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1. Desirable difficulties make learning more challenging, slower, and more frustrating in the short term, but better in the long term. (David Epstein – Range)

2. Expanding your mastery is deeply meaningful. Your instinct of meaning tells you when you optimize the rate at which you’re learning and developing. (Unknown)

3. Sustaining an effort is the most important thing for any enterprise. The way to be successful is to learn how to do things right, then do them the same way every time. (Pat Riley – NBA Legend)

4. Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment. (Jason Hreha)

5. Building purpose is not as simple as carving a mission statement in granite. It’s a never-ending process of trying, reflecting, failing, and above all, learning. (Dan Coyle – The Culture Code)

6. You don’t need to know everything when you begin, but you need to know something. You don’t need to know what perfect looks like, just what better looks like. Better is enough to point you in the right direction. (Eric Greitens)

7. Excellence is a process of evolution, of cumulative learning, or incremental improvement. (James Kerr – Legacy)

8.  “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence. (Angela Duckworth – Grit)

9. Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don’t go from wrong to right. Rather we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. (Mark Manson)

10. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity. (James Clear – Atomic Habits)

11. It’s OKAY to make mistakes. It’s UNACCEPTABLE not to learn from them. (Ray Dalio – Principles)

12. The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. (Alvin Toffler)

13. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. (Ancient Proverb)

14. Good habits come from thinking repeatedly in a principled way, like learning to speak a language. The good thinking comes from exploring the reasoning behind the thinking.  (Ray Dalio – Principles)

15. We become what we do if we do it often enough. We act with courage, and we become courageous. We act with compassion, and we become compassionate. (Eric Greitens)

16. In retrospect, my crash [failure] was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it gave me the humility I needed to balance my aggressiveness. I learned a great fear of being wrong that shifted my mind-set from thinking ‘I’m right’ to asking myself ‘How do I know I’m right?’ (Ray Dalio – Principles)

17. Success is the enemy of learning. It can deprive you of the time and the incentives to start over. Beginner’s mind also needs beginner’s time.” (Naval)

18. There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure. (Colin Powell)

19. Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride.  (Ryan Holiday – Ego is the Enemy) 

20. If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. (Carol Dweck – Mindset)

21. A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. (English Minister)

22. Ordinary people seek entertainment. Extraordinary people seek education and learning. (Benjamin Hardy)

23. Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success. (Thomas Watson)

24. Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. (Ben Franklin)

25. If you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy. (Jim Rohn)

26. The magnitude of the challenge X the intensity of your attack = your rate of growth

27. If I fail more than you, I will learn more than you.  (Seth Godin)

28. If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, ad become more, you are a leader. (John Quincy Adams)

29. TIf you’re not growing anywhere you’re not going anywhere. (Unknown)

30. “If you want to grow you’d better name your priorities, then you’d better name the behaviors that support the priorities. (Don Meyer)

31. When a flower doesn’t grow, you fix the environment for which it grows; not the flower. (Unknown)

32. Certainty is the enemy of growth. Being wrong opens up the possibility of change. (Mark Manson)

33. For learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem. (David Epstein – Range)

34. Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don’t go from wrong to right. Rather we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. (Mark Manson)

35. What are your convictions? Because growth is non-linear. (Unknown)

36. Experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. (Tim Keller)

37. Habits are like the entrance ramp to a highway. They lead you down a path and, before you know it, you’re speeding toward the next behavior. (James Clear)

38. We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate. (Ilya prigogine)

39. That’s the paradox of the growth mindset. Although it seems to draw attention to failure, and in fact encourages us to seek out failure, it is unflaggingly optimistic. We will struggle, we will fail, we will be knocked down—but throughout, we’ll get better, and we’ll succeed in the end. (Chip Heath)

40.  Its necessary for men to grow up, get their act together, to adopt responsibility, to bear a burden, to speak truthfully, and to take responsibility because there are important things to do in the world. Because the world will be a lesser place if they don’t allow whats within them to come forward. (Jordan Peterson)

41. Grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.”  (Angela Duckworth)

42. Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love. (John Stott)

43. The biggest accelerator to growth is changing someone’s relationship to feedback. (Shaka Smart)

44. Human beings change through study, habit, and stories. (David Goggins)

45. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. (Victor Frankl)

46. We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit. We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self. (Atomic Habits – James Clear)

47. Change of place + change of pace = change of perspective (The Purpose Driven Leader )

48. Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self-defining seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character. (Daniel Coates)

49. Our job as leaders is to build better bridges to enable the right change to happen. We can choose to do it on purpose. (Bernadette Jiwa)

