Why Talented People Don’t Succeed At Work

by Solange Lopes | Nov 10, 2014 | Career | 1 comment

Photo: nicoleisthenewblack.com

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work” – Stephen King. Or is it really?

There are a lot of talented people out there, people who were just born with an innate ability to do things most of us would need light years to complete. Take drawing, for instance. After many drawing lessons and programs through school, I still draw stick people with humongous heads and itty-bitty arms and legs. It’s just not my thing. Could it be if I applied myself and worked hard at it, I could draw spectacular people in amazing colors and shapes? Probably, but I’d much rather have dessert…

Scott Dikers, one of the founders of the reputable news source the Onion, thinks hard work is much more important than any talent in the world. Malcom Gladwell, author of the best-seller, Outliers, would probably agree with him, as the premise of his book is around hard work and circumstances winning over raw talent. And we can all agree that with hard work, dedication and consistency, the human brain can master just about anything, almost.. Yet, as much as we may argue to the contrary and deny the importance of innate, raw ability, talent does matter, much more than we may think…

So why are there so many talented people who can’t seem to get it right at work? Why do so many of the most famous business gurus, from Henry Ford to Walt Disney, and some of the biggest scientists, thinkers and investors, the likes of Einstein and Thomas Edison, encounter some of the biggest personal and professional failures at first? Could it be that talent is really not enough for success? That hard work is more valued in our society, and raw talent frowned upon as the “lazy” privilege of a few? Or could it be that our professional landscape, rife with myths of optimal productivity, excessive automation, and damaging competitiveness, is actually unable to recognize and leverage talent?

I’ve had the opportunity of meeting extremely successful people in the corporate sphere. Yet what struck me most about them was not their out-of-hte-box ideas, or innovative decision-making, or even sheer originality. No, many, if not most of the extremely successful “corporate” people also happen to “outwork” and “out-network” everyone else. Many of them are the ones at work after hours, and the ones at the exclusive happy hours around the boss. Is there anything wrong with that picture? No! Yet, if we want more people to succeed at work and work in itself to be be more challenging and fulfilling for everyone, there’s a whole lot that is missing from this picture…

Yes, talent is not enough, you need hard work to bring it all to fruition. Yet, when original, innovative and raw talent is overlooked in favor of robotic increased productivity and inside favoritism, we all suffer. There’s a reason millennials want to work for themselves, and why Corporate America is not comfortable with this generation of fulfillment-seeking, fearless, passionate, unconventional individuals.

And that may be the reason why so many talented people are not successful at work, and why work, in return, is not as successful as it could be…

The Corporate Sis.