"Set high standards and few limitations for yourself"
About this Quote
Self-help slogans usually flatter you with permission; D'Angelo flips the script by making the permission conditional. "Set high standards and few limitations for yourself" is a compact piece of modern achievement culture: you are both the gatekeeper and the prisoner, and the lock is internal.
The intent is plainly motivational, but the mechanics are more interesting. "High standards" invokes discipline, craft, and a kind of moral seriousness about your own output. It rejects the soft-focus version of confidence that asks only that you "believe". Standards imply measurement, revision, and the willingness to be dissatisfied. Then comes the counterweight: "few limitations". This isn't anti-rules chaos; it's anti-excuse. Limitations here are the stories you tell yourself about class, talent, age, timing, temperament, the tidy narrative that says "that's just not me."
The subtext is a negotiation between ambition and self-protection. Most people wield limitations as insurance against disappointment: if you never try fully, you never fail fully. D'Angelo is arguing that the real threat isn't failure but the quiet bargain of under-aiming. High standards without loosened limitations becomes perfectionism and paralysis. Few limitations without standards becomes restless self-reinvention with nothing to anchor it.
Context matters: as a late-20th-century American author in the motivational tradition, D'Angelo writes into a culture obsessed with self-authorship. The line feels at home in a world of resumes, side hustles, and "personal brands", where the most consequential constraints are often invisible and self-imposed. It works because it offers a bracing, two-part identity: be demanding about what you make, and generous about what you might become.
The intent is plainly motivational, but the mechanics are more interesting. "High standards" invokes discipline, craft, and a kind of moral seriousness about your own output. It rejects the soft-focus version of confidence that asks only that you "believe". Standards imply measurement, revision, and the willingness to be dissatisfied. Then comes the counterweight: "few limitations". This isn't anti-rules chaos; it's anti-excuse. Limitations here are the stories you tell yourself about class, talent, age, timing, temperament, the tidy narrative that says "that's just not me."
The subtext is a negotiation between ambition and self-protection. Most people wield limitations as insurance against disappointment: if you never try fully, you never fail fully. D'Angelo is arguing that the real threat isn't failure but the quiet bargain of under-aiming. High standards without loosened limitations becomes perfectionism and paralysis. Few limitations without standards becomes restless self-reinvention with nothing to anchor it.
Context matters: as a late-20th-century American author in the motivational tradition, D'Angelo writes into a culture obsessed with self-authorship. The line feels at home in a world of resumes, side hustles, and "personal brands", where the most consequential constraints are often invisible and self-imposed. It works because it offers a bracing, two-part identity: be demanding about what you make, and generous about what you might become.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
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