Hey everyone. I hope your week is going well. 🙏
Before continuing with this article, I suggest finding a quiet place and taking your time to read it, as there may be several ideas to digest.
In different disciplines, be it sports, martial arts, or many other skills, we see exceptional athletes who look very gifted. People often say that this person is very talented because, in the first days or months, they may display speed, timing, coordination, balance, and power. Surely, some beginners learn and adapt faster when they begin. However, is it right to assume that this starting point guarantees that someone will become exceptional?
I remember from my early days of Muay Thai training a guy who had exceptional kinesthetic intelligence. He would get movements and techniques very quickly. His intelligence in this direction was impressive, and I was pretty sure he was going to advance and become a professional.
On the other hand, there was another guy. He was very stiff, to be honest. He couldn’t get the techniques properly. I myself was not very good at understanding some techniques at the beginning, but even to me, he seemed very untalented, and I could tell he had difficulties in learning techniques. So I judged that he would not progress.
But time proved me wrong because the talented guy trained for some months (six if memory serves me right) and I never saw him again at the gym. The other guy, who appeared very stiff and untalented, kept training for years. He even competed in England in many competitions. He evolved as a martial artist in ways I couldn’t have imagined back then.
So what makes the difference? Who really continues to improve? Only those who have talent? Only those who stick with discipline?
The question is not whether someone is talented or not. It is whether the talent displayed at the beginning shows who will progress, who will persevere through difficult phases, and who will reach the highest levels of mastery in a certain field.
A scientific study by Werner Helsen and his colleagues, conducted with soccer players in Belgium, investigated this and noted that, yes, natural differences are real. They examined soccer expertise, talent selection, maturity, and accumulated practice to understand what role talent played. And, of course, their research is relevant to martial arts and other disciplines as well.
Something very interesting that came out of this study is that what appeared to coaches as early talent was mostly a matter of age and maturity. In youth sports, people tend to be grouped according to age, but within the same age group, there is a high chance that children separated by several months are present. Why does this matter? Because there are often children separated by nearly a year of physical development within the same category.
This tells us that coaches may have mistaken temporary physical advantages for permanent natural talent. During adolescence, the growth spurt can be very rapid. There is an interval of time during which people may develop physically at very different rates.
I remember that, in my class, there was a guy who was one year older during high school. He had to repeat a class, so he ended up in the same class as me. When we played sports and wrestled, he was way stronger than us, and we could tell the difference.
Therefore, given the fact that older athletes, even by eight to ten months, can be stronger, faster, and taller during that critical hormonal period in adolescence, they were selected more often simply because they were born closer to the beginning of the selection year.
Consequently, this selection created more coaching and better opportunities for those who were selected. It fed their self-esteem, coaches gave them more hours of attention, and that is why they had greater chances of becoming better at the sport.
Meanwhile, many of those who were not selected -who could have been very talented- probably went home believing that they were not cut out for this, while, in reality, the difference was mostly physical. They didn’t receive the coaches’ trust, and they didn’t receive enough attention.
Now, this is the interesting part: after the selection date changed, the research noticed changes in the pattern too. This time, it was the players born near the beginning of the new selection period who were more likely to be recognized as talented.
Do you see what was going on here?
The research found that the scouts, more often than not, were not discovering fixed natural ability, even though they thought they were. Their judgment was being influenced by the fact that some children were more physically developed within that age group, but this didn’t necessarily mean that they possessed more natural talent.
It turned out that the children who received better coaching, more encouragement, and more opportunities were those who were a step ahead in hormonal development. Those who had not yet reached that hormonal peak missed these benefits.
So they either had to try again the following year, assuming they didn’t internalize the rejection as low self-esteem or personal failure, or they gave up altogether, believing that they lacked talent.
In the same way, coaches in martial arts may make a similar misjudgment. They may see someone who initially displays explosiveness, flexibility, aggression, courage, or fearlessness, and place more confidence in that person, giving them more time and attention. And they may ignore less visible qualities like patience, humility, attention to detail, the willingness to overcome the ego, and the willingness to correct mistakes.
Here, there is another factor that plays a significant role: the personality of the coach and the qualities they value most.
How objective are they?
If coaches are subjective and lack introspection, they will likely appreciate the qualities they personally view as important and neglect those they don’t consider important, even when they may be objectively wrong.
So, directly or indirectly, they may suppress the talent of some people while aiding the talent of others. And perhaps those who were suppressed or neglected could have become better. Who knows?
