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(Fortune Magazine) — What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it - or you don’t.
Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful.
Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great….
The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.
Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.
What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, “The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.” In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith.
Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he’d have been cut from his high school team.)
In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.
Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18.
read more What it takes to be great - [Fortune @ CNN Money]
What do you know? Mozart began playing at two, and if he averaged 35 hours of practice a week, he would, by the age of eight, have accumulated 10,000 hours of practice. Child prodigy? or a child who found what he love to do at a very young age and worked very hard to perfect his craft?
Hmmm, lemme see… what was i doing as a child? drawing, painting, dancing? damn! i should have stick to those! I would have been world famous doing one of those by now! 
kidding… 
i guess this just re-enforces the fact that when people found what they love to do and want to excel in it, no matter what age they are at, they can achieve success through lots and lots of hard work. hmmm, don’t we all wish there were such things as natural talent? I guess now we know why prodigies and geniuses are rare…. coz most people are not prepared to put in the hard work, they want sweet smell of success served right up to their noses on a silver platter.
Sometimes we want to accomplish so much, we forget that we’re only human.
Where do one draw the line?
At the sake of health?
At the sake of sanity?
At the sake of friends?
At the sake of money?
To achieve something great, sacrifices must always be made.
