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February 08, 2018

From The New Yorker:
For every prodigy doomed to misery by early success, we can cite another who started off strong and kept going.

From The New Yorker:
We understand instinctively that being a prodigy wasn’t his platform for a lifetime’s achievement; it marked the possibility of a highly specific, highly term-limited kind of performance.

From The New Yorker:
[Unusual] excellence emerges within tightly structured local traditions, whether they are in fifteenth-century Florence, in painting, or in San Pedro de Macorís, the “cradle of shortstops.” One good painter with an apprentice produces a Renaissance, just as one good coach with willing kids supplies the major leagues.

From The New Yorker:
What typically emerges from looking at kids, gifted and ordinary, is that, from the kids’ point of view, accomplishment, that is, the private sense of mastery, the hard thing suddenly made easy, counts for far more in their inner lives than does the achievement—the competition won, the reward secured.

From The New Yorker:
The mystery of mastery, felt in the child’s mind or muscles, is more compelling than the concreteness of achievement, the trophy pressed in her hands.

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