I read “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth. It was given to me as a gift by Adley Wong. Thanks Adley! I love this book so much.
I read the book when Adley gave it me but re-read chapter 3, “Effort Counts Twice”. She talks about how we have a bias towards what we believe is “talent”. But she quoted sociologist Dan Chambliss, who completed a study of competitive swimmers and observed that the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which, is, in a sense, ordinary.
He said “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skilled activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There’s nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and altogether, produce excellent.”
Ultimately she says that without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. Without effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive.