"Reconciling oneself to the fact that projects "take the time they take" can be a necessary step in finishing projects at all. My mind is not simply prone to distraction, it is prone to rebellion. The wrong kind of pressure makes it resist its own commands, sends it spinning out of its own control. Bearing down, reining in, whipping harder doesn't get "me" back on track so much as set me against myself in a showdown I always lose winning. Better to just glide on the thermal of whim until the destination once again comes into sight and a smooth approach becomes finally possible.

Not to say that one can drift one's way to success. Aims must be fixed and kept in mind, even if one knows it's worse than useless to charge right at them. One must develop a sense of one's attention as one develops a sense of a powerful but skittish horse, calmly riding wide of known dangers…

We need to reconcile ourselves to our own temperaments, stop trying to fight or drug ourselves into submission…"

"1: Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.  2: Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.  3: Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture. Life is visceral.  4: Constantly improve your craft. Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.  5: Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know.  6: Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world.  7: Try not to work for stupid people or you’ll soon become one of them. 8: Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.  9: The Golden Rule actually works. Do good.  10: If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career."

"Differentiate between hard work and long work. Long work is just time-consuming." -from conv with Seth Godin

"What did we find?  <br />
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*After introduction of National Curriculum tests in England, low-achieving pupils had lower self-esteem than higher-achieving students; before tests, there had been no correlation btwn self-esteem & achievement. Low self-esteem reduces chance of future effort & success.<br />
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*High-stakes tests can result in transmission teaching & highly-structured activities…favors only students w/ certain learning styles…tests can become rationale for all that is done in classroom.<br />
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*A strong emphasis on testing produces students w/ a strong extrinsic orientation towards grades & social status, i.e. a motivation towards performance rather than learning goals…<br />
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*Interest & effort are increased in classrooms which encourage self-regulated learning by providing students with an element of choice, control over challenge & opportunities to work collaboratively. <br />
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*Feedback that is ego-involving rather than task-involving is associated w/ an orientation to performance goals."

"Ultimately, Zoch maintains, all education is self-education. The secret of academic success is no different from success in other fields of endeavor, and it involves hard work, the will to succeed, and practice, practice, practice. Yet when students fail or become bored, critics insist that it is the teacher's fault. Zoch shows persuasively and in great detail that progressives derided instruction but never held students accountable for their own learning; it is always the teacher who is to blame if the children aren't motivated. Consequently, students have come to expect that their teachers must entertain them. As one of Zoch's students said to him one day, "Maybe if you'd sing and dance, we'd learn this stuff.""

"Ainslie is probably right that procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself (derived from a Latin word meaning “to put off for tomorrow”) entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and, by the eighteenth, Samuel Johnson was describing it as “one of the general weaknesses” that “prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind,” and lamenting the tendency in himself: “I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.” And the problem seems to be getting worse all the time. According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002. In that light, it’s possible to see procrastination as the quintessential modern problem."

"Talent is a label given by people who do not know the amount of practice that has been performed in order to develop observed skills. It is a microinequity. It is an insult. It says, “You have skills that in my judgment, you did not earn.” Isn’t it a much greater ‘gift’ to have worked hard at developing a demonstrable skill? The owners of these skills are, as are most, unreliable in reporting their own levels of interest and effort. When asked if they practice, they under-report. When inquired about their interest, they are blasé. Isaac Stern, when interviewed by Ellen Langer about his practice habits says that he practices sometimes while ‘watching television programs’ and laughs. Musicians are notorious for under- and over-reporting their practice (depending on who they are trying to impress)."

"The clarifying metaphor that strikes me, however, is that autonomy, mastery, and purpose — which are really the core ingredients of generative thinking — can be made available to students if we can get our young people out of the single-file line that has formed in front of the counter and motivate them to grab an apron and explore what’s behind the counter."

"Which has the superior economic model, the United States or Europe? The question keeps coming up and never gets resolved. It is having another go-round at the moment, with the adversaries lining up as usual. Conservatives say that Europe's social-democratic model is bound for the landfill of history. Progressives defend the model, even if they usually stop short of recommending it outright.

"The point of the story is that when you tell students they’re innately great, the students feel no need to improve. Furthermore, they end up trying to protect this image they have of themselves by avoiding things that might end in failure. If kids are told they’re hard workers, on the other hand, they’re less afraid of embracing new challegnes because they can think of themselves of hard workers even if they fail and it’s the working itself that they value in themselves."

"Gladwell: Meaningful work is one of the most important things we can impart to children. Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out…