Quotes About Talent

As John Bruer describes in The Myth of the First Three Years, nature has developed three ways for you to learn as an adult: Continue to strengthen your existing synaptic connections (as happens when you perfect a talent with relevant skills and knowledge), keep losing more of your extraneous connections (as also happens when you focus on your talents and allow other connections to deteriorate), or develop a few more synaptic connections.

Rapid learning offers another trace of talent. Sometimes a talent doesn't signal itself through yearning. For a myriad of reasons, although the talent exists within you, you don't hear its call. Instead, comparatively late in life, something sparks the talent, and it is the speed at which you learn a new skill that provides the telltale clue to the talent's presence and power.

Satisfactions provide the last clue to talent. As we described in the previous chapter, your strongest synaptic connections are designed so that when you use them, it feels good. Thus, obviously, if it feels good when you perform an activity, chances are that you are using a talent.

The bottom line on skills is this: A skill is designed to make the secrets of the best easily transferable. If you learn a skill, it will help you get a little better, but it will not cover for a lack of talent. Instead, as you build your strengths, skills will actually prove most valuable when they are combined with genuine talent.

Talent is any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.

An actor who knows his business ought to be able to make the London telephone directory sound enthralling.

But she never distanced herself from others, and she was enormously friendly to everyone—no stuffy attitude, no star complex. As for her talents, Grace acted the way Johnny Weissmuller swam or Fred Astaire danced—she made it look easy. And she probably went through life being completely misunderstood, since she usually said exactly what she meant.

I'd like to work with Justin Bieber. He's talented and he's so young. I know what he's going through. I've lived what he's living through right now. Working with him would complete a circle of sorts for me. And he might find it a worthwhile experience himself.

A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

With my talent, I can make people laugh and give them another attitude about life. What a blessing that is for me.

For the root of genius is in the unconscious, not the conscious, mind. It is not by weighing, balancing, trimming, expanding with conscious intention, that an excellent piece of art is born. It takes its shape and has its origin outside the region of the conscious intellect. There is much that the conscious can do, but it cannot provide you with genius, or with the talent that is genius' second cousin.

It wasn't because Eva had not tried her best. She had nearly killed herself trying. But she had been like a gifted mathematician set to paint a picture.

friends who could write novel after novel as effortlessly as a politician could lie,

Just because you were good at something didn't mean it was a match with your personality or psyche.

My level of skill? My imagination may be prodigious, but that's a lot to ask of it," he said with a twinkle in his eye.

I've looked at pictures that my mom has of me, from when I was four years old at the turntable. I'm there, reaching up to play the records. I feel like I was bred to do what I do. I've been into music, and listening to music and critiquing it, my whole life.

Genius has no country. It blossoms everywhere. Genius is like the light, the air. It is the heritage of all!

And, now, come to this spot Where the spotlight is hot And you'll see in the spotlight A Juggling Jott Who can juggle some stuff You might think he could not... Such as twenty-two question marks, Which is a lot. Also forty-four commas And, also, one dot! That's the kind of Circus McGurkus I've got!

Musical Genius

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.

Finally, even random differences in opportunities that arise early in one's career can accumulate, via the Matthew Effect, to generate large differences in outcomes over the course of a lifetime. Rawls's claim was that because the mechanisms of inequality are essentially accidents—whether of birth, or of talent, or of opportunity—a just society is one in which the adverse effects of these accidents is minimized.

I know that I'll forever be involved in ballet. This is where my life was meant to be, and I don't see myself straying completely away, ever.

I loved playing the guitar and I knew I was pretty good at it, so that's what I wanted to do with my life.