Exceptional work is always associated with periods of deep concentration. Nothing excellent ever comes from a scattered effort
We pay attention half-heartedly on almost everything we do these days. We live in an activity illusion and think that ‘busyness’ is equal to good business. Busyness is sometimes just procrastination in disguise. Busyness may make you feel good and make you think you are more productive but when we look back at the end of the day we realize we haven’t done anything worthwhile. We are training our minds to have continuous partial attention, and our attention is being fragmented ...Exceptional work is always associated with periods of deep concentration. Nothing excellent ever comes from a scattered effort.
Your example
[About Angela Duckworth - American academic, psychologist - experiment]
Duckworth finds it useful to divide the mechanics of achievement into two separate dimensions: motivation and volition. Each one, she says, is necessary to achieve long-term goals, but neither is sufficient alone. Most of us are familiar with the experience of possessing motivation but lacking volition: You can be extremely motivated to lose weight, for example, but unless you have the volition— the willpower, the self-control— to put down the cherry Danish and pick up the free weights, you’re not going to succeed.
If a child is highly motivated, the self-control techniques and ...
We need to think about failure differently.
I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all.
They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough.
That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.
That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem... And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don't have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don't have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.
The point is this: Big thinkers are specialists in creating positive, forward-looking, optimistic pictures in their own minds and in the minds of others. To think big, we must use words and phrases that produce big, positive mental images.
