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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Talent isn’t a myth, it’s a prerequisite. Same for hard work.

I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. And I [like to] imagine Tyson could spend as much time programming as I have and not be nearly as good.

Talent is a multiplier. When you’re learning something you have a talent for, you’ll know.

For example: in high school I was very into art and into programming. I could spend 30 hours on a digital painting and it looked okay. But when I spent 30 hours on python, I was fluent in a weekend.

Some folks I knew could take those 30 hours of drawing and produce a painting that would take me 3 months. Even after adjusting for baseline skill.

Their rate of improvement was simply beyond anything I could achieve. Same as my rate of improvement in programming was beyond what they could pull off.

Crucially: Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are now. It’s a measure of how fast you improve with practice.

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Talent is a multiplier, but the needle can go negative.

It can be a trap. I knew a guy in college, “Kevin” who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time. He was doing much better than people like me who could pick things up and be an expert beginner in hours or days, because most of us never worked anywhere near that hard for anything in our lives. I had worked that hard for exactly one thing at this point, which put me at a vantage point of being able to see both groups. None of my other peers really understood Kevin. I confess I didn’t always either.

If you can fill your days with things that you are “talented” at, you never get around to the things that are hard but make you a better person or for a richer life. You can justify quitting before you ever start, and only later figure out that “compensating qualities” simply don’t. Not all the time. Especially in a crisis.

    She lives with a broken man
    A cracked polystyrene man
    Who just crumbles and burns

Today a couple of the things that people think I’m talented at, I simply believe are possible when everyone else has given up. The Talent, if there is one, is a better sense of possibility, and a belief that at least a few people could figure things out if they could be arsed to do so. If there’s a second Talent, it’s in figuring out that not only are people fundamentally the same, century after century, but in many cases so are the problems they struggle with. Much like there is some underlying quality of NP-complete problems that makes them interchangeable. Solving problems is itself a thing you can study, and it can make you “talented” in whatever you care to be arsed to try.

I like the way my sister talks about this:

> Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

To reach elite levels you need both.

Your sister isn't Kevin Durant, by any chance. :-) No idea if this phrase was originally his, but it is often attributed to him.

    fortune favors the prepared mind

Is a very similar sentiment but suffers from use of the passive voice. It is a thing that is very obvious in hindsight, but isn't very, I don't know, motivational?

Reframing it into the active voice is a worthy goal, and this version I like better.

That's a high quality comment. If you're interested / amazed by that kind of stuff, do yourself a favor ;

Joe Rogan Experience #1080 - David Goggins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSTk1083VY

Perhaps the ultimate iteration of "Kevin who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time."

This is "the toughest man on earth" ... legit. Highly inspirational story.

I’ll give a slightly different take, but I think your general anecdote and life experience is on point.

Talent measures your intuition level regarding something. So, in your example, Kevin could always reach competence, but Kevin’s afterburner capacity is set to 0% (capped). Some of us have 0-100% intuition on things, on a spectrum.

But as far as what it takes to make it in this world? Competence. Your afterburners can boost depending on it’s capacity, but you can’t run on that unless you are born with a god like afterburner tank (genius, your Einsteins). We are all limited, even the talented.

I feel like what you refer to as intuition other's refer to as taste, to quote Ira Glass:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

and to keep with the other comments I would argue that some people have more taste than others, or more passion, or transferable skills that carry over, which often translates into what we think of as natural talent. But it still takes some work.

This is a fantastic comment. I agree 100%. The smartest things I have achieved came from not giving up and not being too lazy to just do the hard work the hard way when I couldn’t find a shortcut.

I had the somewhat cliched experience of a teacher wanting to bump me into the special needs class, and then testing out of their class entirely.

I was a very earnest kid, and up until that point I took everything my teachers told me literally. "This is how you learn" and everything felt like pushing boulders up a hill. Once I had 'permission' to build my own mental models from the examples provided by the teacher and dismiss their suggestions for how to organize the information... they could barely talk fast enough for my liking.

