Quotes About Improvement

lower, until school

My mother always used to say, "The older you get, the better you get. Unless you're a banana."

A thing that is worth doing at all is worth doing badly... le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

If you're customer-focused, you're always waking up wondering, how can we make that customer say, wow? We want to impress our customers -- we want them to say, wow. That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better.

The greatest improvement is made by the man who works most intelligently.

You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.

I was corrected on how to stir ("from the bottom up, circling, cleaning the sides as you go"), which I assume everyone else knows but which I never seemed to get right. I was corrected on my whisk ("limp wrist, figure eight, hitting four points of the bowl as if it had corners"), which I hadn't known and which is both efficient and actually rather flash (you can reach exhilarating speeds).

By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient.

A top-quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. … That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top-quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

If you're a serious minded leader, you will read. You will read all you can. You will read when you feel like it, and you will read when you don't. You will do whatever you have to do to increase your leadership input, because you know as well as I do that it will make you better.

I do think the patriotic thing to do is to critique my country. How else do you make a country better but by pointing out its flaws?

Don't think 'I can't write an anthem'—think 'The United States of America made it two centuries with a terrible anthem that no one can sing. I bet I can do better than that.

One of the duties of all of us—parents, scientists, everyone—is to help educate the next generation, so they can succeed in their lives and help make the world a better place.

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?

The grandest ambition that any man can possibly have is to so live and so improve himself in heart and brain as to be worthy of the love of some splendid woman; and the grandest ambition of any girl is to make herself worthy of the love and adoration of some magnificent man.

In my career I always tried to improve to become one of the great players, because I felt I had received a gift from God and I had to make good use of it, to become worthy of having received this talent.

Do what you say you're going to do. And try to do it a little better than you said you would.

I have short goals - to get better every day, to help my teammates every day - but my only ultimate goal is to win an NBA championship. It's all that matters. I dream about it. I dream about it all the time, how it would look, how it would feel. It would be so amazing.

If I was staying the same, then I wouldn't be evolving and changing and that would be boring and that would be unhealthy.

The next generation has always been and will be better than the previous one. If it is not, then the world would not be moving forward.

I do reflect on it sometimes, going, 'Wow, if I knew what I knew now I would be such a better server.'

After getting glasses and contacts it was kind of a wow moment that I could definitely see better and on the soccer field it really helped me.

Wow, I think you grow all the time when you're working. You start the job and by the end of it, if it's a long one, you kind of say, 'My God, I was so different at the start of this job.' I always feel like I've changed for the better with each one.