How To Improve Quotes & Sayings

My illusions didn't have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve! — Marilyn Monroe

We think less about how others see and judge us and have the courage to ask ourselves what kind of person we are and how we might improve. — Gyalwa Dokhampa

Everything you do to improve your physical well-being will have a positive impact on how good you feel about yourself. — Brian Tracy

At least you're learning a thing or two about wine. Good to hear you're making such an effort to improve yourself."
"Does the U.S. attorney know how much you like spending your Saturday nights eavesdropping on private conversations?" Nick asked.
"The U.S. attorney knows exactly how I like spending my Saturday nights. — Julie James

How does MINDEF intend to reduce uncertainties, enhance understanding, and improve coordination in the region and beyond through defence diplomacy apart from conferences and meetings? — Low Thia Khiang

Learn how to stay out of negativity. It will improve your health. Learn how to focus on meeting your needs. It will increase your wealth. Learn how to develop strength during difficult days. You will learn how to overcome. Learn how to confess your sins and do away with them. It will help you understand God's grace. Learn how to be patient. It will lead you to accomplish your goals and results. Learn how to give. It will open doors to your blessings. Learn how to become fearless. It will bring you peace. Learn how to trust God above all else and your life will never be the same. — Kemi Sogunle

Whether you job involves chasing criminals, crouching numbers, or wrestling with paperwork, learning how to recognize and rely on those hunches and gut feelings can dramatically improve your job performance. — Laurie Nadel

Members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What's the difference between people who feel successful and people who feel they've failed? The answer is mindset: If you learn and grow from failure, suddenly it becomes a personal asset. People who are successful don't want instant gratification. They don't think about hitting a point of success and never working again. Instead they ask, How do I improve myself and continue to do that consistently over time? — Eben Pagan

He obviously needed more practice, but no matter how often I abandoned him out there, his sense of direction never seemed to improve. — Kelley Armstrong

The aim of education should not be to teach how to use human energies to improve the environment, for we are finally beginning to realize that the cornerstone of education is the development of the human personality, and that in this regard education is of immediate importance for the salvation of mankind. — Maria Montessori

This fair homestead has fallen to us, and how little have we done to improve it, how little have we cleared and hedged and ditched! We are too inclined to go hence to a "better land," without lifting a finger, as our farmers are moving to the Ohio soil; but would it not be more heroic and faithful to till and redeem this New England soil of the world? — Henry David Thoreau

No matter how many improvements have been made, every process is still full of waste and rife with opportunity to improve. — Jeffrey K. Liker

In any case, I hope that it will be a good thing when we understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we'll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don't - and bit by bit we'll rebuild ourselves. I don't think that most people will bother with this, because they like themselves just as they are. Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative, or ambitious. Myself, I don't much like how people are now. We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves. — Marvin Minsky

Again, your challenge is not just to improve. It is to break the service paradigm in your industry or market so that customers aren't just satisfied, they're so shocked that they tell strangers on the street how good you are. — Jack Welch

I reiterate that I am strongly committed to working with those on all sides of politics to improve how Parliament operates. — Peter Slipper

You have to ask good questions. "What can I do to improve?" or "How can I find a better job?" or "How can I be grateful that I lost this job?" Because inside of every problem is the seed of a "difficult gratitude problem" and it always improves your life to solve those problems. — James Altucher

If we have 99% [market] share of Ford Company, the question to us is 'How do we improve the customer satisfaction in order to get that additional 1% share? — Michael Dell

The scenery doesn't necessarily improve in proportion to how far you travel or how much you spend. — Ron Lizzi

The lords themselves are responsible for making the poor people their enemy. They do not want to remove the cause of insurrection, so how, in the long run, can things improve? — Thomas Muntzer

We tend to think that if a student is using a computer as part of an activity, then it's automatically a good activity. After all, they're using technology! But when we look at the results of that time spent at the computer, we really should be asking ourselves, how did this use of technology improve student learning? — Jane E. Pollock

We sometimes make spiderwebs of smoke and saliva, fragile though-packets
Leave thinking to the one who gave intelligence
Stop weaving and watch how the pattern improve — Coleman Barks