These 'models' I would discover later were very like the scientific method. Rote memorization was my absolute nemesis. Hypothesis, attack, defend, revise, repeat. As an adult, people who noticed this about me have asked, "Hey hinkley, I need these people to do <task you've never done before>, can you keep an eye on them?" After the initial panic, within a couple minutes of peppering them with seemingly random questions I can often answer, "sure", and have a sense of what questions I can run through the ersatz model, even go a bit off script, and which ones really require me to interrupt the expert.

When I'm entirely wrong, it's back to pushing boulders uphill again. The ones I remember clearly though are the ones where I was truly awful but motivated to trudge through. If giving myself permission to be a polymath is the best thing I've ever done for myself, giving myself permission to be bad at something for a long time is the second best thing. If I get to the end of my life and find that these turn out to be the things I was best at teaching to others, I won't be surprised at all. "An expert is someone who has made every possible mistake in a narrow field of study." Nothing seems to get me repeat customers like being able to tell someone I came to the same conclusion, and here's a counter example and a better way to think about that problem.

> I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results.

I think this fails to recognise the talents that Mike Tyson has leveraged: the soft skills and gumption to identify the best trainers, the best team, the best opportunities, and to seize those, being motivated to gain fame and plaudits. Plus consistent, world-class training and experience on top - working outside of the 30 hours of class.

These skills are very transferable to other fields. Look, for example, at the George Foreman Grill.

Could you have done the same? Yes, I think it's possible. But, viewing it as only practice and guided training seems like a fundamental error.

If you read Tyson’s story, it’s more that he was extremely talented and people with a talent for the business of boxing took him under their wing. Because they spotted an opportunity.

Tyson famously lost everything when it turned out his manager/promoter was a crook.

But yes, overall you’re right, talent is useless unless you leverage it and put in the work. My argument is that, if you’re gonna put in that much work, it’s best to leverage it on something you also have a talent for.

Lol What??! You think Tyson went out and looked for a trainer?

No. He just happened to be an explosive beast who could knock out grown men at age 13.

Just want to reiterate this. Tyson, in no uncertain terms, was a pure physical phenom. He in no way satisfies the nature vs nature debate (more or less makes it undebatable in his case, as it’s pure nature at work there).

> He in no way satisfies the nature vs nature debate

I'll assume you meant nature v. nurture. If so, then the Tyson family is absolutely an edge case in the debate. Mike was famously in and out of trouble in his younger years, having been arrested 38 times as a teenager. He was a bit of a child of the streets, so to speak.

What is fascinating and much lesser known is his older brother, Rodney. (Their sister unfortunately died at 24 from a heart attack)

Rodney Tyson is a pediatric trauma surgeon.

Two men who grew up eating the exact same food, in the exact same rooms, watching the exact same TV shows grew up to have radically different lives and careers. Yet both are accomplished in their choices.

I don't know what to exactly make of the Tyson family in the nature v nurture debate, but the differences between the brothers are some of the widest that I have seen.

I mean for sports that’s a given. Most sports requires a very special body type. A short person cannot win Olympic gold in swimming or basketball. A large person cannot win cycling over mountains. I’m sure there are tons more but I don’t have the knowledge.

For sports you need to work hard, but you cannot compete without the right boost in the first place.

This doesn't hold only for sport. Take a person with an IQ of 90. He will never become a fields medalist. I don't see how that is different then a small player not being able to win olympic gold in basketball.

People often said that a tall person cannot be the fastest man in the world - until he was.

https://www.sportbible.com/boxing/news-mike-tyson-knocked-ou...

Mike Tyson had an incredible amount of talent and great teachers.

From personal experience I agree with this.

I have a friend who has played Go for years, owns a board, played online often and so on. The closest I've been to playing was reading a Go manga and ignoring all the panels about the rules. I never really played chess or other such games either. First four times we played he beat me soundly even with a handicap. Fourth time I had no handicap. Fifth time I won. And sixth time. And seventh time. His tactical moves were superiors to mine but I could intuitively see the strategic view in ways he simply couldn't. That depressed me for a while because by all rights he should have been winning and not me.

I work with a lot of very talented people.

I frequently watch some of them do a really poor job because they are unable to get over the hangup that "more talented person Y" would be able to do it much better, design it more clearly from the start, etc.

When I look at "more talented person Y", sure, they are more talented, but their work is good because of other behaviors (e.g., a breadth of experimentation before locking in one approach) that have nothing to do with their great intuition/vision about the structure of the result.

