Truer words have never been spoken, across all kinds of domains. When I was a fat desk nerd and decided to become a Marine, I was surprised at how quickly I was able to transform my body and gain the required physical skills - once I found the motivation and discipline. Ditto for language study, programming, etc.
I lost 25# over about 3-4 months while also being more muscular than I'd ever been. Ended up submitting my application with a 290 PFT score out of 300 (20 pull-ups, 100 crunches in 2 minutes, 19:32 3-mile runtime).
The article suggests something different than a compulsion, something like a sudden awareness of music (or art or whatever) that the person didn't have before.
For example, I have a kind of involuntary hobby of cataloging 3rd inversion seventh chords in music. Tchaikovsky likes to use them in descending chromatic sequences. Brian Wilson has a funny one in "God Only Knows" where the bass idiosyncratically resolves up. Etc.
I didn't have an obsession to learn about harmony and then catalog what I learned in the music I hear. I had an awareness of harmony before I took music lessons, then I learned the notation and went, "Oh, that's what it's called."
I think that's one of the most frustrating parts of learning something that's really new to you. Suppose I had no initial awareness of harmony and tried to learn to identify those 3rd inversion seventh chords by obsessively cataloging them. Perhaps I do some work studying pop and classical music, and after lots of effort I come up with the Tchaikovsky and Beach Boys examples. Then some musician with an awareness of harmony walks in and starts effortlessly adding more: there's one arpeggiated when Link falls in a hole in Ocarina of Time, in the theme to Back to the Future, a famous one in the transition of the last movement of Beethoven's Fifth, a string of them in a chromatic sequence in the Shepherd's Tune from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, etc. "Oh, and isn't the verse of Tom Petty's 'Here Come's My Girl' just a famous alternation between a triad and a 3rd inversion seventh chord built on the first scale degree of a Lydian scale?" In that case I would start to wonder whether I really want to continue with my project.
Of course one can actually learn and improve that awareness with enough practice. But it requires perseverance to keep at it in the face of people who naturally have those same abilities (and often don't seem to value them).
I think what defines great teachers is their ability to illustrate new concepts through familiar and relatable examples.
I mention this only because if you take up painting then I recommend studying up on the materials and processes first (how to mix paints on the palette and also on the canvas).
Granted, he hadn't touched the ball since our last set of matches but I'm not letting that take the wind put of my sails.
Obsession is the name of the game. Balance is for chumps. Nobody ever got great at anything by spending a reasonable and well adjusted amount of time working on it.
You had a good point but this seems completely unnecessary. You're not making it into the NBA here, so "great" seems like a very strong word. For most people, basketball and such is not the main purpose, but a side event, a hobby, etc., so it's pretty strange for them to choose to obsess over it.
Of course focusing on one thing and only just that one thing will make you relatively good at it. Everyone already knew that. The issue is just that people have jobs, relatives, other hobbies, etc., so balance becomes more relevant. It's more interesting when someone gets good at something without being able to allot huge amounts of time to it.
But every account I've ever read of a pro golfer's childhood (and I've probably read at least a dozen), indicates that almost without exception, they got obsessed with golf at a young age and every day they didn't have school, would get dropped off at the course in the morning when their parents went to work and practice until their parents picked them up on their way home from work. They got in a staggering amount of practice by the time they were teenagers, but because it happened utterly out of the limelight and was mostly unstructured, people chalk up their teenage virtuosity to "natural talent."
Outside of super-rare outliers, I don’t personally believe that anyone is born with natural talent for anything. When someone is highly skilled at something, I will assume that they spent tons of obsessive time learning and practicing rather than that they tried it one day and found they were magically good at it.
Pro sports is full of natural talents and the top guys are the ones who also work hard in addition to their natural abilities.
I can run a 10.5 after a lot of training, so maybe it's my ego talking here, but I refuse to believe this! I think you must just not have been aware of the training this person did. If they could really run a 10.5 in high school with no training, then with minimal effort they could bring their time down enough to qualify for most any country's Olympic team. A 10.5 100m is good enough to win the high school state tournament in an average US state.
> From time to time we would have some new guy come who clearly didn't know anything about boxing or fighting. But within weeks he would learn and get better than almost anyone else in the gym. He would be faster and punch harder.
These people must have had prior training in other sports. Once you've done strength, agility and speed training and have good coordination, it's easy to pick up another sport.
I think most of that "natural" ability is still down to practice. Tiny innate differences and advantages push people in certain directions, which means they practice those more (through play, to start with), and pretty quickly there are big apparent differences.
If genetics didn't play a meaningful role in athleticism, we wouldn't have evolved it. But even if that was true at some point in history, that would only be temporary, because without selective pressure, genetic drift would move the population to some point where there was selective pressure.
Obviously environment plays a role, with climate giving kids in California more practice time, or the annual cut-off date in team sports affecting who's in what age group.
On the other hand I am much better at software development than a lot of other people with the same background. It was always easy for me to comprehend things and then I also put in a lot of work.
This is not to say that practice isn't the most reliable way to achieve gains (it is!), but some 'just get it' and have ability (either musical or dextrous) on the instrument that most take a lot longer to achieve.
I had a friend in college with no prior musical training who decided his second year to become a classical guitarist. We kind of teased him at first because he clearly had no sudden music-related epiphanies nor any idea of the time involved to master an instrument much less learn to read music and understand theory.
Nonetheless, he spent the time you'd think would be required on a daily basis to gain such competency, plus starting the music track classes. At the end of a year if I didn't already know his initial skill level and his general obsessive dedication to all endeavors, I'd have assumed he was a savant.
Put another way-- most amateur musicians I know spend less than 30 minutes a week doing anything resembling practice. I often hear people drilling a mistake in that scant time. Given that, I'm amazed most people can play anything at all.