Most of you know that I'm a really avid juggler. I also really love teaching juggling. If you want to learn how to juggle, I will find time to teach you. Of course a lot of people don't want to learn. A lot of them say "I'm just not interested," which is fine. And a lot say that they would be interested, but "they don't have the hand-eye coordination".
This is stupid.
Imagine if you came to me saying "H, you should read more", and I said "Sorry, I don't have the vocabulary for that." You'd laugh at me. You'd tell me vocabulary isn't something you have or you don't. It's something that nobody starts out with and everybody develops over time. If you don't have the vocabulary to read a book, than build it up. How? Read more. Reading and vocabulary feed into each other, where developing one also helps you develop the other.
Why should hand-eye coordination be any different?
A lot of people I've met have this weird static view of their abilities. They think you have a fixed coordination, or balance, or stamina or whatever that can't change no matter what you do. Because they can't always catch a ball, they will never be able to juggle. Since I can juggle, I obviously must have burst out of my mother's womb doing a five-ball cascade.
Fun fact: nobody is able to naturally juggle. I've met exactly one person who instantly picked it up, and she already did a crapton of coordination-heavy activities beforehand. Juggling is just an unnatural movement that your body doesn't know how to do, and it can only get that by seriously improving your coordination. Don't believe me? My coordination was so bad it took me three days to learn. Most people take three hours.
As I got better at juggling, my coordination and reflexes steadily improved. As they improved, I became a better juggler. This is because my attributes are dynamic. It's not that I have bad reflexes, it's that I have bad reflexes for now.
And why shouldn't this be true of everything? Don't think you have the balance to dance? Then dance until you have balance. Don't have the ear for music? Then practice until you can tell the tones. Don't have the patience to meditate? Keep doing it for a month and see what happens.
We all start with varying strengths and weaknesses. But when it comes to improving, dedication and motivation matter much more than natural ability. Learning and doing new things change us. If you think of yourself as static then you're doing yourself a huge disservice .
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