I imagine there are plenty of kids who showed an early and passionate interest in golf, AND who had a parent who was a pro, and nurtured their interest, but there is only one Tiger Woods.

I did benefit from parental pressure, although the Scottish kind not the hard-core Asian kind.

Some things I was never going to be. Any kind of athlete at all, for one.

I am the king of all procrastinators, so excellence IS possible. And no amount of parental or peer pressure overcomes it. Only necessity and crisis. You just have to be innately disposed to react more aggressively in crisis. Life’s a balance, like that.

All can drive a person to maximize their talents, and plenty of people squander not only their native physical or mental gifts, but the pressures that might drive them, through resistance, passivity, or disinterest, or even fail to identify possible talents at all. Even those whose gifts could take them in many directions usually miss a few for one reason or another. Every path isn’t for everyone, even if it’s one they could have walked.

But you also can’t make an end product from poor or no materials, with any amount of work.

Few if any people are pure hereditarians. Way too many seem to be pure environmentalists and that position strikes me as so contrary to all learning or human experience that I cannot understand their resistance to any hereditary component. It borders on lunacy.

Too much G, I guess.

What worked for Milo of Croton might have worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger; then again, maybe not. Excellence is to be celebrated, revered, and emulated; the path to get there, however? It will never be the same for every aspirant.