Quotes About Talent

Laboring will earn you a daily wage. The price of labor has a fixed price that is determined by the law of supply and demand. Brains, when marketed through a definite aim, have no fixed price. The sky is the limit in the marketing of specialized talent.

Then a genius has been born!

Men who can do things are discovered. They need not push themselves to the front. Good men are scarce, and the great successful business men of today are the ones who know how to do the work that they are hiring employees to do. Talent in this direction will surely attract the attention of your superiors.

Sincere people do not think of themselves, of their talent, their genius, their virtue, their beautify and because they are so unconscious of themselves, they attract all, and win their confidence, affection, and esteem.

The actual capital value of your brains may be determined by the amount of income you can produce (by marketing your services).

Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.

Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

Of course skills count, but they do count less in highly random environments than they do in dentistry.

Mathematicians are born, never made. Physicists and quants too. I

jealousy is to be found within the same art, talent, and condition.*10

Brain drain is hard to reverse

The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

Only in recent history has working hard signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.

Each person has a unique mixture of intelligences, or ways of understanding the world—linguistic, logical, mathematical, spatial, musical, physical

Sniper is now precisely where some Polity AI wants him and, that being so, some sort of shit is about to hit the fan, because no AI will employ Sniper if a talent for diplomacy or advanced macramé is required.

See, if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist.

You were not given permission to have talent," the captain tells me.

I suspected you had a spark in you, but never dreamed it would be such an inferno!

Mom could have been a great sniper if she had chosen that line of work.

Think of it as a piano, Anastasia." "I hate the piano.

By a fatal law, a genius is always an idiot.

Baby, I said, I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.

But then if you lied to a man about his talent just because he was sitting across from you, that was the most unforgivable lie of them all, because that was telling him to go on, to continue which was the worst way for a man without real talent to waste his life, finally. But many people did just that, friends and relatives mostly.

Zemër, i thash, Unë jam një gjeni por askush nuk e di këtë, përpos unë.