Talent Doesn't Work Hard Quotes

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

Parents think they can hand children permanent confidence—like a gift—by praising their brains and talent. It doesn’t work, and in fact has the opposite effect. It makes children doubt themselves as soon as anything is hard or anything goes wrong. If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard

When you win, you don't examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard you've worked and how physically talented you are; it doesn't particularly define you beyond those characteristics. Losing on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among other things it measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyze your failure, or just complain about bad luck? If you're willing to examine failure, and to look not just at your outward physical performance, but your internal workings, too, losing can be valuable. How you behave in those moments can perhaps be more self-defining than winning could ever be. Sometimes losing shows you for who you really are.

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate. When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance.

It doesn't matter what you expected, but you must accept what reality offers to you at the end.

HARDWORK beats Talent when Talent doesn't WORK HARD

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are or aren’t, you need to make up in hard work what you lack in experience, skill, intelligence, or innate ability. If your competitor is smarter, more talented, or experienced, you just need to work three or four times as hard. You can still beat them!

There was, and still is, a sense that those who make it are of two varieties. The first are lucky: They come from wealthy families with connections, and their lives were set from the moment they were born. The second are the meritocratic: They were born with brains and couldn’t fail if they tried. Because very few in Middletown fall into the former category, people assume that everyone who makes it is just really smart. To the average Middletonian, hard work doesn’t matter as much as raw talent. It’s

If you’re going to complain that someone born with more talent than you will always be better than you no matter how hard you work, how many tricks you learn and how many great teammates you have, do that only after you’ve given everything the very best effort you have. But remember, believing that this isn’t all you’ve got and sticking to that belief will be a far longer and far tougher road to follow than simply throwing your hands up and declaring that you aren’t gifted so it doesn’t matter.

Hard work beats talent, when talent doesn’t work hard

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.   - Kevin Durant  

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.

Those who are given special gifts from the Kinsman have a great responsibility to use them faithfully. That doesn't mean ye won't fail. It just means ye'll have to work hard to make things right.

There is a fairly common pattern in this field where folks go through about three distinct stages. it true of other areas. 1. You know that you know nothing: here you pretty much just use someone else's canned workouts since you don't know what you're doing 2. You know just enough to be dangerous. This is when everybody starts overcomplicating things. You see these insanely complicated training programs and periodization schemes. Lots of charts, graphs and flowcharts. 3. You realize that the above doesn't matter 999 times out of 1000 and you go back to keeping it simple. You realize that hard work on the basics + talent + time > everything else.

The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate. When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance. Opposing positive discrimination based on apprehensions about getting the best person for the job means inadvertently revealing what you think talent looks like, and the kind of person in which you think talent resides. Because if the current system worked correctly, and if hiring practices were successfully recruiting and promoting the right people for the right jobs in all circumstances, I seriously doubt that so many leadership positions would be occupied by white middle-aged men.

Brilliance doesn't depend only on talk and flair, even though we're sometimes tempted to believe so. Brilliance depends on believing in the hard work you're capable of doing, but it also depends on believing in your potential, believing in your minds, believing in your heart. Brilliance sometimes relies on believing in your talents before you have any evidence that they're there. What a luxury, to take such an enormous leap of faith, without hesitation! Because even as I've worked hard year after year for more than twenty years now, as I've polished my work and demanded steady improvement from myself and asked myself to do better, I realize that for all of the concrete skills I've gained, nothing takes the place of truly believing that my ideas and words have a right to be taken seriously. And if I believed enough in my talents years ago to own them, who knows what I could've created?

Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn't want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each one of us a special talent." Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God's name makes them feel guilty. "God wants some of us to become scientists, some of us to become artists, some of us to become firemen and doctors and trapeze artists. And He gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them. That's the way to be happy.

