The Work of Becoming

A framework for baseball and for life

By James Marvel

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Most of what determines whether a baseball player becomes the player he could be is not the work that can be seen.

Most of it happens in places the player himself does not always know to look — in how he meets a hard truth, in what he tells himself after a loss, in whether he is still asking honest questions about his game after the season has ended. The framework that follows is about that interior territory: the deep, foundational development that sits underneath the visible side of player development, and that determines what the visible side can become. The technical refinements, the metrics, the recruiting outcomes — these do not stop being real or important. They do, however, stop being primary. Underneath them is the building of the player himself — who he is and what he is at the level the visible work cannot reach. This essay is an attempt to name that foundational territory, and to give it the shape it deserves.

This is the work I have organized my practice around — the work I came to regard, after my own playing career ended, as the essential one. I spent the first 30 years of my life chasing a dream across every level of organized baseball — from youth and elite travel baseball through the ACC, through the minor leagues to the Major Leagues, and all the way to Japan. Somewhere across those 30 years, doing the work in ways that were sometimes deliberate and sometimes accidental, the framework that follows began to take shape — first in how I approached the game, and then, after I retired, in how I came to understand what the work had actually been. I lived parts of it deliberately, and it is part of why I was able to compete at the levels I did. I lived other parts of it imperfectly, and the imperfection cost me too. This framework, with the benefit of retirement, reflection, and continuous study, is what I now teach families that I sit across from, and it is what I’ve learned to articulate clearly and to see more completely in others. The framework operates at a register that the conversation around player development does not usually reach. Reaching it, for me, is the work.

The framework has three pillars. They are Capability, Growth, and Grit. To begin, we are going to lay them out in this order:

This is the version of the framework we start with. It is not the final form. By the end of the essay it will have evolved into something that looks different from what is on the page now. The evolution is part of the work the essay is doing.

If you are a player, the essay is written for you, and the whole of it will ask more of you than you have likely been asked for yet. That is the point. If you are a parent, the essay is written for you too, and it will ask you to see your son's development as something larger and deeper than what is usually shown to you — and to see your role in it differently. That is the offer. If you are a coach or another professional in the development space, this essay is an attempt to operate at a register I think this work deserves. This is what that looks like.

What follows is what I have come to see.

Capability

“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

-Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act IV, Scene V)

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

-Henry S. Haskins, Meditations in Wall Street (1940)

[commonly misattributed to Emerson]

We begin with Capability, because the rest of the framework only makes sense in light of what it is built toward — and, as we will see, what it is built from.

Capability begins with a question: What am I capable of?

When we ponder this question, we are asking, at the root, about our potential. What is my potential? Who am I, and what am I, at my most fully realized?

The answer to that question is not what most players think it is.

In his book, The Inner Game of Tennis, performance coach and author Timothy Gallwey talks about roses:

“When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as ‘rootless and stemless.’ We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.”

Gallwey writes about roses in a section of his book based on judgment, particularly self-judgment, and you can see this in the first part of the passage. But the power of the analogy for me lies in the second half. We are the rose. Contained within us, at all times, is our whole potential. No matter where we are in our own journeys — 12 years old, 18 years old, or 60 years old — our potential is already inside us. It is not something we have to go out and acquire. We are not operating from some baseline that can only be improved by adding more from the outside. The potential is there. The only question is what we do with it.

Which changes the question we should be asking. A player who believes his potential is already within him stops asking do I have it? and starts asking am I accessing it?

Those are different questions, and they produce different lives.

Do I have it? is a question without an answer. It hangs over every at-bat, every outing, every showcase. It locates the truth of a player outside himself — in results he cannot fully control, judged by people he cannot fully see. And it is exhausting, because it is unanswerable. The harder he chases the answer, the further it retreats.

Am I accessing it? is a question a player can answer every day. He answers it in the cage, in the film room, in how he responds when a coach pushes him harder than he wants to be pushed, in what he tells himself after a hard loss. The answer is inside him, and the work becomes finding it. He is not waiting to find out if he is good enough by someone else’s standard. He is finding out, every day, what becomes available when he treats his own potential with the seriousness it deserves.

This is what it means to take Capability seriously. Not as a destination you arrive at, but as something you are in relationship with, every day of your life.

The rose tells us that our potential is already inside us. But the rose does not tell us how we come to know it. For that, we need a different image.

Why does the surfer wait for the big wave?

Gallwey, again:

“The surfer waits for the big wave because he values the challenge it presents. He values the obstacles the wave puts between him and his goal of riding the wave to the beach. Why? Because it is those very obstacles, the size and churning power of the wave, which draw from the surfer his greatest effort. It is only against the big waves that he is required to use all his skill, all his courage and concentration to overcome; only then can he realize the true limits of his capacities. At that point he often attains his peak. In other words, the more challenging the obstacle he faces, the greater the opportunity for the surfer to discover and extend his true potential. The potential may have always been within him, but until it is manifested in action, it remains a secret hidden from himself. The obstacles are a very necessary ingredient to this process of self-discovery.”

Notice what the surfer does. He doesn’t avoid the wave. He doesn’t endure it as something unfortunate that happened to him. He waits for it. He paddles out to meet it. He treats the wave as the conditions under which he comes to know himself.

This is the move that most players miss. They see challenge as something to get through — as the price of admission, the thing standing between them and the version of the game where they finally feel comfortable. But the surfer tells us the opposite. The challenge is not the price. It is the point. Comfort doesn’t reveal your potential. Resistance does.

A player who understands this stops avoiding the more demanding coach, the higher level of competition, the questions he doesn’t yet know how to answer. He stops waiting until he is ready before he puts himself in front of something hard. He paddles out, because he has learned that the wave is what calls forth the version of himself he is trying to find.

This is challenge — the wave a player chooses to meet. It is sought, deliberately, knowing that he might not be able to ride it yet. The reason he seeks it anyway is that the seeking is itself a part of the becoming. You cannot find out what you are capable of by staying within the boundaries of what you have already proven you can do. Some part of Capability is only revealed by paddling toward something that might exceed you.

But not every wave is chosen. There is a second kind of wave — the kind that arrives whether you wanted it or not. The slump that stretches into its fifth week. The injury that costs you a season. The loss you didn’t see coming. The teammate who passes you on the depth chart while you’re working through something you’re not sure how to fix. These waves are adversity, and they are not optional. Every player who plays long enough meets them. The only question is what they find when they arrive.

Adversity and challenge are not the same thing, but they are doing the same work. Challenge is what the player goes looking for. Adversity is what finds him. Both put him in front of something that exceeds his current capacity. Both ask him to use more of himself than ordinary conditions would have required. Both reveal — to him and to anyone watching — what is actually inside him, what he is willing to risk, what he is made of when the comfortable version of his life is taken away.

The player in search of Capability does not draw a sharp line between the two. He treats them as the same wave taken from different directions. When he paddles out toward challenge, he is preparing the muscles that will hold him steady on his board when adversity comes for him uninvited. When adversity arrives, he recognizes it — not as an interruption of his development, but as the same kind of conditions he has been deliberately seeking. He is not derailed by them. He has been preparing for them, on purpose, every time he gets into the water.

