It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
Interpretation
A positive attitude at the start of challenges greatly influences their success.
William James emphasizes the importance of one's mindset when embarking on challenging endeavors. He suggests that having a constructive and confident attitude at the outset is crucial and can significantly impact the eventual outcome of the task at hand. This insight highlights the psychological aspect of handling difficulties, where positivity can lead to greater success.
In practice
During a motivational speech to inspire students before exams.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.
What we can control is our performance and our execution, and that's what we're going to focus on.
As I've told my three daughters, all of whom I've at one time encouraged to go into macro trading, any man or woman can do anything to which they set their heart and mind.
Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.
A movement only exists when people are inspired to move, _x000D_ to do something, to make the cause their own.
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