Piano Motivational Quotes

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

People always ask me "Son what does it take To reach out and touch your dreams?" To them I always say Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Is it a fire that burns you up inside? How bad do you want it? How bad do you need it? Are you eating, sleeping, dreaming With that one thing on your mind? How bad do you want it? How bad do you need it? Cause if you want it all You've got to lay it all out on the line

Climb every mountain, Ford every stream, Follow every rainbow, 'Till you find your dream. A dream that will need All the love you can give, Every day of your life For as long as you live

Life is like a piano. White keys are happy moments and the black ones are sad moments. Both keys are played together to give us the sweet music called Life.

I hired a chauffeur and I became a motivational speaker, because I don’t drive—I’m driven.

Sordid things, for the most part, are what make human beings, my father included, move. That's what it is to be human, I'm afraid.

Inhale the scent of a forest close by. I can smell the earthy fragrance of autumn as night falls, the leaves gently rustling, I can feel the damp air of dusk descending. The forest is not there. It is in my mind's eye.

But wether I am faking on a player piano, or striking the chords with the power of my own mind and hands, the song of my life is equally suspenseful and full of surprises as it rolls off the pulsating sounding board of destiny - a barcarole that either way will leave, I hope, happy echoes behind

I personally believe that fear is a great motivator. Being afraid can even be healthy, as you really achieve something grand when you get to the other side of your worst nightmare.

One note sounds nice on a piano, but when more than one note is pressed at the same time. It sounds more soothing and nicer . That is how life it is. You can do good on your own, but you always need the support of others to do even better.

He lowers his head and peers at me, meeting my eyes. “No. I can see the life you’ve lived in the depths of your eyes. You are no fool, and you are not ignorant. Perhaps you didn’t learn how to waltz or play the piano, but those are things the rich do merely to fill their time. They aren’t important and they mean nothing. You’ve lived, Lor. You must have experienced so many terrible things in that prison.

For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working around me like two lost souls. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamertine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practise four to five hours a day of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! provided I don't go mad you will find me an artist!

Parental efforts to gain leverage generally take two forms: bribery or coercion. If a simple direction such as “I'd like you to set the table” doesn't do, we may add an incentive, for example, “If you set the table for me, I'll let you have your favorite dessert.” Or if it isn't enough to remind the child that it is time to do homework, we may threaten to withdraw some privilege. Or we may add a coercive tone to our voice or assume a more authoritarian demeanor. The search for leverage is never-ending: sanctions, rewards, abrogation of privileges; the forbidding of computer time, toys, or allowance; separation from the parent or separation from friends; the limitation or abolition of television time, car privileges, and so on and so on. It is not uncommon to hear someone complain about having run out of ideas for what still might remain to be taken away from the child. As our power to parent decreases, our preoccupation with leverage increases. Euphemisms abound: bribes are called variously rewards, incentives, and positive reinforcement; threats and punishments are rechristened warnings, natural consequences, and negative reinforcements; applying psychological force is often referred to as modifying behavior or teaching a lesson. These euphemisms camouflage attempts to motivate the child by external pressure because his intrinsic motivation is deemed inadequate. Attachment is natural and arises from within; leverage is contrived and imposed from without. In any other realm, we would see the use of leverage as manipulation. In parenting, such means of getting a child to follow our will have become embraced by many as normal and appropriate. All attempts to use leverage to motivate a child involve the use of psychological force, whether we employ “positive” force as in rewards or “negative” force as in punishments. We apply force whenever we trade on a child's likes or when we exploit a child's dislikes and insecurities in order to get her to do our will. We resort to leverage when we have nothing else to work with — no intrinsic motivation to tap, no attachment for us to lean on. Such tactics, if they are ever to be employed, should be a last resort, not our first response and certainly not our modus operandi. Unfortunately, when children become peer-oriented, we as parents are driven to leverage-seeking in desperation. Manipulation, whether in the form of rewards or punishments, may succeed in getting the child to comply temporarily, but we cannot by this method make the desired behavior become part of anyone's intrinsic personality. Whether it is to say thank-you or sorry, to share with another, to create a gift or card, to clean up a room, to be appreciative, to do homework, or to practice piano, the more the behavior has been coerced, the less likely it is to occur voluntarily. And the less the behavior occurs spontaneously, the more inclined parents and teachers are to contrive some leverage. Thus begins a spiraling cycle of force and counterwill that necessitates the use of more and more leverage. The true power base for parenting is eroded.

