Quotes About Improvement

The conversation office hours strategy is effective for improving your social life because it overcomes the major obstacle to meaningful socializing: the concern, mentioned above, that unsolicited calls might be bothersome. People crave real conversation, but this obstacle is often enough to prevent it. If you remove it by holding conversation office hours, you'll be surprised by how many more of these rewarding interactions you can now fit into your normal week.

We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.

dedication to stretching his ability, guided by feedback.

Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you're able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing—enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve. Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.

In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a colleague of Neil Charness at Florida State University, coined the term "deliberate practice" to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an "activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual's performance."4

what deliberate practice actually requires. Its core components are usually identified as follows: (1) your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you're trying to improve or an idea you're trying to master; (2) you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it's most productive.

deliberate practice cannot exist alongside distraction,

if you just show up and work hard, you'll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

Not only did Jordan's early practice require him to constantly stretch himself beyond what was comfortable, but it was also accompanied by instant feedback. The teacher was always there, Jordan explained, "to jump in and show me if I junked up a harmony.

Let's assume you're a knowledge worker, which is a field without a clear training philosophy. If you can figure out how to integrate deliberate practice into your own life, you have the possibility of blowing past your peers in your value, as you'll likely be alone in your dedication to systematically getting better. That is, deliberate practice might provide the key to quickly becoming so good they can't ignore you.

the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.

Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.

Si vamos a hacer algo vale la pena comenzar a hacerlo aunque sea rudimentariamente hasta que aprendamos a hacerlo bien, pero empezar a hacerlo ya mismo con lo que tenemos hoy

But if life could be worse, didn't that mean it could also be better?'" As it was, he settled for odd jobs, harvesting occasional crops, living a life that was destined never to rise above the menial. He was proof that the muzzling of motivation only makes for mediocrity, that every man needs a purpose.

To live is to change, and to change often is to become more perfect.

What are some of the things your last employer could have done to be more successful? Does the applicant offer a long list of items and appear to feel he could have run things better than management did? Are his comments constructive or angry? There is a follow-up:

When any problem occurs, you have two choices: you can get upset about it, or you can simply figure out what needs to be done. Getting upset has a seductive quality to it; there is rich drama to be had there. The cost is that there is no happiness to be had. Happiness opens up when you drop the drama and start looking for what needs to be done. Any relationship improves when both people shift from complaints to statements of what they want.

To get to that level of undefended openness to learning, we have to practice as diligently as a master skier or a master cellist.

I prefer to think of myself as a musician who is still learning and trying to do something every time out.

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.

Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.

In any value stream, there is always a direction of flow, and there is always one and only constraint; any improvement not made at that constraint is an illusion.

A lot of what drives me and others working in this space is the knowledge that, whatever your constraints, we can always do better, and the desire to help people on their journey.

high-performing manufacturing operations require and actively promote learning—instead of work being rigidly defined, the system of work is dynamic, with line workers performing experiments in their daily work to generate new improvements, enabled by rigorous standardization of work procedures and documentation of the results.