Tag: Comedy Books

I recently finished “The Art of Doing: How Super Achievers Do What They Do And How They Do It So Well” by Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield. It’s mostly a compilation of interviews, so I’ve bolded the person being quoted for all the quotes below their name. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“The super achievers had ten things in common: Dedication, intelligent persistence, community, listening, telling a story, testing, managing emotions, evolving, patience, happiness.” (i-xliii)

“Know when to pivot, to rethink your plan, while still maintaining the mission.” (xxviii)

“When these emotions compromised their goals, they had the commitment and the skills to examine those emotions and figure out effective ways to cope with them.” (xxxix)

“Because they possess a willingness to challenge their deeply held assumptions and the courage to act on that information, they have been able to overcome obstacles by discarding what doesn’t work and evolving entirely new ways of thinking about their lives and goals.” (xlii)

“George Clinton told us, “If you get to the top and catch up with happy, you got a real problem because you’ll get bored. I’m not trying to catch up with being happy – because it’s the pursuit of happiness I’m after. I want to be so close behind it I can almost touch it. That’s what keeps me looking forward to moving ahead.” (xliv)

“Good writing is not about impressing people with how smart you are but about explaining your subject as simply as possible.’ (xlv)

Laura Linney

“Her goal then is to so thoroughly internalize her role that once she steps on set or stage, she can “throw all the preparation away and let the work bleed through.” (1)

“Most scripts aren’t written to be acted. They’re written to appeal to an executive who doesn’t know how to read a script but has the power to get a film made.” (2)

“Film is a director’s medium, so you need to find out if you share a point of view so you can help them make the movie they want to make.” (3)

Anna Netrebko

“No matter how big you become, you can never be self-satisfied and say, ‘Okay, I’ve made it,’ because the next day you have to go back and prove yourself again.” (10)

“When I started out, I met a lot of extremely talented singers. Everybody thought, “Oh, this one or that one will be a star.” But after a very short time, many of them disappeared. Talent, which is a gift from the gods, isn’t enough. You have to be incredibly smart about your choices.” (10)

“My dreams never went too far. Maybe it would be in my home region of Krasnodar? When I studied, I was not thinking, “I’m going to be the one.” That was not my goal. I loved the music so much that my goal was simply to sing well. That’s it. That’s what I wanted to do. I focused on learning the music, developing my voice and practicing very hard so I could get better.” (11)

“Envy can destroy your soul.” (12)

“Something else has to come through to capture the audience’s attention. It’s soul. Callas had it. You have to find it in yourself. It took me years to find it. I couldn’t even tell someone how I did it except to keep searching for it and allowing it to come out. It’s very difficult to do, but performing with soul is the only way you can move an audience, stun them, shock them, make them cry.” (12)

“Make it (seem like) magic.” (13)

Ken Jennings

“If you let go of the outcome and just enjoy the crazy experience of being on a quiz show, you’ll do much better.” (24)

“No matter how much smarter you think you are than everyone else, you have to first make yourself interesting and TV ready.” (24)

“Overconfidence can kill you. It can be worse than not being confident enough.”( 26)

Yogi Berra

“Play to your strengths and don’t go crazy over weaknesses. The best players improve what they do well.” (32)

Martina Navratilova

“To be a champion you have to play as if every point is a matter of life and death.” (40)

“A lot of players have lost sight of the fact that it’s a game. They’ve lost the joy of playing. They’re so afraid to fail, and with all that pressure, they’re miserable and that affects their play.” (41)

Alec Baldwin and Robert Carlock

“We try to tell emotionally grounded stories in as odd of a way as we can.” (45)

“TV is a medium of limitations. We tell a lot of jokes, but we don’t have a lot of time to mess around. Every joke has to accomplish something, whether it’s smoothing over a transition, telling us something new about a character we’ve known for six years, or progressing the story.” (46)

“In the world of sketch comedy, say on SNL, you can say the most horrible and offensive things and get a laugh, because when the three-minute sketch is over, that world no longer exists and the characters will never see each other again. Whereas, with 30 Rock, we can say things to each other on the edge of being offensive, but you can’t cross that line, because those characters have to continue to live with each other for years.” (47)

“Every character has to have their own voice. On a lot of TV shows there’s no distinction between characters’ voices.” (47)

“Question the script. As we develop a story line, I always ask, what new information have we learned in this scene? How is the story moving forward? How are the stories talking to each other? How is this building? How is the end better than the beginning? Is the end even in the beginning? And most important, am I feeling bored reading this right now? If those questions don’t have satisfactory answers, then, however good the jokes are or acting is, you are failing in your duty to create something funny.” (49)

“The most important question is not “Is this funny?” but “Are we failing at being funny in a larger sense?”” (49)

Simon Doonan

“Reimagine your personal style by uncovering and exaggerating all that is unique about you.” (54)

Tony Hsieh

“The best decisions are made from the bottom up. A manager’s job is to remove obstacles.” (68)