This is the surfer in sync with Capability — and himself. Active seeking, joined with active receiving. The willingness to paddle toward waves he cannot yet ride, and the readiness to meet waves he never asked for. Both are forms of access. Both reveal Capability that quieter conditions would have left undiscovered. Both are necessary ingredients to the process of self-discovery, as Gallwey put it.

Whether you actually surf or not is irrelevant. We are all the surfer, and the wave is whatever, in our own lives, draws from us our greatest effort. In baseball: the moment that asks more of you than you thought to ask of yourself. In life: the test that arrives whether you wanted it or not, and the test you sought out because you suspected something in you wanted to know if you could meet it. Either way, the value is in the encounter. It is in this encounter that we discover who we are and what we are capable of.

This is our north star. And when we orient our lives by it, we are liberated from the things that hold most players back.

We are liberated from living under someone else’s measurement system. Every player today is being graded by Perfect Game, ranked by college coaches, evaluated by velocity readings and exit velo numbers, scored on showcase reports. Some of this data is useful information about a player’s development. All of it is being weaponized against his sense of who he is. A player who knows his potential is already inside him doesn’t have to outsource his identity to any of it. He uses the data when it serves his work, and he ignores it when it doesn’t.

We are liberated from the comparison trap. The 15-year-old player today doesn’t just compete against the players in his own conference. He competes against every player his age in the country, every day, on social media. He watches their highlights, sees their offers, reads their commitments. The comparison is constant and it is structural — nobody asked for it, but everybody has it. A player oriented by his own potential stops looking sideways. There is no one to compare himself to, because the only relevant version of him is the one he is still becoming. His peers are not his competition. They are people walking their own journeys, the same way he is walking his.

We are liberated from the fear of failure. Baseball is a sport based on failure. The hitter who fails seven times out of ten at the highest level for an entire career is enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Which means every day a player walks onto the field, the game is asking him the same question: what are you going to do with the failure that is coming? A player who fears failure spends his career trying to avoid an experience that is built into the sport he chose. He has set himself an impossible task. A player oriented by his own potential treats every day on the field as the challenge he is seeking — because the failure that is coming is not the obstacle. It is the conditions under which Capability gets revealed. The cost of fearing failure is not the failure itself. The cost is a lifetime of Capability that never gets accessed.

We are liberated from outcome-attachment. This is the subtlest of the four traps, and for the player it might be the most insidious. The at-bat is not a stepping stone to the next at-bat, or the recruiting offer, or the draft pick. It is its own complete thing — an encounter, a question, a piece of information about who the player is and is becoming.

The way this trap operates is quiet. A player who appears to be doing all the right things — practicing hard, taking instruction, putting in the time — can still be living entirely in the future. He shows up to batting practice, but he is not really at batting practice. He is at the tournament he hopes the batting practice is preparing him for. He shows up to the tournament, but he is not really at the tournament. He is at the college decision he hopes the tournament will produce. He shows up to college, but he is not really there either — he is at the draft, or the next level, or the dream he has been carrying in his head since he was eight years old. Each present moment is in service of a future moment that, when it arrives, will itself be in service of the next one. The player is always somewhere else. The cage at six in the morning becomes about the showcase in three weeks. The showcase becomes about the offer that might come from it. The offer becomes about the level he hopes it leads to. The player has not been present for a single one of the things that has actually happened.

When meaning is attached to outcomes in this way, every encounter, and every part of life, gets reduced to its result. The result becomes the point. The work — and the journey itself — becomes a means. And several things follow from that reduction, all of them costly.

The player stops being able to enjoy the work itself. The cage stops being interesting; it is just preparation. The film room stops being inquiry; it is just homework. The early lift stops being a small daily act of becoming; it is just the price he has to pay to get where he is going. The texture of his actual life — the part he is actually living, day in and day out — gets emptied of meaning, because meaning has all been moved into the future.

The player also stops being able to absorb what each encounter is actually telling him. An at-bat that produces no hit but produces real information about how a pitcher works gets dismissed as a failure. A practice that produces no visible outcome but produces a real adjustment in his swing gets dismissed as unproductive. The player has organized his perception around results, and so anything that isn’t a result becomes invisible to him. He is paying attention to the wrong thing, and he is paying attention to the wrong thing with such consistency that the right things stop reaching him at all.

And finally — most painfully — the player who lives this way is almost never satisfied. Because outcomes are not in his control, and most of them, by the structure of the sport, will not arrive in the form he is hoping for. The hit doesn’t fall. The offer doesn’t come. The team doesn’t win. The roster spot goes to someone else. A player whose meaning depends on outcomes is hostage to a thing he cannot direct, and he experiences his life accordingly — as a long sequence of near misses and disappointments, punctuated occasionally by an outcome that, when it comes, satisfies him briefly before he attaches his meaning to the next outcome that is now needed.

But the work is where Capability lives. Not in the outcomes the work occasionally produces. In the work itself. The at-bat that produces no hit still produces information. The practice that produces no visible adjustment still produces the player who is capable of the eventual adjustment. The early lift that produces no measurable result still produces the kind of person who is there for the early lift. The encounter is where the becoming happens. The outcome is what occasionally follows.

None of this is an argument for abandoning outcomes. Outcomes matter. The player who wants to play college baseball, the parent who wants their kid to have options, the coach who wants to win games — these are real and legitimate goals. Having an outcome in mind, even a distant one, is healthy. It gives the player a compass. It gives him direction to point everything toward. Without it, the work has no shape.

The distinction is between holding the outcome as a direction and holding it as the source of meaning. The first is useful — it organizes a player’s effort, helps him make decisions about where to spend his time, lets him know whether he is moving forward or sideways. The second is the trap. It is the difference between a compass and a master.

And here is the practical truth, the one the player and the parent reading this most needs to hear: a player who treats the encounter as the point does, in fact, tend to reach his outcomes more reliably than the player who doesn’t. The presence to the work, the openness to information, the willingness to be in the cage at six in the morning because the cage is where he wants to be — these produce a quality of work that the outcome-chasing player cannot match. Outcomes are not unrelated to the encounter. They are downstream of it. The player who organizes his life around the encounter and is present for it is doing the thing that, more than anything else, makes the outcomes more probable.

But the outcomes are no longer the point. They are the occasional, welcome byproducts of a life that has been organized around something deeper.

This is what Capability is. Not a destination you arrive at, but a relationship you are in. Not something you have to acquire, but something you are learning to access. Not a verdict on whether you are good enough, but a quest — for the version of you that only the work, and the wave, can call forth.

Which means the framework we started this essay with was incomplete.

We started here:

But if Capability is the foundation as well as where we are headed — if our potential is already inside us, and the work is finding a way to access it — then the framework has to evolve. Capability isn’t just where we are going. It is where we begin.

