Posted on 09/13/2014 4:36:16 AM PDT by Kaslin
I once knew a guy who wanted to be a singer. I didn’t think he could sing very well, but in all fairness, that never stopped Justin Bieber. In any case, I inquired as to whether he was in a band. He said, “no.” I asked whether he had a demo tape. Nope, he didn’t. I wondered if he was regularly performing anywhere or getting lessons. Uh-uh, he wasn’t. Baffled, I asked him how he expected to become a singer without doing any of those things. He told me that he was hoping to be “discovered” by someone in the music industry.
A lot of people might think that sounds perfectly ridiculous, but don’t we see it in the movies all the time? Isn’t that what happened with Harry Potter and the Percy Jackson series? Doesn’t Professor X do that in the X-Man movies? How about Star Wars?
In the real world, it seldom works like that. Chances are, no one who can really change your life for the better is going to “discover” you because 500 other people who do the same thing as you are already trying to get their very limited attention. As Abe Lincoln said, "Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”
Of course, other people assume that they won’t be discovered because the really exceptional talents are so inherently amazing that they stand out in a crowd. To them, great ability is a gift. This is the theme of The Bourne Identity movies, Frozen, Ender’s Game and almost every super-hero movie other than Batman along with an almost unlimited number of other movies where we see people who practically have super human levels of ability despite never seeming to train, practice or do anything to hone their skills.
Many of us buy into this idea because of professional basketball and football players. Obviously, the players who make it have certain genetic gifts that allow them to compete. But, is that really why they made it? Roughly 1-in-25 high school football players make it to college and then 1-out-of-every 14 college athletes eligible for the NFL draft each year get picked. The odds of making it as a pro-basketball player are just as daunting. Roughly 3 in 10,000 high school players ever make it to the pros – and those are two of the sports where physical skills have the biggest impact. In other words, there are loads of players with as much athletic ability as Kobe Bryant of Peyton Manning who never even cut it as bench warmers in the pros.
When you get beyond a very small number of sports, raw genetic talent has a very small impact. The people who are the best at a profession are typically the ones who like it enough to outwork, out study and out hustle the other people in their profession year after year. The most genetically gifted surgeon, salesman or teacher who graduates from the best college isn’t in the same league as the person with middling natural talent who has been working diligently for a decade. Thomas Sowell was right when he said, “Experience trumps brilliance.”
Worse yet, Hollywood has moved beyond the incredibly gifted savant who’s great to the “average” guy with no particular talents who somehow manages to save the day despite having no appreciable skills. The hero in Kung-Fu Panda likes to eat a lot and somehow that helps him become the “chosen one.” Even if Hobbits are generally stealthier than other creatures, Bilbo Baggins was utterly unremarkable and there was nothing about him that should have given Gandalf the idea that he could be the linchpin of their group. Then there are movies like Rando, The Lego Movie, or one I just caught this week, Ride-Along. After failing to show the most basic skills in every situation related to police work, Kevin Hart breaks a huge case and saves a tough, competent cop from an impossible situation using skills he gleaned from playing a video game.
There’s nothing wrong with playing video games. It’s fun and there are even some people I know who’ve made a living in the industry as game designers or believe it or not, even professional gamers. But, guess what? Those people aren’t just having a blast with their friends playing their favorite games, they worked their behinds off, day-in and day-out to make it in a competitive industry. There are an awful lot of people out there, playing video games, partying and goofing off who think they have oodles of untapped potential. Maybe they’re right about that, but the sad fact of the matter is that someone with great untapped potential will probably fail if they don’t spend enough time preparing for the day they get an opportunity. Movies love to play up “heart,” but in the real world, “heart” loses to preparation 99 times out-of-100.
That’s particularly relevant because Hollywood portrays thriving corporations and successful businessmen who’ve risen to their top of their fields as evil so often that it’s practically a cliché. The Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil series, Weyland-Yutani from the Alien series, Omni-consumer from the Robocop series, Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg from the 5th Element, Ebeneezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol, etc., etc., etc., from here to infinity. To be a rich, successful businessman who put in long hours working his way up to the top in the movies is to be unethical, a drone or a greedy sociopath who’d kick a puppy down the stairs to make 5 more dollars.
This is the mentality that makes people think that the “rich” and “successful” must either be lucky or alternately, they must have done something wrong by default. Meanwhile, in the real world, those are the guys living great lifestyles, marrying the hottest women and providing people with every product they love from iPods to Coca-Cola – and the truth is that most of them deserve it.
Recently, PNC Wealth Management conducted a survey of people with more than $500,000 free to invest as they like, a fair definition of “wealthy,” and possibly “millionaire” once you begin including home equity and other assets. Only 6% of those surveyed earned their money from inheritance alone. 69% earned their wealth mostly by trading time and effort for money, or by “working.”
The truth is, the American dream is still out there if you’re willing to educate yourself, work hard, work smart and save your money. It’s not about doing the right thing, it’s about doing the right thing every day, over and over for decades. It’s about working as an intern without pay, working two jobs if it needs to be done and foregoing the flashy car because you want a bigger cushion in your bank account.
