The only way we can develop muscle is through regular exercise. As soon as we stop stretching and working toward higher ethics, our standards start to sag. The muscle gets soft, and instead of excellence we have to settle for mediocrity. Maybe something even worse.
We can't achieve excellence through talent alone. Or merely by making technological improvements. We can't even buy our way to excellence, no matter how much money we have available to spend. More dollars will never do it. We have to develop a strong corporate conscience. Ethical muscle. And that doesn't happen by accident either.
I think, primarily, acting is like working out a muscle; the more you get to do it, the bigger that muscle gets.
But when we get enough people who don't care, and who don't accept personal responsibility for high ethical standards, our organization gets the "M" disease. Mediocrity. Anybody in the place can be a carrier. By the same token, every individual can carry the cure: the ethics of excellence.
Most of us have just learned to exercise our survival muscle. It's time to build our victory muscle.
Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
Everything I do through the course of my life, every day I do it with my arms, and it means that by using this muscle so much I have changed gradually the state of my muscle, turning my muscle into red fibers.
The biggest issue is muscle pliability. That's what I think the biggest secret to me is. What is muscle pliability? Muscle pliability is keeping your muscles long and soft.
I think self-discipline is something, it's like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.
Don't wait until you're not afraid of something to do it. Do it despite the fear and you'll start to develop a 'fearlessness muscle'.
My workouts include aerobic exercise for a healthy cardiovascular system; strength training to maintain muscle tone and bone density; core strength exercise for a stable mid-section; and stretching to maintain mobility.
People don't realize it, but you've got to take care of it. The vocal cord is the smallest muscle in the body, and it gets more use than any other muscle.
Observation is like a muscle. It grows stronger with use and atrophies without use. Exercise your observation muscle and you will become a more powerful decoder of the world around you.
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
I released that I could crank out a song if I practiced it a lot. If I am in the practice of writing songs everyday or every other day, getting ideas and following through with them, and not just saying "I've got this idea, but I will get to it at some point." If I actually sit down and not be lazy, and follow through with it then you just get in the practice of doing things. It feels very productive, and then it gets a lot easier, because you are working the muscle in your brain. The "song-writing muscle" so to speak.
As exercise is necessary to the development of physical muscle, so development of the moral nature is accomplished through temptation. The soul being given choice, may exercise it in whatever direction it chooses, for it learns just as well by its mistakes as by right action in the first place, perhaps even better.
The idea behind resistance training is that you're basically tearing something and creating a microtrauma in the muscle. When the muscle recovers, it's going to recover stronger and denser than it was before.