Mastery

RAW says something interesting about the development of mastery.

You see there is no sophisticated training done in pro sports. No specific, definite or systematic means in place for developing the kind of high level skills and abilities needed to play the game. You either develop the skills they're looking for, or you don't make it. Ask your coach for help and you get answers like: Well kid, it feels just like pullin' down a window shade when ya doo it right; Ya got to use yer whole body, ya know what I mean? More often than not, niether one has a good conscious idea what they actually mean.

That is why I refer to those who make the cut in pro sports, especially the franchise-level players, as flukes. They have no idea what they do differently from other players, and actually they just serendipitously did things less wrong as they were developing. Fewer bad habits is really what it amounts to. And again no, it's not genetics, if you examine the empirical data you immediately see just how absurd this arguement is in the context of the all-around skills needed for most sports.

These you can say are developmental anomalies, rather than genetic anomalies. And we certainly do find these in nature, our human nature. Other than sports, the records of history give us countless examples of these anomalies in human nature. Men and women who stood out as exceptional for their behvior, both good and bad. But unlike our ball players, some of these were not really flukes at all. They had a very conscious understanding of what they were doing, a systematic and definite means of training.

This reminds me a bit of the aphorism that enlightenment is an accident, but meditation makes you accident-prone.