Baseball legend Ted Williams was one in a million, widely considered the most “gifted” hitter of his time. “I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park,” John Updike wrote in The New Yorker in 1960. “It went over the first baseman’s head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit.”
In the public imagination, Williams was almost a god among men, a “superhuman” endowed with a collection of innate physical gifts, including spectacular eye-hand coordination, exquisite muscular grace, and uncanny instincts. “Ted just had that natural ability,” said Hall of Fame second baseman Bobby Doerr. “He was so far ahead of everybody in that era.” Among other traits, Williams was said to have laser-like eyesight, which enabled him to read the spin of a ball as it left the pitcher’s fingers and to gauge exactly where it would pass over the plate. “Ted Williams sees more of the ball than any man alive,” Ty Cobb once remarked.
But all that innate miracle-man stuff—it was all “a lot of bull,” said Williams. He insisted his great achievements were simply the sum of what he had put into the game. “Nothing except practice, practice, practice will bring out that ability,” he explained. “The reason I saw things was that I was so intense … It was [super] discipline, not super eyesight.”
Is that possible? Could a perfectly ordinary man actually train himself to be a dazzling phenomenon? We all recognize the virtues of practice and hard work, but truly, could any amount of effort transform the clunky motions of a whiffer or a chucker into the majestic swing of Tiger Woods or the gravity-defying leap of Michael Jordan? Could an ordinary brain ever expand enough to conjure the far-flung curiosities and visions of Einstein or Matisse? Is true greatness obtainable from everyday means and everyday genes?
Conventional wisdom says no, that some people are simply born with certain gifts while others are not; that talent and high intelligence are somewhat scarce gems, scattered throughout the human gene pool; that the best we can do is to locate and polish these gems—and accept the limitations built into the rest of us.
But someone forgot to tell Ted Williams that talent will out. As a boy, he wasn’t interested in watching his natural abilities unfurl passively like a flower in the sunshine. He simply wanted—needed—to be the best hitter baseball had ever seen, and he pursued that goal with appropriate ferocity. “His whole life was hitting the ball,” recalled a boyhood friend. “He always had that bat in his hand … And when he made up his mind to do something, he was going to do it or know the reason why.”
At San Diego’s old North Park field, two blocks from his modest childhood home, friends recall Williams hitting baseballs every waking hour of every day, year after year after year. They describe him slugging balls until their outer shells literally wore off, swinging even splintered bats for hours upon hours with blisters on his fingers and blood dripping down his wrists. A working-class kid with no extra pocket change, he used his own lunch money to hire schoolmates to shag balls so that he could keep swinging. From age six or seven, he would swing the bat at North Park field all day and night, swing until the city turned off the lights; then he’d walk home and swing a roll of newspaper in front of a mirror until he fell asleep. The next day, he’d do it all over again. Friends say he attended school only to play on the team. When baseball season ended and the other kids moved on to basketball and football, Williams stuck with baseball. When other boys started dating girls, Williams just kept hitting balls in North Park field. In order to strengthen his sight, he would walk down the street with one eye covered, and then the other. He even avoided movie theaters because he’d heard it was bad for the eyes. “I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from being the hitter I hoped to be,” Williams later recalled. “Looking back … it was pretty near storybook devotion.”
In other words, he worked for it, fiercely, single-mindedly, far beyond the norm. “He had one thought in mind and he always followed it,” said his high school coach Wos Caldwell.
Greatness was not a thing to Ted Williams; it was a process.
This didn’t stop after he got drafted into professional baseball. In Williams’s first season with the minor league San Diego Padres, coach Frank Shellenback noticed that his new recruit was always the first to show up for practice in the morning and the last to leave at night. And something more curious: after each game, Williams would ask the coach for the used game balls.
“What do you do with all these baseballs?” Shellenback finally asked Williams one day. “Sell them to kids in the neighborhood?”
“No sir,” replied Williams. “I use them for a little extra hitting practice after supper.”
Knowing the rigors of a full practice day, Shellenback found the answer hard to swallow. Out of a mix of suspicion and curiosity, he later recalled, “I piled into my car after supper [one night] and rode around to Williams’s neighborhood. There was a playground near his home, and sure enough, I saw The Kid himself driving those two battered baseballs all over the field. Ted was standing close to a rock which served as [home] plate. One kid was pitching to him. A half dozen others were shagging his drives. The stitching was already falling apart on the baseballs I had [just] given him.”
Even among the pros, Williams’s intensity stood so far outside the norm that it was often uncomfortable to witness up close. “He discussed the science of hitting ad nauseam with teammates and opposing players,” write biographers Jim Prime and Bill Nowlin. “He sought out the great hitters of the game—Hornsby, Cobb, and others—and grilled them about their techniques.”
