Talent is never enough..
Sunday, February 28, 2010 12:58I gave this speech during Vista Penang Toastmasters Club meeting (23-Feb,2010):
John C. Maxwell wrote a book titled “Talent is Never Enough”. For those who are wondering who John is, he is one of the leading international leadership guru who has sold more than 12 million copies of his book such as The 360 Degree Leader, Developing The Leader Within You & many more.
My fellow Toastmasters & Guest,
I’m not going to talk about the biography of John C. Maxwell in my speech today. What I plan to do for the next 6 minutes is to talk about the misconception about talent. Is talent enough to be successful in our life? I would like to share based on my research from John’s book, Talent is Never Enough and also from my personal observation.
I would like to start with what is talent? Based on our most trusted source, Wikipedia, talent is the natural ability or a gift in a person to do something without a need to learn how to do it. Obviously talent is already there in each of us since the day we are in our mother’s womb, just waiting for the right time to show it off. To name some of these famous talented people, Pablo Picasso & Leonardo da Vinci for their talent in art, Michael Jackson & The Beatles for their talent in singing, Steve Job and Bill Gates for their talent in technology leadership, Zinadeen Zidane & Maradona for their talent in football and not to forget Tiger Woods in his world of golf. All of these people have special talents that have somehow changed the way we live today.
However for all these talented people, talent alone is never enough to make them successful. Even though their talent does help but there are still many other factors that make them achieved their fame. As I’ve mentioned earlier, talent is just an ability hidden in all of us just waiting for the right time to reveal itself.
To make this happen there must be some internal & external factors that need to be synchronized with their hidden talent.
So what are these factors? In this book John has listed down 13 factors (11 internal & 2 external). I don’t think I have the time to share all these 13 factors, so I’ll just cover only 4 factors ( 3 internal & 1 external)
Let me start with the internal factors. Internally, for a talented person to be successful, that person must have the passion, take the initiative & maintain good character or “PIC” (passion, initiative & character). To illustrate how “PIC” works, let us look at Tiger Woods. He is the first African American to reach the top of the golf world with his talent. He was introduced to golf at a very tender age of 2 years old by his father and from that day onwards he built his passion in golf. Well obviously his talent is not enough because he has to work hard perfecting his swing every single day before any tournament. His passion & hard work has resulted in many victories for him to become world # 1. On top of that, he has portrayed a positive character in his career until recently everything good he gone because of his disloyalty in his marriage. For sure talent for Tiger Woods is never enough for him to sustain his success.
What about the external factor?
Your reputation in eyes of the public is one of the external factors. There is no way a talented person is regards as successful if the public is not acknowledging that. Again taking Tiger Woods as an example, he glamorous & wealthy life is not just because of his talent. The sponsorship & publicity that he received from his success i.e. his reputation have brought his family & himself to fame. Unfortunately immediately after his scandal was revealed throughout the world, many of his sponsors started to pull out their sponsorship because of his bad reputation to the public especially to ladies. That was really a big blow to him because majority of his wealth depends on these sponsorship. Again talent is never enough for Tiger Woods’s reputation.
This example I’ve shared with you today is an eye opener to many of us who thought to be successful in our life we will just need some sort of talent. That is why many of us started to blame our failures because we are lack of that talent. Unfortunately, there are many internal & external factors that will bring us to success. I hope my speech today is wake up call that talent alone is never enough and with that I end my speech.
Thank you