This is the framework we will work with from here. Capability sits at both ends, because it is both the journey we set out on and the journey we never stop walking. Growth and Grit are how we walk it.

And here is what makes the walking matter: our fullest Capability — our fullest potential — is unknowable.

We cannot see the bloom from inside the seed. We cannot know, while we are paddling, what the biggest wave we will ever ride is going to ask of us. We cannot calculate, in advance, what versions of ourselves are still waiting to be called forth by encounters we have not yet had with people we have not yet met under conditions we cannot yet imagine. Capability is not a quantity that can be measured. It is a relationship between a person and the conditions that have been put in front of him so far — and a person who has not yet been tested by harder conditions has not yet revealed what those conditions would have called forth.

This is not mysticism. It is structural. Capability becomes visible only through encounter, and the encounters that will reveal a player’s fullest capability are by definition the ones he has not yet had. He cannot know what he is capable of in a slump he has not yet endured, in a leadership role he has not yet been asked to take, in a moment of pressure that has not yet arrived. He can know what he has done. He can extrapolate, cautiously, from what he has done to what he might do. But the fullest version of him sits beyond the horizon of any extrapolation he can make from where he currently stands.

And the horizon keeps moving. Every encounter the player meets reveals some new dimension of what he is and is not. Each revelation expands the territory of what he knows about himself — which expands the territory of what he does not yet know about himself, because the new dimension opens onto further dimensions he could not have anticipated from where he stood before the encounter. The player who is paying attention does not become more certain about his Capability over time. He becomes more aware of how much of it remains uncharted.

This is what makes the journey of Capability a journey at all. The work of accessing it is never finished, because there is no fixed point to arrive at. There is no version of the player at which he can say: here, I have arrived; this is who I was meant to become. Every supposed arrival turns out to be a new departure point. A man chasing the horizon never meets the horizon. The player who is honest about this stops trying to arrive. He understands, instead, the work of his life is the walking itself.

This is the quest of a lifetime. In baseball, and in life.

Which means how we walk the journey matters more than where it ends — because there is no end, only the walking. And how we walk is a function of how we think. It is a function of what we believe is possible, what we tell ourselves when the work is hard, what we make of failure when it comes.

It is, in other words, a function of mindset.

Which is where Growth comes in.

Growth

“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.”

-Erich Fromm, Man for Himself (1947)

“Become what you are.”

-Pindar, Pythian Ode 2

Capability ended with a claim that placed demand on what comes next. Our fullest potential is unknowable. The work is never finished. How we walk the journey matters more than where it ends, because there is no end — only the walking. And how we walk, we said, is a function of how we think.

This is mindset. The framework of belief and orientation a player brings to every encounter with his work. Not a feeling, not a mood, not a temperament — but a sense of commitments he has chosen about what is possible for him.

Of all the mindsets a player can adopt, one of them stands above the rest. Not because it is the easiest, or the most natural, or the most pleasant. The opposite is true on each count. It stands above the rest because it is the only mindset that makes the journey of Capability possible at all. Without it, the framework collapses on contact with the first hard day.

This is what we will spend the rest of this section unpacking. But before we name it, consider the texture of a developing player’s life — because mindset is what determines what that texture becomes.

A player gets told a lot of things over the course of his development. He gets told he isn’t tall or strong or fast enough. He gets told his swing is too long. He gets told his fastball plays down. He gets told the coach has another guy he likes better. He gets told he’s a senior sign at best. He gets told he peaked at 15. Some of what he gets told is true. Some of it is wrong. Most of it is partially right, partially incomplete, and delivered by people who are themselves limited in what they can see. If for no other reason than they can’t see what’s inside of you.

Every one of those moments is a piece of information arriving at the player’s door. And the question that organizes everything else — the question the rest of his career will turn on — is what he does with it.

There are two responses available. Both are choices, though neither will feel like one in the moment.

He can take that information and let it close him. I’m not tall or strong or fast enough. I’m not a hitter. I’m not the guy. The sentences become final. They harden into identity. The path the player was walking ends where the information arrived. What comes next is a different kind of path — narrower than the one he could have been on, lower-stakes, oriented around what is comfortable rather than what is possible.

Or he can take the same information and let it open him. What am I going to do about my height and strength and speed? What is the coach seeing in my swing that I’m not? Where does fastball play actually come from, and how do I add to mine? Same information. Different posture. The path doesn’t end. It bends, deepens, continues — sometimes through a long and unfamiliar stretch of country, but it continues.

This is the work of Growth — and the work of what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck named the growth mindset. Not what happens to a player. What he does with what happens.

Dweck’s 30 years of research, summarized in her book, Mindset, identifies two fundamental orientations a person can hold towards their own qualities. She calls them the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

The fixed mindset is the belief that your qualities are carved in stone. Your intelligence, your character, your talent — these were given to you at birth in some particular quantity, and that quantity is what you have to work with for the rest of your life. You can demonstrate what you have. You can hide what you don’t. You can succeed when the work is within reach of your innate gifts, and fail when it isn’t. But you cannot fundamentally change what was given to you. The hand was dealt before you ever sat at the table.

The growth mindset is the belief that your qualities are things you cultivate. Listen to Dweck: “Your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.” The starting point matters less than the trajectory. The quantity you were given matters less than what you do with it. Development is real, available, ongoing — and it does not have a ceiling that can be calculated in advance.

Notice that these are not two different attitudes about effort. They are two different theories about what a person is, and can be.

The fixed mindset says: a person is a collection of traits, fixed in their nature and stable across time. The traits can be measured, ranked, and evaluated. The work of a life is to discover what one’s traits are and then settle into the right place in the world.

The growth mindset says: a person is a process, not a collection. The traits we can observe at any given moment are snapshots of someone who is still becoming. The work of a life is to participate consciously in that becoming — to know that you are an unfinished thing, and to take the unfinishedness seriously.

This is not a small distinction. Whether a player believes he is a thing or a process will determine almost everything else about how he develops. The thing is being evaluated. The process is being built. The thing is trying to prove what it already is. The process is trying to find out what it might yet become.

Almost every conversation about player development — about confidence, about coaching, about failure, about identity — turns on which of these two beliefs a player has chosen, often without knowing he was choosing. The first work of growth is to make the choice visible.

⁂

The fixed mindset closes. The growth mindset opens.

That is the whole distinction, rendered in its operational form. Everything Dweck’s research describes, everything we have unpacked about the difference between a thing and a process, comes down to a single posture a player can adopt or refuse. He can be closed — to feedback, to challenge, to failure, to information that contradicts how he wants to see himself. Or he can be open. To all of it.

Open to feedback, even when it stings.

Open to challenge, even when he isn’t sure he can meet it.

Open to failure, because failure is the form information takes when it’s most useful and most painful.

Open to being a beginner, no matter how far along he is.

Open to the version of himself that doesn’t exist yet — and to the work of letting that version emerge through encounter rather than through control.

This is what the growth mindset asks of a player. Not blind optimism. Not confidence. Not positive thinking. Openness — a willingness to let the world act on him and to act on the world in return, without defending himself against what he might learn or what he might have to change.

