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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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