THE MINDSET OF A CHAMPION

                                           * THE MINDSET  OF A CHAMPION * 

In sports, everybody believes in talent. Even -or especially-the experts. In fact, sports is where the idea of  " a natural " comes from-someone who looks like an athlete, move like an athlete, and is an athlete, all without trying. So great is the belief in natural talent that many scouts and coaches search only for naturals, and teams will vie with each hither to pay exorbitant amount to recruit them.

     Billy Beane was a natural. Everyone agreed he was the next Babe Ruth.
     But Billy Beane lacked one thing. The mindset of a champion. 

As Michael Lewis tells us in Money-ball, by the time Beane was a sophomore in high school, he was the highest scorer on the basketball team, the quarterback of the football team and the hitter on the baseball team, batting. 500 in one  of the toughest leagues in the country. His talent was real enough.

But the minute things went wrong, Beane searched for something to break.  "It wasn't merely that he didn't like to fail; it was as if he didn't know how to fail."
As he moved up in baseball from the minor leagues to the majors, things got worse and worse. Each at-bat became a nightmare, another opportunity for humiliation, and with every botched at-bat, he went to pieces. As one scout said, " Billy was of the opinion that he should never make an out." Sound familiar?

Did Beane try to fix his problems in constructive ways? No, of  course not, because this is a story of the fixed mindset. Natural talent should not need effort. Effort is for the other, the less endowed. Nature talent does not ask for help. It is an admission of weakness. In short, the natural does not analyze his deficiencies and coach or practice them away. The very idea of deficiencies is terrifying.

Being so imbued with the fixed mindset , Beane was trappped. Trapped by his huge talent. Beane the player never recovered from the fixed mindset, but Beane the incredibly successful major-league executive did. How did this happen?

There was another player who lived and player side bu side with Beane in the minors and in the majors, Lenny Dykstra. Dykstra did not have a fraction of Beane's physical endowment of " natural ability, " but Beane watched him in awe. As Beane later described, " He had no concept of failure... And I was the opposite."
Beane continues " I started to get a sense of what a baseball player was and I could see it wasn't me. It was Lenny."

As he watched, listened, and mulled  it over, it dawned on Beane that mindset was more important than talent. And not long after that, as part of a group that  pioneered a radically new approach to scouting and managing, he came to believe that scoring runs-the whole point of baseball- was much more about process than about talent.

Armed with these insights , Beane as general manger of the 2002 Oakland Athletics, led his team to a season of 103 Victories- winning the division championship and almost breaking the American League record consecutive wins. The team had the second lowest payroll in baseball ! They didn't buy talent, they bought mindset.    

THE IDEA OF THE NATURE
Now You See It, Now You Don't 

Physical endowment is not like intellectual endowment. It's visible. Size, build agility are all visible. Practice and training are also visible, and they produce visible results.  you would think that this would dispel the myth of the natural. You could see Muggsy- Bogues at five foot three playing NBA basketball, and Doug flutie, the small quarterback who has played for the new England patriots  and the San Diego Chargers.

You could see pete Gray, the one-armed baseball player who made it to the major leagues. Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, who was completely lacking in grace. Glenn Cunningham, the great runner, who had badly burned and damaged legs. Larry Bird and his lack of swiftness. You can see the small of graceless or even " disabled" ones who make it , and the god-like specimens who don't shouldn't this tell people something ?

Boxing experts relied on physical measurements, called " tales of the tape" to identify naturals. They included measurements of the fighter's fist, reach chest expansion and weight. Muhammad Ali failed these measurements. He was not a nature. He had great speed but he didn't have the physique of a great fighter, he didn't have the strength, and he didn't have the classical move. In fact, he boxed all wrong.

He didn't block punches with his arms and elbows. He punched in rallies like an amateur. He kept his jaw exposed. He pulled back his torso  to evade the impact of oncoming punches, which Jose Torres said was " like someone in the middle of a train track trying to avoid being hit by an oncoming train , not by moving to one or the other side of the track, but by running backward."