I recently finished reading Do The Work by Steven Pressfield. Here’s the quotes I found useful (there’s no page numbers because I read an ebook version):
“Fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”
“Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.”
“The problem with friends and family is that they know us as we are. They are invested in maintaining us as we are. The last thing we want is to remain as we are.”
“Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway.”
“Once we commit to action, the worst thing we can do is to stop.”
“Start Before You’re Ready Don’t prepare. Begin.”
“The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.”
“Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.”
“Do you love your idea? Does it feel right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?”
“Get your idea down on paper. You can always tweak it later.”
“Figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there.”
“Your movie, your album, your new startup … what is it about? When you know that, you’ll know the end state.”
“I was thirty years old before I had an actual thought. Everything up till then was either what Buddhists call “monkey-mind” chatter or the reflexive regurgitation of whatever my parents or teachers said, or whatever I saw on the news or read in a book, or heard somebody rap about, hanging around the street corner.”
“Never do research in prime working time.”
“One trick they use is to boil down their presentation to the following: A killer opening scene. Two major set pieces in the middle. A killer climax. A concise statement of the theme.”
“Any project or enterprise can be broken down into beginning, middle, and end. Fill in the gaps; then fill in the gaps between the gaps.”
“One rule for first full working drafts: get them done ASAP. Don’t worry about quality. Act, don’t reflect. Momentum is everything. Get to THE END as if the devil himself were breathing down your neck and poking you in the butt with his pitchfork.”
“Get the first version of your project done from A to Z as fast as you can. Don’t stop. Don’t look down. Don’t think.”
“Ideas come according to their own logic. That logic is not rational. It’s not linear. We may get the middle before we get the end. We may get the end before we get the beginning. Be ready for this. Don’t resist it.”
“Let’s talk about the actual process—the writing/composing/ idea generation process. It progresses in two stages: action and reflection. Act, reflect. Act, reflect. NEVER act and reflect at the same time.”
“Our job is not to control our idea; our job is to figure out what our idea is (and wants to be)—and then bring it into being.”
“You are not to blame for the voices of Resistance you hear in your head.”
“The opposite of fear is love—love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off.”
“Resistance puts two questions to each and all of us: 1)How bad do you want it? 2)Why do you want it?”
“Crashes are hell, but in the end they’re good for us. A crash means we have failed. We gave it everything we had and we came up short. A crash does not mean we are losers.”
“A crash means we’re at the threshold of learning something, which means we’re getting better, we’re acquiring the wisdom of our craft. A crash compels us to figure out what works and what doesn’t work—and to understand the difference.”
“A professional does not take success or failure personally.”
“Finishing is the critical part of any project. If we can’t finish, all our work is for nothing.”
“Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.” (7)
“Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent.” (8)
“Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.” (8)
“Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose.” (8)
“By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.” (18)
“A Manhattan writer I know never leaves his apartment without reminding himself to “come back with a face.” Whether he’s walking down the street or sitting on a park bench or riding the subway or standing on a checkout line, he looks for a compelling face and works up a rich description of it in his mind. When he has a moment, he writes it all down in his notebook.” (30)
“Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.” (31)
“Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you’ll learn to do it better.” (32)
“The golfer Ben Hogan said, “Every day you don’t practice you’re one day further from being good.” If it’s something you want to do, make the time.” (32)
“Make it your priority. Work around it. Once your basic needs are taken care of, money is there to be used. What better investment than in yourself?” (32)
“Immerse yourself in the details of the work. Commit yourself to mastering every aspect. At the same time, step back to see if the work scans, if it’s intelligible to an unwashed audience. Don’t get so involved that you lose what you’re trying to say.” (41)
“Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.” (66)
“Every young person grows up with an overwhelming sense of possibility, and how life, in some ways, is just a series of incidents in which that possibility is either enlarged or smacked out of you. How you adapt is your choice.” (77)
“Never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.” (84)
“There’s a difference between a work’s beginning and starting to work.” (91)
“You don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.” (97)
“Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guaranteed to please. Artists have bigger goals. If being an artist means pushing the envelope, you don’t want to stuff your material in someone else’s envelope. You don’t want to know the envelope has been invented.” (105)