He studied pitchers with the same rigor. “[After a while], pitchers figure out [batters’] weaknesses,” said Cedric Durst, who played on the Padres with Williams. “Williams wasn’t like that … Instead of them figuring Ted out, he figured them out. The first time Ted saw [Tony] Freitas pitch, we were sitting side by side on the bench and Ted said, ‘This guy won’t give me a fast ball I can hit. He’ll waste the fast ball and try to make me hit the curve. He’ll get behind on the count, then throw me the curve.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”
Process. After a decade of relentless effort on North Park field, and four impressive years in the minors, Williams came into the major leagues in 1939 as an explosive hitter and just kept getting better and better and better. In 1941, his third season with the Boston Red Sox, he became the only major league player in his era—and the last in the twentieth century—to bat over .400 for a full season.
The next year, 1942, Ted Williams enlisted in the navy as an aviator. Tests revealed his vision to be excellent, but well within ordinary human range.
Excerpted from the book The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong by David Shenk
But I don’t need to practice Japanese ’til I bleed, right?
Awesome article. It really is amazing how you can do anything with enough hard work and discipline.
Another nail in the coffin of well-roundedness.
That sounds like a lot of work! I’ll just go play some more Pokemon… in Japanese of course B)
I generally agree but I’d also add that innate talent does exist and varies from person to person–in other words, a group of people who all work equally as hard and in precisely the same manner, all other things being equal, will NOT get the same results, there will be a good bit of variation.
However, determination, being persistently consistent as I call it, is the biggest factor.
Cheers,
Andrew
I’m not absolutely sure on that – from a results point of view that is.
Just because success can come easier to some, doesn’t mean they’ll achieve it. I still think the advantage is in the mindset and not “innate talent”.
Your innate talent is probably things you’re attracted to doing anyway, though.
I think that “talent” exists, but has very little to do with success. People who are naturally good at things never learn to put in the hard work to be GREAT. Therefore, they usually end up being mediocre, while the people they were better than at the beginning, who worked hard, own them.
You can be mediocre on innate talent, but you’ll never be GREAT or even good without hard work. And more often than not, “talented” people never learn how to work.
BBL, going home to practice…
Awesome. Are there other books with stories like this? I mean stories about hard work and how people actually got to where they are. I’ve noticed most books about artists/athletes/whatever hardly focus on how people ***actually got to where they did***, which to me is the only interesting part!
Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else [Paperback]
Geoff Colvin (Author)
amzn.to/ek9MN3
Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success [Hardcover]
Matthew Syed (Author)
amzn.to/gUPMh8
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success [Paperback]
Carol Dweck (Author)
amzn.to/eTVLwc
Thanks so much! Bought.
Here’s some web reading, if you haven’t read SoperMemo:
www.supermemo.com/articles/genius.htm
There’s more on the site and it’s all for free xD
PS. There is also this site.
yudkowsky.net
Not directly connected to language learning (the major point is rationality. And AI, in scientific meaning), moreover deffinitely not in Japanese. But it has some good stuff on self-development… And it’s also in e-book format. And it makes you smarter and more attractive (in a way).
For reading everything it’s best to go by Sequences, couse there are those articles whom bring you the light of understanding to everything. (I love not my English as I’m reading this now :/)
Maybe his gift was super focus… but if that story is true i can’t help but feel sorry for someone who sacrificed his youth for something as trivial as baseball. But of course this is an American Story, so I can see how their population would think that is a good thing.
That being said, the story is an excellent example of dedication for language learners.
I assume he truly loved what he was doing, so there’s no need to feel sorry for him – he spent most of his childhood on working to fulfill his dream, that’s hardly a sacrifice.
(I don’t like baseball either)
“But of course this is an American Story, so I can see how their population would think that is a good thing.” Nothing like generalizing about an entire country…
It’s a pretty accurate generalization.
America exports the capitalist dream to all the peoples of the world – Freedom! Bombs! then more freedom, then more bombs. The general population must be just fine with that because that has been the status quo for the last 60 years or so.
Okay, first I’m Canadian, so it’s not like I’m saying this because you insulted me, it’s just that I wish you’d should show some more courtesy to the American people. Like, how many American people have you actually spoke to? How many have been disrespectful to you? My guess is some figure less than 100.
That ridiculously small sample of the population is not something you should base your opinions on.
Secondly, where are you from? Chances are that that this ugly version of the American dream you’ve been hearing about is actually propaganda from your own government or fellow countrymen.
