Wednesday 25 May, 2011

Talent is a Four Letter Word



Talent is the most useless thing to have. Because being talented doesn't encourage you to change yourself and adapt. But it still gets you the results. But what happens when things change and require you to adapt. The results stop coming and then an amazing realization dawns upon you - 'Change is very hard to make'. To put it short, you are in the middle of nowhere and stuck without a map or a compass.

So am I arguing that talent is totally not required? Not at all. All I am saying is that talent is over-rated. Take a cricketer as an example; you don't have to master all the shorts to become a good batsman. Sourav Ganguly mastered the drive and the cut and ended up scoring more than 10,000 international runs. His talent wasn't even comparable to Sachin's or Dravid's, but he was as popular and successful too. His attitude led him to cover his weaknesses and use his strengths. His success only proves that talent is useless unless you know how to use it.

Nothing drives home a point than a comparable analogy. Here is one for this. Talent is like water in a bucket and attitude is like the bucket that gives shape to the water. A bucket without water is of no use and water without a bucket is lost. My point: even a small drop of water needs a bucket to give it shape.

This article was inspired after watching this video by Harsha Bhogle.

2 comments:

  1. Nice analogy because this is the law of nature as stated by Darwin. Anything that fails to cope up with the environment or nature, cease to exist.

    So, in the arena of skills, anybody who fails to cope with the change will eventually be left behind.

    There is one more factor that comes to me and it is a 4 letter word - LUCK. There might be some entities which might not have the capacity of adapting themselves to the new environment or might need more time. So, they have to meet their dusk for no fault of theirs.

    To fit LUCK in the bucket analogy, LUCK is more to do with the quality of the bucket. What if the bucket has a crack? The water in the bucket will be drained out!!!

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  2. Yeah, anything that fails to adapt dies. and the decision to change comes from a strong attitude..

    About luck, didn't factor that in the analogy.. but urs seems to be cool..! And LUCK is definitely another four-letter word (literally and figuratively)..

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