Work consistently hard

It’s just a fact of life; some are born with amazing natural talent. That pretty sums up why certain individuals achieve levels of success that’s difficulty to surpass for many years to come, the type for history books. Pele, Maradona, Zidane, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Tupac, Michael Jackson are just but few examples of people who have made history in their different career choices.

While talent is very important, it needs be developed to realize one’s full potential. This includes practicing and learning new things to enhance your talent. Take for example if you are an aspiring and talented software developer you would need to practice and make software if you are to realize your potential. The same goes for soccer players, they need to continue training and playing soccer. Entrepreneurs too, they also need to practice and learn new business practices.

One more thing, environment is important for nurturing talent. While environment might be something beyond the control of an individual, one needs to take full of advantage of the environment they are in. If you happen to be at Manchester United FC football academy, there is high chance that you are going to be great footballer and so is everyone there. The same is also true if you are a talented aspiring software developer in the Silicon Valley.

If you take full advantage of the environment that you are in and work very hard you would be achieve success that few can dream of.  Usually this level of success is only the beginning of what you can achieve if you are talented. Founding a web service that goes on to be used by hundreds of thousand of people is no small feat. But if you can manage to scale it hundreds of millions of users is incredible; it’s incredible very hard and those who can keep those users for long, seal their place in the history books. The same  applies to footballers, playing for the likes of Barcelona is incredible but  a top goal scorer in these top leagues is wonderful; if you can continue being a top goal scorer for a number of seasons , you just would sealed a place for yourself among the great.

 Achieving initial success can be tempting to a lot. The reality on the ground is that mostly you wouldn’t have realized your full potential. Instead of working very hard most would tend to slacken. The end result is that you end up being average, slightly above average or even dropping to below average. Another thing is that there are lots of people equally talented who are striving to be equally successful, so if you don’t raise your game by working very hard, you just end being overtaken in these competitive environments. From this it’s clear one needs to be on initial success and work even harder.

Also in order to be consistently successful one needs to stay humble. If you start regard yourself as a great you might end up losing your work ethic and focus; because in your mind you would have achieved everything whilst you have not. More over being humble make it easy for you to learn from others. No matter how talented and skilled you can become, you can become more successful if build on top of the foundation others have laid before. It’s quite clear if you can learn from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates you would have chance to become an equally great technologist or even more.

While talent is enough to bring you initial success, one needs to continuously work very hard and continuously try to improve yourself. Getting to the top-level of your career is an achievement, but staying there for a long is what makes legends great and that’s what realizing full potential mean. Michael Jackson was not one hit wonder  and so was Steve Jobs  and other great professionals.