A blog post from Jason

I don’t often comment on mashups, but the Freakonomics Blog has put up a great post on sports. More specifically, it’s a mashup of how individual athletes play to their strengths in order to achieve greatness.

I really like this post because it gets away from the typical athletic stereotypes.  Each case shows how a single person used their mental acuity to gain an advantage on is opponents.  It’s not something any one of us can simply choose to do; each of these stories is about someone with great perception focusing on exactly what matters, and taking advantage of the situation.

For one, it focuses on how extraordinary each player’s talent is.  At the same time, it shows how anyone can improve by making sure they’re focus is in the right place.  It makes you wonder how an average athlete might have been better if they focused on a specific aspect of the game.  It makes you wonder how you could be better by focusing on details that your coach, mentor, or hero focuses on.

But mostly, it makes you wonder what you can achieve by just focusing on the details that come naturally to you, and exploiting that advantage.  Doing what you’re good at doing, doing what you like to do, and doing what you are paid for doing should all coincide.  When you get to the elite stage of these case studies, they do.