Quotes About Talent

People either have comedy or they don't. You can't teach it to them.

If at thirteen you can write ten good lines, at twenty you'll write ten times ten-if the gods are kind. I think there's something trying to speak through you- but you'll have to make yourself a fit instrument for it.

Genius is talent exercised with courage.

Talent is a spring from which fresh water is constantly flowing. But this spring loses its value if it is not used in the right way.

Man könnte sagen: "Genie ist Mut im Talent.

As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price.

These opportunities, then, gave these men the chance they needed, and their great abilities made them recognize it.

I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.

Whether you are five years old and irresistibly drawn to the piano in your home, or you are an adult who suddenly falls in love with music and decides to take lessons, the knowledge that you belong in the world of music is deep and indestructible. It is part of your basic nature, as much as the color of your eyes or the sound of your voice. Even your choice of instrument might feel choiceless; you hear a piano or a cello and somehow know that that is the instrument you must play.

Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.

Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.

The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it's the other way around.

If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the "talented" from the "untalented"; and if you provide the "talented" with a superior experience, then you're going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date.

Achievement is talent plus preparation.

High-tech companies like Google or Microsoft carefully measure the cognitive abilities of prospective employees out of the same belief: they are convinced that those at the very top of the IQ scale have the greatest potential.

Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.

You can take a pitchman and make a great actor out of him, but you cannot take an actor and always make a great pitchman out of him," he says. The pitchman must make you applaud and take out your money. He must be able to execute what in pitchman's parlance is called "the turn" — the perilous, crucial moment where he goes from entertainer to businessman.

But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.

We have seen, Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

far in Outliers, we've seen that extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity. In this chapter, I want to try to dig deeper into why that's the case by looking at the outlier in its purest and most distilled form—the genius. For years, we've taken our

rep" squad—the all-star

eight-year-old because he's too small. So he doesn't get the extra practice. And without that extra practice, he has no chance at hitting ten thousand hours by the time the professional hockey teams start looking for players. And without ten thousand hours under his belt, there is no way he can ever master the skills necessary to play at the top level. Even Mozart—the greatest musical prodigy of all time—couldn't hit his stride until he had his ten

There they are, the professor and the prodigy, and what they prodigy clearly wants is to be engaged, at long last, with a mind that loves mathematics as much as he does. But he fails. In fact -- and this is the most heartbreaking part of all -- he manages to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the one fact most likely to appeal to a calculus professor. The professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at calculus.