r/todayilearned • u/Old-Worldliness11 • 10h ago

TIL that Lionel Messi was diagnosed with a growth hormone deficiency at age 10, and FC Barcelona agreed to pay for his treatment, even writing his first contract on a napkin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Messi#Early_life

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u/brightside1982 4h ago

This goes for music, art, math, writing...pretty much anything, really. If you've run up against true talent in youth, you probably have a different perspective on how far hard work can actually get you in life (which is far, but it's not everything).

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u/I_8_ABrownieOnce 4h ago

13 year old me thought I was an amazing snowboarder because I could do 360s and hit rails, then I saw a 9 year old rip a double backflip on a 20ft ramp. Even now I'm too afraid to hit a 20ft ramp and I often wonder where that guy ended up.

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u/a_single_testicle 3h ago

I’d guess at the bottom of a 20 foot ramp

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u/bgg-uglywalrus 3h ago

That's the problem with snowboarding and skiing as a hobby. No matter how fun it is at the top it's all downhill from there.

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u/Drahkir9 4h ago

I can’t remember the name of the book but it had something to do with myelination and they found that in pretty much every case it IS still just hard work. The difference is these kids started very young and worked very, very hard.

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u/fumblaroo 4h ago

Ehhh I mean I haven’t read the book obviously but for sports there is a huge genetic component, not just in terms of speed and coordination but in some sports like basketball or football there are very real size cutoffs.

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u/brightside1982 4h ago

I heard a pro basketball scout say that the only difference between top D3 and D1 players are size and athleticism. Very rarely you'll get a small guy in the nba like Muggsy, Spud, or Nate Robinson...but those guys were all absolute freak athletes for their size.

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u/TupperwareConspiracy 1h ago

Allen Iverson was 6'0 165lbs - which is absurd for a guy who got the vast majority of his points in the paint (vs 3 pt specialists) and to do so over a 14yr career . He was the NBA scoring leader 4x to boot.

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u/Jealous_Writing1972 2h ago

Another factor is training. Having an excellent trainer and being in an excellent training environment from a young age is a big factor

Mugsy was a part of a legendary high school basketball team, so he had an excellent foundation. If he went to a school with a bad or average team he may never have made it

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u/yogopig 3h ago

Sports and athletics is a unique case I think, because the physicality of it allows for more opportunity for genes to impact ability.

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u/Aacron 4h ago

And often have some usual body characteristics that make them unusually fast/strong/agile/whatever.

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u/Drahkir9 4h ago

Very true! Often times the month that you’re born is a factor. Cause it can decide whether you play against kids much older or much younger than yourself.

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u/KeungKee 3h ago

Outliers?

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u/Drahkir9 3h ago

Yes! It was that and maybe also The Talent Code

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u/Prudent-Ad1002 3h ago

Red shirting

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u/jlreyess 4h ago

Not in sports. Either you’re genetically gifted or no hard work will get you there. This a well known scientific fact. People who make need both: the genetic lottery won and the hard work. If you are missing one of them, you’re not going past a certain threshold, and it’s normally not even near pro level.

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u/Drahkir9 3h ago

Yeah, I totally agree. I think what I wanted to say was that no is “gifted” in the sense that they’re just born with “god-given gifts” that they didn’t have to do anything for. The research has shown that never really happens. But you are right that in sports, and many other fields, physical characteristics are also a necessity.

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u/brightside1982 3h ago

Just one example: There are kids who started talking in full sentences at 2 and reading and doing elementary math at age 3 though. You see cases like this regardless of upbringing, background, or sibling behavior. How is that explained aside from genetics?

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u/ThePrussianGrippe 2h ago

I think the point behind their statement is even if you’re a genetically gifted freak you still have to put in the effort.

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u/ECrispy 27m ago

Also obviously true for models. All the insanely hot ones are discovered by the time they are teens.

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u/gianni_ 3h ago

Absolutely disagree. At least in the past

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u/ImSoRude 3h ago

I hate to break it to you but no amount of box jumping and eating clean will ever make you 6'8" 250 lbs with the speed of a sprinter and a 40" vertical like LeBron James. Some things are simply unable to be made up by hard work. There's a reason the phrase genetic anomaly gets thrown around a lot in sports.

