Quotes About Progress

As Sheryl Shetsky says to other people who are fighting brain tumors, "Don't try to get back to who you were then. This is likely a new and improved you in many ways; moving on is the way to go.

We want desperately to take uncertainty out of the future. But when we take uncertainty out, it is no longer the future. It is the present projected forward. Nothing new can come from the desire for a predictable tomorrow. The only way to make tomorrow predictable is to make it just like today. In fact, what distinguishes the future is its unpredictability and mystery.

If there is no transformation inside of us, all the structural change in the world will have impact on our institutions.

We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we're not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn't feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.

In virtually all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use testing as a tool to identify and bring up your areas of weakness.

We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities.

Making mistakes and correcting them builds the bridges to advanced learning.

In the school of life experience, setbacks show us where we need to do better. We can steer clear of similar challenges in the future, or we can redouble our efforts to master them, broadening our capacities and expertise.

Study skills and learning skills are inert until they're powered by an active ingredient," Dweck says. The active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.

To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don't know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.

We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities. What we do shapes who we become and what we're capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do.

In the school of life experience, setbacks show us where we need to do better.

students need to take more control of their own learning by employing strategies like those we have discussed. For example, they need to test themselves, both to attain the direct benefits of increased retention and to determine what they know and don't know to more accurately judge their progress and focus on material that needs more work.

I've not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work.

First, to be useful, learning requires memory, so what we've learned is still there later when we need it. Second, we need to keep learning and remembering all our lives. We can't advance through middle school without some mastery of language arts, math, science, and social studies. Getting ahead at work takes mastery of job skills and difficult colleagues. In retirement, we pick up new interests. In our dotage, we move into simpler housing while we're still able to adapt.

One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.

I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.

All right, You Great Git, You've asked for it. I'll cover the world in Tastee-Freez and Wimpy Burgers. I'll fill it with concrete runways, motorways, aircraft, television, automobiles, advertising, plastic flowers, frozen food and supersonic bangs. I'll make it so noisy and disgusting that even You'll be ashamed of Yourself! No wonder You've so few friends. You're unbelievable!

I don't want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.

They are merely scars, not mortal wounds and you must use them to propel you forward.

I feel pretty good about it so far, but it's been a little harder to write than I'd hoped.

Sometimes being pushed to the wall gives you the momentum necessary to get over it!

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.