Three speakers debate whether entrepreneurial success requires innate talent or comes from motivation and emotional connection. Speaker B says gut-level intuition can't be taught. Speaker C argues personal drive and following your inclinations matter more than genetics.
Chapters
You know, you're born with a certain thing here, you know, this kind of gut feeling, this kind of determination, you're born with it. I try to make the analogy of that some people are born with a talent. If you locked me in a room with with a piano teacher, for example, for one year, no doubt at the end I could perhaps knock out a rendition of "Roll Out the Barrel." Maybe. Would I ever be a concert pianist? Not in a million years. Because in that example, that person has a talent. And I think I was blessed with some kind of talent of some kind, you see, which— an eye for things, a very fast brain to see the end conclusion. Normally, the end conclusion, I'm very skeptical of what can go wrong. And that is something that I'm afraid to say you can't go and buy in a book somewhere or go and buy a bottle of entrepreneur juice in Boots or something like that. You're either born with it or not.
Finally, I want you to get over this notion that I find so annoying that so many people have, that success and power in life is dependent on something like genetics. Like, some people are born with a larger brain, or they have wealthy parents who are able to send them to the right school, or, or it's all a matter of luck. What really makes people successful and powerful in life— and it's not just me saying this, I read hundreds of books on the subject— What makes people successful is their degree of motivation. I could repeat it 100 times, but it's true every time I say it. When you are motivated, when you feel yourself emotionally engaged in the subject, you learn faster. You learn what could take somebody 10 years to learn, you can learn in 2 years. When you feel emotionally engaged with something, you're able to push past all the obstacles. The sense that it's genetics or the size of our brain or our parents' money, you can't control any of that, obviously. And they can become kind of crutches for some people. But the amount of motivation you feel, the emotional connection you have to what you're studying or doing, that is something within your control. That is something you can choose to take. And it is— You're going to find people giving you all kinds of great advice about your careers, about where you should go for your MBA, et cetera. But if there's one piece of advice that I think is more important than that, it is this idea of following these natural inclinations and creating your own career path and finding a way to engage those deepest motivating parts of your psyche.
My intention with this video was to spread understanding, not fighting. I want you to see that it's not one point of view or the other. You can pull and learn from both, especially the one that you don't immediately resonate with. Embrace the genius of the and.
