One of my favourite quotes: “I’m not talented enough to be unprepared. Are you?”

I think it was in the TV series called The Last Tycoon. When I heard that phrase, something clicked in my mind and I knew that was the secret sauce of all the successful people I admired.

Afterwards, I was talking with a person I admired. He's amazing at his job and super talented. When you're in the same room with him, you think he's great at winging it, he's creating everything on the fly. Years later having worked with him, he told me that he works hard for every meeting, gets prepared again and again even though he's not presenting something. The more he prepares, the more he makes it look natural.