Quotes About Motivation

A leader must not only explain to and reassure employees that their jobs are important to the overall mission of the organization; he must ensure that their work really does contribute, that it is not pointless make-work or wheel spinning.

He'd no longer be a grade-motivated person. He'd be a knowledge-motivated person.

Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven't got it there's no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there's absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It's bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.

Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information.

A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don't whip me, I won't work." He didn't get whipped. He didn't work.

Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.

One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade

The student's biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don't whip me, I won't work." He didn't get whipped. He didn't work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.

Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless—we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in everything.

Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts testosterone levels.

dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.

In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.*

So dopamine is more about anticipation of reward than about reward itself.

Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; dopamine "binds" the value of a reward to the resulting work. It's about the motivation arising from those dopaminergic projections to the PFC that is needed to do the harder thing (i.e., to work). In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.fn50,99

I dont believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.

What's the bee in your bonnet? Seems to be some kind of idealism.

How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.

there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't.

I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard's The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, "It's so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.

If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.

He's interested in Willie. Quite simply and directly. And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It's only the half-baked people like Mr. Patton who are interested in money. Even the big boys who make a real lot of money aren't interested in money. Henry Ford isn't interested in money. He is interested in Henry Ford and therefore he is a genius.

Why did I become a professional pornographer? What can I say? I needed a job, a job was offered to me, and I took it.

In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.

El dolor experimentado en mi vida me había hecho extremadamente sensible al sufrimiento de los demás, y hacía que me sintiese plenamente motivado a aliviarlo.