Larry Weidel argues that mastery means performing without thinking. He uses banjo teacher Craig Smith, baseball's Alex Rodriguez saying "accelerate through impact," and golf instruction to show how the best performers stop overthinking and let instinct take over.
Questions this video answers
Craig Smith (described as a Grammy Award–winning banjo player).
Alex Rodriguez; described as the first to get over a $400 million contract with the Texas Rangers.
When I was getting lessons, started playing, getting lessons long time ago on the banjo from a Grammy Award winning banjo player named Craig Smith out of Winston Salem. He told me, said when you're learning a piece of the banjo, you've got to learn it to where you can play it without thinking. You got to play it basically unconscious. You know, you're gonna be going so fast, your fingers are moving so fast, you can't be thinking about it. And so that applies to pretty much anything, any skill in a business, Anything we're learning, you know, you, you've learned it when you can do it without thinking about it because thinking kills, you know, you, you go to a different. You win big by playing out of the instinctive side of your brain. And when you're thinking too much, you go over the logical side of your brain. You're like. And you always screw it up. I've got a thousand illustrations of that that I've had to learn in life. And it's like Alex Rodriguez, one of the greatest hitters of all time, Major League Baseball, the first one to get over a 400 million dollar contract with the Texas Rangers. He said his, when he was growing up, his coach told him, accelerate through impact. He said, make solid contact, but you're accelerating. It's not good enough to just make good contact. You got to be accelerating. And every golf instructor will tell you you've got to, whatever you're doing, you've got to be moving the club with acceleration. You can't be slowing down, you can't get tentative. And you see that in tournaments all the time. At the end of the tournament, guy will start overthinking and he'll start to tighten up the sphincter muscles. You know, we'll, we'll get in there in the middle of the stroke, he'll go, and then that's just a little bit, it's enough to throw him off on one of those, even a short putt, even a two foot putt. And so you got to get, this is getting out of your own way. You've got to be able to have your fundamentals down to where you can do it instinctively and you can accelerate through the motion. And that's, you know, that's if you're swinging a golf club, you're swinging a bat, you're doing your business, you're doing a meeting, you're on stage, you're speaking, you want to know how you're going to do it, what you're going to do with enthusiasm, with energy. Because it's the energy that you deliver, the, the, the message, the force, the swing that causes the success. And you, when you're doing that, you're staying in the instinctive side of your brain and you're freeing yourself up. You know, this, with this, staying out of your own way, you're freeing yourself up to be successful. So there's a thought about, you know, when you've learned something, when you can do it instinctively with energy and deliver the blow of whatever it is successfully and you win. You know, that's how you, you, you perform at a winning level.