Don't go through life with a closed mind. Allow innovations and creativity to flow. We should always challenge ourselves to excel in more ways than one. Be open to ideas or suggestions on how to improve. And, the chances of reaching your goals will increase enormously. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

Deferral of gratification may be an effect, not a cause. Just because some children were more effective than others at distracting themselves from [the marshmallow in the famous Marshmallow Test] doesn't mean this capacity was responsible for the impressive results found ten years later. Instead, both of these things may have been due to something about their home environment. If that's true, there's no reason to believe that enhancing children's ability to defer gratification would be beneficial: It was just a marker, not a cause. By way of analogy, teenagers who visit ski resorts over winter break probably have a superior record of being admitted to the Ivy League. Should we therefore hire consultants to teach low-income children how to ski in order to improve the odds that colleges will accept them? — Alfie Kohn

No conscious person can read Peter D'Adamo's works without considering much more thoughtfully how their genetic inheritance relates to their needs for specific food, lifestyle and environmental factors to improve their health. — Jeffrey Bland

Competent men in every position, if they are doing their best, know all that there is to know about their work except how to improve it. — W. Edwards Deming

I have a serious challenge for you if you're up for it. Want real feedback? Find people who care enough about you to be brutally honest with you. Ask them these questions: "How do I show up to you? What do you think my strengths are? In what areas do you think I can improve? Where do you think I sabotage myself? What's one thing I can stop doing that would benefit me the most? What's the one thing I should start doing? — Darren Hardy

Doctors are crucial choice architects, and with an understanding of how Humans think, they could do far more to improve people's health and thus to lengthen their lives. — Richard H. Thaler

I want gaming to be something that everybody does, because they understand that games can be a real solution to problems and a real source of happiness. I want games to be something everybody learns how to design and develop, because they understand that games are a real platform for change and getting things done. And I want families, schools, companies, industries, cities, countries, and the whole world to come together to play them, because we're finally making games that tackle real dilemmas and improve real lives. — Jane McGonigal

I think it's absolutely amazing and how the Remain side have the cheek to come and tell us that we improve our security by staying in this organisation I do not understand. — Boris Johnson

If we could honestly promise young couples that we knew how to give them offspring with superior character, why should we assume they would decline? Common sense tells us that if scientists find ways to greatly improve human capabilities, there will no stopping the public from happily seizing them. — James D. Watson

Here are a few patterns you may have seen that indicate the person you're managing is avoiding their next step of growth: covering up or attempting to brush off the severity of a mistake; hoarding data; embedding themselves as a go-to person (aka: bottleneck) by creating a system or process that only they know how to use; resorting to quick fixes instead of asking questions and looking for root causes; asking for more time or resources beyond what was agreed on in order to complete a project, instead of coming to you to talk about what went wrong so you can work together to improve it; letting tension build with a teammate or between departments instead of coming to you for advice on how to handle it. When — Jonathan Raymond

How wonderful that no one need wait a single moment to improve the world. — Anne Frank

What are the three things for which you are most grateful today? 24. Write about how your life would be different if you felt comfortable being yourself at all times. 25. Which relationship of yours would you like to improve? Why? 26. If you were born as an animal, which animal would you choose to be? 27. Finish this thought: I plan to grow spiritually by . 28. — Meredith Lane

What if our bodies were transparent, like a washing machine window? How wondrous to watch ourselves. Joggers would job even harder, blood pumping away. Lovers would love more. God damn! Look at that old semen go! Diets would improve-- kiwi fruit and strawberries, borscht with sour cream. — Lucia Berlin

By providing memorable social media customer service, companies not only create deeper connections with consumers, but they glean valuable insights on how to improve their products or services. — Amy Jo Martin

Life is really a travesty of will: it is a parade of learning how to lose people and improve at feigning indifference.