Now my advice is "don't look around"...

Preoccupation with talent is a trap, for the more and less talented.

> That depressed me for a while because he should [have won].

Wow, that's a humblebrag taken to the next level.

This is a thing even without humblebrag.

I am a descendant of fairly strong guys - one grandfather was a rural blacksmith, the other one started as a lumberjack before going to the (still coal powered) railway to coal the engines. I inherited quite a lot of their physique from them, which means that I can do quite good in a gym without trying much.

Yes, that feels unjust. Not that I am depressed about it, but it is definitely something you ponder upon: why this guy who works so much harder than me does not see as much return on his effort?

This is a thing even without humblebrag.

That traits for fitness are heritable? That is "a thing"? Hmmm, you might be onto something here.

The level of heritability of many traits is far from settled, AFAIK, and given the long shadow of Nazi racial pseudoscience, there is a certain air of suspicion around anyone who researches the topic of heritability too eagerly, at least in the West; China does not seem to have this particular taboo.

And I am not even surprised, the possibility of governments latching onto this and "streaming" people towards whatever they are found to be gifted at, cannot really be dismissed.

No, it's accurately conveying the sadness and the loneliness when you see the right moves (in life, in work) and people being oblivious to them and ending up poor/unhappy/etc.

In that case, throw the game, and let the sap win. Problem solved.

Sorry that I have big doubts, but if this story is true you should consider a career of a pro player.

Yes, I am just a crappy 3k on kgs after several thousand games, so that puts me in the untalented category. If GP can consistently beat me after playing just four games, I'd recommend him to consider going pro as well. I know after my thousandth game I was still figuring out elementary subtleties.

> Talent isn’t a measure of how good you are now. It’s a measure of how fast you improve with practice.

Spot on. Hard work matters, but people stating hard working geniuses as examples without mentioning there are many hardworking individuals without an even close result is just not right.

I agree with most of what your say but I'm not sure how it relates to the points in the article?

The author suggests that talent "doesn't exist", which is pretty clearly false.

My read was that talent, as discussed in bullshit mba speak, is meaningless. Which I can easily get behind. Most MBA speak is just a cloak for confirmation biases.

1. You put quotes around the phrase "doesn't exist" to imply those were the words used but ctrl+F "exist" returns nothing relevant.

2. I don't think the article body suggests that at all and the article title specifically modifies its claim with the word "largely".

I look at swizec's reply as defining some attributes of talent (something the article says is not generally defined when people talk about talent)..

Serious question: When you spent 30 hours on the painting, did you enjoy it? What about for the python?

Loved it. I was seriously into sketching and later digital painting from 6th grade to freshman year of college. Almost went to study art (or try the entrance exam at least).

But my rate of progress just didn’t justify the time investment compared to the results and joy I got out of coding.

Same for poetry (all of high school) and fiction writing (from 1st grade to college). Just didn’t make sense to continue pursuing. Best to focus on the obsession that I also had a huge talent for.

I’ve been able to leverage my writing passion and talent for technical writing. 2/3 not bad imo :)

>I could put in all the hours of practice and guided training into boxing as Mike Tyson and I wouldn’t get nearly the same results. I imagine you could do this if you start training from the childhood and it will be the only thing you're doing.

As you're describing it, talent seems like having developed a set of cognitive skills that fit better with a particular task. Or maybe it's about personality traits.

Or, programming is simply easier than painting or boxing, and boring and tedious for most people.

Physical and psychological traits matter when you undertake certain tasks - how many fast twitch muscle fibers you have, how big and string your lu game and heart is, the angle of your jaw in relation to your brainstem, the distribution of your weight on your body, your personal nerve conduction velocity, your natural aggressiveness and your pain tolerance levels for boxing.

Your natural intelligence, hand-eye coordination, tolerance for failure, and curiosity level for learning programming.

Your hand-eye coordination, imagination, and depth of color vision for painting.

The thing is, while everyone starts with more or less of some physical or mental fitness for a particular task, with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small. Yet o e is Mohammed Ali, and one is Leon Spinks. That difference is not in proportion to the difference in their physical or mental capabilities at the start, and is largely explained in studies by coaching and practice technique.

