You don't have a talent problem, you have a skill problem.

Seeing where the skill checks are and consistently working on them is what athletes and competitors are doing constantly. Their competency has been trained to an incredibly high standard, so when they commit an executional or decision-making error, it is typically because their mental game was off. A trainable skill.

Lower level competitors will sometimes experience a mental game leak because of a competency problem. They run into a challenge they simply don't have the skill for yet, in that specific area. After failing to overcome that obstacle, their sense of confidence drops, their chances to win drop, and it keeps happening until they fix the root issue in competency. If we try to treat a mental game issue such as lack of confidence when the root issue is competency, we are barking up the wrong tree.

Diagnosing the origin of these issues is a huge struggle for anyone. If you get it wrong, you put your efforts in the wrong place and get further from the goal. One reason the best in the world hire coaches is that it is a fast way to surface the patterns and gain the clarity to point your efforts in the right direction. The best coaches help you train this, because awareness is also a skill.

So why aren't we all operating like competitors? Why don't we all have coaches like competitors? How do we train professional players in an elite program?

Broadly, when we program professional players, it is geared to either performance (when there is a big competition coming up) or training (the time between big performances, where we focus on learning new skills).

Many people understand the need for new skills and knowledge, and are receiving coaching through their consumption of books, YouTube, or other well-known sources. Yet people often consume for the sake of it and don't spend time integrating it into a process that allows improvement. This is often because it is far easier to consume a lot of information, more than you could ever implement effectively, and it feels like you're making progress.

You might say, "I'm not a world-class athlete, competitor or executive." And this honesty is important: no pro player started out pro. Regardless of your skill level, the process to get the best results is the same. The whole game is about gaining skills and managing your own growth. I've spent decades either being at the pro level in esports or obsessively decoding what it takes to get there in new titles.

How often do we look at doing business like a skill problem? After a meeting, how often do we stop and ask, how effective was I? After holding someone accountable, or walking out of a pitch for investment, how often do we ask: how did I perform, what could I do better, and what would a successful outcome even look like? When we look at our team culture, can we name a single clearly stated standard, set of values, or vision that aligns everyone? Competitors look at everything as a skill issue first, to isolate signal from noise.

I know all this because I spent twenty years watching it from the closest seat there is. I competed first in LAN finals against the best players in the world. Then I spent more than a decade at the commentary desk, calling the biggest moments in esports live, in front of fifteen thousand people in the arena and millions more online. My job, every single broadcast, was to follow, closely, the performance of the very best in the world for over a decade, and I still do it to this day. I became the general manager of a professional team, and I was responsible, under huge stakes and pressure, for delivering outsized results in too short a time. I succeeded. I've also failed.

After enough reps you stop seeing random outcomes and start seeing a pattern. The pattern is this. Under pressure, talent is almost never the thing that breaks. Under pressure, we are simply experiencing a challenge we either have the competency or the mental skills to overcome.

You don't have a talent problem. You have a skill problem.