the harder I work the luckier I get

Q: How do you do so many things at once and how do you cope with it?

A: I'm going to let the universe bring to me whatever. I'm going to be open to receive it. But I'm also going to be prepared to change direction. I'm not going to be all locked down and closed and trying to control every moment of the day.

excel

Massachusetts kitchen as law office

It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate
the minds of our children and exalt their courage;
to accelerate and animate their industry and activity;
to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness,
abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and
an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue.
If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy,
they will grovel all their lives.
- John Adams [1735-1826]

An earlier reference to Adams here.

A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life

"I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph."

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

- Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919], excerpts from 1899's The Strenuous Life speech

An earlier reference to Roosevelt here.