Born to be a baseball player?

November 23, 2021 by Coach McCreary
Filed under Mental Side

In my day job, I teach Sociology and AP Psychology to high school students. Both are social sciences so the Nature v Nurture debate comes up frequently throughout the school year. Some human behavior is predetermined through genetics. That’s “Nature.” Other behaviors and thoughts are determined by how a person is raised. That’s the “Nurture” side. All social scientists agree that both play a role but there is still much debate over the extent to which each plays in how we turn out.

We’ve all heard the phrase “That kid was born to play baseball.” We hear it applied to other ultra-successful people in other areas of society as well. The question becomes, do they mean the person is/was genetically programmed to be good at ____?

It is certainly easier on the ego if we attribute great performances to genetic factors. Admitting that the player, for example, has just outworked everyone else over a long period of time forces us to admit that maybe we could have been a lot better if we had worked better and/or much harder too. People have a tough time being that honest with themselves.

The mentality that claims success is merely a matter of genetics is a dangerous one. It implies that your success in life is a matter of luck or chance. It’s not. That mentality keeps people stuck. Success in anything involves many small behaviors and thoughts consistently applied over long periods of time. We see the result of their work and assume the person just sort of fell into success overnight. As the saying goes, “It takes many years to be an overnight success.”

Below is a video I show in my sociology classes. It’s a true story about a man who did a very unique experiment on his own children. I don’t think I would ever do this but it does give some good insight on how success is developed.