There are two things that make a person good at something. Love and talent. You can have the most talent in the world, but if you don’t love what you are doing you will never stick with it. It can be your favorite thing to do, but if you have no talent you might never get to where you want to be. Fields is almost like a video games: if you excel at the game, you might get far, but if you meet the slightest bit of difficulty you would just give up, because there is no love there. If you love the game absolutely and devote your every spare moment to it, you may get far, but eventually there will be a boundary you just can’t jump and you’ll have to quit. It’d be like a baby bopping its head against the side of a crib. You would try and try but never get through.
Most people who are good at what they do have a combination of both. True enough, one does sort of stem from another: you like something you always win at more than one you stink at, and if you practice enough you will eventually become good at it. I think this is where most people are. Some talent, some love. But others have a lot of love and a lot of talent. Think of any great person. Take Mozart, for example. He had to have great talent to compose at such a young age, but he would have gone no where if he hadn’t loved what he was doing.
But there is the hidden catch. There is such a variety of fields in today’s modern society that you could never know exactly what you are good at. I’ve met many people who found something they had both love and talent for, but if they could live their lives over again they would have chosen something they have even more love and talent for - the only being that they discovered it too late. Some never found it at all.
Some found it, but simply at the wrong time. I have read many a story of a scientist or philosopher who was laughed at or even killed because of a theory that later turned out to be true.
You may have no strong talents in one area, but have it spread throughout a variety of areas with you not being anything particularly special in any one. This is the way most people are. But some are extremely centered on one thing, and these people excel in those areas.
So what decides how much love and talent you have in a particular area? Certainly not you, or anybody else. Destiny decides what you will be good in and what not. You could have been born to a starving family in Africa, a strict family in China, or you could have been born a young child with AIDS who died before she saw her seventh birthday. What chooses these things? Destiny.
So is your life plotted out by some deities somewhere, your journey planned
before you even step on the path? I don’t think so. You are given paths to
follow through life, and which way you go when the path splits is up to you. Is
it destiny? Or is it choice? Or is it simply life?