PART 1 : Talent Is a Terrible Predictor of Success
10-12 Minute Read
Let's start with a dangerous idea.
The athlete with the best swing on the field is often not the athlete who ends up having the best career.
You already know that's true.
You've seen it.
I've seen it.
Every coach reading this has seen it.
Every scout has seen it.
Every recruiter has seen it.
Every parent who's spent enough years around the game has seen it.
The problem is that nobody likes talking about it.
Because if talent isn't the answer, things become much more complicated.
Talent is easy.
Talent can be measured.
Exit velocity.
Bat speed.
Velocity.
Strength.
Power.
Size.
Sixty times.
TrackMan.
Blast Motion.
Rapsodo.
Spreadsheets.
Dashboards.
Graphs.
Baseball has become very good at measuring tools.
What baseball has never been particularly good at measuring is people.
And that's where things start getting uncomfortable.
Because the longer you're around this game, the more you realize something strange.
Baseball doesn't simply evaluate talent.
It evaluates human beings.
How they respond to pressure.
How they respond to coaching.
How they respond to boredom.
How they respond to failure.
How they respond to success.
How they respond to uncertainty.
How they respond when nobody is watching.
The uncomfortable truth is that the game doesn't care what you can do once.
The game cares what you can repeatedly do.
And those are very different conversations.
Imagine two players.
Player A has better tools.
More power.
More athleticism.
More upside.
More arm strength.
More speed.
The player everybody notices.
Player B is average.
Average tools.
Average size.
Average athleticism.
Nothing flashy.
Nothing that jumps off the page.
At fourteen years old, nearly everybody chooses Player A.
At twenty years old, the answer often changes.
Why?
Because physical tools determine what a player can do.
Behaviour determines what a player will do.
And behaviour compounds.
Every day.
For years.
That's where the gap begins.
And that's where baseball starts becoming less about baseball and more about people.
Baseball Is A People Business Pretending To Be A Baseball Business
The athlete is being evaluated.
But so is the parent.
So is the coach.
So is the scout.
So is the travel ball organization.
So is the academy owner.
So is the recruiting coordinator.
So is the front office.
So is the board sitting around a conference table making decisions.
Baseball people love talking about culture.
Very few spend time understanding the people creating it.
A coach can have incredible baseball knowledge and still lose a room.
A parent can spend tens of thousands of dollars on development and accidentally become the biggest obstacle in their child's growth.
A scout can fall in love with tools and completely miss the person attached to them.
A front office can acquire talent and unknowingly acquire dysfunction.
A board can hire intelligence and accidentally hire instability.
We've all seen it.
Organizations with less talent outperform organizations with more talent.
Teams with no business winning somehow find a way.
Teams loaded with talent somehow implode.
Coaches players would run through walls for.
Coaches players couldn't wait to get away from.
Parents who accelerated development.
Parents who suffocated it.
These outcomes rarely come down to baseball knowledge alone.
They come down to people.
How people communicate.
How people lead.
How people handle conflict.
How people handle accountability.
How people handle responsibility.
How people handle pressure.
The longer you're around baseball, the less it becomes a conversation about mechanics.
The more it becomes a conversation about human behaviour.
And human behaviour is messy.
Which is exactly why most people avoid it.
It's easier to measure bat speed than accountability.
It's easier to measure velocity than emotional regulation.
It's easier to measure power than coachability.
But if your goal is predicting long-term development, the things that are hardest to measure often matter the most.
The Information Problem
Here’s a doozy.
Information has never been more available.
Wisdom has never been more diluted.
Every athlete has access to training videos.
Every parent has access to recruiting advice.
Every coach has access to podcasts.
Every organization has access to leadership content.
Every scout has access to analytics.
In theory, this should make everybody better.
Instead, it often creates a different problem.
People mistake access to information for competence.
A dad watches twenty hours of YouTube and decides he's qualified to redesign his son's swing.
A parent listens to three recruiting podcasts and starts acting like a college advisor.
A travel ball coach attends a clinic and comes home believing he's solved player development.
A JUCO bullpen arm follows Tread, Pitching Ninja, Driveline and a handful of social media accounts and suddenly thinks he could run a high school pitching department.
A board member reads one leadership book and starts questioning people with decades of experience.
We've created a culture where consuming information is often mistaken for understanding it.
Baseball doesn't care how many podcasts you've listened to.
The game eventually asks a much simpler question.
Can you actually do it?
Can you teach it?
Can you lead it?
