Yes, some people are born with passions and talents and they develop them. But many people who never achieve much are also born with talents and passions but they just let them lie dormant, they never develop them.
What this means is that we all come with raw materials in this world but they mean nothing until we develop them. Michael Jordan for example wasn’t so particularly talented until he put in an incredible amount of work than anyone else. Your talent won’t untap itself, it needs your effort.
Mental poverty is mental darkness and this is when you operate from a place of fixed mindset. When you achieve something new or novel, you experience the ‘novelty effect’ – the short-term boost in performance that comes from changing the environment around you.
The fun part is, you can actively use it to make your life better. When the brain experiences this ‘novelty effect’, it secrets a chemical called dopamine. Once it tastes that feeling of euphoria, it says, “please do that again, I really enjoyed it!”
This is the neuroscience of success and that’s how success breeds success because once you taste the sweetness of success, your brain secrets the happy chemical that can be addictive, especially in the context of success.
So, passions and talents alone don’t make any progress, they are more like any unrefined natural resource that you can think of – rough gold, diamond, or platinum which don’t value much until they are processed and refined.
Success comes as a result of consistent action which is linked to brain chemicals associated with happiness called motivation.
This leads to a person adopting a growth mindset that keeps them trying things out and staying focused for long periods of time because the brain knows that the results will be sweet.
