THE BIZMIC himself is back! It has been a while since I laid bare some of my roaming thoughts and opinions because I have been battling against a great many business priorities as well as personal and emotional issues. Yes, even the motivational and inspiring Bizmic is sometimes unmotivated, uninspired or simply has little time to write. But then BMIC must live on; and I must be disciplined and focused to educate, motivate and inspire others with my gift; my writing; My Talent! My question for you today is are you also one of the so called ‘lucky ones’ who are talented in something like art, sports, music, dancing, cooking, inventing, or in a particular area such as mathematics or comedy. Are you one amongst the fortunate few, the extremely blessed, the exceptions to the rule – The Lucky Percent? Is your gift as simple as being ‘beautiful’ or ‘handsome’, being remarkably intelligent, or easily learning languages? Have you identified your innate talent or are you a one of the vast majority I call the Other Percent: unremarkable and seemingly normal in every way. During my ‘intermission’ from writing I have dedicated a lot of thought to why I write and always seem to be musing over philosophical subjects, reading, writing and pursuing profit-making business ventures. I was beginning to think that I am simply one of those lucky people who are naturally talented at writing, and also one of the lucky few with an uncanny ability to monetize my time and energy. It appears that I am just plain lucky, that I was simply born this way, right? I begun to harbor a rather elitist view that I was an esteemed member of The Fortunate Few and thus I was better off than most other people and would naturally succeed no matter what. Thanks to a YouTube Video a friend posted on my Facebook page I have done some further research and come to the conclusion that Talent is not necessarily equal to Success.
Being talented at something is not a guarantee that one will excel in that area. According to bestselling author, Malcolm Gladwell in an interview promoting his recent book, “The Outliers”, talent is not simply about being naturally good at doing something but rather gaining proficiency at that task over constant and ‘deliberate practice’. He stresses the “10,000 Hour Rule” which he uses to illustrate the point that to be truly great at doing something you need 10,000 hours of practice, which is also equal to about 4 hours of practice everyday for 10 years. Gladwell asserts that achieving greatness requires enormous amounts of time spent practicing; he used the musical talents of the greatest and most successful rock band in history, The Beatles, as well as the programming talent of the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, as examples. The Beatles performed live in a strip club in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times, doing 8 hour daily sessions from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time and Gladwell deduces that this incredible amount of time performing was critical to shaping their talent, “so by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.” Bill Gates gained access to a computer in his high school in 1968 at the tender age of 13 – he then spent way more than 10,000 hours programming it and any other computer he could lay his hands on. Gladwell interviews Gates, who says that unique access to a computer at a time when they were not commonplace helped him to succeed. Without that access and subsequent constant practice, Gladwell states that Gates would still be “a highly intelligent, driven, charming person and a successful professional”, but that he might not be worth US$50 billion or so he is worth today.
These and many other examples reveal the real truth about talent: Talent consists of a profound Love for something that is transformed into a Desire to succeed in turn inducing Constant and Deliberate Practice. I mean what if Bill Gates had not spent copious amounts of time programming, or The Beatles gave up playing long 8-hour stints at the German strip club, or I didn’t spend thousands upon thousands of hours reading everything I got my hands on. Would Gates be the wealthy computer genius he is today; would The Beatles be the greatest rock band; would my vocabulary be as polished and erudite as it is? People always ask me why I read so much and my response is always that love reading and I desire to improve my vocabulary and sentence construction and I am not quite at 10,000 hours of writing yet but I’m getting there, day by day, blog by blog. I have been involved in one kind of formal business or another for more than 3 years now and I gain more proficiency and experience in my various businesses as I spend more time deliberately practicing proposal writing, drafting of contracts, deal negotiations, understanding financial information and implementing ideas to create value so in another 7 years of continuing on this path I can guarantee that I will be a Business Guru who is wealthy and quite successful. It appears that the whole point of going to school from Kindergarten through to University, Internships, Apprenticeships and the like is just to equip a young inexperienced individual with their 10,000 hours of practice. It is important to note that it is only something that you love and are willing to work hard at, patiently and with resilience that you will become extremely skilled at doing – in other words your talent is equal to what you desire to constantly and deliberately practice. Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney said in reference to his job that, “You can’t get to places like this without working really hard, loving what you do...and having enormous amounts of energy, patience and resilience”. Note that he was with Disney for almost 30 years before becoming CEO. To reiterate, you may be lucky to have your talent but you will succeed only if you hone that talent with constant and deliberate practice because it takes a long time and massive amounts of effort and toil to succeed at anything so get to work amassing your 10,000 hours at the end of which you are warmly welcome to the much vaunted ranks of The Lucky Percent.
Cheers and may God bless you all!
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