How You Can Level the Playing Field With No Talent

The odds are more in your favor than you think.

There are two types of people in this world.

There are those people who rise to great heights and fame even though they started with little.

Then there are those people who stay where they are in life and who have no interest in improving themselves.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to criticize those people who start out very little and remain that way throughout life.

Life is unfair with a ton of obstacles and roadblocks. Some people are more equipped to better handle these types of situations while others fear obstacles and stay away.

Whenever we see a success story, we think to ourselves,

“This person must have started out as wealthy or was naturally talented. I don’t have any talent so I can’t rise to great heights.”

However, what we don’t realize is that most successful people out there achieved their success by hard work, determination, persistence, courage, etc.

In fact, research done by Thomas Corley on 233 millionaires revealed that 177 were self-made millionaires and of those self-made, 41% came from poor households.

The truth is that to achieve what you want in life, you have to put in the hours and always be determined.

However, this is plain old advice that gets repeated every time.

New advice for us modern people in this new age is to:

STOP complaining and START doing.

Keep reading how this works in real life.

Hard work vs Talent

Many successful people you see out there are sometimes regarded as one of the best in their respective field.

For basketball, Michael Jordan comes to mind.

For golf, Tiger Woods comes to mind.

For soccer, Messi and Ronaldo come to mind.

For computers, Bill Gates comes to mind.

You get the point.

When people look at these successful examples, they think that these people must have been naturally talented and gifted from the start.

Most success stories happen through sheer hard work and a bit of luck. These successful people had an idea and were determined and courageous enough to execute that idea.

“Ideas without execution are hallucinations.” — Thomas Edison

Too many people in this world dream about having a big home in the future, a nice car, a financially secure job, lots of cash, etc.

There is nothing wrong about dreaming but most people stay at that. They just dream their whole lives for luck and success to appear but do nothing about it.

• Most people are not willing to put in the extra hours of hard work to do something useful that will help them in the future. Instead, most people spend the weekend and their free time on entertainment and getting excited.
• Most people are not willing to take risks to get out of their current circumstances. Instead, most people stick to their 9–5 that has a mediocre pay and pays the bills.
• Most people are not willing to follow their true passions because when they look up, they see a huge mountain with steep angles.

Life is life and in life, success doesn't appear. Life rewards those people who are willing to learn, develop, and improve themselves. Life rewards those who want to see themselves in a different position in the future.

If you have no talent, that doesn’t matter.

Hard work is 1000x better than talent because consistent hard work can take you places you had never imagined. Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean that you will stay that way.

A person who is not talented but practices every day or consistently for a long time will eventually beat a talented person in that area.

“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” — Tim Notke

Talent only gets you started in the right direction but staying on the right path requires hard work.

For example, let’s say you are naturally a very fast runner. You have a passion for soccer but you don’t really practice your skills very often because of the assumption that because you run very fast, you will be quite good at soccer.

However, soccer is more than just about running. It’s also about varying your speed to account for changes, excellent footwork, knowledge of the position of different people in front of you, excellent communication skills, various ways to change the angle of the ball, bounce and speed trajectories, etc.

A hard working soccer player who has no natural talent for soccer but is willing to invest so much time for training and practice is going to eventually beat a naturally talented person.

However, people have this sort of thing against success. They almost always assume that it was because of a natural talent or some special circumstances.

However, most successful people are in fact the hardest workers.

For example,

In his early days, Kobe Bryant would show up for 7 a.m. practices at 5 a.m. Also, Lakers head coach Byron Scott once found a sweaty 18-year old Bryant in a darkened gym two hours before practice doing his individual shooting.

Elon Musk is known for his extreme work ethic where he works 80 hours per week and in 2018, he was working 120 hours in a week and regularly sleeping on the factory floor to keep Tesla alive as it struggled to ramp up production of its Model 3.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, he worked from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day since he was also the CEO of Pixar at that time. He also suffered from kidney stones due to his constant working.

What can you do about it?

I already told you that new and current advice for modern society today is to:

STOP complaining and START doing.

STOP complaining about everyone being better than you and being vastly more talented.

STOP complaining that you can’t do anything about your current circumstances in life and that you can’t improve.

STOP looking at other successful people and wishing that you were more talented to achieve their level of success.

You can do something about it. If you have a passion and you really want to chase it, then START doing something about it.

I don’t care if you are super busy with work, life, family, or tons of other priorities. The truth of the matter is that you are going to be busy your whole life and unless you tell yourself that you are going to start chasing your dreams, then you will complain your whole life that you did not have time.

People who really want to upgrade themselves or become someone they want to know how to carve the necessary time to work on their dreams.

If you had to submit a paper to your boss by 12 AM and you only started working on it the day before, chances are pretty high that you are going to complete it by the deadline because it was required by your boss.

However, I don’t think you would have complained that you can’t get the assignment done because you are too busy with other priorities. You would have carved the necessary time to get the assignment done because the deadline was fast approaching.

Try to apply this same concept to life.

STOP trying to complain about not having enough time or not being talented.

If you really want to achieve your dreams, you will:

• Carve out the necessary time consistently
• Start to develop and improve your skills
• Focus more on becoming the person you want to be

Too many people dream their whole lives and get nowhere. Now is the time to get up and start working towards your goal.

If you really want to get somewhere in life, you will keep working and working towards your goals with persistence and determination.

You won’t look at your present circumstances but will instead constantly look at what type of person you will be in the future if you keep working on the right path.

“If it is important to you, you will find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.”

— Ryan Blair

This is how you level the playing field with no talent.