And openness, like every meaningful posture, is a choice. Not a one-time choice — a continual one. Every encounter is its own moment of decision. Every time feedback arrives, every time a coach pushes him, every time he fails in front of people he respects, every time something inside him goes I don’t want to hear this — that is the moment the choice arrives. He can close. Or he can stay open. The mindset is the accumulation of those decisions, made one after another, over years.

The fixed mindset is the easier choice in every single one of those moments. That should be acknowledged plainly. To close is to protect — to keep yourself safe from information that might threaten how you see yourself, from challenge that might expose what you cannot yet do, from failure that might rearrange your sense of who you are. The closed posture preserves. The open posture risks.

This is why the growth mindset cannot be reduced to a slogan. Believe in yourself is not growth mindset. Stay positive is not growth mindset. Growth mindset is the moment-to-moment decision to remain open when closing would be easier, safer, more comfortable. It is choosing risk over preservation, over and over, in the small encounters that compound into a career.

⁂

There is an image worth borrowing from outside our world.

In martial arts, every student begins with a white belt. The belt is the visible mark of the beginner — of someone who knows nothing yet, who is about to be shown how little he knows, who is going to fail in front of his teacher and his peers for years before he begins to understand the work. The white belt is given. The colored belts are earned over time, through the slow accumulation of skill and the testing of it under pressure.

There is a story, almost certainly apocryphal but widely told, of Jigoro Kano — the founder of judo, the highest-ranking judoist of his time — asking on his deathbed to be buried in his white belt.

The writer George Leonard, in his book, Mastery, uses the story to ask the question every player should learn to ask of himself. Kano’s request, Leonard says, was “less humility than realism. At the moment of death, the ultimate transformation, we are all white belts. And if death makes beginners of us all, so does life — again and again.” Then, in the closing line of his book, he turns the story into a challenge for the reader:

"Are you willing to wear your white belt?"

This is what openness to being a beginner looks like, made concrete. Not false humility of pretending you don’t know what you have. The honest acknowledgment that whatever you have learned, there is more you have not. That whatever level you have reached, you are still — in some real sense — at the beginning of something. The pitcher who has mastered his command is a white belt at managing his head in a tied game in the seventh. The hitter who can punish velocity is a white belt at adjusting his approach with two strikes against a pitcher he’s never faced. The shortstop with the best glove on his team is a white belt at being the leader his teammates need when the team is losing.

The growth-mindset player wears the white belt always. Not as a costume, not as humility-performance — but because he understands, structurally, that the work of becoming is never finished. The white belt is who he is, underneath whatever belt he has currently earned.

⁂

Inside the white belt mentality, there is a single word that does more work than any other in the growth mindset’s vocabulary.

Yet.

It’s one syllable. Three letters. It looks like a small thing, and structurally it is — a humble adverb, the kind of word a writer uses without noticing. But when a player attaches it to a sentence about himself, the entire meaning of the sentence reverses.

Consider what a player tells himself, in his own head, over the course of a single week:

I can’t hit a slider. I’m not in the starting lineup. I’m not throwing 90. I haven’t been recruited. I’m not a leader on this team. I don’t know how to handle pressure.

Every one of those sentences is a verdict. Each one names a current state and treats the current state as final. The grammar leaves no room for what comes next, because there is no what comes next — there is only what is. The player who lives inside them is closed by his own language.

Now add the word.

I can’t hit a slider…yet. I’m not in the starting lineup…yet. I’m not throwing 90…yet. I haven’t been recruited…yet. I’m not a leader on this team…yet. I don’t know how to handle pressure…yet.

Same player. Same week. Same gaps between where he is and where he wants to be. But the meaning of each sentence has flipped. The current state is no longer a verdict — it’s a position on a path. Yet gives direction and the path opens. The work in front stops being evidence of what he isn’t and becomes the next thing he gets to learn.

This is what openness sounds like, made portable. Yet is the smallest tool the growth mindset gives a player, and it might be the most important. It travels with him. It costs nothing. It requires no equipment and no schedule. It can be deployed in real time, in the moment a sentence is forming in his head, before the sentence has hardened.

The discipline is to catch the sentences before they finish. To notice the I can’t, the I’m not, the I don’t, the I haven’t — and add the word. Every time. Over years. Until it stops requiring effort and starts arriving on its own.

This is what the work of Growth actually looks like, day to day. Not a feeling. Not a mood. A small adjustment to sentences a player makes about himself, made one sentence at a time, until the adjustment becomes how he speaks.

The white belt mentality and the practice of yet are the structural and the operational forms of openness. Both are postures the player carries with him. What remains is what those postures actually do when the world arrives.

And the world arrives mostly in two forms. Other people tell the player things about himself. And the work tells the player things, in the form of how it goes — what worked, what didn't, what he could do, what he couldn't.

Both are feedback. The growth-mindset player treats both as gifts.

That phrasing is deliberate, and worth pausing on. Gift is not a soft word. A gift is something offered at a cost — someone gave their time, their attention, their care to deliver it. A coach who tells a player something hard is paying a cost: he is risking the relationship, risking being misunderstood, risking that the player will respond by closing. He delivers the information anyway. That delivery is the gift. What the player does with it determines whether the gift gets received or returned.

The closed player returns it. He hears criticism as attack, treats correction as condescension, takes the feedback personally rather than receiving it as information. Sometimes he argues with it. Sometimes he just nods and walks away, having internally decided to ignore everything that was just said. Either way, the gift is wasted. The coach who delivered it learns, over time, that this player is not worth the cost of honest feedback, and the feedback stops coming. The player has trained the people around him to lie to him politely.

The open player receives it. He listens — actually listens, which means letting the words land before deciding what he thinks about them. He sits with the discomfort of being told something he didn't want to hear. He looks at the feedback honestly and asks: what part of this is true? What part is partly true? What part might be wrong, but in a way that's still useful to think about? He knows he doesn't have to accept everything, though he has to engage with it. And the people around him learn that he is worth telling the truth to, which means the truth keeps arriving.

The same posture applies to the feedback the work itself delivers. When the player goes 0-for-4, he can close — I'm just not a hitter, I don't have it today, the umpire was terrible, the pitcher had my number. Each of those is a way of refusing the information. Or he can open — what was I seeing, what wasn't I seeing, was my timing late, was I chasing out of the zone, what did the pitcher figure out about me? The 0-for-4 is the same in both cases. What the player extracts from it is entirely different.

This is failure-as-information, and it is one of the growth mindset's most important moves. Failure in the closed posture is a verdict, the way a coach's hard feedback is an attack. Failure in the open posture is data — a piece of the game telling the player something he didn't know about himself or his approach. The player who has trained himself to receive failure this way ends every hard day with more material to work with, not less.

