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The Most Successful People Are Not the Most Talented
Nothing will block you from what you really want to do when you realize this.
The other day, I read a study by MIT Technology Review that Darius Foroux shared. The study analyzed the relationship between smartness and success and concluded that the most successful people are not the most intelligent ones but just the luckiest.
“The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average, and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.” — Emerging Technology from the arXiv
Although I agree that people’s success has nothing to do with how intelligent or talented they are or how hard they work, I believe that something else influences how much they achieve in the long term, and it’s not luck; it’s how consistent they are over time.
To me, you can achieve the same success as many people if you are consistent enough in your goals.
Think about anything you want to achieve.
It can be as simple as fitness, as creative as having an account with thousands of followers on a social network, or as ambitious as an established company.
In all those areas, there will always be someone better than you already doing it. In all those places, there will always be someone who will tell you that the market is already saturated and that you are not good enough to stand out among all the existing good and successful ones.
However, if every day you get up and do something about that goal, in about 2, 3, or even five years, you will probably have the same experience as them, and the difference is that you will still be there while many of them will have already given up.
When I started writing here, I didn’t even know proper English. Thanks to the classes I took at work, I had a simple vocabulary, but I had never written a professional article in my life (outside of school assignments).
My first article was awful. The words made no sense; no one cared about the topic, and it didn’t go anywhere. In my first month of writing, I earned 0.32 dollars.
