The secret of success

How far can one get? What are we capable of achieving? Is there a recipe for success? Well yes, it seems that there is! Studies have been carried out that claim that to achieve excellence in any field it is necessary to spend more than 10,000 hours at work. I don’t know who counted those hours, but I certainly agree that there have to be a great many hours, and that this doubtless has to be to first and fundamental ingredient in any recipe for success: the capacity for work, the application of willpower and the search for an ideal of perfection. But that’s not all: it’s essential to do some parallel mental work. It’s often the case that our fears become barriers that prevent us from developing our full potential. The power of the mind is much greater than we can imagine, and I’m increasingly conscious of the importance of “visualising oneself”. When we visualise ourself achieving what we want, we project that image and attract it, and are thus later able to reproduce it and achieve our ideal, which then ceases to be an ideal and becomes real. But in art there’s a third essential ingredient: talent, intuition or “soul”, as Lorca called it: that indescribable something. An artist isn’t worthy of the name if he doesn’t have that something. But talent is a responsibility, not a prize. Without work it is nothing, it becomes stagnate and ends up rusting. But these are really only ingredients. We can even simplify the recipe and make it look easier: if we’re capable of putting all our energy into something, of visualising ourself achieving something great, it’s very probable that we will.

Ana María Valderrama, Iberia Magazine, December 2011

See complete article