Crew Motivational Quotes

When you act like a nice guy, everyone examines your motives with a microscope. When you act like a conscienceless louse, they generally take you at face value.

Growl, you live in a slime lair and maintain an identity as the mysterious overlord of an undersea city, you command a fleet of meat dreadnaughts with crews of humanoid whale people, and you're currently reclining in a pulsating mass of gelatinous goo that looks like it escaped from hell's own Jell-O mold--so excuse the fuck out of me if I question your motives.

The seemingly impossible is not the path of the least resistance, but definitely the most rewarding one. Believe that it’s going to happen and tell everyone it’s going happen. Then it will happen. You just need willpower, determination and a smile on your face.

That he/she got there before you doesnt mean you wont get there. it's just means YOU'RE COMING THERE with a BIGGER CREW.

Dreams are meant to be pursued, not postponed.

The crew rowed like demons as Orpheus played “Shake It Off” at double tempo to keep them motivated.

More than one person told us that we simply couldn't pull it off. Luckily, we had a crew who believed in Avatar as much as we did, and they were dedicated to helping us try to prove the skeptics wrong.

You, my dear ... have been wondering why she stuck with him. Although you haven't said as much, it's been on your mind. Am I right?' She nodded. 'Yes. And I'm not going to offer a long motivational thesis - the convenient thing about stories that are true is that you need only say this is what happened and let people worry for themselves about why. Generally, nobody ever knows why things happen anyway ... particularly the ones who say they do. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet)

But the greatest paradox of the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are necessarily made of conflicting stuff—of oil and water, fire and earth. On the one hand, they must possess enormous self-confidence, strong egos, and titanic willpower. They must be almost immune to frustration. Nobody who does not believe deeply in himself or herself—in his or her ability to endure hardship and to prevail over adversity—is likely even to attempt something as audacious as competitive rowing at the highest levels. The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously self-reliant and self-motivated are likely to succeed at it. And yet, at the same time—and this is key—no other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars. The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters. Not the individual, not the self.

This young woman,” said Diana, “was responsible for the destruction of the Triumvirate’s fleet.” “Well, I had a lot of help,” Lavinia said. “I don’t understand,” I said, turning to Lavinia. “You made all those mortars malfunction?” Lavinia looked offended. “Well, yeah. Somebody had to stop the fleet. I did pay attention during siege-weapon class and ship-boarding class. It wasn’t that hard. All it took was a little fancy footwork.” Hazel finally managed to pick her jaw off the pavement. “Wasn’t that hard?” “We were motivated! The fauns and dryads did great.” She paused, her expression momentarily clouding, as if she remembered something unpleasant. “Um…besides, the Nereids helped a lot. There was only a skeleton crew aboard each yacht. Not, like, actual skeletons, but—you know what I mean. Also, look!” She pointed proudly at her feet, which were now adorned with the shoes of Terpsichore from Caligula’s private collection. “You mounted an amphibious assault on an enemy fleet,” I said, “for a pair of shoes.” Lavinia huffed. “Not just for the shoes, obviously.” She tap-danced a routine that would’ve made Savion Glover proud. “Also to save the camp, and the nature spirits, and Michael Kahale’s commandos.” Hazel held up her hands to stop the overflow of information. “Wait. Not to be a killjoy—I mean, you did an amazing thing!—but you still deserted your post, Lavinia. I certainly didn’t give you permission —” “I was acting on praetor’s orders,” Lavinia said haughtily. “In fact, Reyna helped. She was knocked out for a while, healing, but she woke up in time to instill us with the power of Bellona, right before we boarded those ships. Made us all strong and stealthy and stuff.” Hazel asked, “Is it true about Lavinia acting on your orders?” Reyna glanced at our pink-haired friend. The praetor’s pained expression said something like, I respect you a lot, but I also hate you for being right. “Yes,” Reyna managed to say. “Plan L was my idea. Lavinia and her friends acted on my orders. They performed heroically.” Lavinia beamed. “See? I told you.” The assembled crowd murmured in amazement, as if, after a day full of wonders, they had finally witnessed something that could not be explained.

