1) Identify your goals as a pool player. If you’re a 26 year old APA-3 with a pregnant fiancée, you’re never making a Mosconi Cup team. Your peak will be some amateur level below that, and you get to choose what it is!
2) Prioritize fun, even in practice. If pool elevates itself and becomes an obsession or your top hobby, then you’ll feel ok putting in “work.” Even banging balls at Bob’s corner tavern every Thursday night is better than running drills for 2 hours one day and then putting up your cues for the next 3 years.
3)I think a common theme for experienced players is to wish that they had worked on fundamentals more at the start. However, if they literally did that, would they ever stick with pool long enough to become experienced?
We don’t start developing baseball players by having their first few years consisting solely of batting off a Tee. Kids practice twice and are thrown into T-ball games.
In this regard I think early introduction of spin is necessary, even if it’s not the optimal way to generate a pool player in a lab. The tricks you can use to move a cue ball are the “a-ha!” that’s there’s more to pool than just making shots, and this is the hook that creates the obsession.
