Quotes About Motivation

I love what I do, and I don't think I'm the guy who can do, like, a movie a year and that's it. I don't know what I'd do! I've already put stuff independently on the Internet cause I'm bored! I just want to keep going!

I write pretty much year-round, but I definitely do more when a deadline is looming.

Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.

I hope the wonder of what happens to my characters never goes away. That yearning keeps me writing.

I think every day there is some new actress comes out and inspires me to do something else... like Hilary Swank. After she did Boys Don't Cry, I felt this yearning to go out and be even half as good as she was.

Most people share a yearning to be something bigger than them. Something they can be excited about and something that will challenge them to go beyond being average.

I look for that earnest yearning in talent, you may not be the best at what you do, but if you have the passion you can at some point become your own inspiration.

I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of leadership are universal and are often about finding ways of encouraging people to combine their efforts, their talents, their insights, their enthusiasm and their inspiration to work together.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

Over the years, I've given myself a thousand reasons to keep running, but it always comes back to where it started. It comes down to self-satisfaction and a sense of achievement.

I was ironing my own clothes when I was 11 years old. My mental strength goes back to those days.

I've learned over the years that freedom is just the other side of discipline.

Typically, if you reward something, you get more of it. You punish something, you get less of it. And our businesses have been built for the last 150 years very much on that kind of motivational scheme.

When I came back from the military and completed a 4-year degree in 2 1/2 years, I developed the extraordinary habits needed to get a lot done in a very short period of time!

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

The last few years I've been saying I was ready to quit. It wasn't that interesting to me. Now that I'm directing, it's all new again.

Sixteen years as a freelance features journalist taught me that neither the absence of 'the Muse' nor the presence of 'the block' should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book.

Fear is not a motivating factor. You might be able to get a little bit more out of someone in the short term, but you will completely erode your business and your culture in the long term. You're going to lose all your good people. You're not going to have people tell you the truth, and it becomes the tradition.

But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.

There's one thing better than having a great actor, and that's having a great actor who's never done this kind of role before and is hungry to do it. They're testing themselves every day. They want to get out of their trailer and get to work.

If I get any private time in my trailer, all of a sudden I'm doing sit-ups and push-ups.

When I'm working on a movie, I'm in my trailer playing guitar. And then on the road, I read scripts and think of... it just keeps both fires burning. I kind of need both.

I didn't want to be looked at as a below-the-poverty-line kid. But now I think, that trailer is where I got the ambition. The anger. If we had a better life, I wouldn't be here. That trailer made me.