Your first film is always your best film, in a way. There's something about your first film that you never ever get back to, but you should always try. It's that slight sense of not knowing what you're doing, because the technical skills you learn - especially if you have a film that works, that has some kind of success - are beguiling. The temptation is to use them again, and they're not necessarily good storytelling techniques.
A demanding performance challenge tends to create a Team. In any situation requiring a combination of multiple skills, experiences and judgments, a team inevitably gets better results than a collection of individuals. Teams provide the kind of responsiveness, speed, on-line customization and quality that is beyond the reach of individual performance.
Slowly I learnt the ways of humans: how to ruin, how to hate, how to debase, how to humiliate. And at the feet of my Master I learnt the highest of human skills, the skill no other creature owns: I finally learnt how to lie.
I now measure my growth as a photographer in terms of the degrees to which I am aware of, have developed my sense of, and have the skills to symbolize visually the four-dimensional structure of the universe.
It is not mere technical skill that makes a man a golfer, it is the golfing soul.
It certainly strikes the beholder with astonishment, to perceive what vast difficulties can be overcome by the pigmy arms of little mortal man, aided by science and directed by superior skill.
A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.
To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.
Really, handknitting is a dreamy activity, built into many people's thumbs and fingers by genes already there, itching to display their skills and achievement possibilities.
A leader should never compare his technical skills with his employee's.
From what I've seen, you either get grounded in that kind of positive thinking early on in life or you don't. Establishing priorities and using your time well aren't things you can pick up at the Harvard Business School. Formal learning can teach you a great deal, but many of the essential skills in life are the ones you have to develop on your own.
The greatest successes grow out of great failures. In numerous instances the result is better that comes after a series of abortive experiences than it would have been if it had come at once; for all these successive failures induce a skill which is so much additional power working into the final achievement. . . . The hand that evokes such perfect music from the instrument has often failed in its touch, and bungled among the keys. . . . Every disappointed effort fences in and indicates the only possible path of success, and makes it easier to find.
Some missionaries are giants in the Spirit and pygmies in skills in the Spirit. Work hard to develop a balance. Your leaders, and you, should teach the skills to each other.
It's a simple fact: no individual can be good at everything. Everyone needs people around them who have complimentary sets of skills.
To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to intellectual processes.
I always knew that there were huge opportunities for me, and that I had a lot of potential to do a lot of different things, but I also knew it was about my execution and my application of skills.
The more we give importance to skill development, the more competent will be our youth.
Technology and Ideology are shaking the foundations of 21st century capitalism. Technology is making skills and knowledge the only sources of sustainable strategic advantage.
I like to believe that everyone is born with the same skill set, and that it is the influences that one comes upon.
When it comes to fundraising for a social enterprise, if you are pursuing your true passion, you'll learn to become great at your craft because you'll care so much about perfecting the skills necessary to make that dream a reality.