“We try to create an environment where employees feel energized, where work doesn’t feel like work. You’re just living life the way you want to live it, and it happens to make money as well.” (69)

“Ultimately a brand is a shortcut to a set of emotions.” (70)

Will Shortz

“I try to get as many people into the tent as possible by having different “acts” and appealing to everyone at least some of the time.” (76)

Mark Frauenfelder

“The recipe for an excellent blog is to be so deeply obsessed with something that you need to communicate it to others.” (83)

“If you spend too much time obsessing on the minutiae of digital marketing techniques, you’ll lose sight of the mission of a blog, which is to share information with like-minded people.” (84)

Randall Grahm

“The riskiest thing is to stay the course and pretend that things are normal. Nothing is normal; the whole world is upside down. You have to be faily extreme to have any shot at succeeding.” (90)

Constance Rice

“Outlast everyone. There are a lot of folks who are a lot smarter than me. But I am more persistent. I’m more determined and I’ve got more passion. So I outlast everybody.” (102)

Sam Yagan, Chris Coyne, Max Krohn, Christian Rudder

“Getting 99 percent of the people to kind of like you is a waste of time. Accentuate your eccentricities and find the people who will love you as you really are.” (113)

“The three questions that tested above all others in determining if you and someone else have long-term potential are: “Do you like horror movies?” “Have you ever traveled around another country alone?” and Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” (117)

Average length of time for online daters before tying the knot: 18.5 months. Real-world daters: 42 months.

Barry Levine

“Showing that Hollywood actors and TV stars don’t have perfect lives helps people accept their own problems. As an old Enquirer editor once said, the big news organizations tell people what they think they should be interested in, whereas we try to give them stories they are interested in.” (128)

“Know where you’re headed. My hero, Ernest Hemingway, would always leave off writing at the end of the day at a point in his story where he’d know just where he’d pick up the following morning.” (130)

“Pace yourself. No matter how big a story is, you can’t let it overwhelm you, because you have to be back at your desk at eight o’clock the next morning to work on other stories. Years ago, I was afraid to leave my desk. But these days, no matter how busy I am, every day I’ll leave my office, walk around the block, get lunch or go to the gym. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” (131)

“You have to embrace your success and think hard about the failures that come your way, but you can’t obsess on either.” (131)

Chad Schearer

“When you practice, simulate the conditions you’ll be facing in your actual hunt. Become familiar. Practice in the clothes you’ll be wearing with the weapon you’ll be using.” (142)

“Injury rates for sports per 100 participants: football (5.3), hunting (0.05)” (147)

Philippe Petit

“Ask a great artist why they do what they do and the answer will be, “Because I have no choice.”” (157)

“Art happens when you work millions of hours not to make it look hard but to make it look effortless. The beauty for an audience is to be inspired and awestruck because you made them forget that the wire was even there.” (160)

Candida Royalle

“Least popular day for viewing online porn, Thanksgiving; state with highest per capita porn subscriptions, Utah.” (174)

OK Go

“Don’t stop trying things because they don’t fit your own stereotype of yourself. If it feels like fun, it is yourself.” (179)

“Listen to your fans. You may have an idea of who you want your fan base to be – throngs in an arena, the hippest kids at school – but they may not be the ones you end up with. When the backward dance video took off, we realized our hardest-core fans were actually the weirdest, nerdiest ones sitting in their offices and bedrooms, trading videos. It might not have been what we expected, but if that’s where the connection was, why not build on it?” (179)

David Chang

“If you do what everybody expects, you’re going to have an exhausted, boring menu, so we were going to just do what we wanted. We started making dishes we thought that the public was going to love or hate.” (194)

“I don’t like to pat myself on the back, because there’s always a place around the corner that’s going to be better and faster. We have to keep our heads down and work.” (197)

Richard Restak

“One a very basic level, you are what you remember – your very identity depends on all of the events, people and places you can recall.” (201)

“If you think outside the box, playfully altering your perceptions, and try to look beyond the obvious, you will improve your imagination, thinking, and other cognitive processes by creating new linkages and new networks. Being open to and experiencing art or music can help us with this.” (204)

“Trying to control everything that happens in your brain can actually be an impediment.” (206)

“E.L. Doctorow writes, “Writing is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”” (207)

Marc Routh

“Be tenacious. Shows take so long to develop, as long as eight years or more, so we always have at least a dozen projects in the pipeline.” (210)

“There’s a saying on Broadway that musicals are a business and plays are a hobby.” (211)

Michael Sitrick

“Some people worry about having the last word; my concern is getting the first and last word. Get your story out first so you can set the tone for the coverage that follows.” (216)

“Regardless of how actual events occur, journalists believe that the best way to recount these events is in the form of a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, with drama, conflict and surprising twists. This might be a highly stylized – even sensationalized – way of reporting on events, but this way of thinking is so internalized by members of the media that to get your message across to them you have to present that message in the form of a story, sometimes with clearly drawn heroes and villains.” (218)

