Aspire greatly; anything less than a commitment to excellence becomes an acceptance of mediocrity.
Interpretation
Striving for excellence is essential to avoid settling for mediocrity.
The quote emphasizes the importance of having high aspirations and making a strong commitment to achieving excellence in any endeavor. It suggests that anything less than this commitment will result in comfortable mediocrity, which is not a worthy goal.
In practice
In a motivational speech to inspire students to aim for higher academic achievements.
Your ability to set goals is the master skill of success. Goals unlock your positive mind and release ideas and energy for goal attainment. Without goals, you simply drift and flow on the currents of life. With goals, you fly like an arrow, straight and true to your target.
Plan your work and work your plan. Decide in advance exactly how you are going to get from where you are to where you want to go.
Rewrite your major goals every day, in the present tense, exactly as if they already existed
Perhaps the very best question that you can memorize and repeat, over and over, is, 'what is the most valuable use of my time right now?'
Write while the heat is in you. The write who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. To achieve something you've never achieved before, you must become someone you've never been before.
Your choice of people to associate with, both personally and business-wise, is one of the most important choices you make. If you associate with turkeys, you will never fly with the eagles.
Walk that walk and go forward all the time. Don't just talk that talk, walk it and go forward. Also, the walk didn't have to be long strides; baby steps counted too. Go forward.
It was clear to me that if I could get through Princeton at the top of my class, I could do anything in the world.
A champion is simply someone who did not give up when he wanted to.
I'm a very positive thinker, and I think that is what helps me the most in difficult moments.
Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at time. That's the only way it happens-and when it happens, it lasts.
You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want. There's still lots of good in the world. Tell Dally. I don't think he knows.
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