Athletes and Personal Power Laws
Most athletes train backwards.
They spend most of their time fixing weaknesses instead of maximizing strengths.
Sounds right.
Usually it’s not.
Elite performance is asymmetrical.
Barry Sanders wasn’t great because he was balanced. He wasn’t.
He was great because he was impossible to touch.
Everyone knew what he was going to do, but not how.
Didn’t matter.
You can’t hit what you can’t catch.
Same with Jerome Bettis.
Everyone knew he was running downhill.
Through you.
Didn’t matter.
Our world operates under power laws. The highest performers understand this.
A tiny percentage of their traits produce the overwhelming majority of their results.
A lot of coaches claim to love “well-rounded.”
Useful.
Reliable.
Replaceable.
The dangerous athletes are uneven.
One has absurd vision.
Another has freakish speed.
Another scores from impossible angles.
Those traits ARE the thing.
Everything else is minutia.
That doesn’t mean weaknesses should be blindly ignored.
If a weakness keeps you off the field, fix it.
But spending years sanding down your edges often destroys the thing that made you dangerous in the first place.
Don’t mistaken high agency traits for laziness.
The kid who hates conditioning but can’t put the hockey stick down?
Maybe they’re lazy.
Or, maybe they have the best hands on the team?
That’s the part most systems miss.
Obsession is directional.
People naturally drift toward the parts of the sport they’re built for.
And usually, what athletes enjoy most is connected to what they’re best at.
The obsession creates the iteration-based reps.
Those reps create the outlier.
Good CEO’s understand this.
They hire marketers to market.
Builders to build.
Designers to design.
Salespeople to sell.
Nobody walks into a company and says:
“We need everyone equally competent at everything.”
That would be ridiculous.
The best athletes eventually force reality onto the system.
If they are dominant enough at one thing, the game bends around them.
Discover your natural proclivities.
Figure out where they are best utilized.
Become the best in the world at them.
The rest will take care of itself.
INNO ATHLETE
Helping athletes think clearly about performance, strategy, and business.
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