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Comment by: City Worker (Mar-14-2013)
Thanks. I see I didn’t say quite what I meant. Hopefully, I’ll do a bit better now. I did mean to note the extreme importance of commitment and efforts in accomplishing things, whether it does or doesn’t involve changing the world. I believe commitment and effort should, by no means, be trivialized. They are enormously important and should be given their due when attempting to assess the limits of what can and cannot be accomplished. Now, I do not believe, e.g. that a very mentally challenged child can ever be made to function at a normal level, and that, no matter how hard others try, no more than maybe a handful can become another Pasteur or Galileo or Mozart. However, I believe that special talents which are not accompanied by commitment and effort will rarely be sufficient to enable someone to make contributions which change the world in certain fields like the scientific community. However, I do believe that relatively ordinary committed people have changed the world in many areas. Does that mean that those who aren’t born with talents which can possibly lead to them changing the world shouldn’t make efforts? I absolutely do not think so. On a personal note: When I read the quote, I thought about an experience that provided me with some insight and helped me to extrapolate about the extreme importance of commitment and effort. I was surprised, years ago, by the effect of a greater –than-normal commitment of mine, to a project. Having, in the past, been in situations where even my best efforts were insufficient for me to get by, while attending a mediocre graduate school, I decided to commit myself to putting in whatever effort I felt was required to assure a passing grade on my research paper project. I ended up putting in what I considered to be an extraordinary amount of effort. To my surprise, at graduation, I was recognized as having the second best paper (my GPA was a ways from there). In retrospect, I envisioned that what had happened was that, from among a small group, I was possibly the only one who had (in this case, mistakenly) made such a great commitment to the project.
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Comment by: PT (David Alexander) (Mar-14-2013) Web site
Do you mean that it is also necessary to make efforts, no matter what talents one is born with?
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Comment by: City Worker (Mar-13-2013)
It's not enough to be born with special talents.
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