Often, when people see someone achieve something great, they believe that the person had some huge talent that others don’t. Regardless of whether they are a concert pianist or computer guru, footballer or scientist, they usually have some talent. But what most people don’t like to admit is that ambition will win over talent most of the time. Here are a few reasons:
TALENT CAN BE WASTED
Talent alone does not guarantee success. Not every talented person will use their natural ability to its full potential. It is only when talent is combined with ambition that things begin to unfold. Ambition needs little added to go somewhere great. If you have an ambitious drive, you can create an opportunity for yourself, even though you may not feel as talented as others. We will rarely find an ambitious person who did not achieve anything, but finding unsuccessful people with huge talent is really quite easy.
TALENT CAN BE TAUGHT
While not everyone would agree, whatever comes naturally to some people can also be taught to others. As a result, we could say that the people with talent are not as ‘special’ or ‘unique’ as we thought, they only had a head start. If a person has plenty of ambition, and makes the effort to learn, they can become as ‘talented’ as those who had the natural ability. In other words, an ambitious person can learn talent, but we cannot say a talented one, on the other hand, may not be able to learn ambition.
TALENT CAN QUIT
Vince Lombardi, a famous American football coach, once said, “A quitter never wins and a winner never quits”. Despite having huge talent and a bright future ahead, a person without ambition may not have the motivation to keep going when faced with pressures, challenges and failures. Quitting is easy, but ambition, on the other hand, generally takes each disappointment and failure in stride, learning to overcome and move on. Scientists like Issac Newton and Albert Einstein continued pursuing their dreams and passions even though some of their experiments failed. They strived hard to reach their goals and only rested when they succeeded. In the game of life, a finisher without talent still went further than a genius who quit along the way.
While having a lot of talent and ambition is ideal, when it comes down to it when you have ambition in your life more things will seem achievable. So, when you see someone achieve something great, don’t just think it was because of talent, admit that hard work and determination were needed to attain it.
Source: http://wallstreetinsanity.com/4-reasons-ambition-is-more-important-than-talent/
