Talent and hard workThomas Edison was an inventor who said, “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration". According to him hard work mattered more than smartness or talent. The world of business is full of success stories that bolster his argument. A clerk in a trading firm in Aden went on to become Dhirubhai Ambani. From the ashes of World War II Japan, Akio Morita built Sony. And from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg, the IT industry is full of examples of those who had nothing more than a vision but went on to change the world. Sure, these people were talented. But it's one thing to come up with ideas, quite another to make them happen. Hard work is the critical input that separates the great from the ordinary.
In cricket Sachin Tendulkar, hailed as arguably the greatest batsman of all times, is the one who believes in putting in lot of hard work. He practices for hours at a stretch. He hasn't given up the habit even after 20 years in the game. Cricketers like Brian Lara and Vinod Kambli who had talents but did not put in hard work have long fallen by the wayside.
Talent is a bonus. But scaling the peak of success is impossible without hard work.
But there are some people who believe that hard work isn't the be all and end all. You either have it or you don't. And if you don't, not all the hard work in the world can make up for it.
Some people are gifted with innate ability that enables them to succeed. No amount of toil by less gifted plodders can help them reach the same heights. Sports is a good arena to judge the truth of this. Take pace bowling in cricket. Today's bowlers live far more strictly regimented lives than bowlers of past decades; they put in hours in the gym as their predecessors never did. But for the most part, pace bowlers today are an embarrassment compared to the fearsomely talented West Indian quickies to Lillee and Thomson, Imran Khan and Ian Botham - most of whom never saw the inside of a gym.
Or take intellectual achievement. In India it is believed that academic education is absolutely necessary. But men who changed the world, like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, have had little time for these formal systems. Many of them have been rejected or rejected the system themselves. They have proved that it is not hard work and academic education but the innate talent that is necessary to achieve success.
In cricket Sachin Tendulkar, hailed as arguably the greatest batsman of all times, is the one who believes in putting in lot of hard work. He practices for hours at a stretch. He hasn't given up the habit even after 20 years in the game. Cricketers like Brian Lara and Vinod Kambli who had talents but did not put in hard work have long fallen by the wayside.
Talent is a bonus. But scaling the peak of success is impossible without hard work.
But there are some people who believe that hard work isn't the be all and end all. You either have it or you don't. And if you don't, not all the hard work in the world can make up for it.
Some people are gifted with innate ability that enables them to succeed. No amount of toil by less gifted plodders can help them reach the same heights. Sports is a good arena to judge the truth of this. Take pace bowling in cricket. Today's bowlers live far more strictly regimented lives than bowlers of past decades; they put in hours in the gym as their predecessors never did. But for the most part, pace bowlers today are an embarrassment compared to the fearsomely talented West Indian quickies to Lillee and Thomson, Imran Khan and Ian Botham - most of whom never saw the inside of a gym.
Or take intellectual achievement. In India it is believed that academic education is absolutely necessary. But men who changed the world, like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, have had little time for these formal systems. Many of them have been rejected or rejected the system themselves. They have proved that it is not hard work and academic education but the innate talent that is necessary to achieve success.
No comments:
Post a Comment