Top Performance Quotes & Sayings

Aspire higher to attain excellence in whatever you do. But be careful when you reach the peak, where the only way is the way downwards. Maintain your standard! — Israelmore Ayivor

This was our last night. We only had one curtain call, Bree. And I thought they were going to give us a standing ovation, but no-o-o-. Do you know why half the audience stood up?"
"To get a head start on the traffic," Bree said.
"To get a head start on the traffic," Antonia agreed in indignation. "I mean, here we are, dancing and singing our little guts out, and all those folks want to do is get to bed early. I ask you, whatever happened to common courtesy? Whatever happened to decent manners? Doesn't anyone care about craft anymore? And on top of that, it's not even nice. — Mary Stanton

There's so many variables in comedy. Comedy is not this thing that's a performance like a play. It's really an interaction with every single person in the room. And if there's a weirdness in the room for any people, be it something the comedians did at the top of the set or be it the mixture of the people isn't right, something can go awry. So it's really great to see you proven wrong about someone. — B. J. Porter

A top-quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class - based on test scores - by over 10 percent in a single year ... That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top-quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. — Bill Gates

When I did "Top of the Pops" for the first time, Ace of Base was one of the other bands, and I have a memory of them on a small stage next to me in the TV studio. A memory of their performance is burned into my mind. Seared. — Beck

As it turned out, the story he told wasn't about doping; it was about power. It was about an ordinary guy who worked his way up to the top of an extraordinary world, who learned to play a shadowy chess match of strategy and information at the outermost edge of human performance. It was about a corrupt but strangely chivalrous world, where you would take any chemical under the sun to go faster, but wait for your opponent if he happened to crash. — Tyler Hamilton

Colin Morgan gives a stunning performance in Parked; he plays Merlin in the BBC TV show and he says the two characters are like night and day. Watch him. He's got everything it takes to be top notch. — Colm Meaney

Oh, there's no such thing as my favorite performance. I can't sit here today and look back, and say: "Top Hat was better than Easter Parade or any of the others". I just don't look back, period. When I finish with a project, I say: "All right, that's that. What's next?" — Fred Astaire

this book itself is not a book on what people at the top do or should do. It is addressed to everyone who, as a knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization. — Peter F. Drucker

You're going to see this 'Internet of things' start demanding network performance and making the networks much more aware of what is on top of them. — Hans Vestberg

My guess is many top athletes, distance runners included, use performance-enhancing drugs, enough so that the problem must be tackled. — Bill Rodgers

Our communications services revenue growth is being driven by continued strong top-line performance in data, Internet and international - three of the fastest growing and most profitable areas within communications services. — Bernard Ebbers

important components of the management system. It is the process by which top management reviews the effectiveness of the system and analyzes the performance of the organization. — Craig Cochran

When a technology, regardless of how different and difficult it is, sustains the trajectory of performance improvement, my research asserts that the leaders in the prior generation of technology are likely to end up on top of their industry at the end of the transition. — Clayton Christensen

The one and only personality trait the effective ones I have encountered did have in common was something they did not have: they had little or no 'charisma' and little use either for the term or what it signifies." Supporting Drucker's claim, Brigham Young University management professor Bradley Agle studied the CEOs of 128 major companies and found that those considered charismatic by their top executives had bigger salaries but not better corporate performance. We — Susan Cain

... It's just so' - she frowned, hunting for the right word - 'relentless. You think you're getting on top of it. You scoop up a few villains, get a result or two, make a night of it in the bar, then next morning you wake up and start all over again. It never bloody stops...
She described the pressures from headquarters, and from her own divisional Superintendent. The never-ending demands to beat performance target after performance target. The blizzards of paperwork. The fact that no one really knew what their political masters were after. They claimed to have priorities, lots of priorities, but in the end you got to realise there were so many that absolutely nothing got to the top of the heap. When it came to working out what politicians wanted, really wanted, she'd finally sussed the truth: that they were all equally clueless.
pg 157 — Graham Hurley

Sports constantly make demands on the participant for top performance, and they develop integrity, self-reliance and initiative. They teach you a lot about working in groups, without being unduly submerged in the group. — Byron White

A Dr van 't Hoff of the veterinary college at Utrecht ... finds it a less arduous task to mount Pegasus (evidently borrowed from the veterinary school) and to proclaim in his La Chemie dans l' espace how, during his bold fight to the top of the chemical Parnassus, the atoms appeared to him to have grouped themselves together throughout universal space ... I should have taken no notice of this matter had not Wislicenus oddly enough written a preface to the pamphlet, and not by way of a joke but in all seriousness recommended it a worthwhile performance. — Hermann Kolbe

When you truly study top performers in any field, what sets them apart is not their physical skill; it is how they control their minds. — Tina Brown

