As Ericsson explains, “Most individuals who start as active professionals… change their behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of work… is a poor predictor of attained performance.” Put another way, if you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.

You don't know what you can get away with until you try.

Peak performance is dependent on passion, grit, determination, and a willingness to do something poorly until you can do it well.

A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think you have failed — but that won’t be true unless you give up.

How much you can learn when you fail determines how far you will go into achieving your goals.

But if you get out there and do your best, you will either win, or you will learn.

After all, isn’t the point of learning to help you get what you want? Don’t you have to start with what you want and figure out what you have to learn in order to get it?

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly — until you can learn to do it well.

When you are new at something, you need to start creating.

You do your best until you know better, then you do better.

Just because some people can do something with little or no training, it doesn’t mean that others can’t do it (and sometimes do it even better) with training. This is so important, because many, many people with the fixed mindset think that someone’s early performance tells you all you need to know about their talent and their future.

There are boundaries that dictate life: you can only lift so much weight; you can only learn so fast; you can only work so hard; you can only go so far!

Once you start doing only what you've already proven you can do, you're on the road to death.