Are Your Attempts to Emulate Your Role Model’s Success Frustrating You?

No matter what your chosen field is, and I hope your potential allows you to fit into it, you probably have a role model, a person who has been in the field long enough before you, who has made some remarkable achievements, and whom you admire and love to the extent that you would like to be as successful as he is.

Be it Bill Gate if you are an entrepreneur, Oprah Winfrey if you are in the media, Barack Obama if you are in politics, Diego Forlan or Tiger Woods if you are in sports, or whoever successful person that you might idolize, all of them have found their way to the top in their natural talents.

“Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call”

This quote from R. W. Emerson says it all: every human being has been gifted with particular talents which with his spiritual, mental, emotional and physical faculties constitute his potential for becoming who and doing what he’s meant to be and to do in life. Yet too many people go through life trying to be someone else. No wonder most of them are frustrated and filled with a sense of uselessness. The root of their problem is a wrong picture of success and a disregard for their natural endowments.

Success is neither, the wealth of Warren Buffet, the fame of Oprah Winfrey, the eloquence of Barack Obama nor the grace of Adriana Lima. Though your desire to be as successful as they may all be is legitimate, you’ll never achieve real success in life trying to be one of them. Your efforts to be so can only lead you to failure and frustration which in turn, if repeated, will make you feel useless and willing to quit the race.

Your talents are, as part of your potential, clues to finding your life’s purpose.

They also determine, according to M. Buckingham and D.O. Clifton, your strength zone, the area you should focus on for maximum effectiveness as “each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his greatest strength”. Instead of trying to be somebody else and focusing on skills that you don’t have, you need to awaken to your innate gifts, and figure out what your calling is. Only then can you work at maximizing your potential, make full use of it in the field of your calling and impact the world. The key to real success in life is “finding your purpose, growing into your potential and sowing seeds that benefit others”.

In his book, Talent is Never Enough: Discover The Choice That Will Take You Beyond Your Talents, the American leadership expert John C. Maxwell quoted above reports that people can increase their ability in are by only 2 points on a scale of 1 – 10. His advice! Develop the talent that you have, not the one that you want.

How Can You Identify Your Talents?

Struggling to succeed with things that are not in congruency with your natural talents is a waste of time and energy that leads to frustration. It is high time to wake up and identify your innate abilities. Here what the authors of Now, Discover Your Strengths suggest to:

• Monitor your spontaneous reactions to situations you encounter
• Pay attention to your yearnings
• Consider the speed at which you learn a new skill
• Pay regard to your feelings when carrying out a task

You can be successful in the field of your calling, you can achieve even a greater success than the one achieved by your role model. You don’t need to be him or to acquire his talents though you can learn from his success, identify the principles and strategies that helped him, and emulate them. You are who you are, a unique individual with particular talents waiting to be all discovered, maximized and used to make a contribution in this world. In them, you will find your path. Your strength lies in your uniqueness.