Quotes About Improvement

Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Shakespeare teaches you how to act. You come out of this process as a better actor. It's just the nature of the words he writes.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

Writing is like any other sort of sport. In order for you to get better at it, you have to exercise the muscle.

I'd like to take a course in writing. I'm not the best writer in the world. I'd like to write more neatly, even though people don't send many handwritten letters these days.

We are happy when we are growing.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld advised aspiring comedian Brad Isaac that, because daily writing was the key to writing better jokes, Isaac should buy a calendar with a box for every day of the year, and every day, after writing, cross off the day with a big red X. "After a few days you'll have a chain," Seinfeld explained. "You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.

A sense of growth is so important to happiness that it's often preferable to be progressing to the summit rather than to be at the summit. Neither a scientist nor a philosopher but a novelist, Lisa Grunwald, came up with the most brilliant summation of this happiness principle: "Best is good, better is best.

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

For instance, studies show that when mothers listen without offering advice or criticism while their children explain solutions to problems, the children markedly improve their problem-solving ability.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

a stumble may be helpful, because it shows me where I need to concentrate my efforts in order to do better next time.

many people decide to improve their habits, they don't begin by looking where their keys are; they begin by looking in an easy spot.

Many strategies help us change our habits, and four strategies tower above the others: Monitoring, Foundation, Scheduling, and Accountability.

For a happy life, it's important to cultivate an atmosphere of growth—the sense that we're learning new things, getting stronger, forging new relationships, making things better, helping other people. Habits have a tremendous role to play in creating an atmosphere of growth, because they help us make consistent, reliable progress.

For a happy life, it's important to cultivate an atmosphere of growth—the sense that we're learning new things, getting stronger, forging new relationships, making things better, helping other people.

Progress, not perfection, is the goal. I'm a gold-star junkie

Aaron Beck, founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, maintains that people find it easy to notice what their partners do wrong, but not what they do right, so he suggests keeping "marriage diaries" to track partners' considerate behavior; one study showed that 70 percent of couples who did this tracking reported an improved relationship.

Questioners tend to be very interested in improving processes. They like to eliminate mistakes and make things better.

Perfection may be an impossible goal, but habits help us to do better. Making headway toward a good habit, doing better than before, saves us from facing the end of another year with the mournful wish, once again, that we'd done things differently.

the "Hawthorne effect," in which people being studied improve their performance, simply because of the extra attention they're getting. In

When the Schiphol Airport put the image of a housefly above the drains of urinals, men began to aim at it—a change that reduced spillage rates by 80 percent. "Gamification" is used in the design of devices and apps to help people improve their habits.