“There is no such thing as natural talent. We’re all born with zero abilities. You either become competent or you spend your life complaining instead.”
- James Smith
NOW, James Smith is not someone I’ve ever paid much heed to.
He’s a self-made man, a fitness guru known the world over, whose commonality appeals to all the average Joes trying to find the wood through the trees.
People like him. He has a way of telling people they can achieve their dreams that is easily bought into.
‘You can be as good as them. All you have to do is work hard.’
It’s the idea that there is “no such thing as natural talent” that roused the natural suspicions I retain for any self-help artists.
The funny thing was that so many inter-county players liked and shared his statement when he stuck it out on social media last week.
James Smith clearly hasn’t met Peter Canavan.
Or Lionel Messi.
Or Diego Maradona.
Or Tiger Woods.
Those men, and others like them in different sports across the world, have something within them that others simply cannot manufacture, no matter how hard they try.
Don’t mistake that for the idea that they achieved what they did solely because they had this heaven-sent ability.
Nobody ever succeeded on talent alone. Ever.
Many a talent flowed down the drain because the hard work wasn’t there.
Peter Canavan was the most gifted footballer I, and many others, have ever seen.
For me, it wasn’t the points or the goals or even how he’d bounce off men twice his size.
It was how he’d roll back to his feet and spring up with his eyes pointing goalward.
No matter what pressure he was under, he had the ability to execute whatever decision he made.
Not only did he know when the shot was the right option, but he was splitting defences with his delicious one-hop passing long before ‘Gooch’ ever arrived in Kerry.
It’s the combination of execution and choice that makes the greats.
Canavan was reared 50 yards from Glencull primary school. He never left the back pitch.
When he attended St Mary’s as a student teacher, he would spend hours every day, kicking, kicking, kicking.
He was literally the first man at Tyrone training and the last to leave. Every night, he’d kick frees for an hour before training started.
You may read that and think there’s nothing exceptional about it.
That the standard for any county player now is to take the 10,000 hours theory and smash it into smithereens with repetitive practice.
And you’d be right.
They all do it. Reaching the bottom end of the scale for inter-county football, physically and technically, is an achievement in itself.
When it comes to work ethic, at such an elite level the degrees of separation are miniscule.
So when everyone puts in a colossal effort, why then do we have the Canavans or Messis of this world?
Why is it that some men stand out above anyone else in the field? It cannot just be perspiration either.
It is because they take all of that same work ethic and they’re adding it to their natural talent.
We can all get bigger, better, stronger. We can all practice kicking points on the run, working off both feet, developing a dummy.
Look at Dean Rock. When the final chapter is written on this Dublin team, it will record how things might have been very different if it weren’t for him.
Is he a great footballer? Not really.
He is a very, very good one who has maximised every single ounce of himself through sheer bloody-minded repetition and practice.
But try as he might, he will never be able to do what David Clifford can do.
The way he’s come in straight out of minor and, in his first All-Ireland final, taken a sledgehammer to Jonny Cooper’s reputation as one of the most feared man-to-man markers of a generation.
If you swallow the idea that there is no such thing as natural talent, then explain how Clifford, at 20 years of age, does that?
He’s undoubtedly worked incredibly hard at his game.
Genetically, he’s a freak.
But there’s no way that at 20, he could have worked that hard that he’d outstripped every other player in the land.
There’s natural talent in there. There has to be.
Go to Lionel Messi, or Diego Maradona. They came from the same dusty Argentinian potreros. There were millions raised on those hot, bumpy streets.
Very few of them were so small and shy they had to be dragged by their grandmother to play their first game for Grandoli, ‘the worst team in town’, and score five goals against boys that were physical giants in comparison.
“Did you see that? They couldn’t shake him! He is like a flea you can’t get rid of”, his coach exclaimed, giving later title to ‘The Flea’, a book about Messi’s career.
At night, Messi would pray to God to make him tall.
The great Argentine and the great Errigal man are parallels of each other. They should have been at a huge physical disadvantage.
But such was their ability that it didn’t matter.
They were so good that the big men could seldom get near them to hit them.
Messi is a born genius, a talent sent, a man whose ability to play the game from four moves ahead is enough to suggest he is not of this earth.
Maradona, the same. And if anything, the ultimate in the argument that sometimes talent alone can pull greatness along, even where the desire for dedication doesn’t exist.
Tiger Woods had crossed the barrier of 10,000 hours’ practice by the age of 12. Yet more experienced members of the field would still have been far ahead of him in that respect. He hadn’t yet found strength and conditioning.
To win the Masters by a record 12 strokes at the age of 21, you’re telling me that’s just the hours he’d put in to hitting golf balls? That there’s nothing natural about it?
Hard work only beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
Natural talent is what separates those at the head of the field from everyone else.
Don’t let James Smith or anyone else fool you into thinking it doesn’t exist.
