To truly flourish in life and realize your ambitions, the foundational quality you must cultivate is grit. This resilience relies on three pillars: committing to deliberate practice, refining your mental maps, and embracing the patience found in moments of boredom. Now, let's journey back to the eighteenth century, to the era of the musical genius Mozart. Widely believed to possess the innate gift of perfect pitch, the ability to identify musical notes without external reference, Mozart's early accomplishments were nothing short of prodigious. By age 5, he effortlessly played the piano and the violin; at 8, he composed his inaugural symphony, and by 17, he graced the Salzburg court with his musical prowess. At 21, Mozart crafted one of his early masterpieces, the enchanting Piano Concerto No.9, captivating the aristocracy of his time. Yet, can we solely attribute Mozart's meteoric rise to fame to his purported perfect pitch and natural talent? Enter Anders Ericsson, a r...
Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice that calls him to that authentic being is what we call ‘vocation’. But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves… to distract their own attention in order not to hear it and they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine delves a false course of life. -Jose Ortega Y Gasset Many of the greatest masters in the world experienced some kind of force or voice or sense of destiny that guided them forward. For Socrates, it was his daemon (a voice that he heard, perhaps from the gods, which inevitably spoke to him in the negative- telling him about the things to avoid). Such feelings can be seen as purely mystical, hallucinations or delusions. But they can be explained in a certain way: All of us are born unique and far all of us, this uniqueness comes to pla...