When people say "X is a gift, you were lucky to be born with it", they're probably trying to give themselves an excuse to not put in the effort needed to get good at that thing.
Maybe, but I don't think that most people who say this are trying to belittle their idol, rather complement them on the fact that they have a greater skill than others. That no matter how much time someone else puts into it, they will never be as good.
And there is some truth to this. You are born a good jocky, most people couldn't train hard to be that small.
I'm not saying it's always conscious, or that this applies to everything. But I think it has a lot to do with how you see the world, and whether you have what Carol Dweck would call a growth mindset or a fixed mindset.
But that simply isn't true! What training did Michael Phelps do to get those extraordinarily long arms and flipper-like feet? Now don't get me wrong, he trains like a madman, but someone who trains equally hard without those genetic advantages is going to lose. Doesn't mean it's not worthwhile trying to be the best swimmer you can be. It does mean that you shouldn't get depressed if you can't beat him.
The people at the top of any field combine hard work with genetic predisposition. You need both because you will be competing with people with both.
It's a good thing that in our field there is no single winner and the rest are losers. As a programmer, I want to become as good as I can, be one of the few. I might never become better than Linus Torvalds (simply because he'll keep getting better too), but that won't prevent me from achieving my goal.
Our field is not a competition. There is plenty of room for a bunch of great programmers.
Behind that stellar job interview were weeks of preparation. Behind that unforgettable 2 hour movie were millions of hours of work. Behind that elegant half hour piano performance were tens thousands hours of practice. Things you see look easy. They only look easy because the people behind them spent so much effort on it. It's not an excuse; People just know so little about something that they fail to see how much effort it takes to master it; And only because they couldn't do it of the bat, they say its "talent".
7' tall basketball players are only good because the game is played inefficiently. Shorter players have a distinct advantage when throwing underarm and can get ridiculous score percentages. Tall players throwing 'properly' are taking a side-shot at the goal rather than confronting the problem head on by going vertical.
Basketball is such a bastardised sport that height and speed are the dominant skills at play in the sport. No accuracy is required when the majority of your goals are scored by (using a soccer term) walking it into the goal. It's pathetic and boring.
The entire point of the sport is that the goal is high to challenge players to exhibit accuracy that is rarely routinely (and especially not consistently) required in other sports. Yet that doesn't exist any more in the NBA it's circus freaks putting balls through a hole instead of sportsmen exhibiting great accuracy like an archer.
I think you're talking about H.O.R.S.E... the game of basketball includes something called defense, which generally calls on productive offenses to be faster / stronger / taller.
Have you watched pro basketball since the NBA legalized zone defense in 2001? Most of the shots taken in games these days are 3 pointers. The days of Dikembe Mutumbo (or even Shaq) hanging out in the paint and doing tiptoe dunks ended about 8 years ago.
Even 7 foot guys like Rasheed Wallace and Kevin Garnett take 40% or more of their shots from 3 point territory. Wallace shoots 35% on three pointers (30% is the "he's a good three point shooter" threshold). The real three point shooters make half of their shots... a feat of accuracy which is really fucking hard, even more so considering they also have to get to the shot and deal with defense. There is no question most basketball players are genetic freaks but anyone playing in the NBA these days is also scarily accurate.
I hate to agree that I now find the NBA kinda boring... but it's not because it's a circus act (circuses are pretty interesting, actually.) The NBA is boring because almost every player is now so superhumanly good that it's hard to imagine how difficult what they are doing really is.
I like what you're saying but there's some pretty gross hyperbole going on here.
You cite zone defense as though it's drastically changed the NBA - but it's rarely deployed.
You say most shots taken in games are three pointers, but they actually make up 18-22% (over the last decade) of them.
And you say KG and Rasheed take over 40% of their shots from three. Kevin Garnett takes 3.3% of his shots from downtown. For Rasheed it's just under 25%. Both are career stats....
Well it's the internet, i reserve the right to hyperbolize.
I guess i was pretty far wrong about KG though... my bad.
But, threes are up like 40% over the past 10 years. Over the past 5 years the games have been more shooting oriented than ever before. The WSJ had an article a while back suggesting that the real reason is because the league hasn't been doing that great financially, and it's cheaper for teams to get a set of 3 point shooters vs. one LeBron or KG.