There is one more form of openness worth naming, because it powers the others. The growth-mindset player is open to his own curiosity. He asks questions. He asks them constantly, of his coaches, of his teammates, of his own performance, of the parts of the game he doesn't yet understand. Some of the questions lead somewhere. Some of them dead-end. Some of them open onto territory he didn't know was there. He doesn't filter them in advance for whether they will be productive. He just asks. Because the player who has stopped asking questions has stopped finding out, and the player who has stopped finding out is, in the only sense that matters, finished.

These — feedback, failure, curiosity — are not separate disciplines. They are the same disciplines aimed in different directions. The growth-mindset player has trained himself to treat everything that arrives at his door as something to engage with rather than defend against. The white belt is his identity. Yet is his vocabulary. And openness — to other people, to the work, to his own questions — is what those tools are for.

⁂

Everything we have said about the growth mindset so far is true. None of it is easy.

The growth mindset is harder than the fixed mindset. It is harder in the moment, and it is harder over time. That needs to be said directly, because most of the writing on this subject pretends otherwise — pretends that openness is its own reward, that the right posture feels good once you adopt it, that the work of growth gets easier with practice in the way other skills do. Some of that is true, eventually. But to get to eventually, a player has to walk through a lot of difficulty that the fixed mindset never asks him to walk through.

The first difficulty is internal. The fixed mindset gives a player an excuse. I'm not tall enough. I'm not a hitter. I peaked at fifteen. Each of those sentences ends the conversation. There is nothing further to examine, nothing further to do, nothing further to ask. The player is who he is, and the question of his development has been settled. That settlement is comfortable. It is also a kind of permission — to stop working, to stop being honest with himself about what he can and can't do, to stop facing the parts of his game that scare him.

The growth mindset takes the excuse away. It tells him you can change, you can develop, you are not finished — and the moment he believes that, he has to do something about it. He has to look at his swing and ask honestly what is wrong with it. He has to listen to the feedback he doesn't want to hear and decide which parts of it are true. He has to put in the work, in the cage and the film room and the weight room, knowing that the work might not be enough, knowing that he might still fail, knowing that the player next to him might be working just as hard. The growth mindset is exhausting in a way the fixed mindset is not, because it demands. Every encounter. Every day. There is no off switch.

The second difficulty is environmental. The growth mindset is harder because the world the player lives in is mostly organized around its opposite. The measurement systems we named in Capability — Perfect Game grades, velo readings, exit velo numbers, recruiting rankings — are fixed-mindset machinery. They take a snapshot of a player at a moment in time and treat the snapshot as the truth of him. The social media comparison trap rewards the same machinery: highlight reels, ranking lists, commitment announcements, the public-facing performance of arrival. The culture surrounding a developing player is almost entirely calibrated to tell him who he is right now, and to evaluate him against other players who are also being told who they are right now. None of that culture is asking the question Growth asks. None of it is calibrated to support the slow, unglamorous, mostly invisible work of becoming. A player who chooses the growth mindset is choosing it against an environment that mostly rewards the fixed version.

The third difficulty is the deepest, and the most important to name plainly.

Baseball is not fair.

You can do every piece of the work. You can adopt the right mindset. You can put in the years. You can show up day after day after day. And the broken-bat flare will still fall in front of the right fielder. The mishit ground ball will still find the hole. The well-struck line drive will still go right at the center fielder. The umpire will still call the strike low and away that wasn't a strike. The recruiting coordinator who said he loved your tape will still go silent for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Your team will still lose games you played well in. You will still get hurt at the wrong moment. The work does not guarantee the outcome. It never has, and it never will.

This is the part of the growth mindset that has to be held honestly, because if it is not, the whole framework collapses the first time the universe doesn't pay out. The growth mindset is not a deal a player makes with the world: I will do the work, and the world will reward me. The world does not negotiate. The world does what it does, and the broken-bat flare falls or it doesn't.

What the growth mindset offers is something different. Not a guarantee about outcomes. A posture for what to do with them.

When the bad call happens, the closed player blames the umpire. The open player notices that the call was bad, accepts that the at-bat is still over, and asks: what did I do well in that at-bat? What can I learn from how it went, separate from the call? How do I show up to the next one? The bad call is real. The growth-mindset player is not pretending it didn't happen. He is also not letting it become the thing the at-bat was about. He extracts the information he can. He releases what he can't change. He prepares for what comes next.

This is the actual discipline. Not pretending the world is fair. Not letting the world's unfairness close him. Holding both — this was unfair, and I am still going to work — at the same time, every time, for years.

The argument for choosing the growth mindset, given all of this, is not that it makes the player happier in the moment. Often it does not. The argument is not that it produces better outcomes. Often it does not — at least not in any way the player can predict or count on. The argument is what it produces in him.

The fixed-mindset player who has had a hard week is angrier, smaller, more defeated than he was the week before. He has had to construct new excuses to keep his identity intact. He has had to add more height to the wall he has been building between himself and the world. The closed posture is preserving him, the way it always does — but it is also progressively shrinking him.

The growth-mindset player who has had the same hard week is tired, sometimes deeply so, but bigger than he was. He has been forced to look at himself honestly. He has learned things he wishes he hadn't had to learn. He has felt the cost of his own mistakes and the limits of his own current abilities. And he has stayed open to all of it. The work has expanded him.

The player you become is the only outcome you control. It is also the only outcome that travels with you — to the next at-bat, to the next season, to the next level, to the life after baseball ends. The fixed-mindset player carries his wall. The growth-mindset player carries himself.

This is why the harder path is worth choosing. Not because it makes baseball easier. Not because it makes baseball fairer. Because of who the player becomes by walking it.

And this — baseball — is one specific theater of a much larger truth. The same logic applies to every domain in which a person is trying to develop. The world rewards the fixed posture. The world is unfair in ways that have nothing to do with effort. The work does not guarantee outcomes. And the only thing a person actually builds, over a life, is the kind of person he has chosen to become through how he met what happened to him. The growth mindset is the harder choice in baseball, in school, in marriage, in fatherhood, in the long stretches of any career. It is also, by some distance, the choice most worth making.

⁂

We have been at altitude for several pages. Let me bring this down to the ground.

Three moments in a player's development. Three events that happen to virtually every player who plays long enough. And, in each one, the same fork in the road — the same choice between the closed response and the open one.

Watch what happens.

The strikeout.

A player walks back to the dugout after striking out looking on a pitch he thought was a ball. The umpire's strike zone has been inconsistent all night. He sits down on the bench and lets the at-bat run through his head.

The fixed-mindset player tells himself: I'm not seeing the ball well. I never see the ball well in this park. That ump is a clown. I suck. He arranges the at-bat into a story about why what happened was outside his control or representative of who he is. By the time he walks to the on-deck circle in his next at-bat, the story has hardened. He carries it into the box. He swings tentatively, late on the inside fastball, and grounds weakly to second. The at-bat the story predicted has now happened. He returns to the dugout with the story confirmed. And the process starts over.

The growth-mindset player tells himself: That was a pitch I should have swung at. Why didn't I? Was I sitting on something else? Was my timing off? What did the pitcher just learn about me with that pitch? What did I learn about the pitcher? He doesn't excuse the call — the call was bad. He also doesn't let the call become the at-bat. He extracts what he can: he was looking for something the pitcher hadn't given him, and the pitcher will now likely come back to that pitch in his next at-bat. He files this away. When he walks to the on-deck circle again, he has more information than he had before. He carries that into the box.

