#359 : My Consideration recently – Talent

well, i’ve been thinking all the way about one thing, which we call TALENT.. some said it is a natural ability that god-given to somebody, while others said that it is a advantage that somebody has that make them easier to achieve something.. whatever it is, it has been considered as one of the greatest factor of success.. many have said that Kaka, Lionel Messi, Mozart, Beethoven, Michael Jordan, and so on are the talented and the gifted ones.. so, do the others are not the talented ? or are they haven’t found their gift yet ?

for me, talent and the talented is very interesting.. and i’ve bought 2 books from Amazon which related to success and talent.. one titled Outliers (by Malcolm Gladwell).. i finished reading this book yesterday.. and today, i started reading ‘Talent is Overrated : What really separates world class performers to others’.. these two books have an intimidative title for me.. I will definitely review these two books in my blog after this.. maybe i will write about the Outliers tonight or tomorrow morning.

In my opinion, talent is only a small part of success, especially after reading Outliers.. Outliers said that many factors decide the success of someone.. e.g : environment, social and economy condition, family, time, and etc.. Mr Gladwell gave an example about Bill Gates. He is not only great at programming, but one of the most important factor of his life to become a software mogul is that he has a privilege to do some programming jobs about 10 thousand hours freely while in that time, computers were hardly found. but lucky for Bill, he can access the computer as much as he can, and this gave him advantages that he was more ready to anticipate the software booming in that time.. another example, do we know how much time did Mozart, Beethoven, Jordan spend to achieve their peak level ? i believe that they had a ‘nightmarous’ training, intensive practice, rather than just believe on their talent and boom, they are great performers.. nothing great can be instantly achieved..

For me, talent is only taking 10-15% part of our success.. while the others, i believe, is the kind of hardwork, motivation, environment, and the other factors.. of course, still talent must be considered as a decisive factor.. but it will only differs some people to others if they has done same things (same practice time, same social condition, same teacher, and many other similarities).. Talent will be the last decider.. but we shouldn’t have only think about that talent, besides, we should think whether we has maximized other factors which we can handle, if we considered talent as a God-gift and it can’t be gotten easily.. sometimes, we haven’t practiced as hard as we can, so we couldn’t performed well, and of course we will say ‘okay, i’m not good. i don’t have any talent in this subject’..and of course after we said that, we will leave and judge that we are not talented..

so, i think, if you want to success, just choose what you want to be a world class performers at.. why we should be a world-class ? because it shows that you have to reach your maximum point *with or without your talent* to really do the best.. and first of all, knowing your environment condition will be a good idea.. after that, you can really focus on those things.. 10.000 hours of learning – tips from Outliers, and deliberate practice – tips from Talent is Overrated.. those two ‘training’ and ‘exercise’ should be done rather than just regret why others have talent while you think you don’t.. if you can maximize your 85-90% ability (minus the talent), you should be on ‘world-class’ level and it’s above the average people.. of course, if you have reached that stage, you will see so many people with skills like you, and in that stage, i can believe that there is ‘talent’ that differs us.. but as long as we haven’t reach our own maximum point, than we should consider about our effort, not just our talent.. yes it’s true that talent is believed can ease the attempt to reach the world-class performance.. but it’s not the only one factor..

well, me myself know that i haven’t / or haven’t found my real talent *if there is any*.. but i don’t like to just surrender to those who i believe has talent and more talented than me.. i will try as much as i can to pursue them *in positive ways* and reach my maximum performance.. if i am still in laziness, at least i know that i can’t do what the others can do because of myself, not just because they are more talented than me..