I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work.

The universal survey of life as a whole, an advantage which man has over the animal through his faculty of reason, is also comparable to a geometrical, colourless, abstract, reduced plan of his way of life. He is therefore related to the animal as the navigator, who by means of chart, compass, and quadrant knows accurately at any moment his course and position on the sea, is related to the uneducated crew who see only the waves and skies. It is therefore worth noting, and indeed wonderful to see, how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract. In the former he is abandoned to all the storms of reality and to the influence of the present; he must struggle, suffer, and die like the animal. But his life in the abstract, as it stands before his rational consciousness, is the calm reflection of his life in the concrete, and of the world in which he lives; it is precisely that reduced chart or plan previously mentioned. Here in the sphere of calm deliberation, what previously possessed him completely and moved him intensely appears to him cold, colourless, and, for the moment, foreign and strange; he is a mere spectator and observer. In respect of this withdrawal into reflection, he is like an actor who has played his part in one scene, and takes his place in the audience until he must appear again. In the audience he quietly looks on at whatever may happen, even though it be the preparation of his own death (in the play); but then he again goes on the stage, and acts and suffers as he must. From this double life proceeds that composure in man, so very different from the thoughtlessness of the animal. According to previous reflection, to a mind made up, or to a recognized necessity, a man with such composure suffers or carries out in cold blood what is of the greatest, and often most terrible, importance to him, such as suicide, execution, duels, hazardous enterprises of every kind fraught with danger to life, and generally things against which his whole animal nature rebels. We then see to what extent reason is master of the animal nature, and we exclaim to the strong: ferreum certe tibi cor! (Truly hast thou a heart of iron!) [Iliad, xxiv, 521.] Here it can really be said that the faculty of reason manifests itself practically, and thus practical reason shows itself, wherever action is guided by reason, where motives are abstract concepts, wherever the determining factors are not individual representations of perception, or the impression of the moment which guides the animal.

As recounted in his book It’s Your Ship, one of Captain Abrashoff’s first moves was to interview every one of the 310 crew members on the ship. He learned their personal histories and their motivations for joining the navy, and he sought their opinions about the Benfold: What do you like most? Least? What would you change if you could?

the crew was in a self-reinforcing downward spiral where poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely necessary. In order to break this cycle, I’d need to radically change the daily motivation by shifting the focus from avoiding errors to achieving excellence.

Because what would you rather read about: a swashbuckling starship captain? Or a being as incomprehensible to us as we are to an amoeba? To be fair, science fiction novels have been written about a future in which this transformation has occurred. And I could write one of these, as well. The problem is that for the most part, people like reading about other people. People who are like them. People who act and think like, you know . . . people. Even if we imagine a future society of omniscient beings, we wouldn’t have much of a story without conflict. Without passions and frailties and fear of death. And what kind of a story could an amoeba write about a man, anyway? I believe that after a few hundred years of riding up this hockey-stick of explosive technological growth, humanity can forge a utopian society whose citizens are nearly-omniscient and nearly-immortal. Governed by pure reason rather than petty human emotions. A society in which unrecognizable beings live in harmony, not driven by current human limitations and motivations. Wow. A novel about beings we can’t possibly relate to, residing on an intellectual plane of existence incomprehensible to us, without conflict or malice. I think I may have just described the most boring novel ever written. Despite what I believe to be true about the future, however, I have to admit something: I still can’t help myself. I love space opera. When the next Star Trek movie comes out, I’ll be the first one in line. Even though I’ll still believe that if our technology advances enough for starships, it will have advanced enough for us to have utterly transformed ourselves, as well. With apologies to Captain Kirk and his crew, Star Trek technology would never coexist with a humanity we can hope to understand, much as dinosaurs and people really didn’t roam the earth at the same time. But all of this being said, as a reader and viewer, I find it easy to suspend disbelief. Because I really, really love this stuff. As a writer, though, it is more difficult for me to turn a blind eye to what I believe will be the truth. But, hey, I’m only human. A current human. With all kinds of flaws. So maybe I can rationalize ignoring my beliefs long enough to write a rip-roaring science fiction adventure. I mean, it is fiction, right? And maybe dinosaurs and mankind did coexist. The Flintstones wouldn’t lie, would they?  So while the mind-blowing pace of scientific progress has ruined far-future science fiction for me, at least when it comes to the writing of it, I may not be able to help myself. I may love old-school science fiction too much to limit myself to near-future thrillers. One day, I may break down, fall off the wagon, and do what I vowed during my last Futurists Anonymous meeting never to do again: write far-future science fiction.  And if that day ever comes, all I ask is that you not judge me too harshly.