The strikeout was the same. The next at-bat is not.

The lost starting job.

A player has started every game this season at shortstop. Then, in the middle of June, the head coach calls him into the office and tells him a younger player is going to start the next series. No promises about what happens after.

The fixed-mindset player walks out of that office and into a story. He doesn't trust me anymore. The new kid is the favorite now. I've been demoted. I'm not the player I thought I was. He tells two teammates that night. The story spreads. Over the next week, he practices with his energy slightly off — not visibly enough to draw a comment, but enough that anyone watching closely can see it. When he gets back on the field in the second game of the next series, in relief of the new starter, he is playing for himself, and he’s playing not to fail. He commits a costly error in the sixth inning that he would not have made a month ago. The story he told confirmed itself again.

The growth-mindset player walks out of the same office and into a different question. What did I miss? What is the coach seeing in the other kid that he isn't seeing in me right now? What can I work on this week that might change his mind? He goes to the coach the next day and asks — not defensively, not angrily, but openly. What do I need to do? He listens. He hears something he doesn't want to hear. He sits with it overnight. The next morning he goes to the cage and starts working on the thing the coach named. When he gets back on the field in the second game of the series, he is playing for the team and for the work, and with more confidence. In the at-bat that follows he hits a hard line drive to right-center. He may or may not get the starting job back this season. But he has responded in a way that gives him the best chance to do so.

The demotion was the same. The week was not.

The recruiting cooling.

A player has been corresponding with three college programs since the beginning of his junior year. The coaches have been responsive — texts back within a day, emails returned, a warm call after a tournament. Then, in the spring, the responsiveness shifts. Emails take three days, then five, then ten. Texts go unanswered. He still gets occasional acknowledgments, but the warmth has gone out of the exchanges. Nothing has been said. He has not been told no. But something has clearly changed.

The fixed-mindset player constructs an interpretation and lives in it. They never really wanted me. I was a backup option all along. I can’t play in college. The whole process has been a waste of my time. Or, alternately, he constructs the opposite interpretation and lives in that: They're just busy. The season's hectic. They'll come around. I'm overreading this. Both interpretations protect him from the same thing — having to engage with the ambiguity honestly. The first lets him quit pursuing the relationships, because the relationships were never real. The second lets him not pursue them either, because they're going to come back to him on their own. In either version, he is not doing the harder work of reading the situation accurately and adjusting.

The growth-mindset player notices the cooling and gets curious. What changed? Did my last tournament put them off? Am I carrying myself the right way on the field? Or is this just the normal rhythm of a busy time of year? He doesn't catastrophize and he doesn't pretend nothing is happening. He picks up the phone and calls the coach, asking in a respectful, non-needy way, where he honestly stands — not demanding an answer, just opening the door for one. He calls a coach he trusts outside the situation and asks for an outside read. He goes back to his tape and watches it with the question what would a college coach see here that might have changed his mind? And he keeps showing up, keeps doing the work, keeps developing — knowing the three programs may come back, knowing they may not, knowing that other programs are watching, knowing that what he is building is going to get him to where he is supposed to be.

The cooling was the same. The rest of the season was not.

Three moments. Three forks. Same events, different lives.

Notice that in each scenario, the fixed-mindset player is not making the harder choice and losing. He is making the easier choice and losing. The story he tells protects him from having to do anything about his situation. The protection is the cost. The growth-mindset player is paying the cost in the opposite direction — he is doing the harder, more uncomfortable thing in each moment, and gaining something for it. Sometimes the gain is visible. Sometimes it isn't. But the player who chooses growth ends each of these events with more material to work with than he had going in. The player who chooses fixed ends with less.

This is what compounding looks like. Not in the financial sense, though the financial metaphor applies. In the developmental sense. Each closed response makes the next closed response easier and the next open response harder. Each open response makes the next open response easier and the next closed response less appealing. Over a career, the two players diverge — not because of the events that happened to them, but because of the choices they made about what to do with each event.

The events are not the story. The choices are.

⁂

So why do this? Given the cost, given the unfairness, given that the work does not guarantee outcomes — why choose the harder path?

The answer has been visible across this entire section, but it's worth naming directly now.

The growth mindset, over time, produces a kind of person the fixed mindset cannot. Not a more talented player, necessarily. Not a more successful one in any guaranteed sense. A more alive one.

The growth-mindset player, after years of choosing openness over closure, develops capacities that the fixed-mindset player loses. He learns how to hear hard truths without flinching. He learns how to lose without being diminished by it. He learns how to be told he isn't ready and treat that as a temporary fact rather than a verdict. He learns how to walk into rooms he hasn't earned the right to be in yet, to do the work that earns him the right, and to walk into the next room. He learns how to be a beginner in his twenties, in his thirties, in his forties — to keep meeting the version of himself that doesn't yet exist, and to keep walking toward him.

He learns that the work itself is interesting. Not in a forced or instrumental sense — interesting the way solving a hard problem is interesting, the way figuring something out is interesting, the way the slow accumulation of skill is its own quiet pleasure. The fixed-mindset player relates to his work as labor — something he does to get to outcomes. The growth-mindset player relates to his work as inquiry — something he does because the doing itself is part of who he is. The hours in the cage are not penance. They are practice in the deepest sense of the word: a discipline that produces both skill and the person who possesses the skill, at the same time.

This is what the payoff actually is. Not happiness in any cheap sense. Not constant joy. Not freedom from the hard days, which still come, and still hurt. The payoff is the fulfillment of being a person who is genuinely growing — who feels his own ongoing expansion in the world, who knows that the work is producing something even on the days the scoreboard does not, who carries an internal sense of trajectory that does not depend on external confirmation. There is an energy to this kind of life. A quiet, sustainable energy that the fixed-mindset player never has access to. The fixed mindset preserves; the growth mindset feeds.

And then, after years of this — after thousands of small choices to remain open, after the discipline of yet catching itself in the player's head before sentences finish, after feedback received as gift and failure received as information and curiosity allowed its full operation — something changes.

The mindset stops requiring deliberate choice.

And this is the part that gets misunderstood.

When the growth mindset becomes fully internalized, the player stops feeling himself choose it in the moment. The openness is no longer an act of will against his closed defaults. It has become how he sees the world. Feedback arrives, and his reaction is curiosity rather than defensiveness, without him having to manage the reaction. Failure happens, and he extracts information from it without having to remind himself to do so. Hard truths land, and he sits with them as a matter of course, because that is the kind of person he has become.

