

Successful People Start Before They Feel Ready - gmatty
http://jamesclear.quora.com/Successful-People-Start-Before-They-Feel-Ready

======
stephenp
I'm reminded of Emerson's "Self Reliance." Successful people are always
already successful, even if you have never heard of them. Could be this is why
they act before other people might think they are ready. Here's a passage that
came to my mind (though the whole thing is genius):

"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment
with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted
talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That
which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows
what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master
who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have
instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a
unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow.
Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is
assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this
moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of
Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but
different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent,
with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself[.]"

Maybe "greatness" and success are apples and oranges. (It depends if the
latter has a purely mercantile meaning, which is boring and temporary, in my
own view.) But I'd agree that the truly great innovators -- whether in poetry,
programming, painting, music, business -- they don't worry about failure. They
may not like it but it doesn't stop them. Greatness may be aided by fortune
but it doesn't ask for permission. It may be forgotten or overlooked in its
own time. But like Emerson and this author, it's hard to dispute the central
tenet: "success" requires action combined with talent, and a deeply held
conviction that now is always the right time to act.