Well – she’s busy. She has a passion of sorts that defines her day. So each day would have purpose, and she has friends who live in the same way who sort of plan things and then relax together, so she certainly would have good times, where she would feel safe and sort of mellow. I hope. A bit floppy, maybe, like when you’ve worked really hard and look forward to a lovely rest. But I wonder if it gets her down that she doesn’t use her talents more, isn’t able to express herself in that way, because she’s clever and she could really do something amazing if she . . . Hard to say. Hard to say I suppose what makes a happy life.

My huge generalities touched on millennials’ oversensitivity, their sense of entitlement, their insistence that they were always right despite sometimes overwhelming proof to the contrary, their failure to consider anything within its context, their joint tendencies of overreaction and passive-aggressive positivity—incidentally, all of these misdemeanors happening only sometimes, not always, and possibly exacerbated by the meds many this age had been fed since childhood by overprotective, helicopter moms and dads mapping their every move. These parents, whether tail-end baby boomers or Gen Xers, now seemed to be rebelling against their own rebelliousness because they felt they’d never really been loved by their own selfish narcissistic true-boomer parents, and who as a result were smothering their kids and not teaching them how to deal with life’s hardships about how things actually work: people might not like you, this person will not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it’s hard to be good at something, your days will be made up of failure and disappointment, you’re not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die. And the response from Generation Wuss was to collapse into sentimentality and create victim narratives, instead of grappling with the cold realities by struggling and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist.

Marriage is inefficient!” she proclaims. “The whole construct is a model of wasted resources. The wife often stays home to care for the children, or even a single child, abandoning the career she worked so hard for, losing years of creative output. Beyond the wasting of talent, think of the physical waste. For every home, there are so many redundancies. How many toasters do you think there are in the world?” “I have no idea.” “Seriously, just guess.” “Ten million?” I say impatiently. “More than two hundred million! And how often do you think the average household uses its toaster?” Once again, she doesn’t wait for my answer. “Just 2.6 hours per year. Two hundred million toasters are sitting unused, statistically speaking, more than 99.97 percent of their active lives.

Key to the success of many with ADHD is finding the “right life” in which to live. This means a job in which their particular talents for nonlinear thinking and quick emergency response are prized, and a spouse who can appreciate, or at least learn to live with, an often uneven distribution of work within the relationship. Without these things, many with ADHD feel that they don’t really fit into the world, or that the face that they put forward in order to fit in is false. The other critical factor for the success of an ADHD spouse in a relationship is for both partners to continue to respect differences and act on that respect. Here’s what one woman with ADHD says about living a life in which others assume that “different” is not worthy of respect: I think [my husband] uses the ADD as an excuse to be bossy and stuff sometimes but I find it very upsetting and hard on my self esteem to have my disorder and learning disabilities used that way. We do have very different perspectives but reality is perspective. Just because I see things differently from someone else doesn’t make one wrong or right…how I experience life is colored by my perception, it is what it is. I hate how people try to invalidate my thoughts feelings and perceptions because they are different from theirs. Like telling me [since] they feel…different[ly] from me [that their feelings] should make me magically change! It doesn’t work that way. Even if my ADD makes me see or remember something “not right” it’s still MY reality. It is like those movies where the hero has something crazy going on where they experience reality differently from everyone else.

Michael Lewis, the author of The Blind Side, wrote about professional basketball player Shane Battier, who plays for the Houston Rockets, in an article titled “The No-Stats All-Star.” He describes Battier as follows: “Shane Battier is widely regarded inside the NBA as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win. [Because] Battier . . . seems to help the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his personal interests.” Subtle, hard-to-measure ways. Lewis continues: Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse—often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots . . . On defense, although he routinely guards the NBA’s most prolific scorers, he significantly reduces shooting percentages. [We] call him Lego. When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. Husbands, children, and coworkers may not understand what it is exactly that we do. Yet because of who we are and what we do, whether in our home, community, or workplace, things magically work. Like Shane Battier, our very presence seems to just make everything and everyone work better together. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but in my experience this “magic” of bringing people together and enhancing their strengths is a talent that many women seem to have. It’s one reason we are so good at being a safe haven and playing a supporting role, but it’s a talent that we can use for great good when we dust off our dreams and put on our Batman suit.