This looks, from the outside, like the player who never thought about his mindset at all — the player who reacts to what happens to him without any conscious orientation, without ever knowing the choice was available. That player also isn't choosing his mindset moment to moment. He's simply running on whatever the environment installed in him before he ever paid attention. The internalized growth-mindset player also isn't choosing his mindset moment to moment — but he has chosen it so many thousands of times that the choice has become identity. The two states are structurally opposite. They look similar only because both lack the visible effort of the middle stretch — the long years when the player was deliberately catching himself in the moment, deliberately holding open when he wanted to close, deliberately choosing the harder thing over and over until the choosing wore a path.

The unaware default is closed by accident. The internalized orientation is open by accumulation.

This is what the work of Growth is for. Not to produce a player who has to remember, every day, to be open. To produce a player whose openness has become so deep that he can stop remembering. The deliberate practice was the path to the place where deliberate practice is no longer required.

A player who has reached this place is not done. He is still becoming. The work of Growth has no end; the journey toward Capability that we never stop walking does not end here, either. But the way he meets the work has changed. He is no longer struggling to adopt the right posture. He is the posture. And the work he does from inside that posture is qualitatively different — lighter, in some ways, even when it is hard — because the friction of fighting against his own defenses is gone.

This is who the growth mindset, fully chosen over time, eventually makes out of a player. Not a guarantee. A person — alive, growing, ongoing, free of the wall he might have built, carrying himself instead.

This is the payoff. It is worth every cost the path required.

This is what Growth is. The harder choice, made deliberately for a long time, until it becomes the kind of person a player has become.

But mindset alone is not enough.

A growth-mindset player who does not act on his openness is still, in the only sense that matters, the same player he would have been with the fixed mindset. The openness is the precondition. The action is what makes the openness real in the world. A player can hold the white belt in his head and still skip his lift. He can repeat yet to himself and still avoid the harder coach. He can know that failure is information and still refuse to extract it. Mindset without action is talk.

What Growth makes possible, Grit makes happen.

Growth gives the player a posture toward what happens. Grit gives him a set of commitments about what he does in response — in the cage, on the field, in the small choices that nobody is watching, in the hard moments that test what he has built. The two are not separable. They depend on each other. But they are distinct, and the work of becoming a player who matters requires both.

Which means there is one more section to walk through.

Grit

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

-Attributed to Calvin Coolidge

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot, and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

-Michael Jordan, Nike Commercial (1997)

Like Capability before it, Growth ended with a dependence on what comes next. Mindset, however deeply held, doesn’t act. The growth-mindset player who never paddles out, who never risks a swing adjustment, who doesn’t rise with his early alarm because his body is telling him not to, is still the same player he would have been without the mindset at all. The growth mindset orientation is the precondition. The action is what makes the orientation real in the world.

This section is about that action — about what the work of becoming actually looks like when a player has to do it.

The question that organizes Grit is different from the questions that organized the first two sections. Capability asked what am I capable of? Growth asked what do I believe and what do I make of what happens to me? Grit asks the most direct question of all: what do I do, and who am I becoming through the doing?

The academic work most directly responsible for our modern understanding of this question belongs to University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth. Duckworth has spent her career studying high achievers across wildly different fields — spelling bee finalists, West Point cadets, elite athletes, world-class artists — looking for the common thread that separated them from people of equal apparent talent who did not reach the same heights. Duckworth expands on her research in her widely read book, Grit. What she found was not what she expected, and not what most people assume.

The people who reached the highest levels were not the most talented. They were not the most disciplined in any conventional sense. They were not the most naturally gifted with willpower, or the best at delaying gratification, or the most rigorous about their schedules. They were, instead, people who could not stop chasing. Their standards always sat just past their reach, and the gap between where they were and where they were trying to go did not frustrate them — it fueled them. They were, in Duckworth’s words, satisfied being unsatisfied.

What set them apart was the combination of two specific qualities — a deep, enduring interest in what they were doing, and the resilience to keep at it through the parts that were boring, frustrating, or painful. Duckworth gave the combination a name: grit. The combination of passion and perseverance. 

That definition is the foundation we’ll build on. But for the players I sit across from, I find it more useful to translate Duckworth’s research into something more direct, and more demanding.

Grit shows up in two places at once. It is who you are, and it is what you do. And neither one is real without the other.

Who you are is an identity. It’s the answer you give — to yourself, when nobody is asking — to the question, “What kind of player am I? What kind of person?” Players with grit have a settled answer. They are the kind of person who finishes. The kind of player who shows up to the cage when nobody is watching. The kind of competitor who doesn’t quit on a pitch, an at-bat, an inning, a game, a season, a career. This identity isn’t bravado, and it isn’t something you announce. It’s something you know about yourself, quietly, and it holds the line when adversity tries to pull you apart.

What you do is action. It’s the early lift, the extra bullpen, the film session you didn’t have to do. It’s the response to an 0-for-4 — do you go take swings, or do you go pout? It’s the response to a coach’s criticism — do you sit with it and grow, or do you defend and blame? Action is Grit made visible. It’s the only proof you have, to yourself or anyone else, that the identity is real.

The two feed each other. Every action you take in the direction of who you say you are reinforces that identity, and the stronger the identity, the more naturally the next action follows. This is not a trick of motivation. It is how character gets built — one rep, one response, one decision at a time — over time.

Duckworth's research bears this out. When she looked at what set paragons of grit apart — what they shared, regardless of field — she found four psychological assets in common: interest, practice, purpose, and hope.

These four are Duckworth's. The pairing that follows is mine. I find it useful to read her four assets as describing two different things at once. Two of them describe who these people are. Two of them describe what they do.

Interest and purpose live on the who you are side.

Interest is whether you actually love the game, the work itself, the daily texture of it, not just the idea of being someone who does it. Duckworth distinguishes this from passing fascination — she describes interest as something that has to be discovered, then developed over time, then deepened across a career. Not given fully formed at birth. Not stable across a life. Interest in this sense is something a player has to find, build, and then keep building.

For the players I work with, this is one of the most clarifying ideas in her research. A 15-year-old who isn't sure whether he really loves baseball is being told, implicitly, by everyone around him: if you really loved it, you would know. Duckworth's findings suggest the opposite. The high achievers she studied did not arrive in their fields with mature passion already in place. Their passion grew. It deepened through engagement, through the slow accumulation of skill and meaning and identification with the work. The player who is uncertain at 15 is not failing to love the game. He is at an earlier stage of an interest that, with the right kind of engagement, can become the through-line of his life.

This matters because the player who believes interest has to be fully formed and obvious to count will quit the game at the first signs of ambivalence. The player who understands that interest develops will stay engaged through the ambivalence, and that engagement is what produces the deepening Duckworth describes.

Purpose is the conviction that the work matters — that what you're chasing connects to something larger than yourself. Duckworth treats purpose as a distinct asset from interest, and the distinction is important. Interest is about whether you love the work itself. Purpose is about whether the work means something beyond your own enjoyment of it.

A player can love hitting without feeling that hitting matters. He can find the daily texture of the work pleasurable without yet feeling that the work is connected to anything larger than himself. That player has interest but not yet purpose. He may still work hard. He may even succeed in conventional terms. But he is missing the second of the two qualities that, in Duckworth's research, separates the people who reach the highest levels from people of equal talent who do not.

