By Paul Mascetta, Self-Improvement Expert

Achieving a high level of success is something many people aspire to do. Most people naturally have the desire to achieve a high level of success in all areas of their lives. Some of these areas include relationships, work, sports; etc. To achieve success in any of them however, a few key components such as discipline, hard work and persistence must be present.

When it comes to your career or how you choose to make your living, many people aren’t exactly sure what road they want to take. Simply put, they don’t know what they want to do with themselves. I approach this problem with one premise. Develop your talents and natural abilities.

Those that achieve high levels of success are usually doing what they are naturally good at or have a "knack" for. Congruent to that, is that fact that these same people work extremely hard but their work is a "labor of love" so they don’t even really view it as work. The work that they perform consists really of them developing and improving these talents to reach their maximum potential.

Take professional baseball players for example. For most of them, baseball either came fairly easy to them or they loved playing so much that they played consistently and eventually developed a great ability. Either way, a professional baseball player is an expert in his field and he loves what he does. I’ve never heard of a successful pro-ball player complain about his job.

I believe that every single person is either given some God-given talent or possesses certain traits or abilities that are unique to them that they can use to develop and improve talent. With that talent, they can then create a certain advantageous platform for them to expand upon.

The first step in this process is to take a minute and think about your hobbies. Think about the activities or events that you seem to participate in and the actions that you seem to perform the most frequently for sheer enjoyment purposes. Write them down on a piece of paper. After doing so, take a good look at each one and think about what it is exactly about each one that seems to bring forth enjoyment to you or why you find it entertaining.

Perhaps you love listening to music and deep down inside you have desire to create your own music so that you can provide that level of enjoyment to someone else just as someone has done for your or at least share it with them. Or maybe you are a sports fanatic and beneath it all, you admire that strategic planning among the opposing teams or the burning desire to achieve victory.

What ever your reasons for enjoying or being entertained by certain aspects of life, I’m sure that buried deep inside of you, are qualities and or abilities that relate to those aspects (which is why you identify or admire them so much) that you can harness and then develop to their maximum potential to position yourself to be successful. How you can market them is another process but before that, you must identify them.

Now even if you believe that these abilities do not exist within you, don’t worry. You can develop them from nothing. That’s right, you can develop them from nothing and the process is fairly simple. The fact that your even reading this article tells me that within you is the desire to improve some aspect of your life and to ultimately become a success. The key now is feed the desire with what you already have or what you can transform pretty easily.

People usually spend a lot of their time doing things they enjoy. When you spend a lot of time doing something, you tend to become better at it. So here’s the key, if you can identify what it is about your hobbies that you enjoy so much and apply that component to something productive that can yield a result (like extra income for example) you can be on your way to achieving success. Talent develops similar to the way compound interests works with a savings plan. Each time you improve 1 element of talent you become more confident and that alone will multiply your abilities exponentially.

When you couple this process with modeling other successful people, the results can be tremendous. Before you can model others and strategically plan how you will market or sell your abilities, talents or services, you must first identify them. The exercise described above is a great start.