I could practice basketball for 10,000 hours, but there's no way I could do it professionally. You have to figure out what your natural abilities are, and work hard in those areas.
He was better than all the seven-feet-tall guys in that contest in 1986.
Assessing potential is hard. For example, one might assume that "height" is a phenotypical requirement for being an elite basketballer. But Webb proved that assumption is incorrect.
You'll likely make similar mistakes assessing your own potential. So why bother? Do what you love and let the chips fall where they may.
So yeah, let those chips fall where they may, unless they end up turning your life into shit.
PG's advice comes co mind: "Stay upwind". Playing basketball or the piano is not upwind, so it might be wise to forgo those things even if you love them.
If you're studying as a musician and targeting symphonic performance as a career goal, you need to realize that you're going into a field which maybe has a couple dozen job positions open up per year world wide. Being the 200th best clarinet player in the world, despite being statistically very impressive, means that you still won't be able to work as professional symphonic performer.
On the other hand, if you set that as a nice-to-have goal, but are fine working as a studio musician or teacher, it becomes a much more attainable goal.
Fortunately, as a software developer, even if you're only one of the top several thousand you have a pretty big chance of doing impressive stuff.
My sister is about to finish a degree in music from a decent conservatory, but I'm glad she decided to double major half-way through. She's very good, but she doesn't have what it takes to be competitive in a race for maybe a dozen open positions every year for her instrument.
The strawberry jam was awesome though:
He and his career constitute evidence that "height" is not a requirement to be an elite basketball player. It's definitional and not arguable.
In science today's "anomaly" is sometimes the evidence that leads to tomorrow's breakthrough.
It's just like when people say they shouldn't worry about monetizing because of Google.
Most tall people suck at basketball. Some elite basketball players are short. The fact that most elite basketball players are tall does not really help us write our basketball-success-prediction algorithm. People dedicate their careers to solving this problem. It is very hard.
Since this is hard and likely to yield garbage results anyway, and most likely only leads to worry, time-wasting and excuse-making don't bother with these thoughts. Instead, erase every doubt from your mind, get in the long boat, row west and find Valhalla. (Given Google somehow came up I had no choice but to bring Valhalla into the discussion.)
The right things don't exist... or have we already forgotten the whole "do what you love" concept?
What you do should be at the intersection of what you love and what you're good at.
Spend 20 hours each doing 10 different things, and then pick 2-3 of them to spend 200 hours doing. Then pick the one. While it may take 10,000 hours to be truly awesome, you can probably get a sense of being "good" at something in a much smaller amount of time.