Sure. But even then, trying looks very different from not trying. I got a saxophone, played it by myself for a few weeks, then booked a lesson with a teacher. At the start of the lesson I played a few notes and said: “Anything jump out at you? I think some notes come out flat, and the sound isn’t bright enough, anyway you see what I’m doing and any advice would be good.” Then he gave me a lot of good advice tailored to my level.
Here’s a video from Ben Finegold making the same point about learning chess:
“Is it possible to be good at chess when you start playing at 18?” Anything’s possible. But if you want to get good at chess—I’m not saying you do, but if you do—then people who say things like “what opening should I play?” and “my rating’s 1200, how do I get to 1400?” and you know, “my coach says this but I don’t want to do that”, or you know, “I lost five games in a row on chess.com so I haven’t played in a week”, those kind of things have nothing to do with getting better at chess. It’s inquisitive of you, and that’s what most people do. People who get better at chess play chess, study chess, think about chess, love chess and do chess stuff. People who don’t get better at chess spend 90 percent of their energy thinking about “how do I get better” and asking questions about it. That’s not how you get better at something. You want to get better at something, you do it and you work hard at it, and it’s not just chess, that’s your whole life.
Or alternatively, they might be bad at more than one single narrow task within the relevant domain.
Sure. But even then, trying looks very different from not trying. I got a saxophone, played it by myself for a few weeks, then booked a lesson with a teacher. At the start of the lesson I played a few notes and said: “Anything jump out at you? I think some notes come out flat, and the sound isn’t bright enough, anyway you see what I’m doing and any advice would be good.” Then he gave me a lot of good advice tailored to my level.
Here’s a video from Ben Finegold making the same point about learning chess:
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