Important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning.

No matter what your current ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.

In a growth mindset, challenges are exciting rather than threatening. So rather than thinking, oh, I'm going to reveal my weaknesses, you say, wow, here's a chance to grow.

Effort is one of those things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it.

The best thing parents can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning.

What did you learn today? What mistake did you make that taught you something? What did you try hard at today?

Test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don't tell you where a student could end up.

Failure is information-we label it failure, but it's more like, 'This didn't work, I'm a problem solver, and I'll try something else.'

Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?

The wrong kind of praise creates self-defeating behavior. The right kind motivates students to learn.

Exceptional people convert life's setbacks into future successes.

I live each day with the joy of blessed moment.

All great stories began as shitty first drafts.There are no exceptions to this.

I always give one actor an emotion to make it very easy so he or she can root to it.

Before Michael Caine you had to have been in the RAF to be an actor.

What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.

The miracle of the Atonement can make up for imperfections in our performance.

And more importantly - what we have chosen to do

I grew up playing field hockey and lacrosse - prep school sport - and I was terrible at them.

Unlike the phone system, the Internet has no Ma Bell or FCC to mandate new policies for the entire system. Not even Microsoft can make us all upgrade our routers. I think.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.