Comment by ksdale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksdale | Hacker News Reader

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I'm way into golf and on the golf subreddit, there are regularly people who show up who ask about their chances of going pro as a 20-something or 30-something, and a chorus of people will respond that all pro golfers have tremendous natural ability (which may well be true) and that if you aren't already a great golfer without really practicing, you're not going to make 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."

I think this points to the idea that there’s a blurry line between talent and just a really early head start. Lots of the things we call skills are composed of more basic, lower level skills and in general skills can overlap in different domains. For example the skill of programming can be seen as being composed of / overlap with the skill of thinking abstractly, which may be composed of things like being able to visualize, draw relationships between ideas, sit still for long periods of time. Sports skills may be composed of the skill of something like detecting very subtle physical cues in your body. Are these things really skills though? I would say yes because you can train yourself to get better at them, but I suspect low level skill start developing so early on that it’s hard to catch up to others if you start developing them later in life. We think of these skills as innate talent because they can start to differentiate kids at a very early age, but that’s due to these skills starting to develop so early in life.

It’s like the old sports coach’s expression: “You don’t need talent in order to practice!”

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.

There's a huge spectrum of natural athletic ability in children; you could see it in plain sight you just played sports as a kid.

There's a huge spectrum in the amount of each type of athletic play children have done.

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.

The science has a clear cut answer to this, not only with twin studies but also with different genes having been tied to specific body features that directly affect athletic ability.

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.

Yeah it's most obvious that there is some natural/genetic talent at play in sports like swimming/track and field. I was pretty obsessed with running in high school - I trained damn hard, did 80 mile weeks in the offseasons, etc. I ended up being pretty good, but there were some guys who trained less hard and less smart than me that were just as good (or better), and I certainly was not capable of becoming an elite runner no matter how hard I trained. It is just not in my genes to run a sub-4:00 mile or whatever. While I think it's comforting to think that all natural talent is just hard work and we could all be geniuses and savants if we just put in the effort, I don't think it's true. That being said, I do think people overestimate the difficulty of picking up many skills to a proficient or superior level.

Have you ever engaged in any sport and seen young people develop? You would immediately see that some people just "get it" and are better than others. They are faster, stronger and move better. The superstars are the ones who combine talent with hard work.

My experience with youth sports is that the kids who "just get it" are the ones who have been watching/playing sports since very young with their family and friends. My family wasn't really in to watching sports and it took me a while as a kid to figure out that that's why everyone else on the team knew how to play and I didn't even know the basic rules. Looking back it would have helped me a lot if a practice or two was devoted to learning how the game actually worked.

I did a lot of sports growing up but I had to accept that there are people who start out at a level that I can never achieve no matter how hard I try. I still get a lot of benefit from it but u think it's wrong to tell people they can hang with top athletes if they put in the work. It raises unrealistic expectations.

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.

Natural talent certainly exists. I used to be into boxing. Trained 6 times a week really hard for many years and improved a lot of from where I started. 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. In the same way Mozart was able to compose music at the age of 3 or Gauss just understood math naturally some people just understand certain sports. In school we had a guy who could run around 10.5 over 100m without any training. I could never reach that no matter how much I trained.

Pro sports is full of natural talents and the top guys are the ones who also work hard in addition to their natural abilities.

> 10.5 over 100m

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've been a guitar teacher for about 20 years, and my experience disagrees with your feeling. Some people have much more aptitude for the guitar than others; I've had some kids who have picked up playing chords in a tiny fraction of the time that is typical. While generally the ability to learn seems to correlate with their general intelligence level, there have been some who are far better than you would expect.

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.

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