The ability to follow a trainings regime until you reach success is largely a mental tolerance for failure and determination. If you have lots of success, you tend to continue. But if you were to continue despite failure, you would eventually reach the success you were after if the training regime was correct.

Yep all those things you describe fall under talent. A big one in sports is your genetic predisposition to how fast you can recover. Or how much punishment you can take before your body breaks.

A common training approach for eastern europe gymnastics is to take a bunch of 5 year old kids, train them all the same. Whomever is left standing at 13 gets to compete in international meets.

After 10 years of boxing, I can give a fun round or two even to people prepping for olympic tryouts (I’ve tried). But a talented 14 year old kid training to go pro in a few years ... they smoke me every time. Even my fully developed adult musculature and the years of ring experience can’t compete with their level of focus and talent. I look like a fool every time.

> with enough proper training the difference between two trained professionals is very, very small

At the extreme ends of elite competition everyone works ridiculously hard. Everyone has the perfect nutrition and the training and the coaches and so on. When the difference between olympic silver and gold in swimming is the length of a knuckle ... either we’re seeing random probabilities playing out (the competition is within margin of error for the test), or it’s genetics.

What else could it be?

>>What else could it be?

At that level, it's generally known to be the mental preparation for the given day (along with a bit of luck, as you mentioned).

Indeed, everyone at that level has already been filtered and selected for similar top levels of skill, knowledge, conditioning, equipment, diet, coaches, etc., etc., etc. It comes down to the mental game both internally and between competitors on that particular day.

A classic book to understand some of this is The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey [0]

Source: I formerly competed at international levels for several years in alpine ski racing (mostly DH/Super-G), and studied neuroscience in college as a result of the many fascinating mental phenomena I found in training and competing.

One very interesting fact I came across in neuroscience is that perceptual thresholds for relevant senses, e.g., touch sensitivity for a musician, are about 10X finer than normal people (i.e., they can detect physical differences only 10% the size of that detectable by normal population), and that this is trainable. So yes, this is definitely on the skill/ training side, agreeing with the author.

OTOH, I know some top level musicians who quickly point out that the people with insane levels of desire, motivation, and hard work who will never get to the level to pass a professional audition. But I haven't further data to see what is the issue (does it come to talent, or some genetic shortcoming in their sensory-motor systems, or have they self-sabotaged, or what 20 other factors?)

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance...

I have a very deep interest in this topic and nearly went into neuroscience for similar reasons but instead ended up blazing my own trail at the intersection of machine learning and sports training. I am very cognizant of my own strong bias toward these conclusions and want to avoid confirmation seeking. Have you encountered any research, literature or reputable programs that I could investigate further?

You ask a really good question, and it seems there is a deficit there, at least in my current knowledge

What comes closest is some studies on extreme forms of Buddhist meditation. One of the interesting discoveries is that during normal meditation, the parasympathetic system (homeostasis, breathing, etc.) is very dominant, but during the peak enlighentment experiences of the advanced meditators, the sympathetic system (fight-or-flight) system associated with athletic performance also runs at very high levels. Normally, the sympathetic & parasympathetic systems are in opposition, when the sympathetic system is active, parasympathetic is suppressed, and vice-versa. The other situation where both systems activate is during sex (arousal needs paracympathetic, orgasm sympathetic). The interesting connection I made is that I'd noticed these intense flow states sometimes occurring in the most intense times, where everything in my mind was absolute calm - I called it "fast meditation", as in meditating at 85mph. I know others also experience this. I conjecture that this is some of the same phenomenon seen in advanced meditation, just form the opposite end (here, maxing out the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic maybe kicks in, but I have no measurements other than my mental state).

There's also some research on the "flow state" related to accelerated perception, where people feel that they can see insane levels of detail and time slows down, as in accidents. They were trying to recreate it to understand it, and I found the efforts entirely lame and a waste of time. I can tell all kinds of stories about seeing very clearly both important and trivial things at high speed, and having entire trains of thought which I can verify happened in fractions of a second by noting the beginning and end points of the chain of thought and calculating in the distance and speed. These studies catch none of it, and I can say that even with years of training and effort, it is still extremely elusive (which is why I can't really fault the researchers, I don't yet have any great ideas on how to capture it).

