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.
To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.
The faster you go, the more students you leave behind. It doesn't matter how much or how fast you teach. The true measure is how much students have learned.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.
I see myself as, first and above all, a teacher of history; next, a writer of European history; next, a commentator on European affairs; next, a public intellectual voice within the American left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter.
Here I have opportunity enough for the exercise of my talent, as the chief of my time is spent in conversation.
Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.
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