Are You a Born Winner?

Are all successful people born with natural talent?

Have you ever watched a sports champion in action and found yourself envying their ‘natural’ talent? Have you ever thought that the sports star was lucky to have been born with the skills to succeed?

If you have, don’t worry – It’s actually a common misconception that successful people are born with some kind of natural talent that allows them to succeed in life. Winners in sport are often referred to as ’born winners’ or ‘natural’s by sports commentators, but what we perceive to be a natural talent is in fact the result of hard work and dedicated training.

Natural Talent
Champions are made, not born. Champion athletes might be born with great genes but think of it this way, being born to Olympic champion parents doesn’t guarantee you’ll ever win an Olympic medal. Think about the sports champs you admire. Are the soccer players born to score goals, the UFC fighters born to become champion in their weight division, the sprinters born to run, the basketball stars born to play and the pole vaulters born to vault? You see what I mean? ‘Naturals’ in sport work really hard to become naturals.

“Nobody’s a natural. You work hard to get good and then work hard to get better”
Paul Coffey, ice hockey player

10 000 Hours
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of Outliers: The Story of Success. He has made a study of the habits of successful people and it is his belief that anyone can become an expert in anything if they dedicate 10, 000 hours of practice to it. So, let’s do the math: If you practice doing something for 1 hour every day, that will add up to 365 hours in a year, so in just over 27 years you’ll be an expert at doing that something. Not a particularly motivational thought perhaps, but, the point Gladwell is really making is that no one is born an expert; successful people become successful because they dedicate themselves to practicing their craft. There really are no ifs or buts about it. The only ‘but’ is to talk about people who get lucky, but that’s like saying the way to become wealthy is to win the lottery.

Nature or Nurture?
Golf champion Tiger Woods became the youngest player to win a Masters title at the age of only 21, so does that make him a natural talent; a born winner? He began playing at the age of 2 and by the age of 8 he had won the Junior World Golf Championship, so if we apply Gladwell’s theory and say that Woods practiced golf after school each day and then played all day on the weekends, a rough estimate is that he played an average of 3 hours every day in childhood, working out at just over 9 years to accumulate 10 000 hours of dedicated practice. Woods started playing at age 2 and won his first professional tournament at age 21. That’s 19 years of dedicated practice. Born winner?

How about Brazilian soccer superstar Ronaldo? At the age of only 20, he became the youngest player to win the FIFA World Player of the Year. He was 17 years old before his career in soccer began, but how many hours of dedicated practice had he put in before then?

Do What You Love and Love What You Do
Okay, I’m certainly not suggesting that 10 000 hours of practice will make you a Woods or a Ronaldo, but it will make you a very skilled golfer or soccer player! Successful people do what they love and they love what they do. Sports players become successful because they love their sport. They get involved in their sport because it gives them a ’buzz’ and it’s that buzz that keeps them involved and keeps them putting in the hours of practice that leads to their success.

The key to finding your own success in life is to find something that you love. You don’t have to be a ’natural’ talent to succeed in the area you love; you just need to be doing something you love to do. When you love what you do, you keep doing it, and it’s that dedication to practicing your craft that will bring you success.