Dayniz Yael Velasco Coronel

PC 101L Life Skills

Mr. Arnold Santos

12 July 2022

Hard Work And Develop Your Talents

Last week I had an offer to change jobs, they offered me a better salary than I had at

the time, the offer included more responsibility and using some technologies that I still

haven't mastered very well. I was undecided on whether or not to take the opportunity of

that good work, I did not feel capable, when I remembered the question I worked on in the

week 12 lesson in the writing practice, ¿What counts more hard work or talent? I must

admit that a part of me had a fixed mindset, I believed that I was born with certain abilities

and that I was not going to change that. But also a voice inside me reminded me that I am a

Daughter of God and that as such I have inherited a divine potential and that if I work hard

to develop it I will be able to do wonderful things with my talent.

I believe that both are important, hard work and talent, because when we work hard

we develop our heavenly potential that was hidden or we didn’t know we had. Many

companies fight for “talent”, but spend 20% of their resources on finding talent and 80% on

training. This means that hard work can develop talent, it is better to find a person willing

to learn and progress and invest in it because in the end you will end up developing a talent

that you have hidden. 

 When I studied lesson 3, I found the growth mindset, this belief that your abilities

can change if you work hard, if you try again and again you develop a new skill. The

president Heber J. Grant thought “What we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not

because the nature of the task itself has changed, but because our potential to do it has

increased.” I think If we strive every day to develop our talent by working hard, we can

reach our divine potential. If we work hard we can change our potential and get new gifts.

Our Heavenly Father gives us spiritual gifts and it is our duty to develop it to serve the

Church and the world.

The growth mindset taught us too that we can learn from difficult tasks. That failure

is an opportunity for growth and development of new skills. And when we have acquired

new skills we can continue working on others. And so the more we work on our

weaknesses, we will be acquiring new skills, and in the end we will be developing our

divine potential to the fullest, which is the purpose for which we are here on this Earth.

Many people believe that we are born with defined talent and that no matter how

hard we try, we will not be able to develop new skills and our brain can’t change. But new

studies have discovered that the brain grows whenever we obtain new knowledge.

Scientific evidence suggests that the relationship between effort and talent is quite complex.

On the one hand, there is clearly a natural tension between both qualities; one cannot be

understood without the other. In fact, talent is essentially performance minus effort: the

more talented you are, the less effort you have to put in to reach a certain level of

performance. In the same way, if you want to surpass someone who is more talented than

you, you had better work harder than them. So it is a combination of hard work and talent.
 So, in the end I made the decision to accept the new job. I know that I will have to

work hard, but I have also been promised that if I develop my talents in order to serve my

neighbor and help in the Lord's plan, I will receive the necessary help to achieve it. Each

one of us must know that we are children of God and therefore we have inherited gifts from

him, gifts that we must discover in order to exploit them and contribute to a better world.