“Newspeople tend to be skeptical, idealistic, naive and sometimes relentless, with egos larger and more fragile than the average person’s. For example, journalists love to scoop their rivals, so give a reporter exclusive access to your high-profile client and you might have just made a grateful ally for life.” (218)

“Sometimes by working with instead of against the media you acn turn an unmitigated disaster into a success story.” (218)

“Finding a lead steer, a well-regarded reporter from a reputable institution willing to question conventional wisdom, can initiate a positive media stampede or reverse the direction of a negative one.” (219)

Bill Gross

“There are four types of management skills. And you need people with each one of the four skills to complement each other. The Entrepreneur is ahead of his time, sees the future and invents things. The Producer takes the new product and executes. The Administrator is the organizer who puts systems in place, makes sure the orders are filled and the bills are paid. The Integrator is a people person who understands the other three types and helps them get along, because they often hate each other’s guts.” (240)

“As long as people are punished for failing, they’ll be more focused on keeping their jobs than taking risks.” (241)

“Be 10 times better than your competition. Customers don’t’ want to switch to a new product or service that’s 10 percent better. They’ll only switch to something that is radically better than what’s already out there.” (242)

“Markets can change faster than you can imagine. Instead of judging your success by the size of your office, your marketing budget or the number of employees, sometimes you have to immediately scale your company to last as long as it’s going to take until people are ready for it.” (243)

Guy Kawasaki

“”You cannot influence people unless they actually find you likable.” (248)

“A baker believes she can make more and bigger pies. An eater believes that life is a zero-sum game: What others eat, he cannot eat. Bakers are trusted. Eaters are not.” (248)

“The more complex people make something, the less you should trust it.” (248)

“Always be generous. The most powerful favor is the one given with no clear link between the favor and what you want back.” (250)

Helio Castroneves

“It’s not about pushing harder; it’s about knowing when to push harder.” (256)

“Don’t stop learning till you’re six feet in the ground.” (257)

“To get there, you have to work so hard and face so much frustration that you can forget why you even got into racing. But when you stop enjoying yourself. what’s the point?” (258)

“Sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug.” (260)

Stephen Dubner

“The best way to write a bestseller is not to try to write a bestseller. Write the book that you want to read.” (262)

“Write what you like. I’m convinced that the worst way to write a bestseller is to try to write a bestseller.” (262)

“Every topic needs an idea. As a magazine editor, I learned a topic is nothing without an idea. If you can’t wring out the idea from a topic, then don’t do the story.” (263)

“Keep it simple. One mistake that smart people often make is trying to remind everyone else how smart they are.” (264)

“It’s always better to tell a story simply than to show off.” (264)

“Simplicity allows you to connect with your readers. They trust plain language.” (264)

“If people finish a book, they’re much more likely to tell other people about it.” (265)

“The op-ed was about parenting… It had nothing to do with anything, but TV producers read USA Today, so suddenly we got on the Today show. Matt Lauer said, “oh man, this is really cool – what else is in your book? Why don’t you come back every week?” Then ABC came to us and said, “Why don’t you come back every week on all our shows – Good Morning America, World News Tonight, etc/” So, we started to have a cumulative advantage – once something becomes big, it’s a lot easier for it to get bigger.” (266)

“I’ve always had the good luck to write what I wanted and get paid. But, if I couldn’t write what I wanted, I wouldn’t write. I’d do something else, ‘cause I’ve got to get paid.” (267)

“From sportswriter Red Smith: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” (267)

“From Flannery O’Connor: “There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” (268)

As always, if you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.

I recently read “How To Write Good” an e-book by John Vorhaus. The quotes I found most interesting are below. As always, if you liked the quotes, please buy the full book here.

“90 percent of everything everyone thinks is pretty much the same stuff, so the trick of reading other people’s minds is really just getting better at reading your own.” (KL 70-72)

“Choice is made. Don’t second guess. Move on.” (KL 80-81)

“To me, in this context, better is largely just faster. I consider myself a “better” writer when my process is more efficient, when I’m getting more writing done.” (KL 86-87)

“Whimsy says that any choice is a good choice. Whimsy explores ideas just for fun. Whimsy doesn’t care about broken bits of writing or storytelling. Or grammar. Or syntax. Or complete sentences. Whimsy plans to fix everything later. Whimsy, out of sheer whimsy, thinks of as many ways as it can to express whimsy. Whimsy knows there’s more than one path through story. Whimsy says what the fruck. (And whimsy makes fruck a word.)  Whimsy knows the secret of how to write good.” (KL 89-92)

“It’s so great to be a writer who doesn’t fear to be a fool.” (KL 105)

“All real writers are addicted to writing. ” (KL 136)

“The first goal of every writing project, for this completist writer at any rate, is to get the first draft done, and that won’t happen in the presence of fear.” (KL 142-143)

“Judge a sentence by this test only: Does it get you to the next one? If yes, keep writing. If no, fix what needs to be fixed and move on. But the thing is, again, move on. Get that first draft finished. Major revisions – real fixes – will come later, and that’s part of your active practice, too.” (KL 175-177)