I wish I could point you to specific references, but these were all readings from a while back.

BTW, ML and sports training seems like a potentially very fruitful area! I'd love to hear more about it. I found that much of the most interesting areas are at the intersections of different fields, so I wish you good luck in your pursuit!

We have had similar experiences. I discovered meditation and flow state accidentally - at first I thought it required intensity, and so I would ride my motorcycle in increasingly dangerous situations and down mountain trails in order to trigger it. This led me to take up skydiving (angle tracking, wing-suiting) and BASE jumping as I believed it was merely adrenaline that I was seeking.

I discovered I could trigger the state reliably without risk during high-level matched competitive video-game play. (Smash Bros) I had nearly 10 years of low-skilled competitive practice but with infinite online matched games I found I could reach a flow-like state on a nightly basis, so long as I played long enough. (I played for approximately 4 hours per night over a two-year period). I was also able to achieve a flow-like state with near certainty using a very simple piano tile tapping game, given long enough sessions. I had simply been using the game to train my thumbs for speed.

Eventually I left my career in software to pursue flow in Skydiving, which I now consider to be a mistake. After studying meditation and Yoga, it has become clear to me that the state is not triggered by external factors at all, and that it is itself a skill.

Admittedly far fewer of these states stand out as truly peak, quasi-religious experiences. I suspect there is a continuum and the binary classification is a judgement we place on the experience "retroactively". It comes from having enough space in your attention to notice the contrasting state of the body and the mind, the level of current performance, and then to notice the noticing itself. The rush of pleasure and excitement is not pre-existing, it is the result of a positive judgement you place on the situation. Despite its appeal this is undesirable, and tends toward interrupting flow in the precisely the same way as one loses control of a lucid dream after just having reached it. IMHO focusing on the subjective threshold for isolated study is misguided.

My current work focuses on creating an abstract framework which adapts to the athlete in order to create the external conditions which allow the athlete to most easily find the flow state. Rather than teach them how directly I hope to trigger it unexpectedly and allow for it to be sustained indefinitely during training. Of course, I'm not foolish enough to admit this to my benefactors.

Do you suppose I might be able to get a grant for this sort of work?

Wow - totally cool - you've definitely gone wild with this! Reminds me of a quote I read from the great weight-lifter Vasily Alekseyev, who talked about what he called the "white zone", and how amazing it was, and how you would work for years to get into it again.

I totally agree about the continuum - for the most part it is so strange from ordinary experience that it seems like a binary shift, but yes, I think it is important to see it as a continuum (perhaps a bit stepped/quantized, but not sure).

Fascinating that you managed to get there with the tapping game doing speed drills. I often had ideas but it was before common MRIs and other technology that we had for examining brain functions at high resolution. That is something you could get into an MRI, and/or an intense electrode-sensor grid and measure! So, yes, I'd think some funding might be possible. I know academic funding is it's own labrynthine nightmare, so probably best to be in a program supported by an experienced professor/primary researcher who knows the ropes. OTOH, if you can get to show some results that improve performance, perhaps approaching some top pro sports team owners for funding? (I know if I were a billionaire with a team, I'd be interested in something that could give us an edge!) The question is whether you can generate useful results soon, and in what sport. You seem to have made a lot of progress in eSports, there might be some money there... Let me know if you're interested in chatting offline (is there a DM function here to exchange contact info w/o publishing?)

Hacker news is pretty bare bones - I don't even seen reply notifications. I've temporarily added some contact info to my "bio" if you'd like to discuss in more depth.

For my purposes the extreme end of elite competition is less interesting. My intuition tells me that the distribution of all athletes is multimodal, and that whatever attributes contribute the most to ending up in the normally distributed pool of elite individuals are present in all of them, and so I would expect a lower variance as you've indicated.

I would like to allow for the possibility that mindset and internal mental models which are learnable rather than innate could account for the particular distribution an athlete belongs to.

For instance someone prepping for Olympic tryouts may be in either the right tail of a lower mode of the distribution, or the left tail of the higher mode of the distribution.

