In creative endeavors luck is a skill.
Interpretation
Luck in creativity comes from preparation and effort.
Twyla Tharp's quote suggests that what is often perceived as luck in creative processes is actually cultivated through practice, hard work, and a keen understanding of one's craft. It emphasizes that successful creative outcomes rely on the skill and readiness of the artist rather than mere chance.
In practice
During a keynote speech on innovation, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of preparation in successful creative ventures.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
Meditation here may think down hours to moments. Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head and learning wiser grow without his books.
Diseases can be our spiritual flat tires - disruptions in our lives that seem to be disasters at the time but end by redirecting our lives in a meaningful way.
We are too apt to love praise, but not to deserve it.
I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.
In their innocence, very young children know themselves to be light and love. If we will allow them, they can teach us to see ourselves the same way.
Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.