The analyst Richard St. John has lead some researches to determine the keys of success. According to him, there are 8 things that really lead to success :
1- Passion : Do what you do for love, not for money
2- Work : Nothing comes easily, you have to work for it
3- Good : You have to be good doing what you do, and for that you must practice again and again
4- Focus : You must focus yourself on one thing
5- Push : You got to push yourself physically and mentally through shyness and self-doubts
6- Serve : To be useful for someone
7- Ideas : You must have original ideas
8- Persist : Do not give up when you encounter a problem.
To my mind, among all these keys of success, the most important is work. The author said that nothing comes easily and it's true, even if you have the passion, original ideas or if you're very good, you have to work for succeed.
And at the contrary if you have no ideas, no passion, if you can't focus on only one thing, you can still succeed whith hard work.
And there are a lot of examples :
- Even a great tennisman like Roger Federer, who is really good, persisting and focusing on tennis has to work a lot to succeed.
- From another side, a man like Arnold Schwarzenegger who started his life as a poor thin Austrian has became a very famous culturist, actor and politician thanks to a lot of work.
Then if you want to reach the top of the top, effectivelly you would need more than only work to succeed. To keep the previous example, Federer was born to be tennisman and that's why he is so good. As Newton was a genius, and that's why he discovered so many theories. But I think that whith work you can still go pretty far.