Dontchev was born in Bulgaria and emigrated to America as a young kid when his father, a mathematician, took a job at the University of Michigan. He got an undergraduate and graduate degree in aerospace engineering, which led to what he thought was his dream opportunity: an internship at Boeing. But he quickly became disenchanted and decided to visit a friend who was working at SpaceX. “I will never forget walking the floor that day,” he says. “All the young engineers working their asses off and wearing T-shirts and sporting tattoos and being really badass about getting things done. I thought, ‘These are my people.’ It was nothing like the buttoned-up deadly vibe at Boeing.” That summer, he made a presentation to a VP at Boeing about how SpaceX was enabling the younger engineers to innovate. “If Boeing doesn’t change,” he said, “you’re going to lose out on the top talent.” The VP replied that Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.” Dontchev quit. At a conference in Utah, he went to a party thrown by SpaceX and, after a couple of drinks, worked up the nerve to corner Gwynne Shotwell. He pulled a crumpled résumé out of his pocket and showed her a picture of the satellite hardware he had worked on. “I can make things happen,” he told her. Shotwell was amused. “Anyone who is brave enough to come up to me with a crumpled-up résumé might be a good candidate,” she said. She invited him to SpaceX for interviews. He was scheduled to see Musk, who was still interviewing every engineer hired, at 3 p.m. As usual, Musk got backed up, and Dontchev was told he would have to come back another day. Instead, Dontchev sat outside Musk’s cubicle for five hours. When he finally got in to see Musk at 8 p.m., Dontchev took the opportunity to unload about how his gung-ho approach wasn’t valued at Boeing. When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.

Perhaps I won’t tire of her,” Gray protested, just to be contrary. Because, apparently, that was how brothers behaved. “Perhaps a dolphin will fly out of your arse. And here’s an argument even you can’t refuse. Grayson Shipping doesn’t need a reputation for delivering damaged goods. You want me to hand George Waltham an impregnated governess?” “I wouldn’t get her with child. Give me that much credit, at least.” “I give you credit for nothing. Let’s try this one last time, shall we? You made me this ship’s captain. If I’m the captain, what I say goes. And I say you don’t touch her. If you can’t abide by my orders, take command of the ship yourself and let me go home.” “Go home and do what? Squander your fortune and talent on dirt farming?” “Go home and take care of my own family. Go home and do what I damn well please, for once.” Cursing, Gray leaned against the wall. He knew Joss would make good on that threat, too. It hadn’t been easy, coaxing his brother out of mourning. Gray had resorted to outright bullying just to convince him to take command of the Aphrodite, threatening to cut off his income unless he reported to London as agreed. But he needed Joss, if this shipping concern was to stay afloat. He’d worked too hard, sacrificed too much to see it fail. And if Joss didn’t become a willing partner, it all would have been in vain. “Stay away from the girl, Gray.” Gray sighed. “We’re on the same ship. I can’t help but be near her. I’ll not promise to refrain from touching her, because the girl seems to lose her footing whenever I’m around. But I give you my word I’ll not kiss her again. Satisfied?” Joss shook his head. “Give me your word you won’t bed her.” “What a legend you’re making me! Insinuating I could bed her without even kissing her first.” Gray worried the edge of his thumbnail as he considered. “That might prove an amusing challenge, now that you suggest it.” Joss shot him an incredulous look. “With some other lady, on some other ship.” Gray raised his hands in a defensive gesture. “I’ll not bed her. You have my word. And don’t think that’s not a great sacrifice, because it is. I’d have her in two, three days at the most, I tell you.” “Once again-not amusing.” “For God’s sake, Joss, it’s a joke. What do you want, an apology? I’m sorry for kissing Miss Turner’s hand, all right?” Joss shook his head and flipped open the logbook. “No, you’re not.” “Yes, I am.” The odd thing of it was, Gray was telling the truth. He knew he was being an ass, but the joking was easier than honesty. For all his teasing, he hadn’t kissed her hand with the intent to seduce, or to judge if she tasted as sweet as he’d dreamed. He’d kissed her fingers for one reason only. Because they were trembling, and he’d wanted them to stop. It was wholly unlike him, that kiss. It was not a gesture he thought it wise to repeat. That girl did something strange to him.

