Imagine you are a miner, and you’ve been assigned to one specific mine and tasked with finding every ounce of gold in that mine. No one knows how much gold the mine contains.
At the onset of your endeavor you are surprised by how easy it seems to mine gold. There seems to be chunks of gold everywhere! After about a year of this you notice that the gold chunks are getting smaller and less frequent. After three years the biggest gold nuggets you can find are the size of a buckeye. In year seven the only gold you can find are small flakes, perceivable only when the light hits them just right after you have sifted the dirt away.
God comes down at the end of year seven and tells you you have found 98 percent of the gold in the mine. Only two percent left to find, then you can leave. From the outside looking in this seems encouraging, but you realize the truth of your situation. The rate at which you are finding gold has drastically decreased from when you started. It will take you the same amount of time to find the last two percent of gold that it took you to find the first 98 percent. Who can really know if every speck of gold will be found?
This is exactly how ability, potential, and work ethic relate to one another.
Your potential in any given field is the gold mine.
Your ability is the gold.
Your work ethic is the act of mining.
You choose a mine (potential) that seems to have a lot of gold (ability) in it. You begin to work (mine) to increase your abilities to fulfill your potential, and it seems you are improving rapidly. As time goes on you realize it is getting harder to find ways to get better. You reach a point where you are almost as good as you could possibly be, but if your work effort is a constant, it will take you at least the same amount of time to reach the summit of your potential as it did to get to the last stop before the summit.
The rate at which you improve decreases in proportion to the amount of abilities you acquire. It turns out that TIME is our limiting factor, and the people that sift out the last two percent of gold in the mine are the people who play the long game and are patient enough to see it through.
No great thing is created suddenly.
Epictetus
Braden Bristo’s - The Journeyman’s Path 