improvement

We're better off. But I don't know if the world's better off. I don't know if the two are the same thing.

When you keep seeking to improve, you will never get bored with your craft.

English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.

Let the improvement of yourself keep you so busy that you have no time to criticize others.

It__ all about control. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to become master of your own destiny, you have more to learn. Parkinson__ is a perfect metaphor for lack of control. Every unwanted movement in my hand or arm, every twitch that I cannot anticipate or arrest, is a reminder that even in the domain of my own being, I am not calling the shots. I tried to exert control by drinking myself to a place of indifference, which just exacerbated the sense of miserable hopelessness.

A sous-chef with dreams of her own restaurant empire may have mastered the art of classical French sauce making, but not yet have developed the signature cooking style she imagines as the cornerstone of her own chain of restaurants. She gauges her progress not only by whether she is moving toward her aspirations, but also by her improving skills. Our chef may not yet have the stature of Chef Auguste Escoffier or Emeril Lagasse, but she can remember a time when she could not name the five French mother sauces, let alone execute them. She's made progress. Appreciating the skills she has developed is a marker along the path toward her culinary aspirations. The sense of accomplishment that accompanies improved skills is one of the rewards we reap when we dedicate ourselves to mastery.

Mastery lies on an infinite continuum, and as a result we will never reach the end. We can, however, see to it that we are as far along that continuum as our circumstance allows.

The best yardstick for our progress is not other people, but ourselves. Am I better than I was yesterday? This is the only question worth asking. As long as you go to bed at night a better practitioner than the one who woke up that morning, you have succeeded. Your worth should have nothing to do with how your progress stacks up relative to another.

Make improvements, not excuses. Seek respect, not attention.

If there was anything I learned from John the Baptist, it was that the sooner you confess a mistake, the quicker you can get on to making new and better mistakes.

Learn from the past but use the present to create the future.

There is always much to be learned from bad times, and to many people who prosper, they get good lessons from bad times inorder to find the way out.

We make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch one another's success: and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve.

You steadily grow into becoming your best as you choose to be accountable and accept responsibility for improvement.

The most important thing you can do is to get into an iteration cycle where you can measure the impact of your work, have a hypothesis about how making changes will affect those variables, and ship changes regularly. It doesn't even matter that much what the content is - it's the iteration of hypothesis, changes, and measurement that will make you better at a faster rate than anything else we have seen.

Life isn__ about being perfect; it__ about improving. It__ not about achieving more, acquiring more, or even about actually being more. It__ about becoming better_better than you were.

To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

No one creates a perfect resume on their first try. Writing a perfect resume is a messy process, but the easiest way to start is by simply getting in the right mindset and putting pen to paper.