I have seen many athletes come into my gym who I would
consider having exceptional talent. You often have to just sit
back and almost stop yourself from becoming envious in
seeing how they just pick it up without much hassle. I really
sucked at martial arts when I first started and I am not just
saying that. When it came time to choose teams for various
sports at school I was always the last one to be chosen.
I thought as probably many do, that I was never going to
make it in martial arts, because as I viewed it I had zero
talent. However I noticed that many people who had talent
where very self-absorbed and egotistical. There was an air of
superiority and although people may have recognized their
skill hidden deeply there was animosity and dislike towards
those athletes.
In the years coaching and training myself, I have come to
realize that TALENT is overrated. Today I look around and I
see the guys with talent,.You know them. They take off a few
weeks of training, even sometimes a couple of months and
they come back as if they had been there all the time. And yet
although they are talented they are not GREAT!
We all know what talent is, it is usually for the most part very
demonstratable and is in individual action such as the ability
to just get things right almost immediately and been able to
pull a technique off the second they learnt it. However
GREATNESS is when you bring more to the table than just
yourself. When someone in the gym brings GREATNESS to
the class everyone is inspired. They don't need to be the
most talented athlete and often they are not, but they add
VALUE. The common denominator of someone who has
GREATNESS vs. a person of talent is that their presence
raises everyone else's performance levels.
This is essentially what GREATNESS is the ability to make
everyone else around you better, not just yourself. There are
many talented athletes that I know personally, but beyond
their talent there is a void an emptiness. Sure they may be
great fighters, capable of wondrous athletic feats, but they
don't add VALUE, they don't help people GROW. GREAT
coaches are exactly the same they are continually trying to
make their athletes around them better, not just from a
fighting standpoint, but more than that. GREAT coaches
inspire people to explore and to go beyond what they feel is
possible. The irony in this is that just because you may have
a coach of GREATNESS does not necessarily mean that you
will be get the messaage. You need to discover that beyond
your own selfish needs, GREATNESS lies in the hands of
athletes who recognize that adding VALUE is more important
than personal selfish success. When I was young I believed
self-gratification meant I was successful, as I became older
and more mature I realized that I wanted my athletes I was
teaching to be successful.
Cheers,
Rodney King