Quotes About Progress

Once you got started, all you had to do was keep placing one foot in front of the other, no matter how happy or sad you were. I'd taken that first step because I'd wanted to look better. I'd wanted my clothes to fit. But it hadn't taken me long to figure out that the biggest benefit was less about vanity than it was about sanity. Walking always helped.

Maybe part of find what you wanted was recognizing what you didn't want. Maybe there was hope for me yet.

I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you're taught to eat your greens before you have dessert.

But just as the world is opening up, it's closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes.

Don't plan it, don't overthink it, just let it happen, you've got to find a way to bridge the chasm from here to there, from this unthinkable present to some unthinkable future . . .

Ah well. You know what they say. Progress, not perfection. That's why it's called training. Shall we begin again?

I can't do much yet, but even if I can do a little to help ... I want to give it all I have! If a person doesn't do anything, they never get any better. Doing one little thing, taking one little step forward ... I gotta believe it will help build a better future!

and once again ... we will head toward that time.

Alleviating poverty is not the same as creating prosperity. The prosperity paradox

If present rates of improvement continue, however, we would expect the cruising range of electric cars, for example, to intersect with the average range demanded in the mainstream market by 2015, and electric vechicle acceleration to intersect with mainstream demands by 2020.

Getting something wrong doesn't mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.

Necessity remains the mother of invention.

Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea.

We adhere to the saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," while not really questioning whether "it" is "broke.

They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.

For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.

People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this…is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror-because data is only available about the past.

Innovation is less about producing something new and more about enabling something new and important for customers.

Figure I.1 The Impact of Sustaining and Disruptive Technological Change

Ojomo, "Obsession with ending poverty is where development is going wrong," Guardian, February 8, 2017

Adopting new technologies can improve the way we solve Jobs to Be Done. But what's important is that you focus on understanding the underlying job, not falling in love with your solution for it.

This is what processes aligned with customer jobs do: they shift complexity and nuisances from the customer to the vendor, leaving positive customer experiences and valuable progress in their place.

Clayton M. Christensen

The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be strongly influenced by the circumstance.