The 14-year old that smokes you may have developed a mental model or learning approach which places him in an entirely different class at the outset. Talent is a label you've placed on him retroactively, but what assurance do you really have that those differences are explained biologically/genetically rather than resulting different mental representations of the sport and training process?

> what assurance do you have that those differences are explained biologically/genetically rather than resulting from different mental representations of the sport and training process?

Dude, don't do this. "Mental representations" have nothing to do with how fast we can run or how high we can jump.

You are basing this assertion on what, precisely? Attention, posture, pattern memory and state-estimation all strongly impact every level of athletic performance. This has been studied extensively. If I had a better term to describe these aspects of neural organization I would use it. I like mental representation because a coach on the ground can impact development of an athlete by providing a picture of what to focus on during performance, and this representative picture directly improves the signal to noise ratio for the athlete.

This is absurd. Physical attributes.. size, strength, fast-twitch muscle, jumping ability, endurance, sprinting power and speed, these all have massive genetic differences amongst people. You can look up on 23andme they even display genetic markers for sprinting ability.

The "table stakes" for being an elite athlete in many sports are so far beyond what you can just mentally train yourself to achieve by will. Plenty of amateur athletes have mental focus and work ethic, and train religiously, but this doesn't push them anywhere near elite performance levels.

I don't know what you're arguing against, exactly. If you take two athletes with similar physical qualities, and one receives appropriate training while the other does not, the former will outcompete the latter. I'm assuming that everyone in the far right tail of elite performance has the biological advantages you mentioned.

Let's simplify the model to two distributions to make it easier to see: well-trained vs. poorly-trained individuals, where the variance of each distribution is largely accounted for by physical differences. So long as these two distributions overlap, it is a mathematical certainty that some poorly-trained individuals will outperform some well-trained individuals, due to physical and genetic markers. So far so good.

I'm suggesting that there are several overlapping distributions, and that it's impossible to know with certainty whether you've lost to someone due to their physical advantage or their superior cognitive approach & training - if you are only considering the two of you in isolation. The question must be asked of populations, not of individuals.

Anyone who has experienced breaking through plateaus after a decade of training knows this is true. Whatever seem absurd to you must be due to some other miscommunication. I specifically exempted the top elite performers from consideration because in that restricted case my argument no longer holds. I thought that was clear.

Given that humanity has been competing in athletics events for thousands of years and that athletic event optimization is a massive industry (including state actors) if there was a learnable mental approach you'd assume they'd have found it by now (and everyone would be using it). Moreover I'd argue the ability to relatively quickly come up with a mental model that the rest of humanity is unable to replicate would itself be a form of innate talent.

Have you read about the Fosbury Flop? This is an example of changing the model in order to push the boundaries of what was considered possible. Also, I agree that there is likely a talent component to establishing the best models for training - but it's also a skill. Imparting these models is what world class coaches do, after all.

You are totally right that well-exploited sports have established models that are probably optimal, especially at the elite level.

I find these circumstances boring, personally. My interest lies in learning unfamiliar or complex tasks for which no optimal model is known, and also in maximizing the rate of skill acquisition by iterating on the model generation in an abstract way.

I think you are indicating by example that initial differences normally attribute to "talent" or "biological advantage" are greatly diminished at the level of peak performance, which results from dedication and practice. This is in line with the literature that I've read.

However I'm not familiar enough with boxing to understand the example and so you might be saying something else. Can you elaborate on why you chose Ali and Spinks as exemplars, and what you perceive to be their differences?

Yes, that is what I was asserting. I chose Spinks because he defeated Ali in a split decision in the biggest upset of the sport. However, their overall careers were so different. Ali is considered to be the greatest of all time by many.

When Spinks beat Ali, he was the quickest to win the title in history. He also was the only man to take a title from Ali. He was younger, faster, in better shape and had a longer reach than Ali.

However, despite the physical attributes favoring Spinks in every way, and the previous victory, in the rematch Spinks was completely destroyed by Ali, who trained hard for the fight this time.

These two are perfect examples of elite athletes with excellent physical similarities that put their careers on similar trajectories when you compare their early careers. However, Ali's mental talents and training skill so far surpassed Spinks that Ali only lost 5 times and won the title 3 times, while Spinks lost 17 and only held the title once.

Physical prowess matters, but not as much as training at the elite level.

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