Written by Sports are a game of wins and losses, failures and success, talent and effort. It’s indisputable that the mere thought of sports wouldn’t exist without athletes. Athletes bring a unique set of skills designed to play a role in creating individual or team success. But what makes one athlete better than another, what’s the recipe for winning, and what’s the secret to crowning champions?
Athletes’ skills are used to create a performance that’s either positive or negative. You could say that an athlete’s “secret sauce” to performance is talent multiplied by effort. Talent can be defined as a unique, natural ability or aptitude that the individual does not earn. Effort, on the other hand, is the conscious attempt of physical or mental exertion.
If we multiply both factors to achieve performance, can we say that one can exist without the other, or is even more important? The natural talent of athletes driven by their genetic makeup and natural ability can be harnessed into a profound skillset. To harness these skills, minimal practice or performance effort is needed. These gifts will take an athlete to great lengths compared to athletes who may not possess the same natural talent. Therefore, you will find the one person on the team who learns quicker, plays faster, finishes early, and adapts easily to challenges within sports. Many gifted athletes can hang on to their success until put up against someone with similar natural talent. When athletes of similar natural talent meet, we must consider the next factor to performance: effort.
Effort comes in the form of practice effort and performance effort. Practice effort encompasses the exertion used to enhance one’s skill set, and performance effort is how hard one uses his or her skills to achieve a performance outcome. Therefore, the combination of efforts will outperform natural ability when those abilities are of similar value. Notably, effort is more challenging to execute because it is less natural than talent. Effort requires a conscious choice to put into action, where talent is a gift.
Here’s the breakdown. We can not control how much natural talent we’re given. However, we can control how much practice effort we put into harnessing our natural abilities and how much performance effort we exert to be successful.
So, who wins, talent or effort? I would argue talent will get athletes to a specific tier of success. They may be leaps and bounds ahead of their counterparts until a certain point. Ultimately, though, when talents are similar, effort takes over. It comes down to who will exert more practice and performance effort to play at a specific level. Even the most naturally gifted athletes, such as Patrick Mahomes and Lebron James, are as successful as they are because they were disciplined enough to use effort to elevate their natural skills.
Now the question is, what kind of athlete will you be? Will you rely on your gifts to take you so far, or will you take on the physical and mental challenge of becoming greater than you could on mere gifting? Will you work harder, fight longer, stay later, push further, and dream bigger? Natural talent is fixed, but the effort is endless.