- Principles of human movement
- Learning how to learn
- Talent is grown, not given
- Anyone can be good at anything (almost)
- Genetics are a thing
- Do the things you like doing, not necessarily the things you’re good at (thought often, being good at something initially will mean that you like it, and then the cycle of being good at thing → like it → do it more → gets better at thing → likes it more; kicks off.)
I have too many hobbies. All my life, I’ve jumped around from interest to interest, chasing the joy of the rapid learning and achievement that only comes from the beginners entry into any given area, and quickly fades once you reach a basic level of proficiency. Basketball, tennis, golf, swimming, skateboarding, parkour, breakdancing, track and field, boxing, Brazilian jiu jitsu, olympic weightlifting. And not just sports: special interests, genres I liked, books, music. Hopping from spans of being obsessed with alt rock, hip hop, 90’s rap, Japanese city pop, night-synth, chillstep, EDM, country. Even in my career I’ve hopped around: trading, software engineering, data engineering, back to trading. Why did I do this? Was it that I didn’t like the grind? I just wanted to quit when things got hard? Boredom? After revealing the mystery of the skill, did I want to quickly move on to something else? ADHD? Maybe a little of all of the above. But also a bit of longing, always being told from a young age about talent, seeing talented individuals doing their sport and excelling, and wanting to find that “special thing that I’m gifted in” for myself. But that search never yielded results. As a teen, this was extremely disheartening. If you believe that talent is god-given, and part of your life is discovering the “thing” that you’re really good at, and then spending years searching for it and not finding it, you’d be a bit downtrodden as well. However, at some point I came around to the idea that talent isn’t given, it’s grown.
At first I thought my jumping around from hobby/special interest/sport was a curse, but only later did I realize it was actually a gift. By going through the beginning stages of many different things, you become a jack of all trades. You get really good at learning, quickly. This has suited me well throughout my life. You also begin to see the threads of transferability that weave themselves through different sports. For example, you begin to understand how to use your legs, how to drive your hips to generate power, what movements act like a whip, and what act like a lever. How your muscles work, feeling comfortable in your own body, fluidity of movement. The underlying principles begin to reveal themselves to you, you develop a sense of athleticism that spans beyond any one specific area. You get really good at picking up the deeper message that instructions are trying to convey. You’ll understand from first principles how the movements in the sport work. In tennis, power is generated from the legs pressing into the floor, moving into the hips, connecting through the torso and back muscles, through the rotation in the shoulder to outlay the power to the wrist and through the racquet to hit the ball. In golf, same type of thing but altered slightly, with slightly different leverages. You begin to see the tempo in the movement itself, and understand the importance of leg drive in sports. Your brain starts to understand movement of your body as a whole, not simply a bag of parts. You aren’t just moving your arm, you’re leveraging your entire body, every muscle and tendon connected, playing a game of tag with power and momentum flowing through each fiber to bring energy from one spot to another.