A Quote by Neal Stephenson

Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was. — © Neal Stephenson
Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.
Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature.
Unlike the talent for war, the ability to make peace has always been rare.
Natural talent is a questionable phenomenon. Inclination perhaps, but innate ability is extremely rare.
The older I get, I realize, 'Man, I'm a very rare bird,' and that's not because of necessarily my talent or ability; it so much depends on luck and just the grace of the universe.
I would never tie in creative with a talent's contract. To me, that is insanity. Creative needs change, talents evolve or not, and to be locked in to a talent having the ability to not run the plays that the team dictates is not smart business.
He's probably the hardest-working guy I've been around who has great ability. Overachievers work hard because they have to. Peyton has rare talent, but chooses to push himself like he doesn't.
The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent.
Talent is talent, and everybody knows somebody who has talent or ability, but they never really converted it into a productive performance for whatever reasons.
I think we judge talent wrong. What do we see as talent? I think I have made the same mistake myself. We judge talent by people's ability to strike a cricket ball. The sweetness, the timing. That's the only thing we see as talent. Things like determination, courage, discipline, temperament, these are also talent.
Many people don't have the ability to be rich, because they're too lazy or they don't have the desire or the stick-to-itiveness. It's a talent. Some people have a talent for piano. Some people have a talent for raising a family. Some people have a talent for golf. I just happen to have a talent for making money.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
It is a very rare thing for a man of talent to succeed by his talent.
There's a lot of different ways to be successful in college basketball. Most of it stems from talent and having the ability to recruit.
Having started with Bollywood and then moving to Telugu industry, I feel that it is not possible to survive without talent in any industry.
The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it.... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane.... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.
Most people aren't encouraged to think of their labor as very valuable. We usually think of it as the necessary thing we engage in in order to survive. We live in a world where our ability to survive is connected to our ability to draw a paycheck. But there are other ways of organizing labor and culture. For example, people who are pushing for fixed universal base income, or a welfare system that separates wage labor from the compensation required to survive. It was only when I thought of those alternatives that I was able to really understand what we mean when we say sex work is work.
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