We look at people who are world-class. And we say, “You know what? They must have had rich parents. They must have lived in the right neighbourhood. They must have gone to the right schools. They must have had lucky breaks. They must have come from blessed backgrounds.” And that’s just not true. If you’ll look at the research and you look at the backstories. Let’s go to the Brazilian footballers. I mean, these are some of the most talented footballers or wherever you’re from, you might call them soccer players, but they are truly world-class. But if you look at their backstories, many of them came from the poorest areas throughout Brazil and they were not privileged and they didn’t have great backgrounds.
What they did have in common were a few things. Number one, is a commitment and a desire to be BIW, the best in the world.
Number two, they were members of talent hotbeds. So they were in communities where, when they were little kids where every single one of their friends in Brazil also wanted to be a legendary football player, soccer player. And they looked at, they admired, their heroes were the great Brazilian football players. And they knew they lived in beautiful houses and they basically saw football or soccer, whatever you want to call it, as a ticket out of poverty. And that gave them the fire and the belly. And so because all their friends were doing it and because the Brazilian government had set up these training institutes that were using cutting edge training techniques, where they touched the ball a lot more, by the time the Brazilian footballers had reached 14 or 15, they had touched the football millions of times.
And so when compared to their counterparts and other places around the world, they were
undefeatable, they were undefeatable, but it wasn’t natural talent.
It wasn’t divinely blessed gifts. It was just a reflection of the talent hotbed, the skills that they
learned, the coaches that they were blessed with versus privileged backgrounds. You can do this too. It’s not about natural gifts. It’s about at learning what to do and then applying it every day. Other talent hotbeds. Let’s look at Silicon Valley. I mean when Steve Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple in the garage, every one of their peers was thinking about technology. There
was that homebrew club that Steve Jobs was a member of and where he met actually, he met Steve Wozniak. And so every one of those people were thinking about technology and they were thinking about computers and because they were in that talent hub and it was a Hewlett
-Packard was helping them with resources. And there were people that were coaching them. They were inspired to grow these companies.
Now the world pedestal Steve Jobs and Wozniak and Larry Ellison and all of those people that
were around at that time as geniuses. They weren’t geniuses. They just did different things. Final example of a talent hotbed would be Florence during the Renaissance age. Incredible art came out of there, incredible inventions. But again, it was less about these people having privileged backgrounds. I mean, if you look at someone like Michelangelo and one thing I invite you, I encourage you to do before you get to the end of your life is go to the Vatican and witness the Sistine Chapel. And when we witness greatness, something deep within us is triggered and it reminds us of the greatness you have within you and I have within you. We all have that greatness. We all have that genius. We all have that destiny.
We all have that giftedness within us, but it’s smothered as we leave the perfection of childhood and we receive the messaging of our mom and our dad, well-intentioned as they were, but they start to share the fears that they were trained to fear with us. And then we go to school and our teachers say fit into a box and think like everyone else. And don’t dream too big. And we get the messaging from the media and the rest of society and the peers around us that says live within a box and eat from a box and drive to work in a box and die in a box. And we live the best y ears of life in this box of mediocrity or averageness versus stepping up to the bigger game of playing at world-class.