Effort > Talent

"Well, hello, world." This one's for all the coaches out there. It's going to be pretty short. It's just about an experience that validated a process and a thought process that I find myself battling on a regular basis. I think it was this author duckworth and she wrote about this equation and it was that talent times effort equals skill. Skill times effort equals achievement and the idea being that effort counts as much or twice as much as talent. Then you ask a coach, you have two athletes. One has a tremendous amount of talent, has a tremendous genetic ability. You can see it. It's easily observable. And then you have another athlete who has a tremendous amount of desire, determination, and capacity for work, but might lack that talent, the genetic makeup that has a predisposition towards being better. You ask coaches, who do you want? And they will tell you that they want the hard-working, effortful athlete with the ability to create so much capacity and effort. Then and not the athlete that has the loads of talent. Then you ask a coach to pick one on their team and have the actual choice because this does happen. It happens to me every year. And what I have told myself before and I have to believe, a lot of coaches tell themselves this as well, is that if you give me the talented kid who might not have the work ethic in trans-ic motivation, maybe they don't take well to external motivation, but man, they're talented, you could just see it. They will take the talent, when push comes to shove, they'll take that talent because they think that they will be able to reach them and have them reach their potential. I had this exact situation happen at the district championships on this last Saturday, it would have been May 9th, 2026. We had the four by 800, four runners each running two laps around the track. We have a fairly deep squad and they're roughly similar in times, but we were ranked third and had to finish in the top four to get through, knowing full well that there will be teams that haven't ran their best runners as a squad yet this season, so the third seeding might be a little misleading, and we had two athletes to choose that fourth spot from. One falls right into that genetically gifted loads of talent, you can see it. The other one falls into the incredible hard worker with lots of capacity, lots of effort, and doesn't have the same ceiling. And ultimately, and I cannot take full credit for making this decision, but I am the head coach after speaking with the primary distance coach. I told him this exact thing, I said, look, we have this one, he's very, very talented, but he doesn't practice very well, he misses a lot of stuff. There is a high level of return, if he does really well, there's also a risk. Then we have this other young man who has worked his tail off all season long who might not be able to achieve the same thing and has had some races where he's had very bad results. Ultimately, it came down to what's the right thing? What is the actual right thing according to our values and what we're trying to build as a culture? What is it? And it's, you take the kid that's put the work in all year long. If you don't make it at the end of the day, you can at least sit with yourself and sit with those kids and be able to look them in the eye and say, you know, you earned the right to try to make it to the next round. You earned that right. And I debated when I was thinking about how I would kind of put this recording together if I would tell you what the outcome was, what actually happened. And we finished in third place. We had a really good day. All four runners gave their best efforts and were rewarded with a trip to the sectional round next Saturday. Validating their work, the work the coaches put in, the idea that we need to value the effort, reward the effort, and not worry so much about the results. And I think we did, you know. When the goal is experience, then everything's a win. And I think we did that yesterday. And it was really a great moment to be a part of. And I feel very grateful that I got to be a part of it. Peace.