At the end of 1785, Mozart once again shifted his focus. He moved away from the rapid and voluminous composition of piano concertos and longed to return to writing operas. He had written Die Entführung aus dem Serail only three years prior, but despite its raging success throughout Europe, he had little motivation to return to operatic writing until he met Lorenzo Da Ponte. Da Ponte was a true Renaissance Man—not only was he a Roman Catholic priest, he was a successful poet, and most importantly, an opera librettist. Throughout Da Ponte’s life, he would write the libretti for 28 operas from 11 different composers, Mozart among them. Da Ponte was responsible for the libretti for three of Mozart’s most prolific opera in the modern era—The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte.

Dealing with an Upholder Child In most ways, the parents of Upholder children have an easy time. Upholder children want to understand and meet expectations, and they’re self-motivated. Parents don’t have to be involved in many homework battles or remind a child to feed a fish. An Upholder child will practice the piano without many reminders, plan ahead to pack the right soccer equipment, and keep track of the school schedule. Parents enjoy this aspect of Upholderness, but they may get frustrated when a child can’t turn off the Upholder Tendency. From time to time, they want the child to loosen up or let go of expectations. Not likely. The Upholder child may go nuts if he can’t do the thirty minutes of reading that he’s supposed to do before bed or if she arrives five minutes late for school.

For many years, psychologists believed that in any domain, success depended on talent first and motivation second. To groom world-class athletes and musicians, experts looked for people with the right raw abilities, and then sought to motivate them. If you want to find people who can dunk like Michael Jordan or play piano like Beethoven, it’s only natural to start by screening candidates for leaping ability and an ear for music. But in recent years, psychologists have come to believe that this approach may be backward.

Reimprinting the third semantic circuit can now follow easily. The human brain is capable of mastering any symbol-system if sufficiently motivated. Some people can even play Beethoven’s late piano music, although to me this is as “miraculous” as any feat alleged by psychic researchers; people can learn French, Hindustani, differential calculus, Swahili, etc. ad. infinitum — if motivated. When the first circuit security needs have been reimprinted and second-circuit ego-needs have been hooked to mastering a new semantic reality-tunnel, that tunnel will be imprinted.

During the first part of this stage, the encouragement and support of parents and teachers was crucial to the child’s progress, but eventually the students began to experience some of the rewards of their hard work and became increasingly self-motivated. A piano student performed for others and appreciated the applause. A swimmer basked in the approval and respect of peers. These students became more vested in the process, and their self-image started to include those abilities that were setting them apart from their peers. In the case of team sports, like swimming, the students often relished being part of a group of like-minded people. But whatever the reasons, the motivation started to shift from external to internal in origin.

Of course, it comes down to a little creativity and a lot of motivation. The creativity is inside all of us. The motivation is rougher.

trial and error. Other experimenters recorded the visual fields of target subjects exposed to the color red. Trainees who learned, through feedback, to approximate that same neural activity reported seeing red in their mind’s eye. Since those days, the field had shifted from visual learning to emotional conditioning. The big grant money was going to desensitizing people with PTSD. DecNef and Connectivity Feedback were being touted as treatments to all kinds of psychiatric disorders. Marty Currier worked on clinical applications. But he was also pursuing a more exotic side-hustle. “Why not?” I told my wife. And so we volunteered in her friend’s experiment. IN THE RECEPTION AREA OF CURRIER’S LAB, Aly and I chuckled over the entrance questionnaire. We would be among the second wave of target subjects, but first we had to pass the screening. The questions disguised furtive motives. HOW OFTEN DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE PAST? WOULD YOU RATHER BE ON A CROWDED BEACH OR IN AN EMPTY MUSEUM? My wife shook her head at these crude inquiries and touched a hand to her smile. I read the expression as clearly as if we were wired up together: The investigators were welcome to anything they discovered inside her, so long as it didn’t lead to jail time. I’d given up on understanding my own hidden temperament a long time ago. Lots of monsters inhabited my sunless depths, but most of them were nonlethal. I did badly want to see my wife’s answers, but a lab tech prevented us from comparing questionnaires. DO YOU USE TOBACCO? Not for years. I didn’t mention that all my pencils were covered with bite marks. HOW MUCH ALCOHOL DO YOU DRINK A WEEK? Nothing for me, but my wife confessed to her nightly Happy Hour, while plying the dog with poetry. DO YOU SUFFER FROM ANY ALLERGIES? Not unless you counted cocktail parties. HAVE YOU EVER EXPERIENCED DEPRESSION? I didn’t know how to answer that one. DO YOU PLAY A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT? Science. I said I might be able to find middle C on a piano, if they needed it. Two postdocs took us into the fMRI room. These people had way more cash to throw around than any astrobiology team anywhere. Aly was having the same thoughts

