From a letter to me, dated April 5, 2006 — epd
Who can read a crystal ball? But who can, since there seems to be none. Shakespeare knew, and he knew that dear Brutus, our fate is not in our stars, but in our weak hearts, that we are underlings. There is no star made for anyone at his time of birth, to shine on until he passes on to his grave. There’s just the first step that one takes at every turn or choice, when will is stopped and put to the test. There’s just the next step that one must keep on taking to finish without let up the path he’s chosen.
In a way of classifying persons, there’re those who initiate something that others dare not initiate, but manage not to finish it. There’re those who pick up to finish something that others have initiated and started. There’re those who don’t start anything or pick upon something started. And there are the rare ones who initiate and finish what they initiated. Success is correspondingly distributed among these classes in respective degrees. In this regard, Edison is quite on the mark that it is all 99% sweat and that the remainder, a fit of 1%, is all that’s left to genius or talent. Of course, the 1% genius never shows up in the multitude. It’s a rare gift. That’s why it’s genius—a rare if not an accidental twist of genes.