“Ideas will come to you more quickly if you’ve been putting in the time at your chosen craft.” (105)
“Mark Twain said, “the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” (110)
“What you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.” (110)
“When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can’t simulate in a sedentary position.” (113)
“Giving yourself a handicap to overcome will force you to think in a new and slightly different way.” (114)
“A plan is like the scaffolding around a building. When you’re putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears.” (119)
“In creative endeavors luck is a skill.” (120)
“The more you are in the room working, experimenting, banging away at your objective, the more luck has a chance of biting you on the nose.” (121)
“It’s vital to know the difference between good planning and too much planning.” (122)
“Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers.” (126)
“It’s tempting to believe that the quantity and quality of our creative productivity would increase exponentially if only we could afford everything we’ve imagined, but I’ve seen too many artists dry up the moment they had enough money in the bank.” (126)
“Obligation is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working.” (127)
“You only need one good reason to commit to an idea, not four hundred. But if you have four hundred reasons to say yes and one reason to say no, the answer is probably no.” (128)
“Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great.” (128)
“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.” (129)
“You can’t overthink when you don’t have time to think at all.” (132)
“Too much planning implies you’ve got it all under control. That’s boring, unrealistic, and dangerous. It lulls you into a complacency that removes one of the artist’s most valuable conditions: being pissed.” (133)
“Art is competitive with yourself, with the past, with the future.” (133)
“Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom: “Why do I have to obey the rules?” “Why can’t I be different?” “Why can’t I do it my way?”” (133)
“To force change, you have to attack the work with outrage and violence.” (135)
“My perfect world does not exist, but it’s there as a goal. What are the conditions of your perfect world? Which of them are essential, and which can you work around?” (136)
“How to be lucky: Be generous. Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you.” (136)
“New collaborators bring new vectors of energy into your static world – and they can be combustible.” (137)
“Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.” (144)
“Skill gives you the wherewithal to execute whatever occurs to you. Without it, you are just a font of unfulfilled ideas. Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence, allowing you to dare to be simple.” (163)
“Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.” (164)
“Learn to do for yourself. It’s the only way to broaden your skills.” (165)
“Personality is a skill.” (165)
“One of her skills, and a great deal of her charm, was this built-in sense of humility. The greatest dancers have that.” (165)
“Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them.” (165)
“Perfect practice makes perfect.” (165)
“The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.” (166)
“Practice without purpose, however, is nothing more than exercise. Too many people practice what they’re already good at and neglect the skills that need more work.” (167)
“The great ones shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on their imperfections.” (167)
“The golfer Davis Love III was taught by his father to think of practice as a huge circle, like a clock. You work on a skill until you master it, and then you move on to the next one. When you’ve mastered that, you move on to the next, and the next, and the next, and eventually you’ll come full circle to the task that you began with, which will now need remedial work because of all the time you’ve spent on other things.” (167)
“Switching genres was Beethoven’s way of maintaining his inexperience, and as a result, enlarging his art.” (168)
“Analyze your own skill set. See where you’re strong and where you need dramatic improvement, and tackle those lagging skills first.” (169)
“Japanese sword fighter Miyamoto Musashi counseled, “Never have a favorite weapon.” (169)
“We need this breadth and passion if we’re going ot keep perfecting our craft, whether or not there is approval, validation, or money coming from it.” (173)
“Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.” (173)
“The willingness to take directions is a skill noticed mostly when absent.” (175)
“The more you know, the better you can imagine.” (177)
““We’ve always done it this way” is not a good enough reason to keep doing it if it isn’t working.” (186)
“When you’re in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.” (187)
“You’ve got two minutes to come up with sixty uses for the stool. A lot of interesting things happen when you set an aggressive quota, even with ideas. People’s competitive juices are stirred. Instead of panicking they focus, and with that comes an increased fluency and agility of mind. People are forced to suspend critical thinking. To meet the quota, they put their internal critic on hold and let everything out. They’re no longer choking off good impulses.” (191)
“Sometimes you can’t identify a good idea until you’ve considered and discarded the bad ones.” (192)
“If you’re in a creative rut, the easiest way to challenge assumptions is to switch things around them and make the switch work. The process goes like this:
Identify the concept that isn’t working.
Write down your assumptions about it.
Challenge the assumptions.
