesting options. "The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that's the hardest phase," he says.

if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

These changes crept up on us and happened fast, before we had a chance to step back and ask what we really wanted out of the rapid advances of the past decade

we should treat with great care any new technology that threatens to disrupt the ways in which we connect and communicate with others. When you mess with something so central to the success of our species, it's easy to create problems.

Change isn't something most people enjoye, even if it's progressive change.