Challenges that exceed my current skills

The highly accomplished were paragons of perseverance.

Their passion was enduring.

. First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep
way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction.

“I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge” and “I finish whatever I begin.”

Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.

they demonstrate unusual “ability” in combination with exceptional “zeal” and “the capacity for hard
labor.”

There is a gap, James declared, between potential and its actualization. Without denying that our talents
vary—one might be more musical than athletic or more entrepreneurial than artistic—James asserted that
“the human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he
habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum.”

“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. 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.”

greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.”

“With everything perfect,” Nietzsche wrote, “we do not ask how it came to be.” Instead, “we rejoice in
the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic.”

“No one can see in the work of the artist how it has become,”

“Our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius,” Nietzsche said. “For if we think of genius as
something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking. . . . To call
someone ‘divine’ means: ‘here there is no need to compete.’”

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.”

Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when
you take your acquired skills and use them.
“Eighty percent of success in life is showing up.”

when you don’t come back the next day—when you permanently turn your back on a commitment—your
effort plummets to zero. As a consequence, your skills stop improving, and at the same time, you stop
producing anything with whatever skills you have.

“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. Talent you have naturally.
Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.”