Kim's blog

- We thought at the time they were good; they were the best we could make, but our thinking was so elemental that the pots had that quality also, and so they don't have a richness about them which I look for in my work today."- Since reading and writing didn't come easily, Irving learned that to do anything really well, you have to overextend yourself... In my case, I learned that I just had to ..

-Those words rattled around in my mind for days. Finally, I dried my tears, stopped my cursing, and sat down at my computer. I opened the word processor and stared at the blinking cursor, realizing I hadn't gotten far beyond the basic observation that talent was not enough to succeed in life. I hadn't worked out how, exactly, talent and effort and skill and achievement all fit together.-Talent i..

-Newly equipped with a casual acquaintance with cash flow, the difference between revenue and profit, and some other rudimentary facts about that I now knew to call "the private sector," we were shipped off to our designated offices around the world, where we would join teams of other consultants and be matched up with corporate clients to solve whatever problems they threw our way.-You can't bl..

-In fact, the point of indifference between a striver and a natural was only reached when the strive had four more years of leadership experience and $40,000 more in start-up capital.-What we say we care about may not correspond with what- drop down- we actually believe to be more valuable.-The "naturalness bias" is a hidden prejudice against those who've achieved what they have because they wor..

-My students weren't equally talented. Still, when it came to learning seventh-grade math, could it be that if they and I mustered sufficient effort over time. they'd get to where needed? Surely, I thought, they were all talented enough.-During the next several years of teaching, I grew less and less convinced that talent was destiny and more and more intrigued by the returns generated by effort..

-Apparently, aptitude did not guarantee achievement. Talent for math was different from excelling in math class.-It seemed a sure bet that those for whom things came easily would continue to outpace their classmates. In fact, I expected that the achievement gap separating the naturals from the rest of the class would only widen over time.-Honestly, was getting x all by it self in an algebraic eq..

-what struck Mike was that rising to the occasion had almost nothing to do with talent. Those who dropped out of training rarely did so from lack of ability. Rather, what mattered, Mike said, was a "never give up" attitude.-Grit predicted who stayed and who left. Moreover, no other commonly measured personality trait - including extroversion, emotional stability, and conscientiousness - was as e..