Act on the challenge.” (193)
“Jerry Robbins made a point of going to see everything because he could find something useful in even the worst productions. He’d sit there, viewing the catastrophe onstage, and imagine how he would have done it differently. A bad evening at the theater for everyone else was a creative workout for him.” (195)
“There’s no point in analyzing it. If you could figure out how you get into a groove you could figure out how to maintain it. That’s not going to happen. The best you can hope for is the wisdom and good fortune to occasionally fall into a groove.” (196)
“Knowing when to stop is almost as critical as knowing how to start.” (207)
“There comes a point where you have to let your creation out into the world or it isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn.” (208)
“You can’t be stoic and strong about everything. Some things in life are just meant to be enjoyed simply because you enjoy them. They are their own rationale.” (209)
“You do your best work after your biggest disasters.” (214)
“It’s vital to be able to forget the pain of failure while retaining the lessons from it.” (214)
“You won’t get very far relying on your audience’s ignorance.” (218)
“If you don’t have a broad base of skills, you’re limiting the number of problems you can solve when trouble hits.” (222)
“When people who have demonstrated talent fizzle out or disappear after early creative success, it’s not because their gifts, that famous “one percent inspiration,” abandoned them; more likely they abandoned their gift through a failure of perspiration.” (233)
“An artist’s ultimate goal is the achievement of mastery.” (240)
“Every time you set out to create something new, you have to prove to yourself you can still do it at least as well as, if not better than, you did it before. You can not rest on your creative laurels.” (241)
I recently finished reading “Talent is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin. Below are the quotes I found useful and applicable to the entertainment industry. As always, if you find the quotes useful, please read and buy the book.
“Many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started.” (3)
“Research confirms that merely putting in the years isn’t much help to someone who wants to be a great performer.” (4)
“If customer ignorance is a profit center for you, you’re in trouble.” (11)
“Today, in a change that is historically quite sudden, financial capital is abundant. The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability.” (12)
“Being good at whatever we want to do is among the deepest sources of fulfillment we will ever know.” (16)
“One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.” (18)
“There is absolutely no evidence of a ‘fast track’ for high achievers.” (19)
“Over and over, the researchers found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training. “(23)
“IQ is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, IQ predicts little or nothing about performance.” (45)
“No matter who they were, or what explanation of their performance was being advanced, it always took them many years to become excellent, and if a person achieves elite status only after many years of toil, assigning the principal role in that success to innate gifts becomes problematic, to say the least.” (61)
“In math, science, musical composition, swimming, X-ray diagnosis, tennis, literature – no one, not even the most “talented” performers, became great without at least ten years of very hard preparation.” (62)
“Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual such as chess or business related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.” (66)
“Anyone who thinks they’ve outgrown the benefits of a teacher’s help should at least question that view.” (67)
“At the driving range or at the piano, most of us, as adults, are just doing what we’ve done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.” (68)
“The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.” (68)
“Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities we can already do easily; while panic-zone activities are so hard that we don’t even know how to approach them.” (69)
“Identifying the learning zone, which is not simple, and then forcing oneself to stay continually in it as it changes, which is even harder – these are the first and most important characteristics of deliberate practice.” (69)
“You can work on technique all you like, but if you can’t see the effects, two things will happen: You won’t get any better, and you’ll stop caring.” (70)
“Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. Instead of doing what we’re good at, we insistently seek out what we’re not good at. Then we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over. After each repetition, we force ourselves to see – or get others to tell us – exactly what still isn’t right so we can repeat the most painful and difficult parts of what we’ve just done. We continue that process until we’re mentally exhausted.” (71)
“The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people wont’ do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.” (72)
“Deliberate practice does not fully explain achievement – real life is too complicated for that. Most obviously, we’re all affected by luck; time and chance happeneth to us all.” (79)
“Genes could play a role in a person’s willingness to put himself or herself through the extremely rigorous demands of becoming an exceptional performer.” (81)
“Frequently when we see great performers doing what they do, it strikes us that they’ve practice for so long, and done it so many times, they can just do it automatically. But in fact, what they have achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically.” (82)
“Great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice – avoiding automaticity. The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behavior impossible.” (83)
“Practice is all about pushing ourselves just beyond what we can currently do.” (84)
