08 Mar 2008 12:28:06 | Saleem Rana
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The only reason some people enjoy success while others fail is
because those who succeed persist in holding the vision of what
they want.
They succeed, in the first place, by creating a vision.
Then they persist in that vision. As it sinks deeper into their
minds, it becomes a driving obsession. It becomes their most
cherished value. And they spend all their time in trying to
materialize that value. This drives them to training themselves
to achieve their goal.
Most people believe that success is a result of a realized
talent. Talent is what people see. They see a bewildering array
of skills and conclude—incorrectly—that the talent made the
person brilliant. Others attribute it to motivation. Again, this
is the effect, not the cause that arises from a vision.
I contend that talent is cultivated from vision, and that as
vision deepens, as action toward learning and implementation
proceeds, skills develop and accumulate. The end result of
numerous small skills is a prowess or flair for doing something
that we call talent. Personal development happens incrementally,
in small quotas, in chunks.
How did Albert Einstein become the greatest thinker the world
has ever known? What is the wisdom we can gather from looking at
his success story? How did a patent office clerk achieve success
as a celebrity? The simple answer is that he was a genius. He
had more brain cells. He had more ability to think.
Yet a history of young Albert Einstein showed that he was not a
brilliant student. In fact, his teacher once sent a note to his
parents suggesting that he was wasting time attending school.
And as for genius—there have been many, many talented,
brilliant physicists and mathematicians.
What Albert Einstein had was a vision. He was driven by an
indefatigable curiosity about the nature of the universe. When
he was 16, he imagined what it might be like to ride the waves
of a light beam.
From this vision, Albert Einstein developed powerful inroads
into his ability to envision things in his mind’s eye. His
thought-experiments deepened in clarity and precision over many
years. They reached such intensity that they accumulated into
insights that answered in a most unorthodox way the riddles of
physics.
Later, when he died, it was found that he had an enormous
preponderance of brain cells that most normal people did not
possess.
It is my contention that just as a muscle that is constantly
exercised, his brain developed extraordinary connections and
fusions over a lifetime of intense usage.
Albert Einstein became a genius because he held a vision. His
skills at right-brain cognition developed over many years
created such a preponderance of insights that he just had to
discover how the universe glued together.
In a similar way, every one of us can develop remarkable
capacity in any field if we just hold the vision long enough,
shun distraction, and persist in our ideal despite everything
that comes our way to throw us off our chosen path.
The journey to accumulate a thousand skills begins with
developing the first one. Progress comes from sustainability of
vision.
You can be what you want to be if you hold it long enough and
ferociously enough to overcome all obstacles. And, in the end,
what you will gain will be exponentially greater than the sum of
all your efforts. It, in fact, be a true quantum leap.
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