Katia, Shelby, Tim, Shiro and I are doing our best to play cards in the lounge.  Shelby got some adhesive so we can stick them to the coffee table, but it’s still a challenge and some of them escape to float away.  We’d be in the Centrifuge Module, but we don’t want to end up, you know, dead. Shiro says, “So, now that we’re on our way, I think it’s time we start getting real.  We need to be prepared for what’s out there.” “I think we’re about as prepared as we can get,” Shelby comments, discarding. “In all the training, we never had any discussions about motives.” “Motives?” Tim asks. “Yes,” Shiro says. “For example, look at the crew the aliens chose.  With the exception of Jim, all of us are young.” “Well that’s self-explanatory, isn’t it?” says Tim.  “Why send older, less physically fit individuals on such a physically rigorous journey?  No offense, Jim.” “The females are younger than the males, but all of us are of reproductive age.”  He looks up from his cards, “Doesn’t that make you a little curious what they have in mind?” “Shiro!  You’re making me uncomfortable,” Shelby says. Looking at Katia, Shiro says, “And you’re the youngest, Katia.  Very young, in fact, and intelligent on a scale beyond the reach of the vast majority of humans.”  He glances from side to side, “All of us, in fact, are exceptional.  With the exception of you, Jim.  No offense, of course.” “None taken,” I say.  “Full house.” Everyone groans and I collect all the chips we have placed in a Ziploc bag. Tim asks, “Are you suggesting that they intend to keep us as pets and breed us, or something?  Because that’s impossible.  You know all the men on the crew have been sterilized.” “Yes, I know.  But do you think that, if they have the technology to do what they have already done, they might also be able to overcome such a hurdle?  They will have our DNA, and three perfectly viable wombs to work with.  That should be enough.” Shelby exclaims, “That is enough!  Good grief, Shiro.  Are you trying to give us nightmares?” “I just want us all to be prepared for all eventualities.” Blinking, her brows furrowed, Shelby says, “How considerate of you.  That’s enough preparation for today.” ∆v∆v∆v∆v∆

First, I am thrilled that paramedics are finally getting the respect they deserve for being the professionals they can be. The scope of practice is expanding, and patient care modalities are improving, seemingly by the minute. Patient outcomes are also improving as a result, and EMS is passing through puberty and forging into adulthood. On the other hand, autonomy in the hands of the “lesser-motivated,” can be a very dangerous thing. You know as well as I do that there are still plenty of providers who operate from a subjective, complacent, and downright lazy place. Combined with the ever-expanding autonomy, that provider just became more dangerous than he or she ever has been – to the patients and to you. Autonomy in patient care places more pressure for excellence on the provider charged with delivering it, and also on the partner and crew members on scene. Since the base hospital is not involved like it once was, they are likewise less responsible for the errors and omissions of the medics on the scene. Now more than ever, crew members are being held to answer for the mistakes and follies of their coworkers; now more than ever, EMS providers are working without a net. What’s next? I predict (and hope) emergency medical Darwinism is going to force some painful and necessary changes. First, increasing autonomy is going to result in the better and best providing superior patient care. More personal ownership of the results is going to manifest in outcomes such as increased cardiac arrest survival rates, faster and more complete stroke recovery, and significantly better outcomes for STEMI patients, all leading to the brass ring: EMS as a profession, not just a job. On the flip side of that coin, you will see consequences for the not-so-good and completely awful providers. There will be higher instances of licensure action, internal discipline, and wash-out. Unfortunately, all those things will stem from generally preventable negative patient outcomes. The danger for the better provider will be in the penumbra; the murky, gray area of time when providers are self-categorizing. Specifically, the better provider who is aware of the dangerously poor provider but does nothing to fix or flush him or her, is almost certain to be caught up in a bad situation caused by sloppy, complacent, or ultimately negligent patient care that should have been corrected or stopped. The answer is as simple as it is difficult. If you are reading this, it is more likely because you are one of the better, more committed, more professional providers. This transition is up to you. You must dig deep and find the strength necessary to face the issue and force the change; you have to demand more from yourself and from those around you. You must have the willingness to help those providers who want it – and respond to those who need it, but don’t want it – with tough love by showing them the door. In the end, EMS will only ever be as good as you make it. If you lay silent through its evolution, you forfeit the right to complain when it crumbles around you.