So we’re left with two paths to assembling phenomenal talent. You can find a way to hire the very best, or you can hire average performers and try to turn them into the best. Put bluntly, which of the following situations would you rather be in? We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work right away. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers. Doesn’t seem like a hard choice when it’s put that way, especially once you realize there’s probably enough money in your budget to get these exceptional people—it’s just being spent in the wrong places. Companies continue to invest substantially more in training than in hiring, according to the Corporate Executive Board.74 Per employee Training spend: $606.36 Hiring spend: $456.44 % of total HR expense Training spend: 18.3% Hiring spend: 13.6% % of revenue Training spend: 0.18% Hiring spend: 0.15% Companies spent more on training current employees than on hiring new employees. Data from 2012.

Think of the difficulties facing an exceptionally talented child. A completely controlled existence, a world structured around said child’s genius. Constant work, attention, adulation and expectation. Until the one day the child wakes up, literally and figuratively, and decides she doesn’t want to be a prodigy. She doesn’t want to work so hard to live her life. She sees the people around her taking the easy road, sleeping in on the weekends, having plenty of time to date and do homework, and suddenly, she decides that is the life she wants. Someone who is so driven might actually pursue that simple life with the dogged determination that made her such a gifted athlete.

The celebs I hate are the manufactured celebs. Famous people are surrounded by parasites and cocksuckers - people who hope to make a bit out of it themselves or grab a few crumbs from the table. But a while back one of these parasites figured out "why go through all the hard work of trying to discover a talented sucker before somebugger else does?". "Why not just CREATE one, right here, right now?". So they pick someone who maybe owns one or two bits of the celebrity toolbox - an arse that doesn't look like it fell off the back of a refuse truck, or a complete lack of self-consciousness - and teach them to simulate the other bits. It works fine for the cameras, but when you meet them in real life - oh dear.

2 + 2 doesn’t always add up to 4 in Life. Integrity and hard work, for instance, don’t always deliver (worldly) success no matter how talented you are. Which is why faith and patience are critical on the journey. So, trust the process of Life. And be patient. Over time, you will learn to love the Life that you have. And, eventually, what you want will flow to you, on its own.

How To Get the Exact Position You Desire. Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited. An artist loves to work with paints, a craftsman with his hands, a writer loves to write. Those with less definite talents have their preferences for certain fields of business and industry. If America does anything well, it offers a full range of occupations, tilling the soil, manufacturing, marketing, and the professions. First: decide exactly what kind of a job you want. If the job doesn’t already exist, perhaps you can create it. Second: choose the company or individual for whom you wish to work. Third: study your prospective employer, as to policies, personnel, and chances of advancement. Fourth: by analysis of yourself, your talents and capabilities, figure what you can offer, and plan ways and means of giving advantages, services, developments, ideas that you believe you can successfully deliver. Fifth: forget about “a job.” Forget whether or not there is an opening. Forget the usual routine of “have you got a job for me?” Concentrate on what you can give. Sixth: once you have your plan in mind, arrange with an experienced writer to put it on paper in neat form, and in full detail. Seventh: present it to the proper person with authority and he will do the rest. Every company is looking for men who can give something of value, whether it be ideas, services, or “connections.” Every company has room for the man who has a definite plan of action which is to the advantage of that company. This line of procedure may take a few days or weeks of extra time, but the difference in income, in advancement, and in gaining recognition will save years of hard work at small pay. It has many advantages, the main one being that it will often save from one to five years of time in reaching a chosen goal. Every person who starts, or “gets in” halfway up the ladder does so by deliberate and careful planning.

hard work also plays a very important role, because it’s true that hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. But combine the two and that’s when you get rocket fuel.