“Keep giving them you until you is what they want.” (KL 181-182)

“The more comfortable you become with making those arbitrary choices – the ones that make you cringe and think, Jeez, they’ll never buy this! – the sooner those arbitrary choices become your voice.” (KL 184-185)

“Trust your choices – not that they’re good ones, necessarily, but that they’re yours.” (KL 219)

“As a writer you want to make choices that are easy and fun for you. You don’t want to make choices based on how you think your work will be received or what traffic some mythical market will bear.” (KL 219-221)

“When I find myself shining too long or too much, what I do is I take the win. I bask in the moment momentarily, then tell myself to get over myself and get back to work.” (KL 491-493)

“What happens when things go as planned? Nothing. The story stalls because emotions remain unchanged.” (KL 530)

“Once you see pivots as the substrate of story, and once you understand your story as merely a long string of emotional states changed by new information, you’ll find that you get less and less lost, and your stories have more and more drive.” (KL 532-533)

“Drive a story from action to emotion, emotion to action, action to emotion, and start getting good at that.” (KL 573)

“At the right time in the development process you would dress up Jack’s room, describe the furniture, the people you see, fill it up with detail. That time, though, is not now. Now it’s just action, emotion, action, emotion, action, emotion, until you get the hang of it.” (KL 575-577)

“Don’t be afraid to write stuff that some people hate; if people don’t get worked up one way or another, you’re never going to have any kind of career.” (KL 593)

“Your writing’s not good, your writing’s not bad, it’s just the writing you’re doing now.” (KL 604-605)

“Feel good about writing bad. It’s easy to do if you remember that your writing always serves the twin goals of advancing the current work and advancing your craft.” (KL 608-609)

“Never get down on yourself for a day of bad writing. Every day, every hour, every minute you spend writing, even the worst, builds craft.” (KL 610-611)

“None of it’s wasted. None of it. I’ve had bunches of broken stories that lay fallow until I got good enough to fix them.” (KL 662-663)

“Writer’s block takes place at the specific intersection of too much fear and not enough information.” (KL 698)

“If you say ouch, my feelings every time someone gives you bad news about your work, A) you’ll drive those people away and, 2) your work will cease to evolve.” (KL 813-814)

“Inappropriately large goals kill will and crush productivity. Appropriately sized goals offer the immediate reward of a job, well, done.” (KL 860-861)

“You’re a writer; it’s your job to tell people what to think.” (KL 897)

“A theme is a truth we believe in and want to promote, expressed as a call to action.” (KL 940)

“For 99 percent of the writing process, the best thing to do with the audience is ignore it, because contemplation of the audience takes you off the page.” (KL 951-952)

“A story is an arc of change from denial to acceptance of the theme.” (KL 969-970)

“It’s easy as Mad Libs if you think about it. The theme of the story is [insert theme]. The hero is [insert name]. The story is [name learns to theme].” (KL 984-985)

“Rock bands figured it out long before writers. Just because they were on their own label didn’t mean they sucked. It meant they’d found a way around a clumsy, cumbersome distribution system that no longer met their needs.” (KL 1020-1021)

“More often than not, rules are made by rule-makers for the benefit of rule-makers. If those rules don’t benefit us, we don’t have to follow ‘em.” (KL 1023-1024)

If you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.

I recently finished reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. I consider this a comedy book since motivation and self-direction are so crucial to comedy. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the whole book here.

“When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity,” Deci wrote. Rewards can deliver a short-term boost – just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off – and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.” (8)

“Societies also have operating systems. The laws, social customs, and economic arrangements that we encounter each day sit atop a lawyer of instructions, protocols, and suppositions about how the world works. And much of our societal operating system consists of a set of assumptions about human behavior.” (16)

“Routine, not-so-interesting jobs require direction; nonroutine, more interesting work depends on self-direction.” (30)

“The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.” (33)

“When children didn’t expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards – if you do this, then you’ll get that – had the negative effect.” (36)

“When institutions – families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example – focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behavior,” they do considerable long-term damage.” (37)

“Try to encourage a kid to learn math by paying her for each workbook page she completes – and she’ll almost certainly become more diligent in the short term and lose interest in math in the long term.” (37)

“In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.” (39)

“Another study of artists over a longer period shows that the concern for outside rewards might actually hinder eventual success.” (43)

“Those artists who pursued their painting and sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity itself than for extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially recognized as superior.” (44)

“Extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks – those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion.” (44)

“Several researchers have found that companies that spend the most time offering guidance on quarterly earnings deliver significantly lower long-term growth rates than companies that offer guidance less frequently.” (56)

“In environments where extrinsic rewards are most salient, many people work only to the point that triggers the reward – and no further. So if the students get a prize for reading three books, many won’t pick up a fourth, let alone embark on a lifetime of reading.” (56)

“For routine tasks, which aren’t very interesting and don’t demand much creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivational booster shot without the harmful side effects.” (60)