Because of this bias from a coach, an explosive beginner may receive advanced opportunities, while a quieter beginner may be overlooked despite potentially possessing stronger long-term discipline and willpower.
Early performance is easy to notice, but it takes a wise coach to see beyond appearances. Not because appearance is unimportant. It is important. But some qualities that matter more in the long term are harder to recognize, and a keen eye capable of seeing past the facade is needed to notice them.
In that study, a comparison was made between international, national, and provincial players. They were of similar ages and had begun training at similar ages.
With time, the gap started to become much larger because the players who accumulated more hours of practice achieved better results and became more exceptional in their field.
I will share with you the approximate accumulated hours of practice for each of these three categories after 18 years:
International group: 9,332 hours
National group: 7,449 hours
Provincial group: 5,079 hours
These data show us that the more hours of accumulated practice there are, the higher the level tends to be.
Surely, these numbers do not prove that hours alone make the difference between the levels of athletes, but they help us understand something very fundamental. Those who reached the highest levels didn’t just have an advantage at the beginning. They also invested more time after the excitement of the first phase had passed.
Their superiority in skill was connected more to what they did repeatedly over the years.
Do you see where I’m getting at?
It is in the medium and long term, which is a difficult stage, that it is decided who truly continues and who sticks with it. This is where the fruits of discipline become impossible to ignore.
Often, gifted athletes progress quickly, and they receive that boost and positive feedback from others, like, “Wow, you’re so talented.”
They become somehow addicted to feeling good, being great at something, one of the best. But in the medium and long term, when they are faced with challenges, other talented people, the need to practice for more hours to compete with other professionals, and the many unpredictable difficulties of life, they are introduced to friction that no longer makes the process so easy.
It felt good at the beginning when what was being observed was mostly their talent. But now, when hours of practice are needed, when competition demands specific results, it becomes more difficult. When they don’t receive that reward, that dopamine, that “Wow, you’re good,” as easily as before, things change.
Often, they may feel some kind of emptiness. Consequently, they may become demotivated, and there is a higher risk that they will eventually quit.
On the other hand, less gifted athletes were not used to hearing pleasant words and compliments. They are not used to being one of the best in the class.
And if they made it through this phase and didn’t give up, they were given one of the greatest strengths one could ask for. They became accustomed to little victories, to feeling better, and to making progress, some days less and some days more. And they carried this mindset with them in the long run.
That is why this was the best gift they could receive.
Even though it didn’t seem like it at the beginning, they learned to be okay with making just a little progress, with being just a bit better than yesterday.
This change in their frame of mind is what probably enabled them to develop the psychological mechanisms they would later need to handle pressure from life and competition during the middle and later stages.
They cultivated resilience, even though perhaps they were not aware of it.
In simple words, one has learned to enjoy being good, while the other has learned how to become better.
With this in mind, we begin to see that discipline does not overcome talent in a flash, in one dramatic moment. Rather, it overtakes it gradually, with time.
From a martial arts perspective, we may see someone whose timing is impeccable, who flows through combinations that seem effortless, who can come back after a tough shot, and who can read opponents exceptionally well, to the point that they seem to possess future sight.
They seem capable of coming up with brilliant tactics and strategies, and they can remain composed under pressure during hard sparring sessions and fights.
When people see them perform, they often say, “They have a natural talent for it.”
But what they don’t see is the darker part.
They only see the tip of the iceberg, missing the fact that this is most likely a person who kept working during the beginner stage, even without receiving the coach’s spotlight.
Through quiet work over the years, they created what spectators later saw as talent, even though, in reality, it was more discipline than talent.
Many of these martial artists continue to refine their timing and distance, while many others stop training because training becomes repetitive and boring and no longer gives them that initial emotional excitement.
If someone becomes addicted to the initial emotional reward and uses it as the main motor for continuing to train, chances are they won’t continue for long.
They must discover something more mental: a purpose and values that go beyond immediate emotional reward. There must be something that aligns with their values and character, and they must use that as a motor instead.
That decisive stage, when many quit and others remain consistent, often comes when training no longer feels new, many repetitions are required, and many defeats and failures that bruise the ego need to be experienced.
That stage is the bridge to mastery.
So it is very important to accumulate hours of practice, but it is even more important for those hours of practice to be consistent.
The researchers in the soccer study warned that simply counting hours is not enough to measure development. They noticed that physical training needs to be balanced with rest to avoid overtraining.
