Quotes About Motivation

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you

None of these students was interested in achieving solely for achieving's sake; rather, they had a natural hunger for intellectual challenge and a flair for transforming their personal interests into exciting projects

locus of control theory, a subfield of personality psychology that argues that motivation is closely connected to whether people feel like they have control over their ultimate success in an endeavor.

The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it's also dangerous. Telling someone to "follow their passion" is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.

How do people end up loving what they do?

Why do some people enjoy their work while so many other people don't? Here's the CliffsNotes summary of the social science research in this area: There are many complex reasons for workplace satisfaction, but the reductive notion of matching your job to a pre-existing passion is not among them.

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.

waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan.

There is a popular notion that artists work from inspiration—that there is some strike or bolt or bubbling up of creative mojo from who knows where… but I hope [my work] makes clear that waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible, terrible plan. In fact, perhaps the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration. In

Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

People play differently when they're keeping score," the 4DX authors explain.

To summarize, I've presented two different ways people think about their working life. The first is the craftsman mindset, which focuses on what you can offer the world. The second is the passion mindset, which instead focuses on what the world can offer you. The craftsman mindset offers clarity, while the passion mindset offers a swamp of ambiguous and unanswerable questions.

the individual's scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual's current deep work hour count.

intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement and sense of fulfillment

to your work, then he will close the deal. To

When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.

A now voluminous line of inquiry, initiated in a series of pioneering papers also written by Roy Baumeister, has established the following important (and at the time, unexpected) truth about willpower: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

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.

be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.

First, it allowed me to connect, at a visceral level, accumulated deep work hours and tangible results. Second, it helped calibrate my expectations for how many hours of deep work were needed per result. This reality (which was larger than I first assumed) helped spur me to squeeze more such hours into each week.

you don't produce, you won't thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.

The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.

The idle mind is the devil's workshop