Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
Interpretation
Growth comes from challenging oneself and stepping outside of comfort zones.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of pushing beyond our current limits in order to achieve personal growth. It suggests that remaining within the confines of what we already know and have mastered leads to stagnation, while attempting new challenges opens the door to development and success.
In practice
I often remind myself of this quote when I feel hesitant to take on new projects at work.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Deep meaning lies often in childish play.
Get someone else to blow your horn and the sound will carry twice as far.
Anything you rely on can become a crutch. And disabled or not, when you rely on something, that is what will cripple you.
I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: 'Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.' I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have - When he gives everything that is in him to do the job he has before him. That is all you can ask of him and that is what I have tried to do.
Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.
It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck even while waiting for it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.