I am a big fan of sports to an extent, and you will notice that some sportsmen have the natural ability to get the job done, while others are more of hard workers. All these guys can score and earn points for the team i.e they can do what is needed for the team to win a championship. Any skill in any field can be learned if you have the potential and the will to learn the trade but some things come out better if you are talented. I don’t know how to define talent but teach two people how to cook. The talented cook can come up with recipes like KFC. He will be more creative in his cooking.
I tried frying chapati once and the outcome was nasty, I can cook other meals well but chapos are not my cup of tea. I like them with tea though.
I won’t rag on hard work just yet, it is said that Rooney might be more talented than Christiano but the latter has achieved tremendous success through sheer hard work that Rooney can only dream of. Christiano is quite a hustler to me, since the days he was in Manchester, you could tell that guy was grinding in the field to score goals. And he eventually won Ballon d’or and became a billionaire through football.
Messi and Beckham are talented but after seeing what Christiano has achieved through hard work, we can say that sure, you can work hard and just be like those talented cats in any field.
The only thing about talent is that if you have it, you will pull off some things that people can look at and say “how the fuck did he put all that together?”. He must be really good.
The topic should have been skills or talents? I said nah, let me instead compare talents with hard work. Another good example is of the late Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. Jordan had been practicing his craft from a young age and he had the athletic ability of a basket player. Kobe also practiced for a long to be a dope basketballer but he was more of a hard worker.
He didn’t even have that athletic built because he gained a lot of weight just a few months after retiring. That means he had to grind to be in shape and keep scoring. He once gave a story of how he never scored a single point at some season in high school. He learned all the shootings and became the best player in the league next season. He was more of a learner as opposed to a natural like Jordan.
The outcome is that they both achieved tremendous success in basketball and they are even compared to each other in terms of greatness. Rest in peace to Kobe.
The key in all these is to combine both talent and hard work. I am lazy, and we all are, to be honest. We just push ourselves to work hard because we have to live and not because we like to, there is no substitute for hard work, maybe working smart but you will still be working anyway.
If you are to pick an artist like Picasso, he was insanely talented but he still had to do 50,000 paintings. And you might ask yourself why such a talented guy needs a crazy catalog to become big. And the interesting part is that we only know like 50 of those thousands of paintings.
And Picasso is not a unique case, pick any famous artist, maybe a musician. Not all Michael Jackson songs are mega hits, most of them are but not all. There are only a select few that became number one on the charts and stayed on top for weeks.
There is another thing in this argument of talents versus hard work and that is purpose. If you have a strong purpose in anything that you do, it will fuel you towards great achievements in that field.
Above all, there is potential and passion in something, not every hard-working individual will pick a ball and start kicking it and become Christiano Ronaldo. Christiano has the passion, athletic ability and dribbling skills, he has some talent. 2pac was not the best lyricist but he still had a lot of talent. He had a great voice too.
I am not sure I can be a great dancer; I know I can be a multimillionaire writer if I continue churning out thousands of words. However, dancing is a different ball game, breaking bones, and moving my waist is just a daunting task. I dance in my yoga classes and sometimes in clubs and that’s all. I won’t kid myself into a dancing competition.
This is why people respect doctors, not everyone can do medicine, it needs tremendous hard work and just a good IQ. That field has a lot of content that you need to absorb and store like a sponge. If you don’t have good retention of knowledge, you can struggle to excel in such a field.
The fourth factor in the talent versus hard work argument is luck. There are lucky breaks in people’s careers. If you happen to be in the right place at the right time and with the right skills and talents, you can land good opportunities. You put yourself in places where your talents are needed and you will be lucky.
If you are a great dancer and you dance in your room, no one will know what a dancer you are but if you dance in competitions, and on your channels, people will notice your skills. And you can get opportunities.
Both talents and hard work are needed in life, I am more into talents. Teaching a talented person is easier because they get it easily, as opposed to teaching a hard worker. Hard workers can still do, they get the job done. A talented hard worker is even better.
To a productive week!
