There’s so much genetics and innate aptitude to elite level performance that if you don’t see yourself rapidly advancing toward top level performance at most skills it’s safe to say you will never be at the competitive standard at those. I’d argue many people that are told they have a “self-limited” mindset are just making themselves not feel terrible by being brutalized for being legitimately incompetent compared to what competitive standards rely on.

I want to also be clear that I’m not arguing that it’s not worth trying to be good at things you enjoy. By all means, that is healthy and a good use of time. I am making the distinction specifically around elite level play and the competitive standards.

People don’t like this argument but it is so far the case and there’s a plethora of evidence for it depending on the activity. It honestly can boil down to a couple things in most cases easily enough.

VO2 max is the measure of the maximal effort of your cells at consuming oxygen. This varies in humans between 20 and 90, with average being around 40 for women and 45 for men. It is well known that with rigorous persistent training that men can raise their VO2 max by about 20%. There’s even more potential with blood doping, altitude training, and illicit substances but it hardly goes up much more after that. If your VO2 max when first tested is around 45, do you think you’ll be competitive at any intense movement based activity? The average VO2 max of male olympic track and field atheletes is 75.

For weight lifting there is bone density, limb length, shoulder width, and overall size. All of these are barely alterable aside overall size. Someone who is 5’8” 140 lbs no matter how much training they ever do in their life might only ever bench 225 or 250. Meanwhile a 6’5” 280 lb man might bench 225 in his first month of working out. Granted here there is weight classes, so you would still need to put in the effort to find out how you may compare.

For things like musicianship, there is large variability in the tolerance of tendons and finger joints to rigorous practice. The amount required for elite level play is in the order of several hours per day for potentially decades. Shin Lim a famous magician was on track to being a concert pianist first, but had to withdraw due to developing carpal tunnel syndrome. Do you really think he had poor technique causing this? Extremely doubtful. On top of this, the ability for people to play various acrobatic repetoire varies quite a lot. Many people even with decades of rigorous practice will not ever be able to play the works of Alkan or Liszt etudes.

Many elite level players of shooters and other games have reaction times significantly lower than the general population.

It is thought but is not proven due to the difficulty of study that there is a cognitive equivalent to VO2 max and this is something much higher in top level players of fast paced competitive games compared to the general population. It certainly would make sense given the metabolic activity of cells working almost the same everywhere in the body.

Personal anecdote: My brother was reasonably athletic but not top level, but exceptionally gifted at math (never really studying all the way to acquiring a masters from university), so he chose contract bridge as his game of choice. He makes a living off it now and is a national champion. He told me the game and improving at it came completely naturally to him even far past what normal people would think is good and he said that’s just how it is. “I fell into this spot from inertia.” Several pro players of other competitive games have said something similar. It’s not “IQ” either. My brother has a friend who is something unreasonably gifted intellectually (tested IQ something like 158) and a multimillionaire and grinds like NO other at whatever he does. He is one of the all time best at a popular gameshow. He put this effort into Bridge too for quite a while. My brother said he’s decently good at it but nowhere near the competitive standard.

The point of all this rambling is that I think natural variability in talent accounts for far more than people think and attitudes toward mastery in many things adjust due to awareness of how one measures up after a reasonable effort has been put in. It is best for one to find the niche in their life where they seemingly have the most aptitude and go above and beyond developing in that area. These “attitude” ideals are great and all but they don’t make the difference between elite and average. They make the difference between average and good. And by extension I think trying every psychological trick you can possibly come up with like in the article to try and make up for being incompetent at a particular skill is probably less useful than simply finding something you seem naturally better at.