“Power is the ability to affect others and get the outcomes you want – and that's true whether on the individual, national or international level. You can exert power in three ways. You can do it with coercion (sticks), you can do it with payments (carrots) and you can do it with soft power – through attraction.”
— Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Harvard Professor & Creator of "Soft Power" Concept

The quote archive

Performance

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

Sometimes we fight so hard against the negative. But if we can bolster the positive, we can sometimes get to the same place.

— Michelle Gielan

People often say to me, 'You must be so pleased with the effects your work has had.' But the daily feeling is frustration. There's much more to do. For kidney transplantation, I could tell you about victory after victory in a war we're losing -- because the shortage of transplants is growing rather than shrinking, as diabetes and hypertension become an epidemic. There's so much to do, so little time, and it's so hard to be persuasive.

— Alvin Roth

If the sixty hours of capacity was always there in those rats — what are we writing off as fixed limits in human beings that are actually just locked potential waiting for the right belief?

— Nir Eyal

The phrase 'seeing is believing' has it exactly backwards. The research shows that believing is seeing.

— Nir Eyal

Strategy is, in large part, institutionalised belief. The question is whether your organisation has any mechanism for examining those beliefs — or whether they're just the water everyone swims in, invisible and unquestioned.

— Nir Eyal

We don't fail because we make mistakes; mistakes can be fixed. We fail because we quit. And we quit because belief collapsed, not because the strategy was wrong.

— Nir Eyal

The test for any belief isn't whether it makes you feel good. It's whether it makes you better at engaging with reality. That's not self-help. That's applied science.

— Nir Eyal

High performance is- truly- a checklist. It's waking up, understanding how many things you can do that day to the best of your ability, getting those things done, allowing yourself time to exercise, eat, rest, engage in active recovery, get some social support, have some mindfulness and gratitude time.

— Steven Kotler

Author & Researcher on Flow State & Human Peak Performance

Anyone worth following in peak performance will tell you that 90% of human performance is mental. The understanding of that mental aspect of the game is brand-new – perhaps 10-20 years old. The work being done around the neuroscience of performance is creating an unprecedented rate of change; it's honestly off the charts.

— Steven Kotler

Author & Researcher on Flow State & Human Peak Performance

Firms like McKinsey are self-reporting that their people are 5x more productive in-flow than out of flow… 500% more productive. That means you can work Monday in-flow and take the rest of the week off – and you'd still get as much done as your peers. Work two days a week? You're now 1000% more productive than the competition.

— Steven Kotler

Author & Researcher on Flow State & Human Peak Performance