How could Digital's collapse be so precipitous? It's because, in many ways, financial performance data is misleading. As you move up to the top of the market, you're getting rid of the less profitable products at the low end and adding business with more attractive margins at the high end. The rate of unit volume growth might be tapering off as you pursue these smaller markets, but your margins actually look better. So Wall Street rewards your stock price until you hit the ceiling. — Clayton Christensen

That's another flaw with performance-based rewards: They are easy for one of your competitors to top. — Joel Spolsky

Except for a handful, chess players don't have such illusions. The game has a severe analytic quality that makes self-deception difficult. Unlike the undiscovered poet who, despite the harsh criticism of his peers, lives on his fantasies for the day that he will be recognized as the next Dylan Thomas, even a young chess player can usually gauge his talent. When Josh was six, he played several games against a pudgy thirteen-year-old who was the top player on his high school team. He beat Josh every time, but a couple of the games were close, and afterwards the boy seemed gloomy about his performance. He explained that if he didn't make significant improvement during the next year, he would wind up as just another wood-pusher. Despite his celebrity in school, he seemed to know that he didn't have it. While — Fred Waitzkin

People are my most important asset. Faith in the supreme being, trust, credibility and performance are the things that have brought me to the top. — Don King

The connection between health and productivity at work is intuitively obvious but has not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of either researchers or corporate financial officers. Ronald Kessler and Paul Stang help to bridge the usual gap between research and the marketplace with the help of a top-notch group of the best 'real-world' investigators obtainable-all in the cause of making the case that employee health should be treated as an investment in business performance-thus creating the new discipline of health and productivity management. — Sean Sullivan

Research conducted throughout the world shows gender balance in top positions contributes to improved competitiveness and better business performance. — Beth Brooke

Top athletes understand that to play at their best, they must alternate periods of intense performance with periods of strategic renewal. — Robin S. Sharma

I like to be against the odds. I'm not afraid to be lonely at the top. With me, it's just the satisfaction of the game. Just performance. — Barry Bonds

Technology has also had a big impact, especially on the bike. Now everything is tested aerodynamically, wind tunnels are used to optimize performance, and frames, wheels, water bottles are all tested. Even clothing, like my Castelli Stealth Top, is faster than skin. — Timothy O'Donnell

I'm getting older and the performance onstage was definitely, it was a bit sexier, but it wasn't too much. I don't want to scare off my fans. At the same time my fans are growing up with me, and I don't want to go way over the top. — Demi Lovato

It is hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was a kind of fire dance in which the stick was thrown and caught, and the flame, tossed and twirled, created sinuous shapes, circles and ever-moving patterns. Ancel's red hair created a pleasing aesthetic alongside the red and orange fire. And even without the hypnotic movement of the flame, the dance was beguiling, its difficulties made to look effortless, its physicality subtly erotic. Damen looked at Ancel with new respect. This performance required training, discipline and athleticism, which Damen admired. It was the first time that Damen had seen Veretian pets display skill in anything other than wearing clothes or climbing on top of one another. — C.S. Pacat

If you've never come across Soccer Saturday, imagine a Samuel Beckett play in which a slick circus-master gets four retired clowns to describe a performance to punters stuck outside the Big Top. You will still be nowhere close to the absurcist drama that unfolds for six straight hours each Saturday on Sky Sports 1 — Esquire Magazine

In performance, you don't always feel that sort of family bond right off the top. It sort of develops and grows over time. — Uzo Aduba

A company at the top of its game has accumulated a number of rules of thumb - implicit assumptions and beliefs about what has been central to its success. New technologies and business models belie or change some of those assumptions, but they only seem sensible if the management team can become aware of those implicit assumptions and mind-sets and suspend them for a moment to contemplate the change. It's very hard to do that with the inherited wisdom, experience, and lore of a company. This is why the failures of incumbents to capture the benefits of disruptive innovations are a result not of bad managers, but of good managers practicing what they have done best. Incremental innovations can quickly be scaled and incorporated. Disruptive innovations require changes in customer sets, business models, or performance metrics that are no longer consistent with what led to success in the past. — Stefan Heck

Typical comments from younger and "top talent" employees: "I want to know immediately if I need to change what I'm doing. I prefer managers who just walk in and tell what I need to do differently." "I can't believe that some managers wait for performance review to let people know they aren't good in a particular area. What's the holdup?" "Just lay it on me. I don't want to wait for feedback. And I want a manager who's open to my feedback, too." "I was hired in as a manager, a role I'd never had before. I'm lucky my boss pushes us to give more feedback to everyone - I get feedback on my feedback. My team is like a hungry beast. I feed them and they keep asking for more! — Anna Carroll

The jokes are great but what really matters for a comedian is his performance, his whole attitude, and the laughs that he gets between the jokes rather than on top of the jokes. — Jack Dee