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Every day when the local house league is playing, you can see players being angry with themselves, expecting more than they’re showing – and doing actually very little to be a better player. Everything could be so easy, though.
If you’ve subscribed to my newsletter, you received a welcome message asking you to send me your biggest problem with becoming a better player. I get a lot of precise and detailed messages like this:
- My pre-shot routine isn’t reliable
- I don’t see the angles
- my aiming system doesn’t work
- always when I’m winning a match, I lose it in the end
When I follow-up with the question: “How often do you practice this skill?”, I hear… nothing.
It's pretty simple: If you'd like to be better at something, you have to practice. Click To TweetMost pool players “practice” by playing with a buddy, between a few times a year to a few times a week. Sometimes they keep score, sometimes they don’t, but in mostly all the cases they just play. And keep doing that for year, although they know that this won’t make them any better.
This can barely be called “practice”. Who would call it “learning” or “practicing”, if a piano teacher just sat you down at the piano and said: “Play!”. And then he’d grab a cup of coffee or call his auntie Sue. Or do laundry.
Practice means to repeat the skill that you’d like to improve, over and over. Focussed, with the courage to fail, attentive, experimenting, at the edge of the skill level you already have. Trying, failing, trying again, getting better, keep going, getting worse again, keep going anyway, gaining a new insight…
What we can learn from babies
How does a baby learn to walk? Does it read books about walking? Does it discuss proper walking technique in forums or on facebook? Does it watch other kids who can already walk and says to himself: “I’ll never learn how to walk like them – well, I don’t want to anyway.”?
No. The baby starts crawling, then it uses maybe a table leg to stand up and learns how to keep standing first. Then, at some point, it makes the first, careful step – before falling on it’s ass. And this how it goes: Trying, falling on it’s ass, getting up, more trying, doing more steps, fallng on it’s ass more often etc. In the end we learned how to walk.
Pretty much like this…
Fuck talent
A nice little sideeffect of the baby example: Everybody can walk. You don’t need talent to do it, although it’s a pretty demanding task. The only thing it needs is constant practice.
Talent is a myth which keeps us from making our dreams come true. Click To TweetSo, don’t tell me you don’t have enough talent to run these 100 balls in straight pool, to break better or finally learn how to jump. The only thing you really need is proper practice.
The good news: You’ve already got everything you need to become the pool player you’d like to be.
Not the bad, but the exhausting news: It’s work.