Talent Doesn’t Decide Whether You Succeed.
One can easily justify ourselves with the notion that we do not have – or were not born with – the talent for success. While some people may naturally have an advantage in some skill sets, success in some way really comes down to a commitment to developing and mastering the skills. Talent is just a starting point.
It is almost impossible to refute the existence of some form of “natural talent”. Some people are genetically engineered to be capable of certain things, especially when it comes to physical ability. However, for most of us, success is not a physical enterprise. We just want to be good at something . We want to get a decent salary while doing something satisfying in order to live a comfortable life. When we don’t understand this, we find ourselves lost on the couch, we look at successful people with envy. Oh, if only we were endowed with such a talent! If only our stars were lined up like theirs. Well, your stars can change. You just have to be the one to change them.
Change the way you look at abilities
A wrong point of view can hold us back from so many things. When you begin to believe that talent is the most important piece of the puzzle of success, you are building the wall yourself. You think to yourself, “I’ll never be that good because I just don’t have the talent.” He’s either there or not, right? The problem is that belief in natural talent implies that you must be born in the right circumstances to be successful. You assume that you must have a pronounced innate ability to do something well just because you are you .
Once you start thinking that way, you have already deprived yourself of the opportunity. You will not allow yourself to step outside the homemade wall. Talent is real and it matters, yes, but its lack does not stop you from doing what you want. You can succeed at something without having a natural talent, it just might be a little more difficult for you.
It really boils down to enthusiasm, commitment, and the belief that talent can be learned, too. When we see talent, we stare at someone’s “gifts” and admire their “gifts,” but if you stop to ask them, it’s probably added to that by years of hard work. Olympic sprinters ran as fast as they could every day of their lives, the musicians picked up the guitar and played to the blood, and the brilliant mathematicians of the world could not resist satisfying their own curiosity with numbers. Do you want to excel at something? Then stop holding yourself back. It’s time to change your mindset and develop your own talent.
Call them skills, not talents.
This is the most important part: stop calling ability talent. Instead, think of other people’s abilities as skills. If someone is good at something, then he is experienced. By calling talents skills, you subconsciously tell yourself that what you see, hear, or read can be learned. Half the battle is just knowing if something is possible at all, and by turning talent into skill, you’ve done it. The musician knows how to play the guitar. They practiced and then practiced again, and as long as you have both hands, you too can be experienced if you follow their example.
Of course, playing the guitar can be considered more technical. What about which depends more on your body? In the same musical vein, one can easily assume that singers are naturally talented and born with the voice of an angel. A recent study by Northwestern University, published in the journal Music Perception, suggests that singing is also a skill. According to the study, most people are good at finding and holding notes, and that people become “bad singers” when they don’t do it enough; what they call a use-or-lose skill. Of course, some people do have amusia, which causes deafness, but it occurs in about 1 in 20 people.
The bottom line for most people is that you can be a good singer if you want to. Why aren’t there more amazing singers? There is. They sing in the shower, in the car, and when doing household chores. Some people don’t like to sing in public or think they are good enough for it.
Even analytical skill sets, which some might say they are not smart enough, require discipline and dedication. In Psychological Review, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expertise, authors K. Anders Eriksson, Ralph T. Kramppe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer examine the learning curves of grandmasters. The authors explain that no chess player has reached the level of an international chess master without at least 10 years of intensive preparation for the game. According to their research, chess masters over 11 years old took an average of 11.7 years to reach such a high status. It’s 12 years of intense chess every single day.
Movies and television love to tell us stories of brilliant minds who can just make amazing equations and solve the most difficult analytical problems, but for most people, getting good at these things still takes a lot of work. Nobody learns the rules of chess and immediately knows how to compete with the best in the world.
When you turn everything into a skill, not a talent, the whole world opens up. These successful people we look at are just starting to look like committed individuals. Successful speakers suddenly become people of experience and practice. Experienced programmers are people who have sat down and spent time learning a language. Strong businessmen and women are just disciplined investors. When innate talents are turned into learning skills in your skills, you see that you can truly succeed in what you want to do if you do it with energy. So what do you want to do?
Train mindfully and exercise a lot
With the right mindset, you are ready for the second half of the battle. Once you know what skills you want to develop, you need to practice. This does not mean doing the same thing over and over. If we go back to the guitar example, repeating the same song over and over is unlikely to make you more proficient in guitar playing. It just makes you more skilled at performing this song. Just as you add weight as you get stronger, you must expand your skill development . To practice mindfully, you need to learn new chords, new rhythms, and new songs in the area you want to be successful in.
Now you have to do a lot of this. It takes more than just 20 minutes of workout a day. It takes hours and hours of practice, and it takes years to get anywhere. Many people call this ” 10 years of silence .” You have to be patient in your practice just as you need to be aware. It may not take you 10 years or 10,000 hours to get where you want to be, but make sure you have a goal .
Without a goal, your motivation can plummet even before you make any real progress. Starting when you have the least skill is the hardest part. This is the moment when most people decide that something is too difficult and give up, but don’t get upset. You probably won’t be very good when you start , but no one ever said that success would be easy. Keep your expectations in check, set times for regular exercise, and just keep going. This is both the hardest and easiest part, but all you have to do is continue.
Don’t cheapen your own achievements
Finally, you don’t want to believe that you have only achieved success through natural talent. For many, the idea of achieving the achievements generated by natural talent makes them cheaper. Instead of earning something through your efforts and dedication, achievement just fell into your lap. Even if you believe that you have a natural talent, changing your thinking in this sense is only beneficial. You want people to know that you have worked hard to achieve who you are, and you want to know for yourself.
It’s much more fun for you to achieve something when you believe you deserve it. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you are “just good at it.” It can be as simple as making macaroni and cheese, or as complex as solving complex mathematical problems. However, you are experienced because you have taken the time to practice.
Success is a tricky equation and there are many variables to consider, but innate, natural, born in this way talent is not an essential ingredient. Maybe naturally talented people have an advantage, or maybe they don’t. It is hard to say. However, what can definitely give you an edge is skill, discipline, practice, enthusiasm, and maybe a little luck (depending on what you want to be successful at). When it comes to success, you are your worst enemy, but you can also be your greatest asset.