‘Although you have the potential you are not doing well!’ That’s something we’ve heard quite a bit. A close look at that statement can break the myth of the potential or talent of a person playing a key role in how things turn out for us. Fortunately, talent plays a small role in our success at anything.

‘Practice makes a man perfect’ is a well-known saying. The practice could simply mean doing something regularly or being consistent at something. To get good at something it’s about doing and repeating just that. Sounds really simple, doesn’t it? Everyone has faced situations where we might have felt that this is not something that I could do, but when we start it, things just flow. It’s nothing that we control but we can be sure that once we start, it will happen. At no point in time could we say that we know what we are doing. It’s every day for itself. But consistence helps us pick things off from the last point and constantly progress.

There will be times when we think that it was a mistake to have taken up something tough or different but if we push ourselves enough things fall in place when we are least expecting it.

That’s when the big change could be seen and it’s completely cumulative. Any ‘Big change’ is an accumulation of the small things that we have been doing every day and consistently.

Achieving something big isn’t something that everyone manages to do. It may not be because few are blessed and talented, rather very few are consistent.

Potential without consistency can be painful to bear. It’s like having something good but not being able to do anything with it and therefore it amounts to nothing. But consistency does the trick for everyone. However small the improvement is, it will amount to something big when added over a long period.

So let’s take things one day at a time and focus on doing our best today irrespective of how things turn out to be. “Genius is 10% talent and 90% discipline” – Robin Sharma.