Quote

"Natural talent is like an athlete's strength. You can be born with more or less ability, but nobody can become an athlete just because he or she was born tall, or strong, or fast. What makes the athlete, or the artist, is the work, the vocation, and the technique. The intelligence you are born with is just ammunition. To achieve something with it you need to transform your mind into a high-precision weapon. . . . Every work of art is aggressive . . . . And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity."

-- The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, p. 182


The speaker in this case was talking about becoming a writer, but I think this is true for anything worth doing. A worthy vocation needs to be worked at and pounded on. Sometimes (many times) that working and pounding is hard, or tedious, or even boring, which means we have to work even harder at it. What's the fun in that? you might ask. The end product, that's what. Even if my end product (a scene for a fic, a paper for a class, a poster for a science meeting, a presentation for a symposium) receives a kind word from only one person, that makes all my work worth it.