#achievement

Your motivations--get that promotion, throw the best parties, run for public office--aren't impersonal abstractions but powerfully reflect who you are and what you focus on. An individual's goals figure prominently in the theories of personality first developed by the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. According to his successor David McClelland, what Friedrich Nietzsche called "the will to power," which he considered the major driving force behind human behavior, is one of the three basic motivations, along with achievement and affiliation, that differentiate us as individuals. A simple experiment show show these broad emotional motivations can affect what you pay attention to or ignore on very basic levels. When they examine images of faces that express different kinds of emotion, power-oriented subjects are drawn to nonconfrontational visages, such as "surprise faces," rather than to those that suggest dominance, as "anger faces" do. In contrast, people spurred by affiliation gravitate toward friendly or joyful faces. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#attention #control #dominance #focus #motivation

He had a sense—honed by experience—that what he’d contrived might achieve something of the effect he wanted. That, Martinius had always said, was the best any man in this fallible world could expect. [p. 67] ↗

— Guy Gavriel Kay

#art #art

In a variation on James's recipe for interesting experience--the familiar leavened by the novel--Hobbs's "art of choosing difficulties" requires selecting projects that are "just manageable." If an activity is too easy, you lose focus and get bored. If it's too hard, you become anxious, overwhelmed, and unable to concentrate. Tellingly, one group is distinguished by its zeal for the kind of work that requires you to give it all you've got: high achievers particularly relish taking on risky projects that have only a 50/50 chance of success. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#attention #focus #art

Musicians, like golfers, have to put their minds in the right place – trusting, confident, enjoying the pressure, being in present. And so forth. Otherwise, no amount of practice or “Time management” will make them better. The same is true in all professions: if you’re stuck in the Training Mindset, evaluating yourself, or thinking in the past or future, you will not perform up to your potential. You will waste a lot of time, be an inefficient performer, and likely assume you need to manage your time better. In reality you need to manage your thinking better. ↗

— John Eliot

#inspirational #overachievement #time-management #inspirational

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement. ↗

— Nelson Mandela

#freedom #glorious #human #never #reign

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

#achievement #does #lie

I had gained so much confidence through my college achievements that I wanted to tackle the world. ↗

— Donna Rice

#college #confidence #gained #had #i

What is the recipe for successful achievement? To my mind there are just four essential ingredients: Choose a career you love, give it the best there is in you, seize your opportunities, and be a member of the team. ↗

— Benjamin Franklin Fairless

#best #career #choose #essential #four

I have been in Congress for more than a half century. I have lived through times of fear and times of hope. Of despair and of achievement. I have seen our government at its best, but today I fear that we see our government at its worst. ↗

— Robert Byrd

#been #best #century #congress #despair

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement. ↗

— Jimmy Carter

#anyone #common #common denominator #denominator #fear