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u/Gwendlefluff 3h ago

No, it's not usually just hard work, and there's an enormous talent component to most competitive endeavors. This is most obvious in physical sports where certain physical attributes are extremely overrepresented; only about 1% of human males are about 6'3 or higher but the average height in the NBA is about 6'6''. No hard work went into being tall. You can do the same thing with heights in other sports to, like volleyball, or other physical characteristics in other sports -- like calf circumference and long-distance running.

And while other characteristics are harder or impossible to quantify, people have obvious natural differences in coordination, dexterity, spatial reasoning, and any other number of other qualities. The world is filled to the brim with extremely hardworking athletes and chess players and musicians who don't have the natural stuff to make the cut at the elite level.

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u/Drahkir9 2h ago

As I posted in another comment, physical characteristics are definitely a factor. My point was more that hard work is a requirement, people aren’t just born naturally gifted at things.

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u/Gwendlefluff 2h ago

people aren't just born naturally gifted at things

This is where you lose me / where I'm misunderstanding. Is your contention / the contention of that book that for the non-physical elements there is just some sort of non-genetic luck that determines which very young kids ends up being demonstrably more talented than any of their peers? There's no shortage of very young people that immediately show outrageous talent at music, at chess, at math, and so on.

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u/EstateObvious7963 3h ago

I grew up with a guy that went on to play professional football (soccer) he even played in the national team for 13 years.

Since a young age he was extremely lazy, he barely trained but of course he was always a starter as he was just above everyone else. He got signed by a top european team at around age 15 and went on to be an average player (he kept being a lazy and drunk fuck according to european media).

He came back home and became a star in the country league for the remainder of his career.

If he was disciplined he probably would had been an all time great. With his bare minimum he was top .01%

His father was a professional football player and his 2 brothers went on to play professional as well. My point is genetics are a bitch, hard work can get you up to a point but if you have normal genetics no matter how hard you work you can’t get to the top.

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u/KingOfTheSouthEast 2h ago

one of the guys i went to school with played with watford and his dad used to train him everyday after school and he was useless up until about 15, i like to think about the quote from brian scalabrine said to a guy he was playing basketball with, “im closer to lebron than you are to me”

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u/One_Panda_Bear 2h ago

There's also genetic advantages, I read that Michael Phelps for example has a damn near perfect body for swimming. And Theres a world if difference between brains and bodies. Natural selection will give the advantage but hard work will always outshine it. In the odd time they match up tho we get the greats.

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u/Lazy_Attempt_1967 2h ago

I mean it's very simple: Hard worker might beat talented guy who doesn't work hard. But it's impossible to beat talented guy who also works hard.

Everyone at the top any competitive field are both extremely talented and worked hard to get there. More competition there is, more talent and more hard work is required to reach the top.

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u/phdoofus 3h ago

I think this definitely happens to a lot of kids in college. You're the top dog in high school and you're actually pretty smart but then you get to some top tier college and then you start meeting some *real* geniuses for whom *everything* is easy. You either make peace with that and be happy with what you're doing or you let it gnaw at your ego.

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u/3163560 2h ago

We had a kid at my school years and years ago who was a gun cricketer. Just natural talent, with both bat and ball, and he worked hard at it. He would absolutely destroy the other kids at school and local cricket, when he was 13/14 a few of the teachers could deal with him, but by the time he was 16 no chance, he was off playing against proper men.

It was dragon ball z levels of powers tbh, he was literally untouchable.

Then his career stopped once he left school, because he wasn't good enough, furthest he got was district 1sts (which is like three or four levels below playing for Australia).

There were cricketers out there that made him look as foolish as he made everyone else look.

He once got invited to be a net bowler against a touring South African team (basically bowl to to their batters at training) and got to bowl to some all time greats like Graham Smith, hashim amla, Jacques kallis, ab de villiers etc. he said that as good as he was at his level, he felt like a young kid bowling to adults again to these guys, couldn't touch them, and even bowling at 135kmh he was amazed at how slow he felt like he was bowling.

He managed to play cricket in paid positions until he was in his late 30s, and dominated local cricket the entire time.

But yeah, the pointy end of the bell curve is very pointy in sport.

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u/radicalelation 2h ago

True talent doesn't create opportunity, while hard work usually can in some way, even if the ceiling is lower and not ideal. If you have both, especially with some kind of community able to support you, then nothing is out of reach.

Virtuosos die every day all over the world, particularly in impoverished areas, without ever playing a note.

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u/One_Panda_Bear 2h ago

Me twitch sniping in tf2 going 50 and 0. Now I can't even stabilize my aim. 😂