Quotes about Performance

Wanting to be better in performance is like wanting to be happy -- it is very difficult to get there directly.  It is much wiser, first, to focus on the building blocks -- and, in the case of performance, the building blocks are commitment, resilience and ruthless disregard for distractions. 

All of us perform better and more willingly when we know why we're doing what we have been told or asked to do.

The price of greatness is that we continue to expand what we do best, putting aside what we do well, especially if what we do well is expected by others.

The more you measure and motivate based on innovation, the less likely you will have a truly innovative culture.

"The new king [Alexander the Great] should perform acts so important and glorious as would make the poets and musicians of future ages labour and sweat to describe and celebrate him."

All the great performers I have worked with are fueled by a personal dream.

Stick with your own perception of yourself—living in your own world—and letting your reality, not the reality presented by other people or particular situations, control your performance.

Great performers in all fields seem immune to what outsiders think about them. Their sense of themselves never depends on the feedback—positive or negative—they get from the environment.

Great performers require a measure of confidence that would strike many as absurd, unfounded, and downright irrational. They believe in themselves utterly, without question, even when everyone else is questioning how good (or sane) they are.

How much we like ourselves governs our performance.

Life is simply time given to man to learn how to live. Mistakes are always part of learning. The real dignity of life consists in cultivating a fine attitude towards our own mistakes and those of others. It is the fine tolerance of a fine soul. Man becomes great, not through never making mistakes, but by profiting by those he does make; by being satisfied with a single rendition of a mistake, not encoring it into a continuous performance; by getting from it the honey of new, regenerating inspiration with no irritating sting of morbid regret; by building better to-day because of his poor yesterday; and by rising with renewed strength, finer purpose and freshened courage every time he falls.

An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise.

Past performance produces present privileges.

It doesn't matter how valid your excuses, they will never change your performance.

The man who does not take pride in his own performance performs nothing in which to take pride.

A message sent to all members of the American Sales Organization at the opening of the IBM Election Prize Contest, September 1, 1932. In every walk of life, the highest places and the greatest rewards go to those who have the courage to attempt and ability to achieve big things. That is true in science. It is true in government. It is true in business. And it is true in this organization. IBM leaders in the past have proved their worth by performance, just as they will in this sales campaign.

Do not waste a minute-not a second-in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it.

Where performance is measured, performance improves. Where performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.

We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us it is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out

Performance for another in no way signals the inferiority of the performer to the one for whom the performance is intended.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

Ever judge of men by their professions. For though the bright moment of promising is but a moment, and cannot be prolonged, yet if sincere in its moment's extravagant goodness, why, trust it, and know the man by it, I say,- not by his performance; which is half the world's work, interfere as the world needs must with its accidents and circumstances: the profession was purely the man's own. I judge people by what they might be,- not are, nor will be.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is speaking to his young fledgling son who is learning to fly: You will begin to touch heaven . . . in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there. . . . To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived. . . . The trick is to stop seeing yourself as trapped inside a limited body that has a forty-two-inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart. The trick is to know that your true nature lives, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.

While I was in Ann Arbor I heard that Boston was a good place to play acoustic music because they still had plenty of clubs. So I moved to Cambridge. I roomed with a Harvard student. I got an apartment the first day I got to town by going to Harvard housing, so I could get cheaper rates, $80 a month or something. I even went to some Harvard classes, just to sit in, because I enjoyed the performance of the professors. The teachers were always so theatrical at Harvard, intelligent show business people, that could keep your attention, and that I think, is the great advantage of Harvard. So I used to go for the show, no matter what subject it was. You could just drop in to a class and watch, it wouldn't matter if you went to the school. No one even asked. The show was good and you would learn something, but you wouldn't get any credit for it. I didn't need the credit

We do what we can, and then make up a theory to prove our performance the best.

There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.

All promise outruns performance.

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laugther.

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it.

"Management" means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.