Can you repeat it?
Can you help somebody else do it?
Development is not a collection of tips.
Development is navigation.
Navigation requires judgment.
Judgment requires experience.
Experience requires humility.
And humility is becoming increasingly rare.
One of the strangest things I've observed in baseball is that certainty often peaks long before wisdom arrives.
The sixteen-year-old thinks he understands development.
The twenty-year-old thinks he understands coaching.
The parent thinks they understand recruiting.
The volunteer coach thinks they understand leadership.
Then life arrives.
Failure arrives.
Responsibility arrives.
Consequences arrive.
And certainty slowly gets replaced by humility.
The people I trust most today are rarely the people pretending to have all the answers.
They're the people asking better questions.
Because once you've spent enough time around athletes, businesses, organizations, families, leadership, addiction, recovery, success, failure, and performance, you realize something uncomfortable.
Human beings are far more complicated than our favourite baseball podcast would like us to believe.
The Biggest Lie In Development
One of the biggest lies in development is that information creates change.
It doesn't.
If information created change, every athlete would sleep eight hours.
Every athlete would have a schedule.
Every athlete would train consistently.
Every athlete would stay off their phone.
Every athlete would manage their emotions.
Every athlete would follow through on commitments.
The information already exists.
The internet solved the information problem years ago.
The challenge isn't knowledge.
The challenge is implementation.
The challenge is behaviour.
Why do some athletes consistently do what they know they should do while others don't?
Why do some people continue evolving while others repeat the same patterns for years?
Why do some athletes hear coaching and grow?
Why do others hear coaching and become defensive?
Why do some people seek discomfort?
Why do others spend their lives avoiding it?
Those questions eventually led me away from mechanics and toward something much deeper.
Personality.
Not because personality determines destiny.
Because personality influences behaviour.
And behaviour influences everything.
Pressure Doesn't Create Problems
Pressure has become one of the most misunderstood concepts in sports.
Pressure doesn't create problems.
Pressure exposes them.
Pressure doesn't create discipline.
Pressure reveals discipline.
Pressure doesn't create character.
Pressure reveals character.
Pressure doesn't create confidence.
Pressure reveals confidence.
Pressure doesn't create emotional instability.
Pressure reveals emotional instability.
The athlete who falls apart after a strikeout didn't suddenly become emotional.
Pressure exposed what was already there.
The coach who loses control after a loss didn't suddenly become reactive.
Pressure exposed what was already there.
The parent screaming at an umpire didn't suddenly become irrational.
Pressure exposed what was already there.
Pressure acts like a spotlight.
It illuminates strengths.
It illuminates weaknesses.
It illuminates habits.
It illuminates blind spots.
Which means if we want to understand performance under pressure, we should probably spend more time understanding what pressure is revealing.
The Question That Built EQ-OS
Over time, I became obsessed with a question.
Not how talented somebody was.
How much of that talent they could access when it mattered.
Because those are completely different conversations.
A player can own a skill and still lose access to it.
A player can own confidence and lose access to it.
A player can own preparation and lose access to it.
The skill doesn't disappear.
Access disappears.
Pressure changes access.
Fear changes access.
Identity changes access.
Emotion changes access.
Distraction changes access.
That question became one of the foundations of EQ-OS.
And eventually Transfer EQ.
Can your talent travel?
Can it travel from practice to games?
Can it travel from confidence to pressure?
Can it travel from high school to college?
Can it travel from comfort to chaos?
Because baseball is full of talented players.
The question was never whether they possessed talent.
The question was whether they could consistently access it.
Why The Big Five Matters
Eventually that search led me toward one of the most researched frameworks in psychology.
The Big Five Personality Traits.
Not because I wanted labels.
Because I wanted a map.
A way to better understand behaviour.
A way to better understand development.
A way to better understand why some people keep growing while others keep repeating.
Over the next several articles, we're going to unpack each of the five traits and examine how they influence athletes, parents, coaches, leaders, organizations, and development itself.
Not as an academic exercise.
As a practical one.
Because if we're serious about helping people grow, then we need to understand the person underneath the performance.
The athlete underneath the statistics.
The coach underneath the authority.
The parent underneath the anxiety.
The leader underneath the title.
The human being underneath the uniform.
And we'll start with the trait that has probably created more innovation, curiosity, creativity, exploration, opportunity, mistakes, rabbit holes, businesses, books, ideas, and unfinished projects than any other.
Openness.
See you in Part 2.