I suspect I shall always fail at this, and fail miserably. I do not know whether that is winning at life or failing at happiness. — Michelle Franklin

Educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve - as Coach Graham taught me - is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can't accurately do that, how can we tell if we're getting better or worse? — Randy Pausch

if you want to set the tone or mood, make sure you get some of the first words in. Think about it, which meeting would you prefer to attend? One that starts with "Let's get going because we have so much to do today and a lot of fires to put out" or one that starts with "I'm happy to see you all today - it's great that we have such a strong team working on these exciting new projects"? Same reality but a very different outlook. Then sit back and watch how people's engagement and motivation improve in response to your power lead. It's one of the most effective tools in this book. — Shawn Achor

AS I TELL MY PATIENTS, your skin, hair, and nails are repairable and replaceable, and most of your organs can be revitalized. But the brain is the one organ you can't replace (no matter what you've seen in horror movies). The brain is where your life resides. It governs all aspects of your health as well as your emotional state. And while you can't get a new brain, you can improve the one you have. There are many different ways to literally make your brain younger which can enhance every facet of your health. This chapter will show how you can lose weight permanently once you balance your brain. Without taking the brain into account, you can diet for the rest of your life and never be happy with the results. — Eric R. Braverman

If editors truly want to improve their byline ratio, they need to stop lamenting the fact that few women journalists send them cold pitches and start taking a hard look at their stable of regular contributors. How many women are on the masthead? How many women columnists or bloggers are on the payroll? This is how real change is going to happen. — Ann Friedman

If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: 'Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.' Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible. — Sam Harris

I don't know how we could use it to improve the job that umpires do, ... The human element in sport has always been a big part of the game. I'm a football fan, too, and I hate instant replay in the NFL. Football games are taking four hours. — Bud Selig

The United States has an active pharmaceutical industry that has brought huge benefits to the U.S. public. Most Americans, who benefit from these advances, have little understanding of how difficult it is to create an important new medical therapy and make it available to improve public health. — Robert Jarvik

Humans have always used our intelligence and creativity to improve our existence. After all, we invented the wheel, discovered how to make fire, invented the printing press and found a vaccine for polio. — Naveen Jain

Mediocrity has nothing to do with how you compare to other people; it's simply a result of not making the commitment to continuously learn, grow, and improve yourself. — Hal Elrod

More people than ever are being paid to think, instead of just doing routine tasks. Yet making complex decisions and solving new problems is difficult for any stretch of time because of some real biological limits on your brain. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to improve mental performance is to understand these limits. In act 1, Emily discovers why thinking requires so much energy, and develops new techniques for dealing with having too much to do. Paul learns about the space limits of his brain, and works out how to deal with information overload. Emily finds out why it's so hard to do two things at once, and rethinks how she organizes her work. Paul discovers why he is so easily distracted, and works on how to stay more focused. Then he finds out how to stay in his brain's "sweet spot." In the last scene, Emily discovers that her problem-solving techniques need improving, and learns how to have breakthroughs when she needs them most. — David Rock

If you want to be happy in life, consider yourself a student. Every day of your life, think: how can I improve? — Nick Offerman

Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better. — Steve McConnell

People do not follow uncommitted leaders. Commitment can be displayed in a full range of matters to include the work hours you choose to maintain, how you work to improve your abilities, or what you do for your fellow workers at personal sacrifice. — Stephen R. Gregg

Make your work IMPORTANT. Important enough to ignore other things. mportant enough to decide to finish it. Important enough to say 'No' to anything else - until it's done." - from "How to Focus : Stop Procrastination, Improve Your Concentration, & Get More Done! — Mani S. Sivasubramanian

Accept that you will not always deal with situations with polished sophistication but trust that you have the power and exercise the will to improve how you cope. — Carlos Wallace

How can you begin to uncover whether gluten sensitivity is causing some of your health issues? Symptoms occur shortly after eating gluten and improve or disappear within hours or days after gluten is withdrawn. Symptoms return again if gluten is reintroduced. — Kris Carr

Thankfully, life is a journey of progress and not perfection, and we can improve our blurred reflection by taking up the Sword of the Spirit. We can find a healthy dose of just how much God loves us in the Bible and start to have as much respect for ourselves as God has for us. — Kristen Clark

What was bizarre, when I was younger, I never watched TV. I would rather watch a movie 100 times than to watch a TV show, just to find another nuance. I can't tell you how many times I've watched 'On the Waterfront', just to find a flaw so that I can learn and try to improve my thing. — Vin Diesel

All people need to know how AIDS is transmitted, and every country has an obligation to educate its citizens. This is why every country must also improve literacy, especially for women and girls, so that they can make wise choices that will keep them healthy and safe. — Laura Bush

