So we may not have it in us to be the best there ever was, but we can be pretty damn good. Good enough to win a local race, good enough to finish a half-marathon, good enough to delight ourselves. But that good enough-ness comes with a price, but it doesn’t cost ten years and a decade of passed up opportunities.
Author: Steve
Sports performance data is just showing us what we've done. Why can't it tell us more?
Yesterday I looked at the date of my last post here and cringed. It's been over three years. It's worse than looking at the scale on January 1st - and yeah, I'm going to start eating right tomorrow and I really mean it this time.
Then a thought occurred to Gladwell: what if the source of genius wasn’t starting really early in life, nor having a mythical, genetic natural talent gene? What if, he mused, it was as simple as “fit”? The performer was lucky to stumble upon a sport, a discipline, an art so early in life and it just “felt” right and, because it was so natural and fun, they just kept doing it. And doing it. For years.
Greatness as a reflection. We watch because we see a glimmer of ourselves, of our potential selves or the potential of our tribe. We see something when we watch sports.
I was listening to Terry Gross interview Jeff Daniels and his comments about acting made me stop running and replay them. He was talking about the style of great actors: Clint Eastwood, James Cagney, Meryl Streep
When you're Victoria Azarenka, the best player on the planet, you can say things like this:
She’d said she needed a hitting partner; just show up, she said, hit for a few hours a day and I’d have the rest of the day to hang at the beach. The South of France sounded really good from where I was sitting, in a cube in San Jose, California. I was a lousy engineer so quitting wasn’t hard.
I'm pretty sure it's a Law of the Universe that procrastination is caused by an irrational estimate of the size of the task you're avoiding. Getting my book out as an ebook seemed, to me, to be an enormous task.