Is Being Consistent More Important Than Being Talented?

Talented people can get you off to a quick start.  The good news: Consistency is what carries your finished product across the finish line.

It’s tempting to assume that talented people will always win. And at first, they usually do. A talented novice can beat a hard-working beginner for a few weeks. But careers aren’t built in a few weeks; that’s a matter of years. And over the years, things change.

Here’s the reason: if you improve a little each day, those incremental improvements accumulate.  The accumulation over a year of those tiny everyday increments has the power to move you far away from your starting point. Talent,  however, has a cap that it cannot go beyond. If a talented person stops practising or increases his abilities, he will be equal to where he was at the beginning, and in time, a mediocre person will be on his level.

This is very clear in tech and creative jobs, because these fields keep changing:

• In Tech, New tools and skills in tech come out all the time. Being smart helps you learn coding, but you need to keep learning regularly to stay good at your job in the future.
• In creative jobs, talent can help you create great work. But to build a career, you need to keep making work again and again over time, and only being consistent can do that.
• In both fields, people who keep working and sharing their work even if it’s not perfect learn faster and improve more than those who wait for inspiration or depend only on natural talent.

Here’s where it gets tougher: No one is born talented but consistent. Consistency is a choice that you have to make yourself day after day, despite gaining any immediate benefits.

However, this isn’t just about selecting one or the other. Talent may get you out of the blocks quickly, but the length of the race is determined by consistency. The most successful individuals tend to have both talent and consistency, but if you can only gamble on one, then the consensus view among experts is that consistency is the only attribute that you can fully control.

So, what do you think: is talent still underrated, or have you seen consistency win in real life?