During the EXIT Tour I used to give a lecture: “Prevention against the unemployment”. I lead the topic for the high-school students towards being successful in their professional life. How can we be successful? How is the success defined? Malcolm Gladwell defines it as a combination of talent, diligence and opportunity. Ease equation: SUCCESS=TALENT+DILIGENCE+OPPORTUNITY
Talent is something we are born with, something what (after we will develop it) will help us to be unique. But to know how to use the talent we need a diligence effort. Man need approximately 10,000 hours of exercise, practice, training to get its talent to the point of mastering it. This time is too long to be able to start and catch it up during the adult life (if we neglected it before). This summer I started to learn to play the drums. It is clear to me, though I have a talent, I will never catch up with those who started as teenagers. Simply, I am not able (and cannot and even I do not want to) find as much time to practice as the masters did. Moreover success is not even ensured by this second precondition. To gain the success we need to have an opportunity to show our talent with our diligence. If there is no opportunity the success will never come.
This summer I got an opportunity to think about the success more closely. Maybe you know it, when “bad luck” is sticking to your heels. I do not know why the bad circumstances love to meet each other in one time. One week they piled up. I had to pay a lot for my teeth, I was at a camp and my colleague from a partner organization called me to solve a problem and get to solve it right a way. The same day I got the evaluation from the European Leadership Forum where I have got the lowest evaluation for my teaching (compared to other colleagues from the teaching team). That was something new for me because I am not aware I would ever be mediocre in anything, and not to be the worst. The same week I was at camp. Not much was expected from me. I taught two girls how to play electric guitar. Their hands touched a guitar for the first time in their life. Moreover one of them was not willing to give up her long nails. I did not any progress. Then, I was supposed to translate one talk from English, but my colleague told me he had found someone else… The whole time I felt like leaving for pension from my job, you love. Everyone respects you and you can get a “Rolex watch” (or very expensive one) as a goodbye gift, but you know, that your time is at the end! You are not needed anymore.
Although it was pretty unpleasant experience, I know that it was really good one to start to think about: “What is the real success for a man?” And what if someone does not have a talent or has a problem to be diligent or will not get the opportunity? I thought a lot about my identity in Christ, that we are talking so much in our Christian circles. And right there, I have partly understood the teaching about the success. The success is ensured just and only by Him and in Him. I am talking about the success that is not connected with the fact – what we know or what we can do. But it is connected with His indescribable grace and acceptance. That is what I consider the real success is – to belong to Him!
Phf