“The best way to avoid the seven deadly flaws of extrinsic motivators is to avoid them altogether or to downplay them significantly and instead emphasize the elements of deeper motivation – autonomy, mastery, and purpose.” (62)

“Your best approach is to have already establish the conditions of a genuinely motivating environment. The baseline rewards must be sufficient. That is, the team’s basic compensation must be adequate and fair – particularly compared with people doing similar work for similar organizations. Your nonprofit must be a congenial place to work. And the people on your team must have autonomy, they must have ample opportunity to pursue mastery, and their daily duties must relate to a larger purpose. If these elements are in place, the best strategy is to provide as sense of urgency and significance – and then get out of the talent’s way.” (64)

“Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.” (64)

“Holding out a prize at the beginning of a project – and offering it as a contingency – will inevitably focus people’s attention on obtaining the reward rather than on attacking the problem. But introducing the subject of rewards after the job is done is less risky.” (64)

“The more feedback focuses on specifics (“great use of color”) – and the more the praise is about effort and strategy rather than about achieving a particular outcome – the more effective it can be.” (66)

“SDT begins with a notion of universal human needs. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs – competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.” (70)

“For Type X’s, the main motivator is external rewards; any deeper satisfaction is welcome, but secondary. For Type I’s, the main motivator is the freedom, challenge, and purpose of the undertaking itself; any other gains are welcome, but mainly as a bonus.” (76)

“Type I’s almost always outperform Type X’s in the long run. Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts. Alas, that’s not always true in the short term. An intense focus on extrinsic rewards can indeed deliver fast results. The trouble is, this approach is difficult to sustain. And it doesn’t assist in mastery – which is the source of achievement over the long haul. The most successful people, the evidence shows, often aren’t directly pursuing conventional notions of success. They’re working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.” (77)

“Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition. Both Type X’s and Type I’s care about money. If an employee’s compensation doesn’t hit the baseline that I described – if her organization doesn’t pay her an adequate amount, or if her pay isn’t equitable compared to others doing similar work – that person’s motivation will crater, regardless of whether she leans toward X or toward I.” (77)

“One reason fair and adequate pay is so essential is that it takes people’s focus off money, which allows them to concentrate on the work itself.” (77)

“Management didn’t emanate from nature. It wasn’t handed to us from God. It’s something that somebody invented. It is, as the strategy guru Gary Hamel has observed, a technology – and an 1850s technology at that. Now look around your office or home. How many nineteenth-century technologies are you still using?” (86)

“Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a three-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age fourteen or forty-three, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting.” (87)

“The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.”

“This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.” (90)

“We’ve always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on,” Cannon-Brookes told me. “If you don’t pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features.” (91)

“At the makers of the GORE-TEX fabric and another example of Motivation 3.0 in action, anybody who wants to rise in the ranks and lead a team must assemble people willing to work with her.” (103)

“You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression, forgetting
themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.

-W.H. Auden” (107)

“In flow, goals are clear. You have to reach the top of the mountain, hit the ball across the net, or mold the clay just right. Feedback is immediate.” (113)

“In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self melted away.” (113)

“With a learning goal, students don’t have to feel that they’re already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart.” (120)

“The two self-theories take very different views of effort. To incremental theorists, exertion is positive. Since incremental theorists believe that ability is malleable, they see working harder as a way to get better. By contrast, says Dweck, “the entity theory… is a system that requires a diet of easy successes.” In this schema, if you have to work hard, it means you’re not very good. People therefore choose easy targets that, when hit, affirm their existing abilities but do little to expand them.” (120)

“Try to pick a profession in which you enjoy even the most mundane, tedious parts. Then you will always be happy. – Will Shortz” (122)

“Mastery hurts. Sometimes – many times – it’s not much fun.” (122)

“Being a professional,” Julius Erving once said, “is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.” (123)

“This is the nature of mastery: Mastery is an asymptote. You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to it. But like Cezanne, you can never touch it. Mastery is impossible to realize fully. Great athletes often say that they can – that they must – become better. They say it when they’re amateurs. They say it after their best outing or at the end of their finest season. They’re pursuing mastery. That’s well-known. What’s less well-known is that they understand that they’ll never get it. It will always hover beyond their grasp.” (125)

“The joy is in the pursuit more than the realization. In the end, mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.” (125)

“Forty-eight hours without flow plunged people into a state eerily similar to a serious psychiatric disorder.” (127)

“The single greatest motivator is “making progress in one’s work.” The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged.” (127)

“Business leaders, Gary Hamel says, “must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty.” Humanize what people say and you may well humanize what they do.” (137)

“It’s often difficult to do something exceptionally well if we don’t know the reasons we’re doing it in the first place.” (138)

“There are certain things that if you value and if you attain them, you’re worse off as aresult of it, not better off.” (142)

“If people chase profit goals, reach those goals, and still don’t feel any better about their lives, one response is to increase the size and scope of the goals – to seek more money or greater outside validation. And that can “drive them down a road of further unhappiness thinking it’s the road to happiness,” Ryan said.” (143)

