When Talent is NOT Enough

 

            When Talent is NOT Enough

Life is tough but life gets tougher when your toughness is not tested to its limits. Comfort zones, anyone? That’s a no-brainer. Everyone of us would prefer ensconced in our own comfort zones but you can’t stay there forever. Circumstances will change. There will be many ‘moving parts’ in our life. Too many variables and unknowns that will shape and impact our next day, our tomorrow, our future.

Over at the NBA post season now hosted out of the ‘NBA bubble’ in Orlando, Florida, everything is down to the Final 4, the top 4 remaining teams vying for the NBA’s O’Brien Trophy. Pundits and media have all hoisted the Boston Celtics as the consensus winner over the Miami Heat. Out of sheer talent, Miami Heat is outmatched by the starters of Boston Celtics. But after two [2] games, the Boston Celtics is in a deep hole holding on to a 0-2 Eastern Conference Finals series handicap.

And except for the Miami Heat organization and its legions of fans, everyone is scratching their heads how the Miami Heat has bamboozled the Boston Celtics in the first two [2] close matches the past week. Ask the Miami Heat team, they will tell you it takes more than sheer talent to romp off with those wins against a tough nut to crack in Boston Celtics. Quoting Dominick Cruz, a popular American mixed martial artist, ‘Infuse heart, soul, spirit and passion because talent is not enough’.

Well said. That explains why the mind-boggling performance of Miami Heat at the NBA Playoffs. How do they play? It’s a total outpouring of intensity and passion. And all these are inter-connected by their emotional connection that are closely inter-twined. For forty eight [48] minutes, they run the game relentlessly whereas for the Boston Celtics, Coach Brad Stevens admitted that they can’t win games if they play for thirty six [36] minutes because what that creates is a gaping hole where they would fall.

Aligning ourselves to what’s going on in the NBA Playoffs, let’s take a leaf from Angela Duckworth, the popular American psychologist who kept harping ‘As much as talen counts, effort counts twice’. Behind all these principles is a straightforward 4-letter word spelled out G-R-I-T. As she defines it, ‘GRIT is the passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way’.

To reinforce GRIT as the key ingredient for us to further succeed in life, let’s piggy-back on GRIT which ends up as the acronym for GUTS, RESILIENCE, INITIATIVE and TENACITY. Yessirrrr, these are the drivers of the continuing Miami Heat successes now at the NBA playoffs.

To cap this off, sharing these proven equations in most of life’s successes.