#effort

What's going to motivate you today? Are you going to do your work because you want to do it well and have some pride in it, or is your paycheck going to be your major motivation? The answer to that question tells you a lot about yourself, and it tells others a lot about you. It also indicates your relationship to life, too, and just how much you're getting out of life. Our lives are full of opportunities and wonderful chances to do wonderful things, and it's only the self-motivated person who's going to find and enjoy most of those great opportunities. The person whose motivation has to come from outside him- or herself is only going to uncover the treasures that others direct them to--and believe me, others won't direct us to too many treasures when they could keep them for themselves. ↗

— Tom Walsh

#effort #inspiration #motivation #opportunity #self-motivation

I know I have a pretty good sense for music, but she was better than me. I used to think it was such a waste! I thought, ‘If only she had started out with a good teacher and gotten the proper training, she’d be so much further along!’ But I was wrong about that. She was not the kind of child who could stand proper training. There just happen to be people like that. They’re blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can’t make the effort to systematize it. They end up squandering it in little bits and pieces. I’ve seen my share of people like that. At first you think they’re amazing. Like, they can sight-read some terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the way through. You see them do it, and you’re overwhelmed. you think, ‘I could never do that in a million years.’ But that’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. Because they haven’t had the discipline pounded into them. They’ve been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they’ve been able to play things well without any effort and they’ve had people telling them how great they are from the time they’re little, so hard work looks stupid to them. They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they’ve put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required or character building. It’s a tragedy. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#japanese #reiko #talent #music

And also I assert our interest in respecting all our obligations and implementing all our commitments. And will save no effort whatever to protect this newborn opportunity of peace, that is provided through what we have already declared here today. ↗

— Mahmoud Abbas

#also #assert #commitments #declared #effort

Our efforts are not aimed at isolating Israel or de-legitimizing it; rather we want to gain legitimacy for the cause of the people of Palestine. We only aim to de-legitimize the settlement activities and the occupation and apartheid and the logic of ruthless force, and we believe that all the countries of the world stand with us in this regard. ↗

— Mahmoud Abbas

#aim #aimed #apartheid #believe #cause

The extra pass and the extra effort on defense always get the job done. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#defense #done #effort #extra #get

Our response has been, 'Well, let's then make an effort to get the Israelis and the Palestinians to sit around the table.' That hasn't happened. So we only have ourselves to blame for this crisis. ↗

— King Abdullah II

#been #blame #crisis #effort #get

Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned. ↗

— Henry Adams

#calling #divinity #effort #every #every man

I think that a president needs to have a variety of views presented. But also, there has to be a team effort, because otherwise, I think it creates a dissonance and difficulty. ↗

— Madeleine Albright

#because #creates #difficulty #effort #i

The human spy, in terms of the American espionage effort, had never been terribly pertinent. ↗

— Aldrich Ames

#been #effort #espionage #had #human

We need to strengthen our analytic capacity in Washington, we need to centralize the anti-terrorism effort. ↗

— John Ashcroft

#capacity #effort #need #our #strengthen