You Don’t Need to Be the Most Talented in Your Field to Achieve Success
Three words are enough: motivation, patience, and resilience.
Talent makes you fantasize. Whatever your field, you may have already noticed that some individuals stand out from the rest. Without any prior work, these people already seem to have mastered everything in their field.
Talented people can do with ease what others take days, months, or even years to master.
Watching a talented person achieve what it took you months of hard work to achieve can be discouraging. Many people are discouraged. Indeed, it is tempting to think that we will never achieve success despite our best efforts.
Choosing to give up by telling yourself that you don’t have the talent to achieve success is the easy way out.
When faced with a difficulty, you should never give up. The difficulties, challenges, and problems that you will face will provide you with exceptional opportunities to reach the next level in your life.
It is only by overcoming these difficult areas that you will be able to continue to progress toward success.
If you take a closer look at the very talented people you come across in your field, you will notice that very often these people have one major flaw: they are not highly motivated. They don’t have an incredible work ethic.
You sometimes get the impression that the fact that you have been endowed by nature with an incredible talent has come with a counterpart that is difficult to bear: that of not wanting to make sufficient effort to fully exploit this talent.
I’ve come across so many more talented people in my life than me. In fact, I always come across some in every area where I try to achieve my goals. However, I have very often been able to achieve better results than those people who are more talented than me.
With time, I have finally realized something essential: if the talent is important in life, it is not the talent that will determine whether or not you will achieve great things.
Your chances of achieving success or not in your field are determined by something much more controllable. Indeed, if the talent is something innate that you can’t decide whether or not to have, it’s the fact that you work hard and are resilient that makes the difference in life.
The good news is that you can decide to be the one who will work harder than others in your field. You can decide to be resilient and go from failure after failure in the arena to overcoming the obstacles that stand between you and success.
It all depends on you and you alone on your road to success.
To succeed, you must first understand that failure is what will bring you one step closer to future success. Indeed, it is by failing that you will discover what does not work. You will then be able to adapt so that you can act differently the next time you fail.
The key lies in your ability to keep trying failure after failure with the same will.
This is easy to say or write, but in life it is difficult. Very few people can show this strength of character. If you want to succeed, you will have to be able to.
As you try new things, you will be able to get closer to people who have already achieved what you want to accomplish. Having a mentor will save you valuable time. The experience of others will help you get closer to success. By adopting this mindset, you will sooner or later achieve success in your field.
This is a certainty. It all depends on your patience and resilience. Once you have achieved success, you will see that those around you are not the most talented people around.
Those who will achieve success as you will be people with the same workforce and the same capacity for resilience.
Relying solely on their talent, the majority of the most talented people you meet will have given up the first real failure they encounter in their lives. Unaccustomed to failure, they will not be able to bounce back when the time comes.
Talent can often be more of a curse than a blessing. It all depends on how you use it.
Once you have achieved success, you are likely to stay there in the long run. The qualities you have to develop to achieve success — motivation, patience, and resilience — are the very qualities that keep you at the top.
Again, you’ll make the difference with talented people who never last very long at the top.
Final Thoughts
The more I think about it, the more I end up thinking that not having extraordinary talent in the areas I’ve targeted since the beginning of my life has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It has allowed me to develop all the qualities I have just detailed.
I have already achieved great things at my level, and I intend to do better thanks to these qualities that I continue to develop day after day. For you, it will be the same. There is no need to continue to envy the most talented people you will meet, or nourish complexes that might demotivate you.
Just be yourself, work hard, and you’ll reach even your wildest goals sooner or later.
Some reading:
Just Trying Already Puts You Ahead of 99% of People: It’s better to try and fail than to sit back and do nothing.
The Great Lesson Bill Gates Taught the Day He Saved Apple and Steve Jobs: Cooperation between competitors can be more effective than the destructive competition.
6 Essential Things to Remember From the Book “A Promised Land” by Barack Obama: A fascinating book about an extraordinary man.
In Just Two Sentences, Elon Musk Explains Why Failure Is an Essential Part of Success: Failure is always an option.