Quotes About Motivation

Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation. For example, being told that you share a birthday with a mathematician can improve the amount of effort you're willing to put into difficult math tasks by 62 percent.

I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work. —Charles Darwin

The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.

In other words, a small thank-you caused people to behave far more generously to a completely different person. This is because thank-yous aren't only expressions of gratitude; they're crucial belonging cues that generate a contagious sense of safety, connection, and motivation.

Think of your windshield as an energy source for your brain. Use pictures (the walls of many talent hotbeds are cluttered with photos and posters of their stars) or, better, video. One idea: Bookmark a few YouTube videos, and watch them before you practice, or at night before you go to bed.

What ignited the progress wasn't any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.

all the world's parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort." [Paraphrasing Carol Dweck, a psychologist who studies motivation]

Envision a reachable goal, and envision the obstacles. The thing is, as Oettingen discovered, this method works, triggering significant changes in behavior and motivation.

High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal.

small thank-you caused people to behave far more generously to a completely different person. This is because thank-yous aren't only expressions of gratitude; they're crucial belonging cues that generate a contagious sense of safety, connection, and motivation.

The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.

This is not to say that being born late into a big family automatically makes someone fast, any more than having a parent die early in life automatically makes one prime minister of England. But it does say that being fast, like any talent, involves a confluence of factors that go beyond genes and that are directly related to the intense, subconscious reaction to motivational signals that provide the energy to practice deeply and thus grow myelin.

group's performance by 30 to 40 percent. The drop-off is consistent whether he plays the Jerk, the Slacker, or the Downer.

This group performed well no matter what he did. Nick said it was mostly because of one guy. You can see this guy is causing Nick to get almost infuriated—his negative moves aren't working like they had in the other groups, because this guy could find a way to flip it and engage everyone and get people moving toward the goal.

But the message from Dweck and the hotbeds is clear: high motivation is not the kind of language that ignites people. What works is precisely the opposite: not reaching up but reaching down, speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle. Dweck's research shows that phrases like "Wow, you really tried hard," or "Good job, dude," motivate far better than what she calls empty praise.

1) talent requires deep practice; (2) deep practice requires vast amounts of energy; (3) primal cues trigger huge outpourings of energy.

It's called mental contrasting, and it seems less like science than the kind of advice you might come across on a late-night infomercial: Envision a reachable goal, and envision the obstacles. The thing is, as Oettingen discovered, this method works, triggering significant changes in behavior and motivation.

The moment you're part of a group, the amygdala tunes in to who's in that group and starts intensely tracking them. Because these people are valuable to you. They were strangers before, but they're on your team now, and that changes the whole dynamic. It's such a powerful switch—it's a big top-down change, a total reconfiguration of the entire motivational and decision-making system.

Oettingen's work doesn't line up with how we normally think about motivation and goals. We normally think about them as being intrinsic to a person. People are either motivated or they're not; accordingly, we describe motivation with terms like desire or heart. But in these experiments, motivation is not a possession but rather the result of a two-part process of channeling your attention: Here's where you're at and Here's where you want to go.

Growing skill, as we've seen, requires deep practice. But deep practice isn't a piece of cake: it requires energy, passion, and commitment. In a word, it requires motivational fuel, the second element of the talent code.

We usually think of passion as an inner quality. But the more I visited hotbeds, the more I saw it as something that came first from the outside world. In the hotbeds the right butterfly wingflap was causing talent hurricanes. "I

They created a high-purpose environment, flooded the zone with signals that linked the present effort to a meaningful future, and used a single story to orient motivation the way that a magnetic field orients a compass needle to true north: This is why we work. Here is where you should put your energy.

Creating engagement around a clear, simple set of priorities can function as a lighthouse, orienting behavior and providing a path toward a goal.

The trick is not just to send the signal but to create engagement around it.