The first step to improvement, whether mental, moral, or religious, is to know ourselves - our weakness, errors, deficiencies, and sins, that, by divine grace, we may overcome and turn from them all. -Tryon Edwards

This weekend, I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It confirmed a few of my philosophical beliefs and debunked others. I will keep this quick: the premise of the book is that there are far more variables involved with a person's success or failure than we care to admit. It is that simple. The Canadian and Croatian hockey teams have many athletes born in the first week of January. A five year-old born in that window can play on the same team as a child born on December 31 of the same year. See the advantage? More physical-maturity (relative to the youth's age-based club teams), better skill and better performance leads to greater opportunity to hone one's skill-set. They consistently outperform their peers. By their 11th or 12th birthday, they earn positions in elite leagues, experience more competition, train with better coaches, practice for many hours compared to their average classmates on regular teams. By their sophomore year in high school, they have caught college recruiters' eyes. Their average peers are just now starting to catch up.  There are many examples of the idiosyncrasies involved in talent evaluation.

How do we apply this to life, business or even CrossFit?

As an athlete, I have always known how much the human mind plays a role but this book changed my opinion of the equation for success. I would have added many variables to the hypothetical equation that you see on our title header. See, those are only the variables that Lindsey and I can control. What about the ones we can't? Gladwell says, to maximize potential, you have to first look at the facts that surround you.

I am now 198 pounds with none of the deficiencies that plagued me then. Muscle-ups are consistent, running is efficient and my formerly glaring weaknesses only need to be tweaked for improvement, at this point. Refined sugar has been eliminated from our diet. Lindsey's journey is similar but her improvement has been much faster. She began CrossFit with the inability to perform a single pull up. Her squat and power clean were strong from training heavy in college but her training had little need for pull-oriented exercises. Her shoulders were strong from an active childhood but she couldn't perform a double-under to save her life. Who needs a jump rope when you play real sports as a child, right? She is undoubtedly confident and diverse in her athletic experiences. Video games are a waste of time in her eyes. She hits a ball out of the park on the first swing of a law firm softball league. She learns to surf in one day (pictured right). She was an all-state, play-off winning, high school football place kicker, though she never kicked before that season. She beat me in tennis, the morning of our wedding day in Rio Mar, Puerto Rico. The list could go on.

There hasn't been an athletic skillset that exceeds her capacity to master it. At our level 1 certification, she knocked out near dead-hang, efficient muscle ups, after PR'ing by over 60 seconds in Fran, while I couldn't notch one that day. Chuck Carswell looked at me as if to say, "Come on brother! There are about 21 black dudes that love CrossFit in all of North America. Represent!" Despite the way I have chosen to depict my level of athletic ability, usually, I do catch up to the front runner, it just takes a lot more work.

This is the beauty of how Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" helped me analyze my own heritage and upbringing. It is not all about talent. It is about resources, coaching, nurturing and the ability to hone those skills with the most able and competitive of one's peers. I better understood how my childhood influenced learning patterns, behavior, assets, deficiencies and character traits. Through my youth and young adulthood, I learned by watching and breaking down tasks into parts. I then set out to achieve the task, once the smaller requisite parts have been addressed. If I came up short, then I made the necessary adjustment.   Not all successful people meet Gladwell's definition but we can all benefit by studying what factors contribute to history's most successful people. The book can help each of us become better-prepared coaches and athletes.