achievement on Learning

Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. A...

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by d...

In normal life one is not at all aware that we always receive infinitely more than we give, and that gratitude is what enriches life. One easily overestimates the importance of one’s own acts and deed...

People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the benefici...

Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus (He who ceases to be better ceases to be good)

The Double Helix, James Watson’s 1968 memoir about discovering the structure of DNA, describes the roller coaster of emotions he and Francis Crick experienced through the progress and setbacks of the ...

I suspect that this is the most important thing I’ve said in all my interviews and talks as well as in this book. It’s a truth that applies to more than writing. It applies to anything that is importa...

The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel determines the way you act.

All of us struggle with our own desires for accomplishment and ambition. Christians especially find it difficult to discern their own worldly ambitions vs. following Jesus’ comand to seek first the ki...

That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it: This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundred’s soon hit; This hi...

The myth seems to be that you’re born with some magic combination of parents, DNA, and lucky breaks, and they conspire to determine what you accomplish in life. Nonsense. And a good thing, too, becaus...

“If one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they’ll achieve it by doing no harm — and...

Lord Nelson once said that all his achievements in life came down to one simple habit: he was always there a quarter of an hour early, never a quarter of an hour late.

What do you want to achieve? Greater riches? Cheaper chicken? A happier life, a longer life? Is it power over your neighbors that you are after? Are you only running away from your death? Or are you s...

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.

Worthy goals are generally motivated by something deeper than success. In her conversations with Nobel laureates, [researcher Xiaodong D.] Lin said she has found that “they all have insatiable passion...

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.

Harold Kushner wrote about a very bright, driven pre-med student at a very competitive college. While traveling in the East the summer before his junior year, he met a guru who said, “Don’t you see yo...

Achievement is the alcohol of our time.

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.

The challenge each of these faced in their deconstruction—and what we may face—is walking the tightrope between becoming our own person and honoring our past. In The Homeless Mind , sociologist P...

In the Christian subculture, there is an unspoken standard, a notorious goal to “win the contest.” It’s there, the contest. We don’t say it out loud, because it sounds ludicrous spoken into the open a...

There are two tragedies in lie. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

How would you define a master? Denise Levertov, the American poet, offers one definition by comparing a master to a Mountain: Not one who one imitates, emulates even, but rather, a powerful presen...

In his book, Scary Close , Donald Miller acknowledges that over time he developed a mask, or a persona that kept even those closest to him from experiencing with him. As he began to peel back layers ...

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

In Jeremiah it is clear that the excellence comes from a life of faith, from being more interested in God than in self, and has almost nothing to do with comfort or esteem or achievement. Here is a pe...

Preaching Commentary Sailing at a Snail's Pace 0.33 miles per hour. That’s about how fast the disciples were going as they tried to haul their boat across the water with the wind against them. ...