Values just don’t drop out of trees into your lap the way they did in the Garden of Eden. You’re a human being, and that means you have to work to get what you want. Nothing is automatic. Nothing. Even though it appears that way from the outside.

You look at a great star, an accomplished actor, or accomplished anything — someone like Eddie Van Halen. You see the guy on the stage, riffing on a guitar like nobody can and creating sounds that nobody’s heard before, but you don’t see all the hours, the obsessive hours, working on that technique, and playing with guitars, and rebuilding them to get the sound that he wanted because he was so obsessed with it.

Being good at anything is an obsession. It’s an obsession with work.

Mark Pellegrino (2020)