I was born without a proclivity to sports and preferring to play games or stay indoors and read books as a child. Books were more interesting and had much more excitement and content than any soccer ball could ever provide. So naturally, without any practice of sports, I hated PE and after school sports and activities my parents would force me into. I bought into my excuse that it was stupid, a waste of time, and didn’t produce anything functional, which is partially true, but mostly a fabricated tale I told myself because I hated how bad I was at it.
There is a quote by Mark Cuban, an investor on Shark Tank, who says something along the lines: “passions are not real. You work hard and you become good at something. You like that thing because you are good at it.” I think this is very applicable when I started to play tennis.
To be honest, I only started because all my friends were doing it and it would make me look “well-rounded” on my college application. I started out very badly, but after the mandatory practices, I naturally got better and started to enjoy it a lot more. This is the formula for success: practice.
Another two examples would be piano and violin, which I was forced to practice for many hours, so naturally, I got better at it. It’s a cliché that practice is the only way to get better at something, but it’s a cliché for a reason. It's very true. The reason practice is so useful is because it automates some things in your brain. Then eventually you’ll think about fewer things each time you play tennis, or piano, or violin, and then you can start to focus on improving or strategic moves because you’ve mastered and automated the basics.
And this automation is not a one-time use magic potion, it happens each time you practice. So when you see famous pianists or famous tennis players, they got that way not because they are naturally more talented than you, but because they practiced more than you and took it more seriously.
As a society we have a tendency to dismiss everything on “natural talent” or “natural intelligence” but that is simply false. We like to tell our lazy selves that because it allows us to simply sit back and not do anything and attribute our lack of success to something “outside of our control,” when it is not. Talent and intelligence are developed throughout the years, and one way to increase both is through practice.