Would you rather be talented or determined, if you had the choice? The notion of talent and hard work is often found in certain fields, such as sports and art. We can acknowledge the fact that the outcome in both cases is success and achievement. Generally, people tend to relate talent to art, for instance, music or poetry, and associate hard work with sports, especially individual sports. Besides, these days, there are plenty of activities through which people can discover a talent in themselves.
It is important to note that, talent has always been synonymous with greatness. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, talent “is a natural ability or aptitude”. Therefore, talent is considered innate, which means that any qualities can be discovered at any age, whereas hard work is a characteristic based on persistence and needs a certain amount of time to actually see progress and then achieve brilliance. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart became a genius at the tender age of seven before he began his journey all around Europe. Furthermore, talent reaches a level that hard work can not achieve, not even with several years of dedication and consistency. According to a Scientific American article, fewer than 5 people out of 10,000 have perfect pitch. Also called “absolute pitch”, perfect pitch is the ability to recognize and re-produce a musical note. Mariah Carey, Beethoven, Ella Fitzgerald and a few more are known for having this gift naturally, which a random person could not get by practising on a regular basis, even for a very long period of time. Talent has considerable benefits in terms of level of success and potential.
However, many successful people have demonstrated that hard work actually beats talent. Mike Tyson once said: “I don’t believe in talent, (…), as long as you have a lot of determination and will power, that’s all you need”. First of all, hard work is based on perseverance. This idea of reiterating consistently the same types of exercises usually comes from either hunger or education. As a matter of fact, someone is relentless because they have either been raised to always want to do better or they have been through so much struggle and pain in their life that they decided to make a change. “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”. This quote attributed to Tim Notke, a high school basketball coach, explains how talent actually needs to be practised regularly and highlights the fact that any talented person who is not working hard will never get ahead of a person who does not have talent but is working hard. Michael Jordan even said: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships”. There is no talent without hard work.
In conclusion, talent and hard work have both shown advantages and disadvantages to support the statement. Personally, I would say that hard work will always beat talent. While, I believe having a talent is a gift and that anyone who has one should benefit from it. Although, I do not consider myself as talented in a certain field or maybe I have not found a talent in myself yet. I have been practising fencing for 13 years now. I really started to get involved in this sport 5 years ago. I have taken part in multiple competitions since then, and after all these years, although my level has evolved considerably, I am not among the best in my category. However, I still wake up at 6 o’clock every morning, train 10 hours a week, trying to be a better person than I was yesterday. This is my definition of hard work as a talent.