Hollywood isn’t going to celebrate you for doing that. In fact, they may cast people like you as the villain and some Hollywood actor like Sean Penn may complain that YOU aren’t “paying your fair share” when you finally start making some serious money at fifty after a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone. Cher will tell you that you’re “greedy” for being upset that the government is taking so much of your money and giving it to people who don’t work half as hard as you do. Michael Moore will have a press conference outside one of his mansions to declare that people like you are ruining America because when your small business took off and you made a fraction of what he makes off of one of his films, you didn’t pay your employees what he considered a high enough wage.
What it all comes down to is that when you start to feel as if Hollywood is shaking its knobby finger directly at people like you, that’s when you know you’re on the right track.
Well put, John Hawkins.
Hollywood needs to get with American jobs.
Jobs.
The other side of this coin, the far bigger side of the coin, if you will, is that you can be one of the uncountable people who "worked their behinds off, day-in and day-out" and never hit it big. This is true not only of sports teams and movie casts, but Silicon Valley start-up employee rosters and Fortune 500 upper management ranks.
This is the mentality that makes people think that the “rich” and “successful” must either be lucky or alternately, they must have done something wrong by default.
Half true, half motivational speaker "you can be anything you want to be" happy-talk to keep you on the treadmill all your life. Again, you can be as good of a software engineer as a guy who's already got a million dollars worth of google stock, but maybe you didn't live here when they were interviewing for that position. Or any of a million other differences that have nothing to do with your skill.
Asserting that luck can never have anything to do with the success of Person A vs Person B is simply foul propaganda to explain away the simple fact that we cannot all be millionaires, so many of the rest of us are working our behinds off, day-in and day-out, simply to enrich those higher up in the economic food chain.
God helps them that helps themselves.
“It’s not about doing the right thing, it’s about doing the right thing every day, over and over for decades.”
Yep. No other way around it.
IOW: ‘Success is Preparation, meeting Opportunity.’
But Preparation meeting Opportunity does not necessarily lead to success, that’s my point.
Hollywood and lying are interchangeable words.
Amen!
Completely agreed.
But America, needs to support American jobs. Especially the GOP.
Stop sending jobs elsewhere. For crying out loud.
My only complaint is that he misunderstands Bilbo’s role in The Hobbit.
It’s not very difficult to be one of the BEST in your industry.
I am the absolute BEST in the trucking field. ALWAYS on time, NEVER had an accident, impeccable customer service skills, etc and my company has acknowledge my brilliance with pay bonuses along with recognition.
However this industry is NOT going to make you rich and quite frankly, I’m rather bored with it as trucking is just a job.
I know my limitations but most people STILL do not.
Dreams are nice but in reality, 90% of us will work in jobs we don’t particular care for in order to pay for homes and feed our children.
It’s called LIFE and humans have been doing it for a couple thousand years.
I see so many of my friends raising their children to believe that they have marvelous futures ahead of them because they are just so WONDERFUL and SPECIAL that they will surely be rewarded just for showing up.
My folks taught us that we had a reasonable future ahead of us if we found out what we were good at and worked like dogs to make it happen.
Once I was goofing around with my Dad and I said, “Maybe I’ll just marry a rich man!” He replied, “Where are you going to meet him? At the bus stop?”
So yes, to make it, you have to show up...but you have to show up with SOMETHING.
Some kids have so much Hollyweird influence today as if that is their education and source of reference. Kids should be taught and modeled how to work for success and then how to handle and balance finances. The non_hard work and entitlement mentality plus everyone is a star to be found mentality of Hollyweird is a poor source of reference for a successful future save for a few. Besides most Hollyweird stars are scrooged up in the head.
“Dreams are nice but in reality, 90% of us will work in jobs we don’t particular care for in order to pay for homes and feed our children. It’s called LIFE and humans have been doing it for a couple thousand years.”
That’s true, too. I feel blessed to be able to do what I love for a living...and someone is willing to pay me for it, too! :)
But, I have worked soul-sucking jobs as well.
bttt
totally agree. You can work your behind off every hour of every day, do the right thing over and over and still be just getting by.
Agree and disagree with the premise of this article. Agree that hard work is the key to success. Disagree that hard work alone is always what leads to success. Creativity, IHMO, can’t be ‘muscled’, and creativity is a huge driving engine of innovation and progression of humanity. There are other things like that. I don’t know much about sales, but I would venture a guess that even if you work for 14-16 hours a day as a salesman, if you don’t have good social skills, the man or woman who does have them may do substantially better than you - working less hours. Yes, arguably you can become ‘better’ socially by working hard at it, but some people by the nature of their genetics and upbringing just have better social skills - without having to work so hard at it.
It’s the nature vs. nurture issue in a slightly different way. Both are important.
The other issue that can’t be ignored, if one is honest about the world, is that deceitful, selfish, manipulative behavior is also, unfortunately, sometimes the fuel to success. A substantial number of ‘success’ stories involve stealing other peoples ideas, intellectual property, and contributions - often after many years of hard work by the people who wind up the victims. Some Nobel prizes have been won that way. In many circles, working hard just gets you tired, if you aren’t capable of watching your back.
I don’t know.
We have shipped entirely too many jobs to China.
Bring back jobs to America. We currently buy (last year) 440 billion dollars of goods imported from China.
We only sold last year, 122 billion dollars to China.
We are sending our jobs away. Bring them back to America.
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