Katey Roberts forwarded me this Tough Love post from Diary of a Hedge Fund Manager... I'd been wanting to write on Dweck's insights and research, which is very useful to understand if you deal with people. Fortunately this blogger has already taken a crack, and it's pretty good. Enjoy. (Thanks Katey!)
Watching Sean White in the Olympics, I was struck by the layered graphics where they super-imposed his jumps with that of the second-best contender. He wasn't just getting a bit higher - he was getting almost twice as high as the next best person in the world. His jumps were more defined. His last "trick" was one he'd invented and to date is the only person who can accomplish it.
It would be easy to chalk that up to raw talent - but I got to thinking about the quotes I'd heard by greats like Michael Jordan and others who would point to the hours upon hours of mundane, torturous repetition and practice required to be able to get to the final product we would see on TV. Sure, some ability doesn't hurt, but many argue that talent is over-rated - discipline and persistence matter as much, if not more. I think Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Outliers that it was about 10,000 hours of experience or practice that creates the "expert" or the "pro."
So I did a little searching on the internet to see if I could find anything about the early Sean White that might show he actually had to work to get where he is... And I found this...
Vision, experimental discovery, personal knowledge - there is so much in this video... Watch and perhaps you will see it too. Please feel welcome to use the comment section to point out what you got out of it...
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