I happen to be kind of an inquisitive guy and when I see things I don't like, I start thinking, why do they have to be like this and how can I improve them? — Walt Disney

If you don't feel you have any choice in a situation, self-esteem and confidence plummet. But once you understand that you do have a choice, self-esteem will improve. You aren't a helpless victim anymore. You decide how you deal with a situation. You aren't just reacting to life; you're creating your life. — Theresa Cheung

Find time to meditate and see how you can improve your life and achieve your goals — Sunday Adelaja

So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. — Dan Ariely

It has pleased and interested me to see how I could get along under difficult circumstances and with so much discomfort but as I say I was not sent out here to improve my temper or my health or to make me more content with my good things in the East. — Richard H. Davis

Many people have been protesting against what they describe as censorship on Goodreads. I disgree. In fact, I would like to say that I welcome the efforts that Goodreads management is making to improve the deplorably low quality of reviewing on this site.
Please, though, just give me clearer guidelines. I want to know how to use my writing to optimize Amazon sales, especially those of sensitive self-published authors. This is a matter of vital importance to me, and outweighs any possible considerations of making my reviews interesting, truthful, creative or entertaining. — Manny Rayner

Mastery is a blind alley. Since, moreover, he cannot renounce mastery and
become a slave again, the eternal destiny of masters is to live unsatisfied or to be killed. The master
serves no other purpose in history than to arouse servile consciousness, the only form of consciousness
that really creates history. The slave, in fact, is not bound to his condition, but wants to change it. Thus,
unlike his master, he can improve himself, and what is called history is nothing but the effects of his long
efforts to obtain real freedom. Already, by work, by his transformation of the natural world into a
technical world, he manages to escape from the nature which was the basis of his slavery in that he did
not know how to raise himself above it by accepting death. — Albert Camus

I've made some films for the military that are teaching things like cultural awareness and leadership issues, that sort of stuff. And try to, in essence, look at what training they're doing and say, 'This is how you can improve the training from a humanistic point of view.' — Carl Weathers

Whether we're the largest, smallest, most or least significant thing in the universe makes for a marvelous late-night discussion. It's not relevant to how we live in the here and now. We need to look around, take measure of ourselves, and decide what we can do and how much of it we do to improve our lives and the lives of as many others as we can reach. — Nikki Stern

One of the biggest benefits of playing box for a young lacrosse player is in the development of lacrosse IQ. Because everyone plays with a short stick [in box lacrosse], you have to focus on being a complete lacrosse player versus specializing as an attackman or d-man. That is how your IQ grows and skills improve. — Peter Lawrence

Difference makers know how to work loose, to model, fine-tune, and play with ideas before they execute them to find changes that are likely to succeed. — David Sturt

Coming to appreciate your worth can, in some cases, dramatically improve your circumstances by changing the choices you make and the actions you take. And as you begin to treat yourself with more respect, other people begin to do the same, since we subconsciously "train" others how to treat us through messages we send through body language, tone of voice, and other subtle cues and behaviors. Discovering your innate worth and living from that place allows you to make more constructive choices-to choose the higher roads of life — Dan Millman

Dear Mr. Wedgewood,
Welcome to the Flying Rose. I hope you have settled to sea comfortably. Your lot may improve in direct proportion to your willingness. I do look forward to more of your fare. Let me lay out my proposal: You will, of a Sunday, cook for me, and me alone, the finest supper. You will neither repeat a dish nor serve foods that are in the slightest degree mundane. In return I will continue to keep you alive and well, and we may discuss an improvement of your quarters after a time. Should you balk in any fashion you will find yourself swimming home, whole or in pieces, depending upon the severity of my disappointment. How does this strike you?
In anticipation,
Capt. Hannah Mabbot — Eli Brown

I don't think age has much to do with writing. I think it's something that can certainly improve in time, but there's no age limit on how old you need to be to write well. — Sandy Hall

A doctor says to a man, "You want to improve your love life? You need to get some exercise. Run ten miles a day." Two weeks later, the man called the doctor. The doctor says, "How is your love life since you have been running?" "I don't know, I'm 140 miles away!" — Henny Youngman

Companies are starting to measure how effective their customer service is and trying to understand what they can do to improve the customer service process. — Sanjay Kumar

