Last week, I came across a question that got me thinking, ‘What counts more—hard work or talents? Why?’ I thought about Olympic sprinters racing across the finish line, a classical pianist playing Mozart’s The Hunt, an artist capturing a single moment in time. What did it take for them to become masters of their craft? I thought about the talents I have and how I discovered them. It has been my personal experience that my talents alone are not enough to master a more complex skill. It required hard work and perseverance to reach that level.
First, talent is the natural ability to be good at something without being taught, but it has its limits. At some point, we come to a plateau and it becomes harder to extend our abilities to more complex projects. This can be discouraging to those that had once found it easy. The only way to improve is to seek further knowledge and push ourselves until we accomplish it.
A Master practices or studies constantly, adding new challenges as they reach their goals. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.” Cultivating a talent requires committing ourselves to work hard until it is second nature.
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Secondly, it is through hard work and trying different things that lead us to discover new talents. We can seek new opportunities by taking a class, joining a friend on an activity they enjoy or volunteering to help an organization or someone in need. If we avoid taking risks, out of a desire to avoid looking silly, we’ll never know if we have a talent for it. We cannot discover our green thumbs if we don’t put the effort into planting a garden.
It can be easily assumed that it takes talent to become successful in any endeavor. We may watch an athlete perform, look at amazing artwork, or taste a perfectly prepared meal. We compare them to ourselves and may find that we fall short, wishing we had such talent. What we do not see is the effort it took to master their dreams.
Take a look at Michael Jordan, who started as a terrible basketball player with no experience and no natural talent; through years of hard work and perseverance, he became a champion in basketball. Another example is Walt Disney. It would be hard to believe that he was fired for a lack of creativity, and yet he went on to create one of the most imaginative places on Earth.
A researcher and winner of MacArthur Genius grant, Angela Lee Duckworth, examined why people who had little to no talent were able to be successful. In April 2013, she presented her findings on a “TED Talks Education” entitled Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance “…one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn’t social intelligence.
It wasn’t good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t IQ. It was grit.” These individuals were passionate in their desire to achieve their dreams and worked hard to accomplish them. If we have the passion, determination, and perseverance we are as capable as those with just talent.
Without a doubt, I would never be the artist I am today without hard work and perseverance to take my artistic talents from doodling to sketching to detailed grey-shade artwork. Talent made learning to draw easier and to see the end product more clearly, but working hard is what allowed me to master harder techniques, failing over and over again until I got it right. When we think about what it takes to become masterful in an area, talent alone is not enough. It takes hard work to become successful.