Finally, it’s not clear that government and the tech industry are competing for exactly the same people. The biggest bidding wars among the tech giants and startups is for technologists who work with advanced technologies like AI and machine learning. Outside of national security and defense (where such skills are very much in demand), government is rarely competing for this talent pool. The skills most needed in government are good product management and service design. The work is hard not because the tech is complicated but because the environment is. Arrogance can be an asset in startups; in government, humility is not only necessary but soon acquired if one doesn’t start out with it. While emotional intelligence matters in all jobs more than the Silicon Valley caricature allows for, it is critical in public-sector work, which is more about change and human responses to change than about technology. The same goes for ethics: a sense of responsibility to the common good and a willingness to think deeply about what harm might come from your actions are assets in any field, but if you’re not already considering these factors, working in government will bring them front and center. When entrepreneurs say that government will never do tech well because lower pay means it won’t get the best people, it’s worth asking what they mean by “best.

해외 첫충 DU-55.COM 추천코드:ASAS7 첫충10%-매충5% 단폴&크로스가능/네임드사다리1.95 홀짝-좌우-출줄/달팽이-로하이/매쿼실시간/국.해외스타리그&LOL/각종스폐셜등. 많은 이벤트로 여러분을 맞이하고 있으니 구경오셔서 둘러보고 가세요. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. 근면은 재능을 이긴다. 재능이 열심히 일하지 않을 때.

4. In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue. Humility is having an accurate assessment of your own nature and your own place in the cosmos. Humility is awareness that you are an underdog in the struggle against your own weakness. Humility is an awareness that your individual talents alone are inadequate to the tasks that have been assigned to you. Humility reminds you that you are not the center of the universe, but you serve a larger order. 5. Pride is the central vice. Pride is a problem in the sensory apparatus. Pride blinds us to the reality of our divided nature. Pride blinds us to our own weaknesses and misleads us into thinking we are better than we are. Pride makes us more certain and closed-minded than we should be. Pride makes it hard for us to be vulnerable before those whose love we need. Pride makes coldheartedness and cruelty possible. Because of pride we try to prove we are better than those around us. Pride deludes us into thinking that we are the authors of our own lives. 6. Once the necessities for survival are satisfied, the struggle against sin and for virtue is the central drama of life. No external conflict is as consequential or as dramatic as the inner campaign against our own deficiencies. This struggle against, say, selfishness or prejudice or insecurity gives meaning and shape to life. It is more important than the external journey up the ladder of success. This struggle against sin is the great challenge, so that life is not futile or absurd. It is possible to fight this battle well or badly, humorlessly or with cheerful spirit. Contending with weakness often means choosing what parts of yourself to develop and what parts not to develop. The purpose of the struggle against sin and weakness is not to “win,” because that is not possible; it is to get better at waging it. It doesn’t matter if you work at a hedge fund or a charity serving the poor. There are heroes and schmucks in both worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in this struggle.

Adele doesn't need any ironic detachment. She can love and appreciate the talent of others without feeling threatened herself. This is often very hard for people. We usually worry that someone else's talent or success is being compared with our own so we take the role of a critic and evaluate people harshly in order to protect our own egos. People like Adele focus on what they like and they ignore the comparisons. Plus, they let the people around them know when they found something that they love about their work or their art.

The refurbished Cromwell must be speaking to something in contemporary culture and the job of the adapters is to figure out what that something might be. They must do so knowing that whatever it is, it is not primarily about religion. The religious background is important in both versions: More’s relentless pursuit of heretics, Cromwell’s sympathy for, and manipulation of, Protestant reformers, the willingness of those reformers to support Anne because she is on their side, Henry’s genuine conviction that God is punishing his sin. But it matters as historical setting, not as contemporary passion. There is no religious shortcut to engagement with these dramas, no assumption that Catholics will hiss Cromwell and cheer More and that Protestants will do the opposite. Some other connection must be forged. What makes Mantel’s Cromwell appealing to readers, audiences, and TV viewers is that he is rather like most of them. He is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell would have been of limited interest. His virtues—hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else—would have been dismissed as mere bourgeois orthodoxies. If they were not so boring they would have been contemptible. They were, in a damning word, safe. But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes more oligarchic, middle-class virtues become more precarious. This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell—he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength. He is a perfect paragon of meritocracy for our age. He is a survivor of an abusive childhood,