“We can see mentors in a new way – not just as wise people to whom we turn for guidance, but as experienced masters in our field who can advise us on the skills and abilities we need to acquire next, and can give us feedback on how we’re doing.” (109)
“The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome.” (117)
“Too high a standard is discouraging and not very instructive, while too low a standard produces no advancement.” (119)
“A mental model is never finished. Great performers not only possess highly developed mental models, they are also always expanding and revising those models.” (124)
“Understand that each person in the organization is not just doing a job, but is also being stretched and grown.” (128)
“Some of the worst teams I’ve ever seen have been those where everybody was a potential CEO,” says David Nadler. “If there’s a zero-sum game called succession going on, it’s very difficult to have an effective team.” (137)
“Reciprocal vulnerability is the beginning of trust. But the process can be rushed only so much.” (139)
“Just as great individual performers possess highly developed mental models of their domains, the best teams are composed of members who share a mental model – of the domain, and of how the team will be effective.” (141)
“In a world that forces that push toward the commoditization of everything, creating something new and different is the only way to survive. A product unlike any other can’t be commoditized. A service that reaches deep into the psyche of the buyer can never be purchased solely on price. Creating such products and services was always valuable; now it’s essential.” (146)
“As products and services live shorter lives, so do the business models of the companies that sell them.” (147)
“The most eminent creators are consistently those who have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen fields, have devoted their lives to it, amassed tremendous knowledge of it, and continually pushed themselves to the front of it.” (155)
“In many creative fields the person who pursues an advanced degree has consciously chosen a path that leads to a professorship, not to a life of innovating in that domain.” (156)
“Innovation doesn’t reject the past; on the contrary, it relies heavily on the past and comes most readily to those who’ve mastered the domain as it exists.” (157)
“People who are internally driven to create do seem more creative than those who are just doing it for the money.” (164)
“Excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else – except in their field of expertise.” (180)
“The consistent finding reported by many researchers examining many domains is that high creative achievement and intrinsic motivation go together. Creative people are focused on the task (How can I solve this problem?) and not on themselves (What will solving this problem do for me?).” (189)
“The people who do become top-level achievers are rarely child prodigies.” (197)
“Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.” (1)
“The Stockdale Paradox: You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” (13)
“The Hedgehog Concept: To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. Just because something is your core business – just because you’ve been doing it for years or perhaps even decades – does not necessarily mean you can be the best in the world at it. And if you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business absolutely cannot form the basis of a great company.” (13)
“No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment.” (14)\
“The best students are those who never quite believe their professors.” (16)
“I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.” – Darwin Smith, CEO of Kimberly-Clark (20)
“The right people don’t need to be tightly managed or fired up; they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.” (42)
“IF you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” (42)
“The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.” (56)
“The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems.” (59)
“Managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great.” (59)
“No matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.” (62)
“The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse.” (72)
“Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time… if you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated.” (74)
“All good-to-great companies attained a very simple concept that they used as a frame of reference for all their decisions.” (95)
“Consider what you can be the best in the world at (and, equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at).” (95)
“You can be passionate all you want, but if you can’t be the best at it or it doesn’t make economic sense, then you might have a lot of fun, but you won’t produce great results.” (97)
“You can’t manufacture passion or “motivate” people to feel passionate. You can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you.” (109)
“You might wonder about what type of person gets all jazzed up about making a bank as efficient as McDonald’s, or who considers a diaper charismatic. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that they felt passionate about what they were doing and the passion was deep and genuine.” (110)
“It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.” (114)
“The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline – a problem that largely goes way if you have the right people in the first place.” (121)
“Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turns drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increase the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth.” (121)
“Good to great” lies in the discipline to do whatever it takes to become the best within carefully selected arenas and then to seek continual improvement from there.” (128)
“Your status and authority in Nucor come from your leadership capabilities, not your position.” (138)
