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.
I stayed on my own path and did not follow the herd. I made a way for myself.
New Year = A New Life! Decide today who you will become, what you will give how you will live.
Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience.
Every day in camp is a difficult day because you worry whether or not you're going to get it right. You worry - or I do, at least - whether or not you're going to live up to the trust as the trainer that the fighter gave you when he asked you to train him.
No person who is enthusiastic about his work has anything to fear from life.
When I have reached a summit, I leave it with great reluctance, unless it is to reach for another, higher one.
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