Hard Work as a Way Towards Success

Humanity always strives towards success, through the course of their actions they will either accomplish their goals or fail. There are many factors that affect the outcome of their struggles, with talent and hard work being the most essential aspects. It is well known that these two fundamental factors are related, yet how hard they can complement each other is less known. People tend to think that they do not need to work hard if they have possessed the necessary skills or talent. Before understanding the correlation between the two, it is important to understand what each aspect is.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, talent means “Natural aptitude or skill”, the term “natural” implies something thathumans are born with, giving an edge or advantage on a specific activities. What is interesting about talent is that each individual can have a completely different set of skills, creating a unique identity that is not affected by knowledge, education, culture, nor experience. For example, a person can be proficient at art but struggle at sports. In contrast, other person is proficient at sports yet is bad at art. This create a distinct difference, in terms of learning rate, between two or more individuals.

The aforementioned advantage that one can have through their talents gives them an opportunity to easily achieve their targets in a specific category compared to those who possess no aptitudes in that category. Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation, which was founded in Boston in 1922 and is one of the preeminent organization in talent assessment and job matching, identifies an individual’s profile through 16 different aptitudes. The test’s score which cannot be defined as bad and good, identify which specific task that comes more easily for the test subject, making it easier to understand how to optimally use one’s talents. Thus, it is important to know one’s aptitudes to fully make use of the advantage given.

Hard work, which means a great deal of effort taken to achieve a goal, becomes a piece of advice that has been repeated so many times that it’s sort of lost its meaning. People think that doing their everyday work properly is considered as hard work, yet the real concept of hard work does not lie on the work itself. It’s everything that must be taken on when deciding to accomplish a goal, creating a work ethic where diligence, sacrifice, planning, and motivation are needed to strengthen character and individual’s abilities. Hard work can become the only way for those who aren’t lucky, wealthy, or talented enough to achieve their goals. Through hard work, it is not impossible to surpass those who are more talented or skilled.

After understanding talent and hard work, the next step is to understand what is the main issue often neglected by people. Many people believe that if you have the necessary talents or skills, they don’t need to work as hard as others. They believe that their talent is enough to accomplish their targets. As a result, they underestimate others and can be caught off-guard by those who work harder than they do.

What is needed to be understood is that having only talents is not enough to achieve more. It is enough to achieve the initial goal, but to accomplish more hard work becomes the main supplement to realize it. The explanation is provided in Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance which quotes, “Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.” Talents affect “the rate of learning” people have, by putting more hard work or effort in the same category as one’s own talents, it will further boost the skills that has been previously owned. As we go deeper into this, hard work appears to have a more important role than talents. If we depicted hard work and talents as a motorcycle, talents will be the working efficiency of the engine of the motorcycle but hard work will be the motorcycle itself. Talents can't work by itself therefore it needs an activator which is hard work. If one is not willing to put in the work to harvest and cultivate their talents then talents itself is useless.

Hard work itself can be considered a form of natural talent as it is not something of which every person is capable. There are some people that born with solid and firm characteristics and there are some that have to learn how to gain these characters. However, this 'hard working talent' is influenced by some factors too. Hard work is the product of survival needs which means that when a person or people have to face problems that can hugely affect their life they will somehow struggle to find a way to solve this problem; this is when hard work takes place. Factors like economy necessity can bring out this hard working attitude.

Many stories exist of people wasting their talents and fading into the background when hard-working individuals compete against them. People like Stephen King, Will Smith and Robert Griffin III are those who gain success by working hard. Stephen King once said: 'Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work' and also Will Smith: “I’ve always considered myself to be just average talent and what I have is a ridiculous insane obsessiveness for practice and preparation.” These words conclude that hard work is more important than talents but if these two going hand in hand it will be much better, like what Griffin III said 'Hard work pays off- hard work beats talent any day, but if you're talented and work hard, it's hard to be beat'. As we walk through this explanations, we can see that to achieve certain goals in our life we need to work it hard and even harder than before. One day our hard work will be paid off and when that time comes we will be more cherish and thankful rather than happy with our talents and do nothing. The most appreciated thing that people can appreciate from a certain successful people are their work ethic. Therefore work hard has no limitation so that there is no excuse for us not the work harder and harder especially focusing on our given natural talents which will be a good assets for our daily life.