[Discussion] Your natural abilities are only a small part of the story. What mainly determines your success in life is how much effort you are willing to put in, and how smart you work.

Preface

I took all the material from an article titled "The Three Factors that Determine How Successful You Are at Learning". If you want to read more about this topic with better formatting and links to relevant sources, go there.

Introduction

Let’s start with the obvious: natural abilities absolutely matter. That is, the smarter and more talented you are, the easier it will be for you to succeed.

However, in the vast majority of cases, our innate abilities cannot guarantee success, or prevent us from reaching our goals. In fact, the majority of studies show that factors such as self-discipline are as good and sometimes even better predictors of success than factors such as intelligence.

One study, for example, found that conscientiousness, or the trait of being “organized, purposeful, driven, and self-disciplined”, is the best predictor of academic achievement, and accounts for five times as much variance in students’ grades as does intelligence.

What this means for you

Essentially, your success at learning new material depends on three factors:

• How naturally-gifted you are.
• How hard you are willing to work.
• How optimized your work process is.

You can’t control how gifted you are. You can control how much effort you’re willing to put in, but working hard without working in a smart way is inefficient, and generally leads to poor results. As such, your focus should be on optimizing your work process, and doing things in the smartest way possible. This will not only contribute to your success, but will also save you time and effort, while making the work process itself far more enjoyable.

TL;DR

Your natural abilities don't usually guarantee success or failure. To accomplish your goals, focus on working hard, and on optimizing the work process as much as possible, to make sure that you make the most out of your efforts.

Again, full credit goes to: The Three Factors that Determine How Successful You Are at Learning, which also contains more useful information and insights on the topic.

Submitted May 12, 2018 at 06:11PM by randomusefulbits https://ift.tt/2Ki83Uy