In the article, “What it takes to Be Great,” Geoffrey Colvin makes the argument “you will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful.” He explains that anyone can become great and no one is born with a gift for a specific profession. Colvin uses many examples to support his statement such as Tiger Woods, a golf champion, Winston Churchill, a great orator, and Michael Jordan, a basketball player. They have proved that “the ten year” rule, deliberate practice, and aiming to get better has helped them achieve greatness. (Colvin) Tiger Woods, at 18 months, was encouraged to play golf by his father. By the time he was 18 years old, he became the youngest winner ever of the U.S. Amateur Championships. Winston Churchill spent hours rehearsing his speeches and became one of the 20th century’s greatest orators. Michael Jordan was kicked off his high school team because he wasn’t good enough to play. After training intensively he became one of the best basketball players. There are many others that have achieved greatness through this practice such as Usher, Sirena Williams, Thomas Edison, and Diane Warren. I believe perfecting your performance by a continuance of practice results in a huge improvement to greatness. We are like play dough. We can mold ourselves into greatness through years of deliberate practice, “…activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results, and involves high levels of repetition”, with the ultimate goal of extending our abilities to improve.
Usher worked really hard to be what he is today. ...
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I agree with Gladwell that hard work can lead to success. Too often we think success happens because someone has money or gets lucky. This is wrong. Success takes hard work, imagination, and motivation. “Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.” (Gladwell 52) If you assert yourself and use your mind and imagination, you can create those
Turn on ESPN, and there are many female sports reporters, and many reports on female athletes. Flip through Sports Illustrated, and female athletes are dotted throughout the magazine. Female athletes star in the commercials. Female athletes are on the cover of newspapers. Millions of books have been sold about hundreds of female athletes. However, this has not always been the case. The number of females playing sports nowadays compared to even twenty years ago is staggering, and the number just keeps rising. All the women athletes of today have people and events from past generations that inspired them, like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the All-American Professional Girls Baseball League, Billie Jean King, and the 1999 United States Women’s World
I learned a lot from interviewing the Coach Maldonado. The main thing I got out of this interview was something I was taught growing up. The outcome depends on how much work you put into doing a task. It’s not something I really learned from Coach Maldonado but it reenforces the idea. I like this idea because if you 're not going work hard for something then why should you expect great results as an outcome. The harder you work for something the more rewarding it becomes at the end. Now a days if you want to become great, it takes a lot of work and time. Professionals didn 't screw around in college and expect to be professional over night, no they worked hard to get at the level they 're at.
Rath states that “talent times investment equals strength (p. 20).” To me this is a very true statement. You might have the talent to do something but if you are not going to invest your time to better yourself then you will not be better yourself. This could also be said for having the drive to do something but without the talent in the task you cannot truly be the best at the task. The tool that helped us determine our strengths via the online assessment, tied into the previous quote by Rath. It asked you questions about both your talents, what you were good at, and it asked how you wo...
Hightower, Kyle. "Female Athletes Pushing the Boundaries of Sports." Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, FL). 02 Jul. 2005: n.p. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.
Woolum, Janet. Chapter 1 Women in American Sports. The Oryx Press, 1992. eLibrary. Web. 23 Jan. 2014.
We all have goals we want to achieve. The battle to reach those goals, is never easy. In Malcolm Gladwell’s text Outliers, it reads, “Achievement is talent plus preparation” (Gladwell 38). To achieve anything, you must have courage. Someone who has a whole lot of heart, can compete with someone with talent. Time and time again I was told “hard work beats talent, when talent doesn’t work hard.” This primarily comes in play with sports, such as hockey as spoken of in the Outliers.