Crazy for You opens backstage at the Zangler Theatre, New York, where Bobby, desperate to break into showbusiness, performs an impromptu audition for the great impresario Bella Zangler. This is not a ‘book number’ – that’s to say, the music is not an expression of character or plot point arising from the dialogue, the defining convention of musical theatre. Instead, more prosaically, it’s a real number, a ‘prop number’: Bobby is backstage and doing the song for Zangler. So it’s sparely orchestrated – little more than a rehearsal piano and some support; it’s one chorus; and its tap-break ends with Bobby stamping on Zangler’s foot. This is grim reality: Bobby is expelled from the theatre. Outside, he makes a decision, and sings ‘I Can’t Be Bothered Now’ – the second song, but the real opening number: the first ‘book number’ in the show. There is an automobile onstage (it’s the 1930s) and, as Bobby opens the door, one showgirl, pretty in pink, steps out, then another, and another, and more and more, far more than could fit in any motor car; finally, Bobby raises the hood of the vehicle and the last chorine emerges. The audience leans back, reassured and content: Susan Stroman’s fizzy, inventive choreography has told them that what’s about to follow is romantic fantasy. More to the point, it’s true to the character of the song, and the choice of song is true to Bobby’s character and the engine of the drama: My bonds and shares May fall downstairs Who cares? Who cares? I’m dancing and I Can’t Be Bothered Now … This lyric captures the philosophy of Ira Gershwin’s entire oeuvre – which is important: the show is a celebration of Gershwin. But it’s also an exact expression of Bobby’s feelings and the reason why he heads to Dead Rock, Arkansas. So the number does everything it should: it defines the principal’s motivation; it kick-starts the plot; and it communicates the spirit of the score and the staging. Audiences don’t reason it out like that; we just eat it up. But that’s why.

knowing that I wanted to be a piano player, and knowing that practicing, of course, was just something piano players did, I turned my daily practice into a habit. Now, habits get a bad rap; we tend to think of things like biting our nails or smoking when we talk about them. But really, a habit is defined as “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.” Tooth brushing is a habit (for most of us). So is showing up to work on time. Those are some good habits. Habits can be good; say it with me. Once you’ve trained your brain to view practicing as a habit, the next step is finding the motivation to adopt that habit. The key to motivation, I’ve learned, is coupling your profound inspiration to a strong belief in yourself, and that’s not something even the best teacher is able to instill. It has to come from within. Building a strong core identity to drive your motivation requires first believing that you’ll eventually master the skill you’ve set out to learn—no matter how farfetched that might initially seem to yourself and others. Having the correct image of yourself is really key here; you have to think of yourself as the thing you want to be long before other people think of you as that. You may only have taken one trumpet lesson and sound horrible, but you still must think of yourself as a trumpet player in order for the habit to stick. You are whatever you do repeatedly. Practicing became such a constant in my day—and in such a natural, unforced way—that I hardly had to think about it. It had become, in other words, a habit.

In Chia’s experiments, professional musicians learn about two pianists whose biographies are identical in terms of prior achievements. The subjects listen to a short clip of these individuals playing piano; unbeknownst to the listeners, a single pianist is, in fact, playing different parts of the same piece. What varies is that one pianist is described as a “natural” with early evidence of innate talent. The other is described as a “striver” with early evidence of high motivation and perseverance. In direct contradiction to their stated beliefs about the importance of effort versus talent, musicians judge the natural to be more likely to succeed and more hirable.

