"One of the biggest keys to success at anything hard is believing that you can figure it out as you go along." - Shane Parrish
"You will struggle with that which you avoid. Conversely, you become good at what you do more of."
"You have to be able to motivate yourself to spend large quantities of energy on a problem, which means on some level that not understanding something (...) bothers you a lot. You (must) have the drive, the will to know." - How to Understand Things
“Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”
"Embarrassment is the cost of entry. If you aren't willing to look like a foolish beginner, you'll never become a graceful master." - Ed Latimore
"The study of deliberate practice tells us that skill improvement is not proportional to total practice, but rather to the amount of practice conducted at the outer edge of our abilities." - Reflections on Three Years of Spaced Repetition with Anki by Geoff Rudduck
"Stenography is a skill. To master it, you must practice. Concentrated review (...) will rapidly improve your skills. Before you can do that, you must identify the areas that require additional work." - Glen Warner
"Spacing out your practice feels less productive for the very reason that some forgetting has set in and you've got to work harder to recall the concepts. It doesn't feel like you're on top of it. What you don't sense in the moment is that this added effort is making the learning stronger." - Make It Stick by Peter Brown
"But what exactly is happening in the gaps in those spaced-out training, practice, or study regimens? At the cellular level, part of the answer may be that some of the mechanisms involved in preserving memories seem to require downtime: recharging periods, in effect, before neurons can get back to the work of strengthening their connections." - Forgetfulness: Why Your Mind Going Blank Can Be a Benefit by Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto
"So the solution to learning resistance is to adjust one’s attitude (...). Don’t draw back from that initial awkwardness but look for it as a welcome harbinger of a new skill. View it as the color that gladdens a gold prospector’s heart, a sign that the mother lode is near and can be found higher up with a bit more effort." - Learning a New Skill Is a Struggle - Find Pleasure in It by Michael Ham
"In fact, testing is one of the best study techniques researchers have discovered." - Ten Mental Models for Learning by Scott Young
"“Error is the price we pay for progress.” - Alfred North Whitehead
"Go over the piece until you can “hear” it in your mind with some level of detail." - Do These Three Things Today and Play Better Tomorrow
"The intermediate plateau contrasts sharply with the beginning phase (...). While those early efforts are marked by some intense difficulties, they are also a period of incredible progress. In a narrow window of time, you go from total incompetence to being able to do quite a bit! In contrast, intermediacy is frustrating. You don’t feel good enough to claim the work of learning is over, but you see diminishing returns from additional study and practice." - The Intermediate Plateau: What Causes It? How Can We Move Beyond It? by Scott Young
"Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
"To accelerate your learning curve, it’s important to get input from mentors, coaches, or experts who’ve done what we’re trying to do." Accelerate Your Learning Curve With These 5 Tips by Darius Foroux
"The idea that you need to spend a very long time working at anything before you become expert makes obvious sense. But people sometimes assume a corollary – that anyone can become expert simply by spending that amount of time. Ten thousand hours may be a necessary condition for becoming expert, but hours alone are not sufficient. Lots of people spend all that time but don’t become expert. You have to commit to continually improve." How to Become An Expert by Roger L Kneebone
"Decades of work from multiple subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.” Deep Work by Cal Newport
"If a plant gets nothing but sunlight, it’s very harmful. It has to have darkness too. In the sunlight, it converts carbon dioxide to oxygen, but in the darkness, it takes the oxygen and converts it back into carbon dioxide. People are like that too. We have to have some periods of doing and some periods of non-doing.” Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
"Your mind doesn’t wander. It moves toward what it finds most interesting. To improve focus, become curious about what’s in front of you." - 22 Nuggets of Wisdom from Cory Muscara
"People plateau when they abandon learning new things and instead focus on doing the old ones harder. What produced improvements in the past probably won’t keep delivering them indefinitely." 100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late by Luca Dellanna
"This distinction between knowledge and skills lies at the heart of the difference between traditional paths toward expertise and the deliberate-practice approach. Traditionally, the focus is nearly always on knowledge. Even when the ultimate outcome is being able to do something—solve a particular type of math problem, say, or write a good essay—the traditional approach has been to provide information about the right way to proceed and then mostly rely on the student to apply that knowledge. Deliberate practice, by contrast, focuses solely on performance and how to improve it." Knowledge vs. Skill by Ben Carlson
Look upon discouragement as a necessary concomitant of speed practice. Improvement comes by starts, even when practice is regular. Today, 60 words a minute is the very limit of your ability; you keep at your practice but there is no apparent improvement,—still the same 60 word gait, and hard at that. Then you try 80 words a minute and nearly get it, and stung by defeat, try again and—well, you think you really could have done 80 words all along. But then comes another plateau of rest in the upward curve of your speed ability. You seem to stick and stick at the 80 mark with no hope of ever climbing beyond it. Then it breaks in on you that 100 words is your real and proper gait but beyond that any improvement is impossible. Still you keep on at practice. Then—but it is a never-ending tale, when you do get beyond, you have the speed, but you have also have something more valuable,—the conviction that you possess the willpower to stick through what seemed a losing fight. And of such is the legion of honor. -Frank Harrison
"Embrace radical incrementalism. People who work a little bit every day tend to cultivate the patience it takes to get good. These people also quit their day's work when it's finished: they identify what their chunk of time or task is per day, they do that and only that, and save more for tomorrow." - The Principles of Patience by Austin Kleon
"Whatever you do, don’t you quit. Not now. Not ever. Even if you’re the last one standing, don't you ever quit."