No country is perfect and not everyone is a good person either, but don’t judge an entire country’s population on a few snobby people and especially for things that their government did that the vast majority of the people do not stand for.
Seeing how you’re freely posting your thoughts and opinions, I’d assume you come from a country that has free speech. And sure, you can pull that out and tell me that you can say whatever you want because of your God(or)gov’t given right, but just don’t use that as a fall back for your bad manners, you’ll only embarrass yourself more on a global stage and cheapen the meaning of that right as well.
America has freed over a billion people from the misery of tyrants. It has required a few bombs to achieve that remarkable statistic. Tyrants don’t usually change their ways as a result of modest disapproval from world bodies. Perhaps you would prefer communism – a system that does not value freedom and which is responsible for murdering over a billion people. Perhaps you are not quite so ambitious and prefer Nazism. The Nazis weren’t nearly as successful as the communists in murdering with regard to sheer numbers, but they did seem to have a fascination with bombs. Who exactly do you prefer? Disneyland?
More of that “deep thinking” that is so famously Simon. I hope you don’t use an ipod, windows, mac, eat at McDonalds, fly in planes, drive a vehicle, or any of the other things that have come out of that bomb-factory known as America. You’re right: the general population is pretty happy with what America has brought the world. Put your money where your mouth is and stop consuming if you’re as different as you pretend to be, Simon. Get over yourself, “mate”.
I have absolutely no interest in baseball, but I certainly don’t feel sorry for the guy. He was the idol of a whole nation, and not the kind of random, vacuous kind of talentless ‘idol’ that was plucked up the entertainment industry to be used to sell magazines or whatever, but a real hero. He had the satisfaction of knowing that he alone was responsible for making himself who he was.
Attempting to be the best in the world or a country at a thing, whatever it is, takes a kind of madness. You need to be willing to make a commitment that pushes other things out of your life and brings you into conflict with ‘normal’ behavior. If you care about it enough, then being able to find this kind of singular focus is a blessing, be it sport, music, language, whatever. All great human endeavors have depths that cannot be fully plumbed in our limited lifespans. The depth that is found in a given pursuit is particularly hidden from those who have little experience of it, and hence the intense passion and devotion that one ‘little’ or ‘trivial’ aspect of human experience arouses in a person can seem incomprehensible. Why pour all the energy and effort of your life into ‘simply’ hitting a ball with a stick? For the same reason someone would pour the energy and effort of their life into plucking strings held taught over a wooden shell, or stare at musty old books in a library. If you are not personally a fan of academia, or classical music, or baseball, this person may appear small to you, perhaps an object of pity. Why, they could have been chasing girls, or drinking beer, or taking foreign trips, or doing x, y, z. Insert whatever you find valuable (which most of us reflectively take up from the society in which we are raised). But such individuals seem small or pathetic only because the depths of enjoyment and fulfillment available to them are not apparent to you.
『我々が高く飛べば飛ぶほど、飛ぶことのできない人々には我々がより一層小さく見える。』 ニーチェ
Moving away from a reply to the above and towards a general comment on the post – My own bit of madness is hardly comparable to Ted Williams, but for 2010 pretty much all I did was sit in my room reading, listening and watching Japanese. I was probably clocking an 80-90 hour Japanese immersion week (counting waking hours only, no sleep listening). Some 4000+ hours over the course of the year. A lot of people would have found it a strange/boring/crazy or trivial thing to do. For me it was one of the most exciting times of my life. It just so happens that as my environment has changed to Japan what I do is now ‘strange’ but in a positive way. I am able to do things quite easily which are supposed to be extremely difficult, such being where a foreigner (or at least a white guy) isn’t really expected to be (such as sitting in a lecture on philosophy, or even just very normal, mundane things like drinking with friends and making stupid jokes). I also can’t deny that it feels great being asked なんでそんなに日本語上手ですか？ (I get it a lot). But social approval and praise came only after the fact, and in itself in no way would have been worth the extreme dedication required to reach this point if I did not find value in the journey itself.
You have inspired me as well. do you have a blog or YouTube channel about your Japanese learning experience?
Sorry, I don’t really have the time. I’ve made a bunch of posts on AJATT+ though *wink* *wink*
What devotion. I’m inspired yet again.
so… why does a guy spend his entire childhood and 4 years of minors to only take just 3 years of major league fame, glory, and cash before applying for the navy?
Is this a veiled lesson on burnout, Katz? 😉
Well, there was that war going on at the time. That may have influenced his decision.
his bio on Wikipedia says he was drafted…
I wonder if the BBC gets its article ideas from here 😉
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13128701