By 
Successful people are highly motivated to practice what they love until they are excellent at it. That is his open secret of success.
This is the story of two real-life schoolmates with conflicting attitudes toward motivation that have led to success for only one of them.
As children, they were both creative. Rose loved music and spent every free minute learning more about it, finding chords on her guitar and writing songs. Her big dream was to be a singer.
Lily spent her free time drawing. She carried a sketch pad everywhere she went and, whenever she could, she filled it with her drawings: horses, mainly, with long, flowing manes and tails that billowed behind them in the wind. They seemed about to jump off the page. She dreamed of being an artist one day.
Lily dropped out of school and went to work in a bank, bought nice clothes and went out a lot. When Rose suggested that she would like to take an art course part time, Lily told her that she didn’t have time.
Rose downloaded singing lessons from the Internet and studied hard, hour after hour, locked in her room, doing singing exercises, learning music theory, discovering how chords work, writing songs…
The church he went to had a choir, and the guy who ran it came up to him one day and said, “I need an extra singer, and you seem to have a decent voice. Would you like to join us?”
Rose was excited and practiced even more. She called Lily to tell her the good news about her. Lily sounded disapproving.
“Why the hell did you agree to that?” she asked. “All that extra work, and you don’t even get paid for it!”
Rose ignored it. Being in the Choir meant that she had the opportunity to sing, and that was what she wanted.
After a while, he had the opportunity to see a band that he greatly admired in the front row. Like the rest of the audience, she joined in the choruses, and because she was now used to projecting her voice without even thinking about it, she drew attention. The people around her turned to look at her admiringly… and there was someone else who she also liked to sing.
After the concert, the leader of the band approached her and, like the boy who directed the Choir, asked her if she would be interested in joining them… only this time, the offer was for her. sing professionally.
It hasn’t stopped there either. Upon discovering his songs, he asked her to help him write material for the band.
Learning that she had studied chord structures, he got her to help him with band arrangements as well. When she pointed out that they would have to copyright her, he also put her in charge of all her royalties.
She suggested that they could use a website and he asked her to design one.
When she convinced him that they needed a proper management structure to get the most out of their hard work, his response was immediate.
“I already run the band,” he said. “YOU can run the company.”
That means the gang now works for Rose. She also earns more than the others, but they don’t care; after all, they earn a lot more since she joined them than before.
Lily called Rose to congratulate her. She clearly hadn’t learned her lesson, even then.
“You are SO lucky,” Lily said resentfully. “If you fell into the river, you’d come out with a fish in each pocket!”