“One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about your sentence.” (155)

“You spend a lot more time grinding through tough tasks than you do basking in applause.” (155)

“At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday. Did you do more? Did you do it well?” (155)

“Reminding yourself that you don’t need to be a master by day three is the best way of ensuring you will be one by day three thousand.” (156)

“Clay Shirky argues that when we design systems that assume bad faith from the participants, and whose main purpose is to guard against nasty behavior, we often foster the very behavior we’re trying to deter. People will push and push the limits of formal rules, search of every available loophole, and look for ways to game the system when defenders aren’t watching. By contrast, a web of rules that assumes good faith – as most autonomy-centered policies do – can actually encourage good behavior.” (173)

“If you think people in your organization are predisposed to rip you off, maybe the solution isn’t to build a tighter, more punitive set of rules. Maybe the answer is to hire new people.” (173)

“Paying great people a little more than the market demands, Akerlof and Yellen found, could attract better talent, reduce turnover, and boost productivity and morale. Higher wages could actually reduce a company’s costs.” (180)

If you liked the quotes, please buy the whole book here.

I recently read The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Competence is no longer scarce. We have too many good choices – there’s an abundance of things to buy and people to hire. What’s scarce is trust, connection and surprise. There are three elements in the work of a successful artist.” (10)

“If your factory burns down but you have loyal customers, you’ll be fine. On the other hand, if you lose your customers, even your factory isn’t going to help you – Detroit is filled with empty factories.” (13)

“If your team is filled with people who work for the company, you’ll soon be defeated by tribes of people who work for a cause.” (13)

“In the words of Joseph Campbell, you’re doing art “for the experience of being alive.”” (17)

“Sometimes, courage is the willingness to speak the truth about what you see and to own what you say.” (17)

“The industrialist needs you to dream about security and the benefits of compliance. The industrialist works to sell you on a cycle of consumption (which requires more compliance). And the industrialist benefits from our dream of moving up the corporate ladder, his ladder.” (27)

“Industrialization is about eliminating the risk of failure, about maintaining the status quo, and about cementing power. “Too big to fail” is the goal of every industrialist, but “too big to fail” means that capitalism is no longer functioning.” (27)

“After nearly a century of effort, the industrial system has created the worker-proof factory.” (28)

“College started as a community of masters and scholars. It was a refuge; it was a place you went to get lost in ideas, to discover and wander, and to plot a course as an academic. Today it’s a place you go to exchange a lifetime of debt for credit hours, a degree, and maybe a good job.” (33)

“The search for the right answer is the enemy of art. the right answer belongs to the productivity-minded industrialists.” (36)

“Art has no right answer. The best we can hope for is an interesting answer.” (36)

“Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it.” (38)

“If you ask someone for the rule book on how to lead, you’re secretly wishing to be a manager.” (40)

“Our cultural instinct is to wait to get picked. To seek out the permission, authority, and safety that come from a publisher or a talk-show host or even a blogger who says, “I pick you.” Once you reject that impulse and realize that no one is going to select you – that Prince Charming has chosen another house in his search for Cinderella – then you can actually get to work.” (48)

“Once you understand that there are problems waiting to be solved, once you realize that you have all the tools and all the permission you need, then opportunities to contribute abound.” (49)

“Precisely because they didn’t fit in, they had little choice but to pick themselves. And once that choice is made, it becomes a habit.” (54)

“We have big-box stores and big-box storage units and big-box debt. But we’re still lonely. And we’re still bored.” (59)

“In order to efficiently jam as much testable data into each generation of kids, we push to make those children compliant, competitive zombies.” (62)

“The risk isn’t the risk of financial ruin (though that might be part of it). No, the risk is the risk of rejection. Of puzzlement. Of stasis.” (64)

“When you expect applause, when you do your work in order to get (and because of) applause, you have sold yourself short. When your work depends on something out of your control, you have given away part of your art. If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it’s no longer your work – the dependence on approval in this moment has corrupted it, turned it into a process in which you are striving for ever more approval.” (71)

“We don’t blame the nail for breaking the hammer or blame the water for leaking from the pot. If the audience doesn’t like this work enough to connect, there’s a mismatch.” (71)

“One definition of propaganda: it benefits the teller, not the recipient.” (76)

“Six Daily Habits for Artists:
Sit alone; sit quietly.
Learn something new without any apparent practical benefit.
Ask individuals for bold feedback; ignore what you hear from the crowd.
Spend time encouraging other artists.
Teach, with the intent of making change.
Ship something that you created.” (82)

“When your art fails, make better art.” (91)

“When the venue doesn’t support your art, you can change it without changing your commitment ot the journey.” (92)

“It’s precisely the high-wire act of “this might not work” that makes original art worth doing.” (93)

“We make the art and then we get the feedback, but the art must happen first. If we’re in love with the feedback and trying to manipulate the applause we get, we’ll cease to make the art we’re capable of.” (94)

