Skill Specialization Quotes

I’d like you to know that almost all of the directors I have met over the years have been decent, likable and intelligent. Nevertheless, many of these good souls are people whom I would never have chosen to handle money or business matters. It simply was not their game. They, in turn, would never have asked me for help in removing a tooth, decorating their home or improving their golf swing. … We are all duds at one thing or another. For most of us, the list is long. The important point to recognize is that if you are Bobby Fischer, you must play only chess for money.

If everyone is good at something different, assigning chores is easy. If your partner is great at grocery shopping and you are great at the laundry, you're set. But this isn't always - or even usually - the case.

I'm unqualified to do anything other than music.

All trades, arts, and handiworks have gained by division of labor... Where the different kinds of work are not distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism.

I'm not good at very many things. The stuff I'm good at tends to be the stuff that people know me for.

Let every man practise the trade which he best understands.

It's one of those things: we've got guys that are very offensive and can take down anyone, and we've got guys that don't shoot at all but are very hard to take down. It's one of those things. You've got to decide what you're good at.

I mean, most actresses can't host and most hostesses can't act, and that's the general rule in the industry.

No man who can do any one thing well will be able to any different thing equally well.

Music and television are turning into the equivalent of gymnastics and tennis: sports built entirely around the identification and training of prodigies.

I'm glad there are a lot of guitar players pursuing technique as diligently as they possibly can, because it leaves this whole other area open to people like me.

I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it's the only thing I'm any good at.

One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others.

Something happened to me and I became really successful at something at a young age, and that stunts you in every other aspect of your life because you feel like that's what you're good at and so that's what you need to stay in.

The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate.

I'm a magician, not a singer.

In high school, I was very good in math and physics. I wasn't good at much of anything else. Some people are good at a lot of things. I don't know how they choose what to do.

I've tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I've failed. I've tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can't control. I'm really quite narrow, you know.

There are people who are good for letters and others that are good for numbers.

I was very good at math and physics. And that's all. I can't do music, art, so there was not a lot of choice for me. I think people should go with their strength and that was my strength.

If my strength is technology, financial structuring is my son's skill.

A hundred cabinet-makers in London can work a table or a chair equally well; but no one poet can write verses with such spirit and elegance as Mr. Pope.