Talent vs hard work is always an interesting debate. I think inborn talent is very real. We all agree something takes thousands of hours to really master then along comes a kid and gets to the same place basically overnight throwing all of the ten thousand hours theories out of the window! I was watching a young man practicing flat tracking. He was a beast! On motorcycles with the size and horsepower to offset body weight he would have still smoked me most thoroughly on the flat track. He was a master flat tracker. I have to wonder just how many hours of experience he had in at his current age of six years old or how much experience he had the year before when he was national champion at five? I had been debating if I wanted to race on two wheels or four for about a year. I decided that day that as an old man of seventeen I was too old to start racing bikes!
I shot pistols with a tweener, ten to twelve years old. He didn't have an athletic build and he was a little overweight. The kind of kid that gets teased at school. Last time I talked to his dad Jr was drawing from the hands up surrender position and shooting five steel plates in 1.7 seconds! Most people will never get there regardless of how many hours they put into practice.
I believe that grinders can often get there, wherever there is for them. I have seen plenty of proof of that. I started off as maybe the worst pool player in the world! Frustrated me that I lost more beer than I won playing in bars the first six months. Thousands of hours later I beat some of the best. Pure dogged determination. Allen Hopkins says he ran out the table the very first time he picked up a stick as a tweener I believe.
Natural talent is real and can make a person's path a lot easier. Rarely all it takes to be a world beater though. Those that think natural talent is a myth are deluding themselves as much as those thinking everyone that gets to the top has natural talent. I think the very most elite probably have a combination of natural talent and a burning desire that sees them putting in the same hours as those with little or no natural talent.
Serena and Venus Williams were mentioned earlier. I don't know that they had much in the way of natural talent for tennis. They did have a father that decided them being tennis stars was his meal ticket while they were little more than crawling! A friend of mine could throw a baseball through the traps at a hundred miles an hour with very little real training. Nothing I could ever do would let me do that.
Most of us have better than average abilities in some area. If we want to compete we need to find and focus on that area we have an edge in. Building on areas we have natural talents in is a whole lot easier than working in areas we have no natural talent.
Hu
I shot pistols with a tweener, ten to twelve years old. He didn't have an athletic build and he was a little overweight. The kind of kid that gets teased at school. Last time I talked to his dad Jr was drawing from the hands up surrender position and shooting five steel plates in 1.7 seconds! Most people will never get there regardless of how many hours they put into practice.
I believe that grinders can often get there, wherever there is for them. I have seen plenty of proof of that. I started off as maybe the worst pool player in the world! Frustrated me that I lost more beer than I won playing in bars the first six months. Thousands of hours later I beat some of the best. Pure dogged determination. Allen Hopkins says he ran out the table the very first time he picked up a stick as a tweener I believe.
Natural talent is real and can make a person's path a lot easier. Rarely all it takes to be a world beater though. Those that think natural talent is a myth are deluding themselves as much as those thinking everyone that gets to the top has natural talent. I think the very most elite probably have a combination of natural talent and a burning desire that sees them putting in the same hours as those with little or no natural talent.
Serena and Venus Williams were mentioned earlier. I don't know that they had much in the way of natural talent for tennis. They did have a father that decided them being tennis stars was his meal ticket while they were little more than crawling! A friend of mine could throw a baseball through the traps at a hundred miles an hour with very little real training. Nothing I could ever do would let me do that.
Most of us have better than average abilities in some area. If we want to compete we need to find and focus on that area we have an edge in. Building on areas we have natural talents in is a whole lot easier than working in areas we have no natural talent.
Hu