They also mentioned that practice needs to have quality and structure. These two factors made a big difference.
Discipline is not the ability to exhaust yourself without thought. It is the ability to organize effort around improvement.
One can spend not only hours, but years, practicing the same thing that makes them comfortable and still remain limited.
On the path to mastery, we need concentration, feedback, adjustment, and adaptation, and, above all, the willingness to overcome the ego and accept that we need to work on a specific weakness.
If any of these are missing, discipline becomes impossible to maintain, and it also means that discipline should have intelligence behind it.
In a martial arts context, this means choosing to practice fundamental footwork rather than giving in to the temptation to practice new, spectacular techniques that look awesome but have little or no effectiveness in sparring.
It means stopping to study why a combination fails instead of stubbornly insisting on throwing it harder.
It may mean asking the coach, on your own initiative, to identify a weakness before they do, working with training partners to expose that weakness, and overcoming the urge to avoid this just to keep the ego unbruised.
Repetition without awareness reinforces mistakes. That is why discipline must include reflection.
Needless to say, neither the research nor this article points toward the extreme belief that everyone’s potential is identical and that factors like biology don’t matter at all.
The researchers acknowledged that factors such as the athletes’ retrospective memories of their training histories, opportunity, and physical maturity made it impossible to draw a definitive answer from the study.
Later sports research, and I will leave all the research links at the bottom for those who want to check them out, explained that, besides dedicated practice, factors such as coaching quality, psychology, personality, and health still play an important role.
Therefore, the claim is not that discipline always defeats talent. It is that:
Discipline often outperforms talent when talent is not developed, applied consistently, or supported by hard work.
Or, as we often hear:
Discipline beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
Talent may influence how quickly someone can gets a move. Discipline influences how many movements are studied, corrected, integrated, adapted, and preserved, especially under pressure.
Talent may create an early lead, but it is discipline that determines whether that lead continues growing or remains latent.
In other words, talent can open a door, but it cannot walk someone through years of training.
There is a psychological danger when someone fixates on talent.
If an athlete frequently hears from the start that they are gifted and doesn’t have enough introspection to remain centred, they may become too attached to this identity and begin to protect it.
As a consequence, they may avoid strong opponents, difficult exercises, criticism from peers and coaches, or failure while attempting a technique because they perceive these things as threats.
Why might they perceive them as threats?
Because, in their perception, these failures reveal that they are not as exceptional as people believed.
Their locus of identity is too external, so they rely on outside recognition to feel good about who they are. And what is worse, they may end up avoiding the very situations required for growth.
Conversely, those who build their identities as people, athletes, and martial artists in relation to practice rather than approval, cultivate a more stable and solid foundation in their psyche.
With this inner structure built, they translate difficulty into something to work on, not something that disproves who they are.
When we truly dedicate ourselves to the path of mastery, be it in martial arts, other sports, or other crafts, we realize that skill and character are built side by side.
This is why discipline is more than just showing up. It is about building a sincere relationship with the learning process.
Beyond image, facade, and ego boosts.
It means returning to practice without needing every session to prove that you are talented.
It means accepting feedback without interpreting it as a personal failure.
It means working on the basics even when trying something new (but not necessary, or even futile) would be more exciting.
It means resting when your body needs recovery instead of mistaking recklessness for dedication.
And it means always keeping the mindset of a student, even when competence and accumulated victories begin to feed the ego.
The main research I mentioned echoes something experienced coaches have known for years:
Those who stand out at the beginning are not always the ones who make it in the long run.
There is no “talent OR discipline.” The ideal thing to do is combine both.
However, talent without discipline remains potential, which is not enough to win competitions, if that is your ambition.
Someone who is disciplined from the beginning may fall behind. They may need more time to understand a concept and more repetitions to learn a technique. They may experience more failures at the beginning.
But with every failure, correction, reflection, and practice, they constantly assimilate and improve.
Over time, these small improvements become part of who they are.
Their strongest point may not be a physical attribute, but the discovery of their authentic way to improve.
I am dedicating my life to developing practical psychological and philosophical methods around two pillars:
The Warrior’s Way of Life: integrating discipline, resilience, and timeless principles into everyday living.
Inner Work: cultivating mental health, clarity, and inner strength through self-mastery and reflection.
But this cause can achieve more, and for that, I need your support.
Your contribution helps me dedicate more time and resources to research and to share deeper work with those who seek it.
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