““Stop doing” lists are more important than “to do” lists.” (143)
“When used right, technology becomes an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it.” (152)
“You cannot make good use of technology until you know which technologies are relevant.” (153)
“Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.” (156)
“Technology cannot turn a good enterprise into a great one, nor by itself prevent disaster.” (158)
“Those who built the good-to-great companies weren’t motivated by fear. They weren’t driven by fear of what they didn’t understand. They weren’t drive by fear of looking like a chump. They weren’t driven by fear of watching others hit it big while they didn’t. they weren’t driven by the fear of being hammered by the competition. No, those who turn good into great are motivated by a deep creative urge and a n inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake. Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity, in contrast, are motivated more by the fear of being left behind.” (160)
“Lasting transformations from good to great follow a general pattern of buildup followed by breakthrough.” (172)
“In a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.” (194)
“Core values are essential for enduring greatness, but it doesn’t seem to matter what those core values are.” (195)
“It is much easier to become great than to remain great.” (204)
“The point is to realize that much of what we’re doing is at best a waste of energy. If we organized the majority of our work time around applying these principles, and pretty much ignored or stopped doing everything else, our lives would be simpler and our results vastly improved.” (205)
“Those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity. Yes, turning good into great takes energy, but the building of momentum adds more energy back into the pool than it takes out. Conversely, perpetuating mediocrity is an inherently depressing process and drains much more energy out of the pool than it puts back in.” (208)
“if you’re doing something you care that much about, and you believe in its purpose deeply enough, then it is impossible to imagine not trying to make it great. It’s just a given.” (208)
“You don’t need to have some grand existential reason for why you love what you’re doing or to care deeply about your work (although yo might). All that matters is that you do love it and that you do care.” (209)
“The real question is no, “Why greatness?” but “What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, “Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.” (209)
“In the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. and it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.” (210)
“The single biggest danger in business and life, other than outright failure, is to be successful without being resolutely clear about why you are successful in the first place.” –Robert Burgelman, Stanford Professor (213)
“Fair or not, people – especially in the United States – can forgive a lot of sins, but will never forget or forgive feeling lied to.” (215)
“It is not the content of a company’s values that correlates with performance, but the strength of conviction with which it holds those values, whatever they might be.” (215)
“Widen your definition of “right people” to focus more on the character attributes of the person and less on specialized knowledge. People can learn skills and acquire knowledge, but they cannot learn the essential character traits that make them right for your organization.” (216)
”Take advantage of difficult economic times to hire great people, even if you don’t have a specific job in mind.” (217)
I recently finished reading “Process: An Improviser’s Journey” by Mary Scruggs and Michael Gellman. Here’s the quotes I found useful.
“You can save yourself from this slow, painful death by getting your focus off of yourself.” (xxii)
“I got that feeling of panic again, and I knew from experience that the best way to handle that feeling is to just start doing something.” (24)
“Stay in the moment. Don’t try to think up clever bits. Don’t feel responsible for creating the final product.” (41)
“When I do manage to exist in the present moment and the present moment only, I feel like I’ve brushed up against something eternal. I’ve touched the divine.” (42)
“What you do in normal life is not theater. Theater is compressed time and space, artificial dialogue, and heightened situations. It is our job as good actors to help the audience believe it’s real and natural. And I think it helps if we believe in the given circumstances ourselves. The more we commit to the character and the play, improvised or scripted, the better we are able to get to that place of the believable.” (64)
“When you follow the dialogue rules, you almost have to explore and heighten relationship.” (66)
“If there is no physical manifestation of your reaction to your discovery, does it exist for your audience?” (70)
“The fact that you can write is an asset – a tremendous asset. That’s why you’re so good at the dialogue rules. Just don’t get ahead of yourself when you’re improvising. React to what you see, taste, hear, touch, and smell – not to the story in your head.” (72)
“Having two points of concentration actually seemed to help me stay in the moment.” (74)
“We worry that we aren’t going to have an honest discovery, so we make up stories. Or if we actually manage to have a real discovery, we worry that our reaction to that discovery isn’t going to be enough.” (75)
“Dialogue comes after the reaction. The ashes after the fire. Don’t try to manufacture.” (86)
“To avoid getting into fights, only make ‘I’ statements. For example, ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ ‘I want,’ ‘I feel.’ (100)
“You are not responsible for the product. Only the process. Improvise moment to moment to moment, and the play will take care of itself.” (103)
“Acting is acting is acting, and if people believe we are who we say we are, it is considered to be good acting.” (140)
