In middle school I played second base for an all-star youth baseball team. My teammates were the very best athletes in our age group. I didn’t belong in that group, but my dad was the coach, so that helped me make the team.

One day my dad decided to take our team to a professional batting cage.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “For the next hour you’re going to be staring down professional fastballs. They’re coming in at 86 to 90 miles per hour. If any one of you so much as makes contact, and I mean even if you foul it off directly behind you, I’m buying the whole team a pizza party.”

And for the next hour I watched the best, strongest, most skilled batters at our age group make complete and utter fools of themselves. Nobody even came close.

The longer it went on the more frustrating it became, if for no other reason than it wasn’t even a surprise. You knew it was going to be a fastball. You knew how fast it was coming. And you knew it was going to be dead center in the middle of the plate.

But it didn’t matter how prepared we were, or how much information we had about the task at hand. Not one of us had developed the skills to succeed at that level.

Yet.

Skill over Talent, Learning over Information

And that’s the point, isn’t it?

We live in an age of unlimited free information. Anything and everything you could ever want to know is readily available to anyone who has the ability to read this blog post. So we fool ourselves into believing that knowledge is the same as doing the hard work of developing real skills.

In his latest book The Practice, Seth Godin distinguishes between talent and skill:

“You’ve been told you don’t have enough talent (but that’s okay, because you can learn the skill instead).
…
Our commitment to the process is the only alternative to the lottery-mindset of hoping for the good luck of getting picked by the universe.”

Every one of us was talented, but talent will only get you so far. None of my teammates on that particular baseball team went on to play professional sports, because not one of us nurtured our talents into the skills required to do so.

(And of course, there’s no guarantee that you’ll succeed simply by nurturing your talent into real skills. Luck plays a huge factor in success. But I guarantee without nurturing your talent into real skills, you will not succeed).

But the very same year I also played basketball in a house league, on a team of far less naturally talented athletes.

This one kid Robbie wasn’t significantly better than any of us, but he was far more driven. I remember his dedication in practices and the seriousness with which he took the games, while the rest of us were just having fun.

Rob Gronkowski would go on to break about every record a tight end could break in the NFL, helping Tom Brady and his particular New England Patriots become one of the most successful teams in the history of all professional sports.

Robbie couldn’t hit a 90 mph fastball at 11-years-old either. But Gronk can.

Here’s a photo of our basketball team that year. I’m on the bottom row, second from the right. Can you spot a young Gronk?