Hard Work Beats Talent When Talent Doesn’t Work Hard
I often find myself over-analyzing my skills and overthinking how I should and need to be growing and improving. A lot of time is wasted as I look for ways to improve my work and fixate on expanding my capabilities when it comes to the most minuscule details.
In one word, this can be summed up as perfectionism. And eventually this desire to achieve perfection leads to procrastination and a lack of results.
Something that I need to remind myself of often:
“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”
Talent Doesn’t Always Correlate to Success
Having true, innate talent is great. The unique ability to excel in a certain discipline or area of expertise can be highly favorable and very rewarding.
But talent doesn’t always lead to success.
Consider someone that is a very gifted writer. That person may obsess over a particular piece of content, spending many, many days fine-tuning every single word, reorganizing various sections of copy, and overly criticizing each sentence until the piece meets their level of standards.
Now consider someone who isn’t a great writer, but is able to produce five times the amount of content in the same amount of time that the talented writer takes to produce one piece of content.
In today’s digital age, algorithms tend to favor quantity over quality. The amount of exposure you gain can run circles around the quality of your work.
Talent of course plays an important part in the equation but talent does not always correlate to success. Whether it stems from perfectionism, procrastination, or some other form of inability to take action and drive results, talent alone will not get you where you want to go. But hard work will.
Work Hard and Talent Will Follow
Grit and resiliency have proven time and time again to be the most important ingredients when it comes to achieving your goals. And while you may not have a great deal of talent in whatever it is you do, by making the effort to continuously learn and grow, you’ll you will eventually evolve your skills over time.
If you feel that you lack talent, don’t be limited by the belief that you’re not good enough or don’t have what it takes. And if you do have talent, don’t let your ego slow you down or delay you from moving full speed ahead.
Success is no accident. It comes from making progress and continuous growth. It is the result of perseverance and commitment.
No matter how much talent you possess, you won’t achieve success without hard work. That’s because hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
