Quotes About Progress

Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. Instead, they are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades. And

We are fighting a war on load times.

A business cliché commands us to "raise the bar." But that's exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar. Picture taking a high-jump bar and lowering it so far that it can be stepped over. If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change.

If failure is a necessary part of change, then the way people understand failure is critical.

just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

So, yes, a long journey starts with a single step, but a single step doesn't guarantee the long journey. How do you keep those steps coming?

once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they're acting.

That sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It's easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.

it was like "peeling an onion" where we were going just slightly deeper on each exchange and when finished, we had moved quite a bit.

Identity is going to play a role in nearly every change situation.

5. In individual relationships, we believe that relationships grow closer with time. But that's not the whole story. Sometimes long relationships reach plateaus. And with the right moment, relationships can deepen quickly.

Lots of things are out of our control. But the goal is to be wise about the things that are under our control. And one thing we can control is how we define the ultimate victory and the small victories that lead up to it.

5. In individual relationships, we believe that relationships grow closer with time. But that's not the whole story. Sometimes long relationships reach plateaus. And with the right moment, relationships can deepen quickly. • Fisherow and her team turned around the troubled Stanton Elementary School by relying, in part, on short parent-teacher home visits before the start of school. 6. According

Big changes can happen.

Whether the switch you seek is in your family, in your charity, in your organization, or in society at large, you'll get there by making three things happen. You'll direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.

To ooch is to construct small experiments to test one's hypothesis.

crystallization of discontent

these were not stories about sudden realizations. These were stories about action.

you need quick wins to get fired up. And getting fired up is super-important.

trainers set a behavioral destination and then use "approximations," meaning that they reward each tiny step toward the destination.

The answer may sound strange: You need to create the expectation of failure—not the failure of the mission itself, but failure en route.

Finding bright spots, then, solves many different problems at once.

Reinforcement is the secret to getting past the first step of your long journey and on to the second, third, and hundredth steps. And that's a problem, because most of us are terrible rein-forcers. We are quicker to grouse than to praise.

We need to be looking for bright spots—however tiny!—and rewarding them.