When we published our article “how to know what to do for a living“, we said that you should look for something you are good at, that you feel passionate about and that people will pay you for. So far, so clear. In fact, any motivational speaker you ask will tell you to discover your talent and work very hard at it. That way, the results will come. Fine, but… what if your greatest talent is mediocre? Put another way, what if you were born not being the best at anything? (That is the most likely case.)
Not everyone is born the best at something, and you have to accept that. But there is no need to get depressed about it, because in reality, despite what we are sold, with a few exceptions most successful people are not better than everyone else at any one thing. Instead, they manage to put together a very effective mix of small things, and those are what really matter for success.
Amancio Ortega is not a good salesman, nor is he a great designer. Bill Gates is not the best programmer on the planet, nor is he a visionary. Steve Jobs never had the knowledge needed to develop the products he sold. He knew what he wanted, but he did not know how to build it. Without Steve Wozniak, Apple would not exist today, and without Steve Jobs, Wozniak would be just another of the many geeks out there.
(Read: What highly successful people were doing at 25)
If these people had focused only on their talent, they would have failed in life, because their talent did not make them stand out from everyone else.
Even if your skills are mediocre, if you combine many small mediocre skills you can create enough potential value to succeed in different fields. If Steve Jobs had met Larry Page (Google), Google would have physical stores all over the world today and would have created the iPhone running Android.
If Bill Gates had decided to go into the car industry, he would probably be competing with General Motors today.
What talent or skills does a businessperson need to succeed?
The truth is that you need to learn all kinds of things you will never learn at university, such as negotiation, discipline, enthusiasm, people skills, body language, communication skills, and the ability to spot the talent you need in the people you want alongside you on your business journey.
If we start from the premise that no successful person has achieved success alone, we can see that this comes from the need to complement one another’s talents. Warren Buffett himself says that Berkshire Hathaway would not be the company it is today if it had not been for Charlie Munger.
We could name hundreds of entrepreneurs and billionaires whom we now see as great geniuses and visionaries, but the reality is that they were people without great talents when they started out, and over time they kept refining their skills until they became the people we see today.
If he had had the necessary talent, George Soros would not have had to work as a waiter and a warehouse porter. He would have gone straight to Wall Street. (Read: Billionaires who started with nothing: from rags to riches)
In other words, it can be quite common to find people with individual talents and skills. In fact, there are a great many talented people who have failed. A combination of skills, on the other hand, is harder to find.
Many people make the mistake of focusing on improving their weaknesses, when what really matters is improving and building on our strengths, because those are our competitive advantage. There are a couple of things that all successful people have in common:
They never give up, and they never stop learning and improving. Likewise, most of them have acquired a set of habits that are more powerful than any talent.
In short: if you have no special talent, congratulations, because you are like the vast majority of today’s successful people.
Further reading
- The 8 beliefs of successful people
- 21 things young graduates should know and accept in their twenties
Featured image: Maksym Kozlenko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