“Art is a commitment to a process and to a direction and to generosity, not to a result.” (95)

“Some people will persevere merely because they are instructed to do so. Those with grit will persevere because they believe they have no choice, not if they wish to be who they are.” (111)

“If the grind is wearing you down, then you may be viewing the grind as the enemy, something apart from the work itself. The person with grit, on the other hand, understands that the grind is part of the work, that the grind is part of what makes the work interesting, a challenge, worth doing. If there was no grind, you’d need no grit.” (111)

“People with grit consciously set long term goals that are difficult to attain and do not waver from these difficult goals, regardless of the presence of feedback.” (112)

“What you are engrossed in isn’t nearly as important as the fact of being engrossed.” (112)

“Blaming the system is soothing because it lets you off the hook. But when the system is broken, we wonder why you were relying on the system in the first place.” (116)

“If not enough people doubt you, you’re not making a difference.” (118)

“I haven’t sought out and read a review or a tweet since. This is not cowardice; it’s the act of someone who wants to keep writing and is determined to do it for an audience of his choosing.’ (127)

“First you must pick yourself, and then you choose your audience.” (127)

“The masses (by definition) aren’t pleased by the new; they are pleased by what others think.” (128)

“An unheard symphony isn’t a symphony; it is notes on paper. Art doesn’t become art until it meets an audience. Your goal as artist is to make art that moves the audience of your choice.” (128)

“Four common mistakes that help you hide:
Busy is the same as brave.
A mentor is going to change your life.
Waiting to get picked is the next step.
There is a secret, and you will soon learn it.” (132)

“The resistance is a symptom that you’re on the right track. The resistance is not something to be avoided; it’s something to seek out.” (136)

“The artist seeks out the feeling of the resistance and then tries to maximize it. The cog, the day laborer, the compliant student – they seek to eliminate the feeling instead.” (136)

“Your effort is rarely correlated with how much the audience cares.” (139)

“A big enough audience will destroy you.” (141)

“The dangerous addiction is to keep expanding the audience until we find people who hate our work.” (141)

“The ability to see the market and the technology and the talent as it is, instead of how you want it to be (or fear it to be), is one of the secret skills of the successful creator.” (145)

“When you’re wrong, the instinct is to blame the universe, not your worldview.” (146)

“You can’t accurately see until you abandon your worldview.” (147)

“Only when you make art that isn’t for everyone do you have a chance to connect with someone. And when you connect with someone, amazingly, you increase the chances that you’ve made something that many will want.” (159)

“If you’re not achieving the results you seek, your definition of good might be wrong, or your art might not be as good as you think it is. Or you might not have gotten lucky this time around.” (160)

“Pick which rules to break, and embrace the rest.” (173)

“Jason Fox says, “The art of compromise is knowing when not to.” To put it another way, “It’s best to get as many people as possible into one room. And then go somewhere else.” (173)

“The industrial economy won’t disappear, but the agenda will increasingly be set by those who make connection, not widgets.” (175)

“Ira Glass understands how you feel:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have… And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work… it is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.” (176)

“An unsolvable problem is almost as good as a solved one. An unsolvable problem means that you can declare defeat and move on. It means you can eliminate this excuse from your almanac of excuses, because your goal is unrealistic.” (181)

“The only way to be vulnerable and go to the edge is to realize that if your art doesn’t work, you’ll be back tomorrow with more (better) art.” (187)

“Habits of successful artists:
Learn to sell what you’ve made.
Say thank you in writing.
Speak in public.
Fail often.
See the world as it is.
Make predictions.
Teach others.
Write daily.
Connect others.
Lead a tribe.” (194)

“Every time you work with someone who makes your work less than it ought to be, you’ve made a choice and you’ll need to live with the consequences. It’s also worth noting how cheap it is to build a portfolio of just about any sort of work now, and you hide your most daring work at your own peril.” (197)

“David Putnam, exiled Hollywood chieftain, is credited with this law: “It is more acceptable to fail in conventional ways than in unconventional ways. And its corollary: The reward for succeeding in unconventional ways is less than the risk of failing in unconventional ways. In short, you can screw up with impunity so long as you screw up like everybody else.” (203)

“When we see the “work” we do as part of a game, with moves instead of failures, with outcomes instead of tragedies, we’re more likely to bring the right spirit to our work. Whatever happens is part of the game – that’s why we’re playing it.” (204)

“My new favorite word in German is funktionslust. It describes the love of doing something merely for the sake of doing it, not simply because it’s likely to work.” (209)

“Artists play. We don’t analyze our return on investment or seek shortcuts. We are playing, not working, and the long way is often the best way to get to where we’re going, because sometimes we’re not going anywhere.” (209)

“Art almost never works as fast as you want it to, and the more you need it to work, the slower it happens.” (211)

“The successes are about the privilege of doing more work, not about winning.” (215)

“Pain is the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a past time. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter.” (237)

“Quality, like feedback, is a trap. To focus on reliably meeting specifications (a fine definition of quality) is to surrender the real work, which is to matter. Quality of performance is a given; it’s not the point.” (237)

If you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.

