Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller th… - Malcolm Gladwell

Achievement is talent plus preparation.

They lacked something that could have been given to them if we’d only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world.

Today we are now thrown into contact all the time with people whose assumptions, perspectives, and backgrounds are different from our own. The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators. Talking to Strangers is about why we are so bad at that act of translation.

Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.