The word amateur derives from the Latin word amator, which means lover, devoted friend, or someone who is in avid pursuit of an objective. In the original sense, an amateur is someone who does something for the love of it.
Too many feel that what they’re good at isn’t valued by schools. Too many think they’re not good at anything.
What we think of ourselves and of the world makes us who we are and what we can be.
Sometimes, of course, your loved ones genuinely think you would be wasting your time and talents doing something of which they disapprove.
Wiseman has identified four principles that characterize lucky people. Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities.
Communication is not only about words and numbers. Some thoughts can’t be properly expressed in these ways at all. We also think in sounds and images, in movement and gesture, which gives rise to our capacities for music, visual arts, dance, and theater in all their variations.
There are three related ideas, which I will elaborate as we go on. They are imagination, which is the process of bringing to mind things that are not present to our senses; creativity, which is the process of developing original ideas that have value, and innovation, which is the process of putting new ideas into practice.
I’ve said that education is a living process that can best be compared to agriculture. Gardeners know that they don’t make plants grow.
Many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface.
The first boy said, “I bring you gold.” The second boy said, “I bring you myrrh.” The third boy said, “Frank sent this.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
As Joseph Campbell says, if you move in the direction of your passions, opportunities tend to appear that you couldn’t have imagined and that weren’t otherwise there.
In my experience, most people have a narrow view of intelligence, tending to think of it mainly in terms of academic ability. This is why so many people who are smart in other ways end up thinking that they’re not smart at all. There are myths surrounding creativity as well.
A person’s native tongue influences the way he or she perceives music. The same succession of notes may sound different depending on the language the listener learned growing up.”12 As evidence, speakers of tonal languages including Mandarin are more likely than Westerners to have perfect pitch. In one study, 92 percent of Mandarin speakers who began the music lessons at or before the age of five had perfect pitch compared to 8 percent of English speakers with comparable music training.
Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform.
Many of the opportunities you have in your life are generated by the energy you create around you.
When you’re in your Element, your sense of time changes. If you’re doing something that you love, an hour can feel like five minutes; if you are doing something that you do not, five minutes can feel like an hour.
Dr. Henry Lodge, coauthor of Younger Next Year, makes the point sharply. “It turns out,” he says, “that 70% of American aging is not real aging. It’s just decay. It’s rot from the stuff that we do.
But it also taught me that it is easier to overcome people’s judgments than to overcome our own self-judgment, the fear we internalize.
A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force.