If you don't have talent, do you still have to work hard?
Some time ago, Zhang Ziyi was on the hot search.
The reason is a sentence she said on the reality show "I Am an Actor 3":
"To be in the arts requires talent, and effort without talent is meaningless."
This sentence instantly caused discussion among netizens.
Some people think that in order to succeed, "talent" is one of the very important factors: there are so many people who learn piano, but there are very few famous artists like Lang Lang; there are many people who are writers, but Mo Yan has only one; there are many people who study painting, and I have not seen how many "Qi Baishi" or "Picasso" have been trained...
There are also many who oppose: According to this logic, is there no need to work hard without talent? And, most of the world is ordinary people, so "effort" is meaningless?
Can people with poor talent succeed on their own efforts?
The answer, of course, is yes.
Zeng Guofan, a Han minister in the late Qing Dynasty, was a very ordinary, even a little low-talented person.
When he was taking the exam, he took the exam 7 times in a row before he won the Xiucai exam.
There is a widely circulated story that goes like this: a thief sneaked into Zeng Guofan's house at night, hid on a beam, and prepared to steal after Zeng Guofan slept. Unexpectedly, Zeng Guofan endorsed the book under the lamp all night, and for a long time, he could not always memorize it. The thief waited on the beam, and finally waited madly, jumped down and yelled at Zeng Guofan: "Why are you so stupid?" Isn't it just an article? I remember everything I hear on the beam! ”
With that, the thief memorized the article from beginning to end and flew away, leaving Zeng Guofan with a stupid face.
Loudi, Hunan Province, held a 10,000-car tour of Damei Mountain
This story may well have been fictional, but the fact that Zeng Guofan was stupid was well known at the time.
Zeng Guofan himself said: When I was a child, I was particularly stupid, and my father gave me lectures, but I just couldn't understand it, so that the poor old man repeated it over and over again, and when he walked on the road, he would suddenly repeat it, and when he slept in bed, he would suddenly repeat it, and he would repeat it to the point that he could not repeat it again. Alas, no way, who called me so stupid...
If you want to talk about "talent", most people probably think that Zeng Guofan is not "talented" at all, right?
However, he relied on his own efforts to go all the way up the clouds, and eventually became a famous military figure and politician in the late Qing Dynasty, to the point where he was under one person and above ten thousand people.
How did Zeng Guofan rely on his own efforts to finally complete the counterattack in life?
His efforts are inseparable from these three key factors:
Zeng Guofan began to study at the age of 5, and at the age of 14, he followed his father to take xiucai.
But their qualifications were mediocre, and they even took the exam 5 times, and each time they fell in the first place, which made Zeng Guofan and his father a joke in the local village.
Father and son are not discouraged, because the ancients said that failure is the mother of success, and it does not matter if you fail today, it is a big deal to take the exam again.
Later, the two of them studied hard and went to the examination room.
This time, Zeng Guofan's father passed the exam, but Zeng Guofan still fell on the list - what kind of mood would it be for a person who did not pass the exam 6 times in the imperial examination? Especially after the 6th time on the list, his examination papers were also used as negative teaching materials, which were hyped up, which was simply a large-scale "social death scene".
For most people, after many failed exams and humiliated, most of them will have self-doubts and whether to continue or not.
But Zeng Guofan did not think so, he was more assiduous, and it was another year after reading.
At the age of 23, Zeng Guofan once again embarked on the road of imperial examination.
This time, in one fell swoop.
On the road of Kao Xiucai, Zeng Guofan walked seven times, and it took a full 9 years from the age of 14 to the age of 23.
In the past 9 years, how many blows has he suffered, how many blank eyes, and how many people have denied him? We don't know.
But it is precisely this indomitable mentality that makes him more and more frustrated and courageous, proving to the world that even if a person has mediocre qualifications, he can achieve great things.
Zeng Guofan's success does not completely rely on his own "buried efforts", but also inseparable from the grasp of "opportunities".
As we said earlier, Zeng Guofan's road to the imperial examination was not smooth, and the results of several examinations in Beijing were not ideal. However, during the imperial examination, he received help from nobles.
This nobleman was mu zhang'a, the minister of military aircraft.
Mu Zhang'a admired Zeng Guofan's article very much and immediately took it as the third place of the first class. When the results of the imperial examination were submitted to the emperor for review, under the strong recommendation of Mu Zhang'a, the Daoguang Emperor promoted Zeng Guofan to a higher rank.
In this way, Zeng Guofan's results jumped to the second place in the first class of the imperial examination, and this result made zeng Guofan himself feel very surprised.
Since then, Zeng Guofan's career has been smooth sailing and rising step by step. He visited the emperor under Mu Zhang'a's ingenious arrangement, won the emperor's favor, and was immediately promoted to a cabinet university scholar, and the official residence erpin.
Of course, Zeng Guofan has never forgotten the "grace of knowing the encounter", whether he is serving in Beijing or going abroad to be an official, he will go to mu mansion to greet him.
Later, when the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement broke out, Zeng Guofan made a decisive transformation, "abandoning literature and following the military", established a new army, and trained diligently, making contributions to the late Qing court.
Some people say that ambition determines the fate of people: those who think the farthest go the farthest, and those who have no ideas can only stand in the same place.
At the age of thirty, Zeng Guofan set himself an ambition: to be a sage, not a mediocre.
As the saying goes, the country is easy to change, and the nature is difficult to move. If you want to become a "sage", your own bad problems have to be changed.
Therefore, Zeng Guofan first started with his most stubborn shortcoming, that is, "quit smoking".
Zeng Guofan had the habit of reading, even when he was fighting, and he had to read late every day, at this time, he relied on tobacco to refresh his mind.
It is undoubtedly a very difficult thing to quit smoking for many years.
On the second day of quitting smoking, Zeng Guofan had trouble sleeping and eating, and he wrote in his diary: "When I first quit smoking, I lost my milk. ”
I didn't expect that quitting smoking was harder than weaning!
A week after quitting smoking, Zeng Guofan was still in great pain.
He wrote in his diary: Since quitting smoking, my mind has wandered, there is almost no master, it is difficult to curb desire, and so on!
And once he made up his mind, he would never tolerate himself, no matter how painful and torturous, Zeng Guofan insisted on not touching the smoking utensils. Eventually, almost a month later, he finally succeeded in quitting smoking.
For Zeng Guofan, "quitting smoking" can be said to be an insignificant little thing, but it is through this "small thing" that we can see his determination to "change himself".
Zeng Guofan is a person with high ambitions and a strong sense of purpose.
It is precisely because of this that in the process of moving forward in life, he can obtain a steady stream of internal driving force, so as to overcome his own weaknesses, overcome external difficulties and temptations, and thus achieve extremely high life achievements.
We have all heard a saying called "three points are destined, seven points depend on hard work".
This sentence is to say that what kind of achievement a person can achieve, only three points rely on talent, and the remaining seven points are inseparable from the efforts of the day after tomorrow.
Just like on the scene of the variety show, when Zhang Ziyi said: "Efforts without talent are meaningless." ”
Another guest, Hao Lei, immediately objected: "Not everyone is born to act, and not everyone can refuse to make bad scenes, what is important is the process of their own accumulation and the process of hard work." ”
In fact, we all know that "choice is greater than effort", but it does not mean that "effort" is not important.
"Choice" is important, but if you don't work hard, a good hand will be destroyed by your "strength".
Back to the opening question: If you don't have talent, do you still have to work hard?
Seeing this, I believe you already have your own answer.