Look for what's missing. Many advisors can tell a President how to improve what's proposed or what's gone amiss. Few are able to see what isn't there. — Donald Rumsfeld

Having a fling with you doesn't appeal to me. You're handsome, but you're too inexperienced and too arrogant to be good in bed. Having ridden many horses doesn't make you a good rider; it just proves that you can't recognize a good one or don't know how to keep her. You're too young for me, and in ten years, when you improve, I will be too old for you. So let's not speak of this again. A thin, high-pitched sound came from the wall. Miko was snickering. — Ilona Andrews

To increase the value of your day, add some love and gratitude to your coffee and some kindness to your dinner. — Debasish Mridha

Softly and kindly remind yourself, 'I cannot own anything.' It is a valuable thought to keep in mind as you struggle to improve your financial picture, worry about investments, and plan how to acquire more and more. It is a universal principle which you are part of. You must release everything when you truly awaken. Are you letting your life go by in frustration and worry over not having enough? If so, relax and remember that you only get what you have for a short period of time. When you awaken you will see the folly of being attached to anything. — Wayne Dyer

It is said in the Upanishads: 'I am the Universe.' If you ask a hundred people as to how they find the world, they are all likely to give different answers. For some, the world is beautiful and the people are good, while for others, the world is extremely bad, and the people are treacherous and sinful. Why the same world is different for different people? It is so, because the outer world is the projection of our inner world. Therefore, the only way to improve the world outside is to improve the world within. While we may not have any control over the outside world, we can change our world within and thus change the world outside. — Awdhesh Singh

The arrow is the intention. It is what unites the strength of the bow with the centre of the target. The intention must be crystal-clear, straight and balanced. Once the arrow has gone, it will not come back, so it is better to interrupt a shot, because the movements that led up to it were not sufficiently precise and correct, than to act carelessly, simply because the bow was fully drawn and the target was waiting. But never hold back from firing the arrow if all that paralyses you is fear of making a mistake. If you have made the right movements, open your hand and release the string. Even if the arrow fails to hit the target, you will learn how to improve your aim next time. If you never take a risk, you will never know what changes you need to make. Each arrow leaves a memory in your heart, and it is the sum of those memories that will make you shoot better and better. — Paulo Coelho

But when we reflect how difficult it is to move or inflect the great machine of society, how impossible to advance the notions of a whole people suddenly to ideal right, we see the wisdom of Solon's remark that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear, and that will be chiefly to reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it, and improve some little on old routines. Even — Jon Meacham

I'm not a huge kind of visual director. For me, it's all about the acting. There's no greater buzz than working with actors and seeing what they can do and how much they can improve on what you'd written. That will always be on the top of my list. It's a real privilege to see it live before anyone else sees it. — Peter Mullan

Even as a child, I told my whole family how to improve their looks. — Jil Sander

There are two main strategies we can try to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We should always be aspiring to know more, and to better ourselves, and to improve ourselves. To improve ourselves, because that's how we improve the world around us, by working within us. — Lauryn Hill

Look at the two of us, barely out of childhood and already we're too old-fashioned for this changing world. Is it possible to be born old? Because I certainly feel it sometimes. How can we hope to stand against unstoppable progress; how can we possibly win a war against the forces of science?"
Oskan snorted.
"Which question do you want me to answer first? Born old? Yes, right now I feel ninety. And as for the rest, we're not fighting progress or science, they're both ideas that belong to people. Ideas that should help us to understand the beauty of our world and improve the lives of everything that lives in it. But the Empire has kidnapped them, and progress of its sort means sweeping aside everything that isn't new, whether good or bad. And to the Empire science is just a means of creating more efficient ways of killing people. — Stuart Hill

A Checklist is an Externalized, predefined Standard Operating Procedure for completing a specific task. Creating a Checklist is enormously valuable for two reasons. First, Checklisting will help you define a System for a process that hasn't yet been formalized - once the Checklist has been created, it's easier to see how to improve or Automate the system. Second, using Checklists as a normal part of working can help ensure that you don't forget to handle important steps that are easily overlooked when things get busy. — Josh Kaufman

