Person of Talent

The fictional character Sherlock Holmes walks into a room where a crime occurred, spends ten minutes looking around and presto, he finds the perfect clue, the ideal way to solve the crime as if he was in the room when it all went down.  Viewers never notice what catches Holmes’s trained eye until later, and we all wonder how we never saw what was so obvious.   Now, we all know Holmes is not real, author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created him as a person of “genius.” Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “People of talent hit targets others cannot hit.  People of genius hit targets others cannot see.”  Holmes was a person of genius, Doyle gave him the knack of being able to understand the non obvious.

People of genius are scarce, and for any young leader or coach, they are difficult to duplicate.  Malcolm Gladwell wrote a best seller called Outliers, in which he never separated top achievers into categories—everyone was a person of genius.  In reality, we know there are people of talent who succeed, and also there are people of luck.  Since being a person of genius is rare, and being lucky can be just as unique, let’s focus on becoming a person of talent. 

Gladwell is right, as it takes 10,000 hours to master anything. It also takes passion and curiosity to stay at the top. 

Here are other critical habits one must have to become a person of talent:

1. Understand life backward, to better live it forward. 

2. Apply the opportunity cost lens with broad options and consider higher-level effects.

3. Grasp the awesome power of compounding, thus being in a persistent and steady-state --- never intermittent.

4. Honor the value of building great habits, one day at a time.

5. Be calm, be stoic and never impatient. 

We all might never become a person of genius, but we can ALL be a person of talent.

Just do these five things every single day. 

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