Practicing Wrong

When I was young I wanted to play basketball. I couldn’t shoot for shit. I spent hours throwing the ball at the hoop but never got any better. Turns out that I didn’t know how to practice. I never learned to figure out what worked and what didn’t. It was just a blur of misdirected wallowing about.

The offshoot from this, not understanding the real problem at the time, was that I believed that you were either good at something or not. If you were good, you could get better, but if you weren’t good, you’d never get better. This thinking kept me from pursuing a wide variety of activities.

I used to be so jealous of people who talked about how much a coach or a teacher helped them on their way to success. Nobody ever did that for me. Of course, later in life, I realized that I never asked nor accepted anybody’s help. That one’s on me.