She felt certain that it was not the country’s panic he wanted to stave off, but his own—that he, and Chick Morrison and Wesley Mouch and all the rest of the looting crew needed her sanction, not to reassure their victims, but to reassure themselves, though the allegedly crafty, the allegedly practical idea of deluding their victims was the only identification they gave to their own motive and their hysterical insistence. With an awed contempt—awed by the enormity of the sight—she wondered what inner degradation those men had to reach in order to arrive at a level of self-deception where they would seek the extorted approval of an unwilling victim as the moral sanction they needed, they who thought that they were merely deceiving the world.

The second element to why the show has worked is undoubtedly my team. And guess what? I am not alone out there. I work with a truly brilliant, small tight-knit crew. Four or five guys. Heroes to a man. They work their nuts off. Unsung. Up to their necks in the dirt. Alongside me in more hellholes than you could ever imagine. They are mainly made up of ex-Special Forces buddies and top adventure cameramen--as tough as they come, and best friends. It’s no surprise that all the behind-the-scenes episodes we do are so popular--people like to hear the inside stories about what it is really like when things go a little “wild.” As they often do. My crew are incredible--truly--and they provide me with so much of my motivation to do this show. Without them I am nothing. Simon Reay brilliantly told me on episode one: “Don’t present this, Bear, just do it--and tell me along the way what the hell you are doing and why. It looks amazing. Just tell me.” That became the show. And there is the heroic Danny Cane, who reckoned I should just: “Suck an earthworm up between your teeth, and chomp it down raw. They’ll love it, Bear. Trust me!” Inspired. Producers, directors, the office team and the field crew. My buddies. Steve Rankin, Scott Tankard, Steve Shearman, Dave Pearce, Ian Dray, Nick Parks, Woody, Stani, Ross, Duncan Gaudin, Rob Llewellyn, Pete Lee, Paul Ritz, and Dan Etheridge--plus so many others, helping behind the scenes back in the UK. Multiple teams. One goal. Keeping one another alive. On, and do the field team share their food with me, help collect firewood, and join in tying knots on my rafts? All the time. We are a team.

Studies show that enthusiastic people get better breaks. They’re promoted more often, have higher incomes, and live happier lives. That’s not a coincidence. The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek word entheos. Theos is a term for “God.” When you’re enthusiastic, you are full of God. When you get up in the morning excited about life, recognizing that each day is a gift, you are motivated to pursue your goals. You will have a favor and blessing that will cause you to succeed. The eight undeniable quality of a winner is that they stay passionate throughout their lives. Too many people have lost their enthusiasm. At one time they were excited about their futures and passionate about their dreams, but along the way they hit some setbacks. They didn’t get the promotions they wanted, maybe a relationship didn’t work out, or they had health issues. Something took the wind out of their sails. They’re just going through the motions of life; getting up, going to work, and coming home. God didn’t breathe His life into us so we would drag through the day. He didn’t create us in His image, crown us with His favor, and equip us with His power so that we would have no enthusiasm. You may have had some setbacks. The wind may have been taken out of your sails, but this is a new day. God is breathing new life into you. If you shake off the blahs and get your passion back, then the winds will start blowing once again--not against you, but for you. When you get in agreement with God, He will cause things to shift in your favor. On January 15, 2009, Capt. Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger successfully landed a jet airplane in the Hudson River after the plane’s engines were disabled by multiple bird strikes. Despite the dangers of a massive passenger plane landing in icy waters, all 155 passengers and crew members survived. It’s known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.” Just after the successful emergency landing and rescue, a reporter asked a middle-aged male passenger what he thought about surviving that frightening event. Although he was shaken up, cold and wet, the passenger had a glow on his face, and excitement in his voice when he replied: “I was alive before, but now I’m really alive.” After facing a life-and-death situation, the survivor found that his perspective had changed. He recognized each moment as a gift and decided that instead of just living, he would start really living.

