Koyum Kolade Afolabi's Blog.

 IF TALENT SLEEPS, HARD WORK WILL OVERTAKE TALENT.

Talent, to my best understanding is the ‘unusual’ natural ability to do something very well, especially in areas that can be ‘developed’ by training.

Talent is also someone who has talent; as defined above.

Hard work on the other hand, is the ability to work diligently and industriously.

With the definitions stated above, it is to an extent, easy to relate the topic.

You’ll agree with me that there are a lot of talents out there with high potentials and the same you will agree with me that there are a lot of people out there with no potential, even though, they once were talents. What probably happened to them was that they slept and allowed hard work to overtake them till they no longer had what it takes to compete with their hardworking counterparts.

The issue of talent and hard work is something that happens in almost every aspects of life; education, football, writing, dancing and even in production.  

Nigeria, with a population of about 170 million people is one of the countries with the best natural talents and human resources. Why then are we still a developing country? Why do we still lack even ‘normal’ things? It is because what we have here is just talent, and most times, talents that don’t want to develop their potentials.

At the beginning, talents here from Africa and the ones from the rest of the world have the same potentials, but as time goes on, the ones from the rest of the world overshadow my African brothers , this, because, they don’t just rely on their talents, they put in more efforts and work harder.  A good example in football is Nigeria’s John Obi Mikel and Argentina’s Lionel Messi. They both were almost on the same level and both were debatable to be the world’s best young talents but at the moment, Obi is struggling for a playing time while Messi on the other side has won the world best player award four times and the runner up three times. This is because Messi didn’t just rely on his talent; he worked harder so as to beat the one who has talent but didn’t want to work hard and the one who is hardworking but not as talented as he was.

Nigeria or any African country has never won the senior FIFA world cup, but has won the junior ones. Our young ones are more talented, their old ones are more fulfilled.

Nigeria; a country with very fast athletes, why don’t we hold records in athletics? Why do we allow ourselves to be overtaken by people we once had potentials than?

There are a lot of ways in which your talent may leave you. Pride, over confidence and under confidence are some of them.

Together, we can do something to reduce the way in which talents in our environment sleep. We can be hardworking, we can educate and enlighten. Enough of blaming the government for our personal issues.

We are Africans, we are talented, lets wake up, we can be better than we are.

If you are a talent make up your mind this moment, you are not going to sleep any longer, you will stay awake and you won’t give the chance to hard work with no talent to overtake you.

Talent is good, hard work is better, talent + hard work is the best.

You are talented and the best at what you do, have you ever wondered how well and better than your former self you will be if you put in hard work? Ponder!

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