We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity. — Dorothy Height

You are now equipped to use the Hook Model to ask yourself these five fundamental questions for building effective hooks: 1. What do users really want? What pain is your product relieving? (Internal Trigger) 2. What brings users to your service? (External Trigger) 3. What is the simplest action users take in anticipation of reward, and how can you simplify your product to make this action easier? (Action) 4. Are users fulfilled by the reward, yet left wanting more? (Variable Reward) 5. What "bit of work" do users invest in your product? Does it load the next trigger and store value to improve the product with use? (Investment) — Nir Eyal

And not just the right thing; it's profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn't get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people's lives. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people's lives just by doing our job a little better? — Steve Krug

I reflect back 35 years ago, and look how far we have come in America with our environmental policy to improve the conditions of our air and water, and we have had some real successes. — Jay Inslee

Honest concern for others is the key factor in improving our day-to-day lives. When you are warm-hearted, there is no room for anger, jealousy, or insecurity. A calm mind and self-confidence are the basis for happy and peaceful relations with each other. Healthy, happy families and a healthy, peaceful nation are dependent on warm-heartedness. Some scientists have observed that constant anger and fear eat away at our immune system, whereas a calm mind strengthens it. We have to see how we can fundamentally change our education system so that we can train people to develop warm-heartedness early on in order to create a healthier society. I don't mean we need to change the whole system - just improve it. We need to encourage an understanding that inner peace comes from relying on human values like love, compassion, tolerance, and honesty, and that peace in the world relies on individuals finding inner peace. - HIS HOLINESS, THE DALAI LAMA — Debra Landwehr Engle

One needs to constantly read up, practice and work, irrespective of your profession. If I feel as an actor that I know everything, then how will I to grow? How will I improve? I'll be stuck in a rut, and eventually I'll grow complacent. — Sonam Kapoor

One of the tests for positive thinking, for constructive thinking, is to test one's idle moments. At those times, is one's mind turning over negative critical thoughts; fighting battles that have been won or lost; rehashing senseless arguments? If so, then one is out of tune. But if one is thinking how to improve a situation or a procedure, how to gain a worthwhile objective, then one is on the constructive side of life. — Paul Davis

By running longer it's like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are. I become aware, physically, of these low points. And one of the results of running a little farther than usual is that I become that much stronger. If I'm angry, I direct that anger toward myself. If I have a frustrating experience, I use that to improve myself. That's the way I've always lived. I quietly absorb the things I'm able to, releasing them later, and in as changed a form as possible, as part of the story line in a novel. — Haruki Murakami

So to the best we can, what we do is focus on creating value for others, and how do we do that? We do it by trying to produce products and services that our customers will value more than their alternatives, and not just their alternatives today, but what the alternatives will be in the future. We try to more efficiently use resources than our competitors, and constantly improve in that, and we try to do the best job we can in creating a safe environment, and environmental excellence, and constantly improve at that. — Charles Koch

Efficiency is about doing things right. Effectiveness is about doing the right things. — Mani S. Sivasubramanian

Optimization implies that we already know how to do something but that we now need to improve it. Innovation implies that we don't know how to do something, and searching for that knowledge is paramount. — Jim Highsmith

We must dispel the negative and harmful atmosphere that has been created by avaricious and unprincipled realtors who engage in "blockbusting." If we had in America really serious efforts to break down discrimination in housing, and at the same time a concerted program of government aid to improve housing for Negroes, I think that many white people would be surprised at how many Negroes would choose to live among themselves, exactly as Poles and Jews and other ethnic groups do. — Martin Luther King Jr.

But a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition, to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution. — Edmund Burke

Don't tell me you're not good at something. People will always be better and worse than you at everything you do. Tell me whether or not you are making progress. If you are progressing, are you measuring your progress? If you are not progressing, why not? Get to know your strengths and your weaknesses. Develop your own personal progress plan and determine how you could improve and progress from where you are. You most likely don't know how far you have come and how much you truly have accomplished. Improve and progress! — Jerald Simon

Certainly businesses the world over are facing greater competitive pressure than ever before, and this leads to executive stress which, in turn, tends to bring out authoritarian tendencies in many bosses. To balance this, we now know a lot more about how we can successfully cope with a situation that is not likely to improve in the near future. — Srikumar Rao