Quotes About Skill

One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.

I'm not paying you for the player you used to be, I'm paying you for the player you are right now.

Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: When attached to a telephone, they could produce even more money. How could they produce money without experience? Answer: Producing in an investment bank was less a matter of skill and more a matter of intangibles—flair, persistence, and luck.

They appeared to know enough to justify their jobs, and nothing more.

WHEN HE WAS a young man Billy Beane could beat anyone at anything.

What most scouts thought of as a learned skill of secondary importance the A's management had come, through hard experience, to view virtually as a genetic trait, and the one most likely to lead to baseball success.

It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart.

Wall Street paid the most for what I could do, which was nothing.

the difference between a great software guy and an okay software guy is huge. A great software guy is worth ten times an okay software guy.

She must have perceived how one could darken and make invisible or at least distant what is unhappy or dangerous in a life; I think her eventual skill with limelight and fictional thunder allowed her to clarify for herself what was true and what was false, safe and unsafe.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert. And I? I was the skill among them. The mechanic. The others wrote out their love of solitude and meditated on what they found there. They were never sure of what I thought of it all. For them I was a bit too cunning to be a lover of the desert. More like Odysseus. Still, I was.

The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. Someone there had assumed I had a skill when my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who can recognize an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone's home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us.

I regard knowing as an active comprehension of the things known, an action that requires skill. Skilful knowing and doing is performed by subordinating a set of particulars, as clues or tools, to the shaping of a skilful achievement, whether practical or theoretical. We may then be said to become 'subsidiarily aware' of these particulars within our 'focal awareness' of the coherent entity that we achieve.

As I've heard some bakers say, baking takes a lot of time, but for the most part it's not YOUR time.

Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.

For me, playing simply is dribbling. For me, playing one or two touches is harder. Playing simply is the most difficult thing.

It's hard to simulate the things that I do.

If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.

I can really fish - I've been fishing since I was a kid.

I've been playing a guitar since I was 10 years old.

The only way to develop your talent is to build it inside you, how sincere you are to the art.

I think I'm good enough to play and sing.

Mainly I was able to perform with music - I played the French horn, I would sing, and I was a drummer in the pipe band. So I think it was a way to show off.

I make sure I sing a cappella to let people know I can sing.