The beginning is hard," [Levin] went on. "By the end of the day they're restless. Part of it is endurance, part of it is motivation. Part of it is incentives and rewards and fun stuff. Part of it is good old-fashion discipline. You throw all of that into the stew. We talk a lot here about grit and self-control. The kids know what those words mean.

Those 3 things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the 3 qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is nor how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five, It's whether our work fulfills us.

[Greenberg] offered his pilots what everyone from hockey players to software tycoons to takeover lawyers has been offered on the way to success: an opportunity to transform their relationship to their work.

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by "we" I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn't.

Il successo è una funzione della perseveranza, della caparbietà e della propensione a impiegare ventidue minuti per trovare il senso a qualcosa che la maggior parte delle persone lascerebbe perdere dopo 30 secondi.

Hard world is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

That's like being a hockey player born on January I.

Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.