And then, you know, you’ve got to apply those skills and produce goods and services that are valuable to people. Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time – longer than most people imagine. With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.” I would add that skill is not the same thing as achievement, either. “The separation of talent and skill,” Will Smith points out, “is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams, who want to do things.At the very same time, effort makes skill productive. But effort factors into the calculations twice, not once. Talent – how fast we improve in skill – absolutely matters. Of course, your opportunities – for example, having a great coach or teacher – matter tremendously, too, and maybe more than anything about the individual. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them. Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort.Great things are accomplished by those “people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives who never tire of combining together the means available to them.”.There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.” Dan Chambliss, the sociologist who completed the study, observed: “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole.

The title of the article “The Mundanity of Excellence” encapsulates its major conclusion: the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.

Outliers, Galton concluded, are remarkable in three ways: they demonstrate unusual “ability” in combination with exceptional “zeal” and “the capacity for hard labor.”.

In the long run, grit may matter more than talent.”

I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest. When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I won’t just have a job I’ll have a calling. “I’m going to grow up to love my work as much as you love yours.

Quotes about grit