Chapter 6
Cultivating the ability to persist
Effort and talent
Remember Lee, my workshop delegate who took up the guitar, found it difficult and gave up. From Chapter 3, you may now recognise in Lee symptoms of a fixed mindset. Because he found it awkward to form chord positions with his left hand, it therefore followed that he was not cut out for guitar playing.
The combined view of social scientists who have studied achievement across a wide range of disciplines is that effort is twice as important as talent. Talent simply means that we acquire skills quickly. Effort is required first to hardwire those skills and then second to use those skills in order to achieve. Remember that when Anders Ericsson examined a number of very high achievers ...
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