Overcoming Natural Talent

I’ve always been naturally talented at quite a bit. By that I mean I have good hand-eye coordination, high-speed brain processing power, and all my limbs and good vision. With this natural good ability, I haven’t had to really dig deep and try all that hard. School came easy, until college. I was decent at sports, but not elite.

This middle ground is where I’ve stayed. Good enough. Not necessarily excellent. Not top of the line.

A trap that many of us have fallen through. Because I’ve been good enough, it meant that I could get through. Meaning I didn’t have to try all that hard. So I stayed in a good place.

Getting to excellent. This is what I’m striving towards. If I were to stay mediocre for the rest of my life, then I wouldn’t get very far. I wouldn’t be known as the best I could possibly be in any area of life.

Then the question that I ask myself is how do I get to excellent? What steps and processes do I follow to get there? Noticing that I don’t know how long it will take to get there. Which is also a massive shift for me.

Because when I disconnect the outcome from the process of being great, greatness should be achieved. I can’t control the outcome. I can only control the process. Staying process-focused and being able to do the actions to produce a reproducible result that improves over time should lead me to greatness.

Honestly, getting involved in shooting sport, something I am brand new to has helped me tremendously in this area. As well as going to The Proving Ground with 3 of 7 Project. Staying process focused is not what I was doing. I was focused on the outcome.

Now, it took me a bit to reconcile the difference between the two in my mind. Process focus has no concern with the outcome. The focus is on the training. On the actions. Do you need feedback? Absolutely! You’ll make adjustments from the actions you take in training, or how people respond to your product or service. How you train will also be different for each area.

How I train for action pistol is significantly different than how I practice my writing or communication skills. Surprisingly, many of the same principles overlap. It takes diligence, focused effort, and attention to improve. There are techniques in the beginning that will be overlooked. The skills you’ll work on in the beginning will be different when you are advanced. Increasing the number of quality repetitions is the name of the game.

I am just starting to learn and incorporate it into who I am. By no means am I perfect and I have a long way to go. There is a long road to becoming excellent. Personally, it’s something I wish I knew sooner, but all I can do now is to move forward the best I can with the tools I have at my disposal.