50. I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. (Aldous Huxley)

51. You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. (Darren Hardy)

52. We can say this much with confidence: When change works, it tends to follow a pattern. The people who change have clear direction, ample motivation, and a supportive environment. (Chip Heath)

53. Change isn’t an event, its a process. (Chip Heath)

54. The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion. (Paul Coelho)

55. You have to put someone’s back against the wall in order to create change. (Billy Donovan)

56. The moment you accept total responsibility for EVERYTHING in your life is the day you claim the power the change ANYTHING in your life.  (Hal Elrod)

57. We believe in teaching and learning foundational principles. We believe in the pursuit of mastery through deliberate practice. We believe in progress over perfection. Explore Excellence. (Quinn McDowell)

58. You succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.  (Tim Ferris)

59. Habits are the backbone of excellence. (James Clear)

60. “The biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions, and decision making is a two-step process (first learning and then deciding).”  (Ray Dalio – Principles)

61. The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future. (James Clear)

62. Years of research and experience back up this biblical reality: You must have relationship to grow. (John Townsend)

63. Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience. (James Clear)

64. Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become. (Angela Duckworth – Grit)

65. Excellence is mundane. Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. (Mundanity of Excellence)

66. Grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older. (Angela Duckworth – Grit)

67. “Yes, but the main thing is that greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable. (Angela Duckworth)

68. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence. (Mundanity of Excellence)

69. For if we think of genius as something magical we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking…To call someone divine means: here there is no need to compete. (Nietzche)

70. To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to expect a terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. (Jordan Peterson)

71. People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures. (F.M. Alexander)

72. Never a question whether we will or will not develop habits and virtues, but what kind of habits and virtues we will develop. (Stanley Hauerwas)

73. All the benefits in life come from compound interest — money, relationships, habits — anything of importance. (Naval)

74. One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat. (Napoleon Hill)

75. Your success in life is the sum of habits you create. (Unknown)

76. How you do anything is how you do everything. (Unknown)

77. Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow. (Unknown)

78. You travel along a road in steps. Excellence is a matter of steps. (Ryan Holiday)

79. What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but first steps to something better. (Wendell Phillips)

80. Excellence doesn’t mean perfection. It means doing all you can with all you have at that moment. (Tony Evans)

81. Virtues that are not practiced die. Resilience that is not practiced weakens. The only way to keep resilience alive-through success, through temporary comfort, and through the challenge of the age-is to engage ourselves in purposeful learning at every step of life. Every master must have a master. Every good teacher must still be a student. (Eric Greitens)

82. We learn who we are in practice not in theory. (Unknown)

83. We should be, in part, beginners for our entire lives. Beginning anew refreshes the habit of learning.  (Eric Greitens)

84. Failure is Feedback. Learn from it and move on. (Jack Butcher)

85. You don’t learn anything until you do something. (Unknown)

86. We can’t grow unless we are sure that we are both known and loved. (John Townsend)

87. Great changes come when we make small adjustments with great convictions. (Eric Greitens)

88. Excuses are incompatible with excellence. (Eric Greitens)

89. The vultures that feed on our excuses: blaming, whining, self-pity, wallowing. (Eric Greitens)

90. We must be brave enough to innovate and seek what’s new and next. Excellence is about being your best possible self, and there will always be room for improvement. To experience sustainable personal growth we must recognize and acknowledge our mistakes while continually reinventing ourselves. (George Raveling)

91. Excellence is beautiful and, like all beautiful things, temporary. One moment we are victorious. The next moment we were victorious. An excuse however, endures. An excuse promises permanence. Excellence is difficult. An excuse is seductive. It promises to end hardship, failure, and embarrassment. Excellence requires pain. An excuses promises that you’ll be pain-free. (Eric Greitens)

92. Happiness is a kind of working off the soul in the way of perfect excellence. (Aristotle)

93. Building habits in the present allows you to do more of what you want in the future. (James Clear) 

94. Flourishing is the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affirming scope. (Edith Hamilton)

95. Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better. (Pat Riley)

96. It is by continually striving together for the highest levels of truth and excellence that we create meaningful work and meaningful relationships. (Ray Dalio)

97. It’s not rocket science; it’s the way God designed us to grow. Others discipline us, and then we can do it for ourselves. (John Townsend)

98. Your quest is not to perfect yourself, but to be better than your imperfect self. (Eric Greitens)

99. We look for the “quick fix.” We want what we want right now. We may want our pain to end, our career to take off, or a relationship to get better. But the clear teaching of the Bible, life, and all the research is that growth takes time. (John Townsend)

100. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. (James Clear)

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100 Best Quotes on Learning, Growth, and Excellence

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