The tricky part in being a mother is that giving is good and it is natural, but we forget to give what really matters to our kids (our time, attention, and affection) and instead spend our energy paying for things for them. We do so because we believe that things matter more to their success than we do. It’s not that our motives are wrong; they are simply guided in the wrong direction—the same direction that all of our friends are headed in. We are stubbornly convinced that providing nicer homes, schools, clothes, tutors, piano lessons, etc., makes us better mothers. This is not a conscious belief; rather it is a strong subconscious feeling that drives many of our parenting behaviors.

It might be objected that men are not trees; that if a man realizes something ought to be done, he can go and do it. This is true within certain limits. There can be social conditions favourable to mathematical studies; if a country urgently needs mathematicians, and if everyone knows this, mathematics may well flourish. But this still does not answer the question of how · it comes to flourish. An external motive, good or bad, is not enough. Greed for money, desire for fame, love of humanity are equally incapable of making a man a composer of great music. It has been said that most young men would like to be able to sit down at the piano and improvise sonatas before admiring crowds. But few do it; to desire the end does not provide the means; to make music you must be interested in music, as well as (or instead of) in being admired. And to make mathematics you must be interested in mathematics. The fascination of pattern and the logical classification of pattern must have taken hold of you. It need not be the only emotion in your mind; you may pursue other aims, respond to other duties; but if it is not there, you will contribute nothing to mathematics.

Variations on a Summer Day" I Say of the gulls that they are flying In light blue air over dark blue sea. II A music more than a breath, but less Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech, A repetition of unconscious things, Letters of rock and water, words Of the visible elements and of ours. III The rocks of the cliffs are the heads of dogs That turn into fishes and leap Into the sea. IV Star over Monhegan, Atlantic star, Lantern without a bearer, you drift, You, too, are drifting, in spite of your course; Unless in the darkness, brightly-crowned You are the will, if there is a will, Or the portent of a will that was, One of the portents of the will that was. V The leaves of the sea are shaken and shaken. There was a tree that was a father. We sat beneath it and sang our songs. VI It is cold to be forever young, To come to tragic shores and flow, In sapphire, round the sun-bleached stones, Being, for old men, time of their time. VII One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guineas, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent. VIII An exercise in viewing the world. On the motive! But one looks at the sea As one improvises, on the piano. IX This cloudy world, by aid of land and sea, Night and day, wind and quiet, produces More nights, more days, more clouds, more worlds. X To change nature, not merely to change ideas, To escape from the body, so to feel Those feelings that the body balks, The feelings of the natures round us here: As a boat feels when it cuts blue water. XI Now, the timothy at Pemaquid That rolled in heat is silver-tipped And cold. The moon follows the sun like a French Translation of a Russian poet. XII Everywhere the spruce trees bury soldiers: Hugh March, a sergeant, a redcoat, killed, With his men, beyond the barbican. Everywhere spruce trees bury spruce trees. XIII Cover the sea with the sand rose. Fill The sky with the radiantiana Of spray. Let all the salt be gone. XIV Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle Of mica, the dithering of grass, The Arachne integument of dead trees, Are the eye grown larger, more intense. XV The last island and its inhabitant, The two alike, distinguish blues, Until the difference between air And sea exists by grace alone, In objects, as white this, white that. XVI Round and round goes the bell of the water And round and round goes the water itself And that which is the pitch of its motion, The bell of its dome, the patron of sound. XVII Pass through the door and through the walls, Those bearing balsam, its field fragrance, Pine-figures bringing sleep to sleep. XVIII Low tide, flat water, sultry sun. One observes profoundest shadows rolling. Damariscotta dada doo. XIX One boy swims under a tub, one sits On top. Hurroo, the man-boat comes, In a man-makenesse, neater than Naples. XX You could almost see the brass on her gleaming, Not quite. The mist was to light what red Is to fire. And her mainmast tapered to nothing, Without teetering a millimeter's measure. The beads on her rails seemed to grasp at transparence. It was not yet the hour to be dauntlessly leaping.