I recently read “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business” by Charles Duhigg. I think this is highly applicable to better comedy habits (writing more often, performing more often, etc) and highly recommend giving this full book a read. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book.

“One small shift in Lisa’s perception that day in Cairo – the conviction that she had to give up smoking to accomplish her goal – had touched off a series of changes that would ultimately radiate out to every part of her life.” (xiv)

“By focusing on one pattern – what is known as a “keystone habit” – Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well.” (xiv)

“Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.” (xvi)

“Habits are technically defined as: the choices that all of us deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about but continue doing, often every day.” (xvii)

“The habit process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.” (19)

“When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit – unless you find new routines – the pattern will unfold automatically.” (20)

“Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain.” (20)

“The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.” (20)

“It’s possible to learn and make unconscious choices without remembering anything about the lesson or decision making.” (25)

“What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week – as the cues and rewards create a habit – until the kids are consuming an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries.” (26)

“Craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop.” (33)

“First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards.” (36)

“People are more likely to stick with a workout plan if they choose a specific cue, such as running as soon as they get home from work, and a clear reward, such as a beer or an evening of guilt-free television.” (36)

“Once a monkey had developed a habit – once its brain anticipated the reward – the distractions held no allure. The animal would sit there, watching the monitor and pressing the lever, over and over again, regardless of the offer of food or the opportunity to go outside.” (47)

“Habits are so powerful because they create neurological cravings.” (47)

“This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.” (49)

“Only when your brain starts expecting the reward – craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment – will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.” (51)

“Toothpaste consumers need some kind of signal that a product is working.” (58)

“Want to exercise more? Choose a cue, such as going to the gym as soon as you wake up, and a reward, such as a smoothie after each workout. Then think about that smoothie, or about the endorphin rush you’ll feel. Allow yourself to anticipate the reward. Eventually, that craving will make it easier to push through the gym doors every day.” (58)

“If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.” (62)

“The brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.” (77)

“If you smoke because you need stimulation, studies indicate that some caffeine in the afternoon can increase the odds you’ll quit.” (78)

“Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.” (85)

“We know that a habit cannot be eradicated – it must, instead, be replaced.” (92)

“For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group.” (92)

“Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers… The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.” (101)

“When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly.” (108)

“For many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.” (109)

“This keystone habit of food journaling created a structure that helped other habits to flourish.” (121)

“When researchers studied an incoming class of cadets at West Point, they measured their grade point averages, physical aptitude, military abilities, and self-discipline. When they correlated those factors with whether students dropped out or graduated, however, they found that all of them mattered less than a factor researchers referred to as “grit,” which they defined as the tendency to work “strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.” (124)

“Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.” (131)

“Sometimes it looks like people with great self-control aren’t working hard – but that’s because they’ve made it automatic.” (131)

“Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.” (137)

“This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.” (146)

“When people are asked to do something that takes self-control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons – if they feel like it’s a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else – it’s much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they’re just following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster. In both cases, people ignored the cookies. But when the students were treated like cogs, rather than people, it took a lot more willpower.” (151)

“Simply giving employees a sense of agency – a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority – can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.” (151)

“There are no organizations without institutional habits. There are only places where they are deliberately designed, and places where they are created without forethought, so they often grow from rivalries or fear.” (160)

“For an organization to work, leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who’s in charge.” (166)

“During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power.” (175)

“Crises are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down.” (175)

“If we start our shopping sprees by loading up on healthy stuff, we’re much more likely to buy Doritos, Oreos, and frozen pizza when we encounter them later on.” (185)

“People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event.” (191)

“Much of the time, we don’t actually choose if we like or dislike a song. It would take too much mental effort. Instead, we react to the cues (“This sounds like all the other songs I’ve ever liked”) and rewards (“It’s fun to hum along!”) and without thinking, we either start singing, or reach over and change the station.” (203)

“DJs started making sure that whenever “Hey Ya!” was played, it was sandwiched between songs that were already popular.” (207)

“If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.” (210)

“People, it turns out, often go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill.” (211)

“To modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits’ routines, and find alternatives.” (270)

“The problem is that there isn’t one formula for changing habits. There are thousands.” (275)

“When environmental cues said “we are friends” – a gentle tone, a smiling face – the witnesses were more likely to misremember what had occurred. Perhaps it was because, subconsciously, those friendhsip cues triggered a habit to please the questioner.” (282)

“The reason why it is so hard to identify the cues that trigger our habits is because there is too much information bombarding us as our behaviors unfold.” (282)

“Experimenters have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of fives categories: Location, Time, Emotional state, Other people, Immediately preceding action. So if you’re trying to figure out the cue for the “going to the cafeteria and buying a chocolate chip cookie” habit, you write down five things the moment the urge hits: Where are you? What time is it? What’s your emotional state? Who else is around? What action proceeded the urge?” (283)

If you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.