capabilities

Nobody can give you capability.

You either have to be born with it or develop it yourself, through your own effort. Nobody hands it to you. Nobody can.

A great boxing coach will tell you he can’t make you a fighter. He can teach you how to fight — footwork, combinations, defense, the technical layer. But to be a fighter, you have to have a tolerance for violence that most people will never have. The coach can’t install that. You either have it or you don’t.

Other people can give you advice. Frameworks. Tools. Examples to follow. They can awaken something dormant inside you that you didn’t know was there. But they cannot give you something that isn’t given.

Motivation. Drive. Tolerance for violence. The willingness to sit alone with a problem until it cracks. Whatever you call your version of it. It’s yours or it isn’t. Nobody hands it over.

LeBron James and Michael Jordan are widely considered the two greatest basketball players of all time. Agree or disagree about the ranking — the fact remains: no matter how many hours you spent with either of them, they cannot teach you to be six-foot-eight.

So what do you do with this?

Here’s a framework. Something to consider.

When it comes to the things that make you unique — the things that are actually yours, that nobody else has in quite the way you have them — lean in. Find people, places, contexts that highlight your natural gifts. That’s your unique advantage. It’s the only thing you can do that nobody can compete with you on, because nobody else has it.

When it comes to the things that aren’t natural to you, don’t try to become great at them. Find frameworks that raise the floor. Don’t aim for excellence in your weak areas — aim for not letting them become liabilities. Get them to acceptable. Stop there. The energy you’d spend trying to be great at what you’re not gifted at is better spent leaning harder into what you are.

This is the inverse of how most teachers and coaches and groups operate.

In my observation, most of them — even the ones with the best intentions — end up discounting their student’s actual gifts and trying to make them good at whatever the teacher is good at. That’s not malicious. It’s structural. The teacher knows what they know. They teach what they teach. The student who’s gifted differently gets compressed into the teacher’s shape and loses their own.

That’s the trap.

Find people who can see what’s actually yours and help you develop it. Avoid people who try to flatten you into something more like them. Use frameworks to raise the floor on what you’re not naturally good at, so it doesn’t break you, and put your real effort into what you actually have.

Nobody can give you capability. But the right teachers, the right frameworks, and the right environments can help you find the capabilities that are already yours and stop wasting your time trying to manufacture the ones that aren’t.

Something to think about.

— Nic