If someone is very talented but doesn't work, they almost always get beat out by someone who might not be as talented but works their ass off. Pro sports is a good example. In the NBA, players like Kwame Brown or Stephon Marbury are incredibly talented physically, but they didn't want to work, and instead fought with coaches, skipped practice, whined, etc, and now they are secondary players who come off the bench. Most teams would rather have Kurt Rambis or Shane Battier than Kwame Brown, and Stephon Marbury ended up with a veteran minimum contract after being released by the Knicks.
The only this is that when someone who is super talented decides to work hard, then not having enough talent can be a gap. I could practice basketball all I want and never be as good as LeBron James. I just don't have the physical build and athleticism that he has, and unlike Kwame Brown, LeBron has worked hard at building the basketball skills too, so others can't easily surpass him there because he sits around on his ass.
Fiery_Penguin_of_Doom wrote...
I play Magic:the gathering and one of my friends is a "control" player. All day, every day he plays control. He has a talent for it, while I'm not as good as he is I make up for it by hard work to give me a fighting chance. I learn more about the nooks and crannies of the rules, learning the weakness to whatever he plays,etc. This may be an over simplified example but, I think it does the job.
I play MTG as well, have for many years now. We really were separated at birth. On another note, you should play a hardcore aggressive deck perhaps with some burn to see if you can't just kill him too fast. Although, power level of cards people play and own can be an obstacle too. I used to play with this one guy who basically played the most degenerate combo decks from the history of MTG and I didn't win a lot of games. He played things like Flash, Sol Ring, Grim Monolith, Tolarian Academy, Arcbound Ravager and Disciple of the Vault, etc. Most of my decks simply didn't contain enough of the older powerful cards(Force of Will would have been a big help) to be competitive.