He is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell would have been of limited interest. His virtues—hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else—would have been dismissed as mere bourgeois orthodoxies. If they were not so boring they would have been contemptible. They were, in a damning word, safe. But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes more oligarchic, middle-class virtues become more precarious. This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell—he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength. He is a perfect paragon of meritocracy for our age. He is a survivor of an abusive childhood, a teenage tearaway made good, a self-made man solely reliant on his own talents and entrepreneurial energies. He could be the hero of a sentimental American story of the follow-your-dreams genre. Except for the twist—meritocracy goes only so far. Even Cromwell cannot control his own destiny, cannot escape the power of entrenched privilege. And if he, with his almost superhuman abilities, can’t do so, what chance do the rest of us have? This terror

If talent doesn't work hard, hard work beats talent.

You can get good at something just by working hard at it. If you’ve got some talent and you work hard at it, you can get really, really good at it. But excellence, peak performance, being the best you can be at something—that doesn’t happen without coaching.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]

It takes a lot of energy and work to convince yourself that your shit doesn’t stink, especially when you’ve actually been living in a toilet. Once people have developed the thought pattern to constantly construe what happens around them as self-aggrandizing, it’s extremely hard to break them out of it. Any attempt to reason with them is seen as simply another “threat” to their superiority by another person who “can’t handle” how smart/talented/good-looking/successful they are.

Parents think they can hand children permanent confidence—like a gift—by praising their brains and talent. It doesn’t work, and in fact has the opposite effect. It makes children doubt themselves as soon as anything is hard or anything goes wrong. If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, seek new strategies, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.

The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate. When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance

In the absence of those predictions, product and strategy decisions are far more difficult and time-consuming. I often see this in my consulting practice. I’ve been called in many times to help a startup that feels that its engineering team “isn’t working hard enough.” When I meet with those teams, there are always improvements to be made and I recommend them, but invariably the real problem is not a lack of development talent, energy, or effort. Cycle after cycle, the team is working hard, but the business is not seeing results. Managers trained in a traditional model draw the logical conclusion: our team is not working hard, not working effectively, or not working efficiently. Thus the downward cycle begins: the product development team valiantly tries to build a product according to the specifications it is receiving from the creative or business leadership. When good results are not forthcoming, business leaders assume that any discrepancy between what was planned and what was built is the cause and try to specify the next iteration in greater detail. As the specifications get more detailed, the planning process slows down, batch size increases, and feedback is delayed. If a board of directors or CFO is involved as a stakeholder, it doesn’t take long for personnel changes to follow.

It doesn’t take talent to be a kind person, to work hard, to have a good attitude. It takes the right mindset.

Navigate “This Is Too Hard for Me” Thinking Anxious perfectionists like to feel very on top of things. When they think, “This is too hard for me,” they often treat it as fact, instead of recognizing it as potentially just another anxiety-induced false alarm. Remember, if you’re anxiety-prone, then by definition your anxiety system is predisposed to false alarms—that is, registering dangers that aren’t there. Thoughts are just thoughts; the problem is that we accept thoughts as true, and confuse feelings with facts. Part of the reason this happens is memory bias: Your brain will tend to remember events from the past that match your current mood. Because current mood has such a powerful effect on thoughts, consciously trying to recall evidence that you’re skilled and talented probably won’t feel very authentic or convincing when you’re feeling down. If you know this is how your brain works, then you can discount some of the negative thoughts you have when you’re in a deflated mood. Your thoughts will naturally improve when your mood improves. Therefore, regaining confidence is often just a matter of being patient and waiting for a negative or anxious mood to pass. Experiment: Have there been any times in the past when you’ve had “this is too hard for me” thoughts, those thoughts have been a false alarm, and you’ve managed to do the thing you feared was too hard for you? Identify one example. Your example doesn’t need to be something huge. A small example will do.