This country also has the best customer service in the whole world. Waiters and service crews are not motivated by tips. They treat their job as if it’s their life mission.

Craig Newmark simply started e-mailing his friends about local events in 1995; almost twenty-two years later, network effects have kept Craigslist a dominant player in online classifieds despite operating with a skeleton crew and making seemingly no changes to the website design during that entire period! This is where an emphasis on speed also plays an important role. Because Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs focus on designing business models that can get big fast, they are more likely to incorporate network effects. And because the fierce local competition forces start-ups to grow so aggressively (i.e., blitzscale), Silicon Valley start-ups are more likely to reach the tipping point of network effects before start-ups from less aggressive geographies. One of the motivations for this book is to help entrepreneurs from around the world emulate these successes by teaching them how to systematically design their businesses for blitzscaling. When you design your business model to leverage network effects, you can succeed anywhere.

Gentile’s office in downtown Las Vegas, I got on the elevator and turned around and there was a TV camera. It was just the two of us in the little box, me and the man with the big machine on his shoulder. He was filming me as I stood there silent. “Turn the camera off,” I said. He didn’t. I tried to move away from him in the elevator, and somehow in the maneuvering he bumped my chin with the black plastic end of his machine and I snapped. I slugged him, or actually I slugged the camera. He turned it off. The maids case was like a county fair compared with the Silverman disappearance, which had happened in the media capital of the world. It had happened within blocks of the studios of the three major networks and the New York Times. The tabloids reveled in the rich narrative of the case, and Mom and Kenny became notorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Most crimes are pedestrian and tawdry. Though each perpetrator has his own rap sheet and motivation and banged-up psyche, the crime blotter is very repetitive. A wife beater kills his wife. A crack addict uses a gun to get money for his habit. Liquor-store holdups, domestic abuse, drug dealer shoot-outs, DWIs, and so on. This one had a story line you could reduce to a movie pitch. Mother/Son Grifters Held in Millionaire’s Disappearance! My mother’s over-the-top persona, Kenny’s shady polish, and the ridiculous rumors of mother-son incest gave the media a narrative it couldn’t resist. Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life. The media landed on my life with elephant feet. I was under siege as soon as I returned to my office after my family’s excursion to Newport Beach. The deluge started at 10 A.M. on July 8, 1998. I kept a list in a drawer of the media outlets that called or dropped by our little one-story L-shaped office building on Decatur. It was a tabloid clusterfuck. Every network, newspaper, local news station, and wire service sent troops. Dateline and 20/20 competed to see who could get a Kimes segment on-air first. Dateline did two shows about Mom and Kenny. I developed a strategy for dealing with reporters. My unusual training in the media arts as the son of Sante, and as a de facto paralegal in the maids case, meant that I had a better idea of how to deal with reporters than my staff did. They might find it exciting that someone wanted to talk to them, and forget to stop at “No comment.” I knew better. So I hid from the camera crews in a back room, so there’d be no pictures, and I handled the calls myself. I told my secretary not to bother asking who was on the line and to transfer all comers back to me. I would get the name and affiliation of the reporter, write down the info on my roster, and

Finally, it seemed clear that the crew was in a self-reinforcing downward spiral where poor practices resulted in mistakes, mistakes resulted in poor morale, and poor morale resulted in avoiding initiative and going into a survival mode of doing only what was absolutely necessary. In order to break this cycle, I’d need to radically change the daily motivation by shifting the focus from avoiding errors to achieving excellence.