The only reason some people enjoy success while others fail is because those who succeed persist in holding the vision of what they want.

They succeed, in the first place, by creating a vision.

Then they persist in that vision. As it sinks deeper into their minds, it becomes a driving obsession. It becomes their most cherished value. And they spend all their time in trying to materialize that value. This drives them to training themselves to achieve their goal.

Most people believe that success is a result of a realized talent. Talent is what people see. They see a bewildering array of skills and concludeincorrectlythat the talent made the person brilliant. Others attribute it to motivation. Again, this is the effect, not the cause that arises from a vision.

I contend that talent is cultivated from vision, and that as vision deepens, as action toward learning and implementation proceeds, skills develop and accumulate. The end result of numerous small skills is a prowess or flair for doing something that we call talent. Personal development happens incrementally, in small quotas, in chunks.

How did Albert Einstein become the greatest thinker the world has ever known? What is the wisdom we can gather from looking at his success story? How did a patent office clerk achieve success as a celebrity? The simple answer is that he was a genius. He had more brain cells. He had more ability to think.

Yet a history of young Albert Einstein showed that he was not a brilliant student. In fact, his teacher once sent a note to his parents suggesting that he was wasting time attending school.

And as for geniusthere have been many, many talented, brilliant physicists and mathematicians.

What Albert Einstein had was a vision. He was driven by an indefatigable curiosity about the nature of the universe. When he was 16, he imagined what it might be like to ride the waves of a light beam.

From this vision, Albert Einstein developed powerful inroads into his ability to envision things in his minds eye. His thought-experiments deepened in clarity and precision over many years. They reached such intensity that they accumulated into insights that answered in a most unorthodox way the riddles of physics.

Later, when he died, it was found that he had an enormous preponderance of brain cells that most normal people did not possess.

It is my contention that just as a muscle that is constantly exercised, his brain developed extraordinary connections and fusions over a lifetime of intense usage.

Albert Einstein became a genius because he held a vision. His skills at right-brain cognition developed over many years created such a preponderance of insights that he just had to discover how the universe glued together.

In a similar way, every one of us can develop remarkable capacity in any field if we just hold the vision long enough, shun distraction, and persist in our ideal despite everything that comes our way to throw us off our chosen path.

The journey to accumulate a thousand skills begins with developing the first one. Progress comes from sustainability of vision.

You can be what you want to be if you hold it long enough and ferociously enough to overcome all obstacles. And, in the end, what you will gain will be exponentially greater than the sum of all your efforts. It, in fact, be a true quantum leap.