It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.
The hardest thing to do is work hard when no one is watching.
True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
I may not be as visible as I used to be, and by that I mean being in the clubhouse or on the field. But I'm just as invested as I've always been.
When a business becomes successful seemingly overnight, no one knows about all the months and years you've invested, all the projects you've tried before that didn't work.
The vision of a champion is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when nobody else is looking.
What I'm doing on stage now is just the tip of the iceberg.
Let's face it, 80 percent of the work I do my kids can't see.
[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.
I've worked extremely hard. There's always that part that people don't see, the things you do behind the scenes.
Often, the more reliably you perform a task, the less likely it is for someone to notice that you're doing it and to feel grateful and to feel any impulse to help or to take a turn.
Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
Much of the work of every life is done in the dark.
It's not that hard to be good, you can be good off raw talent. But I feel like it's that extra step, doing work and putting a body of work in and doing things when nobody else is watching. When nobody else is telling you to do it, you're pushing yourself to do it.
I don't think a lot of people really know what goes into something that they see.
There are decades in the making of the one man of renown; Multitudes that go unnoticed who must wreathe for him a crown.
There's a lot of research behind the scenes that you don't get to see, but I have an instinct that my dad nurtured from when I was born. I was very lucky then.
You think about acting kind of as an iceberg where you've got that 5% that you see... but in order to have that 5%... you have to have another 95%.
It's all well and good when it's going good and people have an opinion on how well you're playing, but it's the hidden things they don't see.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
I took acting five times as seriously as anyone else. I just couldn't show it.
Though you see nothing, he is acting.
Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.