Within his book he uses results from a study that surveyed a group of violinist from a music schools. The study concluded that the violinist who practiced for 10,000 hours or more would play professionally, and the violinist who only had 5,000 hours of practice would become school music teachers. Malcolm Gladwell also uses hockey players as a source of evidence stating that the younger they start playing with the all-star teams the more practices they will gain adding up to the minimum of 10,000 hours that they need to become successful and play in professional level. To sum up his claim of 10,000 hours he states “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,” (39) meaning that those who are at the highest point of success are there because they have practiced harder to get there than anyone else around them. However looking back to what Sonia Alleyne wrote about Frans Johnson’s book, areas such as music and sports are areas where rules never change. Thus deliberate practice and reaching the magical number of 10,000 hours would make a violinist or hockey player successful. Along with the result of David Z. Hambrick’s study even if 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the ideal goal of individuals trying to reach the highest point of success, consideration must be taken that there are some individuals who have innate talent and skill with the ability to reach this point of success requiring less deliberate
Being great at a particular sport, such as baseball, is actually quite simple. It takes a mix of talent and even more hard work. I have seen a very large number of athletes come through this high school with all the talent in the world, but had no work ethic. Talent is only a fraction of what is needed to be great.
If you want to do something successful in life you actually have to work not just think you will get a trophy, and you will be fine.Many professional sports athletes go by this motto that you have to work to do something successful.For example, if you don’t go to college there is really no job that you
Women sports have come a long way, since the days when women were only allowed to watch. “The past three decades have witnessed a steady growth in women's sports programs in America along with a remarkable increase in the number of women athletes (Daniel Frankl 2)” From an early age women were thought to be “Lady Like”; they are told not to get all sweaty and dirty. Over 200 years later since Maud Watson stepped on the tennis courts of Wimbledon (Sports Media digest 3); women now compete in all types and levels of sports from softball to National racing. Soccer fans saw Mia Hamm become the face of Women’s soccer around the world , Venus and Serena Williams are two of the most popular figures in tennis, and Indy car racing had their first woman racer, Danika Patrick. With all the fame generated by these women in their respective sports, they still don’t receive the same compensation as the men in their respective sports fields. Venus Williams, net worth is 60 million dollars; 27 million came from playing tennis (celebritynetworth 4). Her sister, Serena Williams has a tennis...
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates uses ignorance to prove excellence cannot be taught or even attained by human actions. The process involves Socrates purposefully contradicting himself to entice Meno’s focus. Through Socrates, Plato argues particular criteria cannot determine excellence within a collective. Instead, Socrates asserts excellence must be a universal quality and applicable to all individuals, by comparing the human collective to a bee colony. Socrates purposefully fails to use a universally applicable proof for shapes to define a square. All shapHis ignorance is used to inspire Meno’s review of the argument and develop a correct definition for excellence. For Meno’s benefit, Socrates contradicts his methods of deduction and proves excellence is divine. Plato employs Socratic irony to inspire a resolution to a problem by facilitating individual thought and input. As a result, Socrates’ ignorance is based on contradiction because contradiction entices review and the development of a correct resolution. Ultimately, Socrates’ methods entice Meno to assert that both knowledge and excellence are divine gifts or that both are attainable by humans.
I believe that hard work is the real treasure of a person because without hard work we cannot achieve our dreams and goals in life. No one can achieve success without doing hard work. It starts when we stop looking for alternatives or shortcuts towards success. We need to remember that there are no short cuts to success. Hard work, complimented with an intense desire to struggle and to achieve success is the only sure way of reaching success that you have always wanted. Hard work is one of the secret for us to be successful in life. Laziness and sluggishness makes one’s life a curse and only hard work can make your life a blessing. We cannot work hard if we don’t have goals. The meaning of goal according to Wikipedia is a desired result of a
Thomas Edison is widely regarded as one of the most influential inventors and innovators of the Twentieth Century. Edison’s efforts ushered in a new era of technology; a world in which electricity would be harnessed and made to bow before man’s will. Walter Lippman wrote, “It is impossible to measure the importance of Edison by adding up the specific inventions with which his name is associated” (qtd. in Baldwin 409). Edison’s decades long career was a synergistic melding of his success as an inventor and his prowess as a promoter and businessman. He exemplified the ideals of intelligence married to hard work and perseverance. He forever changed the landscape of American invention and the limits of technological change (Baldwin 409).
Thomas Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan Ohio. Thomas Edison was one of most famous American inventor and businessman in nineteenth century. He invented many great and remarkable devices during that period. His most famous inventions such as the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and electric incandescent light bulb. Those inventions bring great influences around the world; also his inventions improve the society. During Thomas Edison’s entire life, he created more than 2000 inventions as well he acquired 1093 patents in the Untied States. Also Thomas Edison became a successful businessman. He manufactures his inventions and selling them to the markets.