Quotes About Improvement

I do not believe that God has created us under this dire necessity to toil, like beasts, to sustain life. I believe it is his will that we should hold absolute mastery over time, so as to devote it mainly to intellectual and moral improvement, domestic enjoyment, and social intercourse.

If you're never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you'll never get better.

Even when every Tom, Dick and Harry was calling for my head, I still felt I could get better at being captain.

I annotated my friend's book manuscript with scribbles on every page. She annotated mine with a single note: This needs to be better . She trusted that I would know what to do, and I did.

Old incompetence is incompetence still.

And hope, Lauren thought, kept life moving. Hope that things would improve, that sadness would pass, that you'd live feeling you'd love and live. Hope that the few fragile threads of this new life won't be snapped before they can strengthen.

Common sense tells us that the government's attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy.

Do we talk about the dignity of work? Do we give our students any reason for believing it is worthwhile to sacrifice for their work because such sacrifices improve the psychological and mental health of the person who makes them?

It is far too easy to be critical. It is far harder to have a better idea.

Fourth lesson in Bible reading: we are challenged to be better than nonfollowers. Followers are marked by a greater righteousness or by more righteousness. (Just what that more will look like can be found in the antitheses of 5:21–48.)

If removing a restriction improves performance or has no impact on performance but improves morale, everyone wins.

Learning from mistakes requires three things: Putting yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes Having the self-confidence to admit to them Being courageous about making changes

it didn't matter if the sketches were "right"; what mattered was that his sketch improved the quality of the conversation,

If you'd like to be good at something, the first thing to go out the window is the notion of perfection.

The absence of a grand schedule removed the constant fear of falling behind that many projects create and replaced it with small but frequent payoffs that we were making things better.

You need to have strong faith in the next draft, that you will be a little smarter and wiser by the time this draft is finished and your only responsibility is to get there. In a way, the draft you write now is a gift to the future version of you.

Depending on anecdotal reports from users was a poor system. It'd be like running a restaurant where you waited for customers to complain about the food instead of tasting it ourselves before it left the kitchen.

When there is a healthy system for recognizing, responding to, and learning from mistakes, over time fewer of them tend to happen

The problem was coherence. We certainly launched many things, but did it add up to making a better product?

Months before I started at Automattic, some of the happiness engineers studied the kinds of requests that came in and realized that if they changed the user interface, they might get better information straightaway from customers. They decided to force customers to answer three good questions: What did you do? What did you see? What did you expect?

It's a hidden, and often scary, cost of rebuilding something: even a perfect improvement reveals old issues hidden by the mistakes of the past.

four big personal questions I asked everyone in e-mail once a month: What's going well? What's not? What do you want me to do more of? What do you want me to do less of?

To be great at something, you must look to the great ones of the past and improve on the ideas and techniques that they started. I was motivated to do better—to improve on the ideas of others.

And the top performers know this, so they make learning a practice.