When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.
Interpretation
Quality of practice is more important than the quantity of time spent practicing.
This quote emphasizes that the effectiveness and method of practice is crucial to mastering a skill, rather than merely the total hours dedicated to it. Focused, deliberate practice can lead to greater improvement and expertise than simply spending more time without a clear strategy or goal.
In practice
In a workshop about skill acquisition, this quote can inspire participants to focus on their practice methods.
We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear.
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.
The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.
Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential.
Here, let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true: Teachers? Teachers make a difference! Now what about you?
The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.
I want to use television not only to entertain, but to help people lead better lives.
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
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