What purpose actually looks like for a developing player is often less grand than the word suggests. Purpose doesn't have to mean I am playing to inspire others, or I am playing to honor my family. It can be smaller and more honest than that. It can be: I am playing because the work of becoming better is the way I want to spend my life. Or: I am playing because this is how I learn to handle hard things, and I want to be a person who can handle hard things. The connection to something larger than yourself is not necessarily a grand cause. It can be a relationship to your own development — a recognition that becoming someone capable of the work is itself something larger than the daily reps.

A player who has both interest and purpose knows, in a way he doesn't have to argue, why he's at the field. He doesn't need to manufacture motivation. He's not borrowing it from a coach, a parent, or some highlight reel. It's already his.

Practice and hope live on the what you do side.

Practice is the daily discipline of improving your existing strengths and attacking your weaknesses. Duckworth, drawing on the work of psychologist Anders Ericsson, distinguishes ordinary repetition from what Ericsson called deliberate practice — work that is targeted at specific weaknesses, conducted at the edge of current ability, accompanied by immediate feedback, and repeated until each component skill becomes fluent.

This distinction matters for a developing player. Most of what is called practice in youth and high school baseball is repetition, not deliberate practice in Ericsson's sense. The player who takes 100 swings of comfortable BP is repeating. The player who takes 100 swings against the pitch he can't yet hit, methodically and without rush, gets immediate feedback on each one, adjusts, and repeats until the adjustment holds, is engaged in deliberate practice. Both feel like work. Only one produces the kind of skill accumulation that grit, in Duckworth's research, actually requires.

A player who has internalized this distinction sees the cage differently. He sees most of the work other players are doing as repetition. He understands that real practice — the kind that produces development — is harder, more uncomfortable, and less common than the volume of activity around him suggests. And he organizes his own work accordingly.

Hope is what Duckworth describes as the response to setback — not optimism, not a feeling that things will work out, but the active belief that effort can change the future. Not I hope things will improve. Rather: I can work to improve them.

This is the asset most readers misunderstand. Hope, in conventional usage, is passive — a wish, an attitude, a way of feeling about the future. Duckworth uses the word more demandingly. Her version of hope is a kind of agency under adversity. It is the decision, made over and over, that the player's situation is not fixed — that the slump can be hit out of, the injury can be rehabbed through, the criticism can be acted on. Hope as Duckworth describes it is the operational form of the growth mindset, applied specifically to the moments when things have gone wrong.

For a player who is in the middle of a hard stretch, this distinction is the one that matters. Hoping that the slump ends won't end the slump. Acting in ways that suggest the slump is something he can work through is what gets him out the other side. Hope is not what he feels. It is what he does. And the decision to act in hopeful ways — to take the extra swings, to watch the film, to go to the coach for help — is the response that produces the change he was hoping for.

Players who have these two don't need anyone to drag them through hard days. They've already decided how those days end.

Identity without action is talk. Action without identity is activity. Duckworth's four assets, held together — interest and purpose anchoring who you are, practice and hope organizing what you do — are what give grit its actual structure over time.

⁂

Everybody wants to see the flawless Olympic performance. Everybody wants to see the flower in bloom. But nobody wants to see the becoming. We skip past it, fix our eyes on the finished product, and then call it natural talent.

This is a flattering mistake, and a comfortable one. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw it clearly: “Our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of genius…To call someone ‘divine’ means: ‘here there is no need for us to compete.’” If excellence is magic, the rest of us are off the hook. We don’t have to ask what we could have done.  But excellence isn’t magic. The sociologist Dan Chambliss spent years studying competitive swimmers — country-club 10-year-olds all the way up to Olympic gold medalists — and published what he found in an essay called, The Mundanity of Excellence. His conclusion was the opposite of what most people assume:

“Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any of those actions; only the fact they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.”

Excellence is built, not bestowed. It is the product of small, ordinary actions, repeated until they aren’t ordinary anymore. The flawless swing, the clean turn at second, the at-bat where everything slows down: these are not gifts. They are accumulations. Every one of them is the visible end of a long chain of unglamorous work that nobody saw.

Which is why, when we look honestly at what separates the players who keep going from the players who stall out, or give up, the answer isn’t talent. It’s effort. Not effort as a slogan — effort as the actual mechanism. Duckworth puts the point as cleanly as anyone has: “Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential.”

Talent is the seed, no matter what kind. Effort is what turns it into anything at all.

⁂

So far we’ve talked about effort as if conditions hold steady — sustained, ordinary, accumulating. Day after day, rep after rep, the work compounds. But that’s the easy version of the story.

The harder version is what happens when the conditions change. When the work stops returning what it used to. When the hits that used to be doubles in the gap stop, and the flares that fell, don’t. When you get hurt. When you get passed over. When you were the best player at one level, and now at another you’re the worst. Every player who plays long enough meets these moments. They are not detours from the path of development. They are the path.

This is where the surfer comes back. Remember why he waits for the big wave: “because it is those very obstacles, the size and churning power of the wave, which draw from the surfer his greatest effort.” It’s only against the big wave that he’s required to use everything he has. And it’s only there that he finds out what everything he actually has is.

Adversity plays the same role for a player. The 0-for-20 stretch, the lost starting job, the long rehab, the recruiting silence — these are not interruptions of your becoming. They are the conditions under which your becoming becomes visible, to you and to anyone watching. The question is never whether the wave is coming. The wave is always coming. The question is what you do when it arrives.

And here is where Grit, in both of its forms, gets tested.

Who you are gets tested — does the identity hold when the results stop? When nobody is clapping, when the parents in the stands are quiet, when the highlight reel is empty, when the recruiting coordinator stops calling, are you still the kind of player who shows up to the cage? Who knows that your early Saturday morning lift is not dependent on how you feel, but is a decision already made?

What you do gets tested — does the action continue when the action isn’t being rewarded? Do you keep taking swings, watching film, asking the harder questions?

The player who answers yes, when nobody would blame him for answering no, is the player who is actually building something.

Resilience isn't a separate quality from grit. It is grit under load.

This distinction matters because most of the discourse about resilience treats it as a property of certain people — a personality trait, a measure of toughness, a thing some players have and others lack. That framing makes resilience look like fixed capacity. You either have it or you don't, and the players who don't are at a structural disadvantage that no amount of work will close.

What I have seen in the players I’ve played with, and what I lived through in my own career, points to a different picture. Resilience is not a separate thing the player either has or doesn't have. It is what becomes visible when the player's identity and action are tested by conditions that try to pull them apart. The conditions are the load. The identity and action are what's being loaded. And resilience is the name we give to the holding-together that occurs — or doesn't occur — when the load gets heavy.

This reframe has practical consequences for how a player should think about his own resilience.

The first consequence is that resilience cannot be cultivated directly. A player cannot work on resilience the way he works on his swing. He can only work on the underlying structure — on building identity and action so deeply that they hold when adversity tests them. Resilience is the downstream observation of that structure under pressure, not a separate skill he develops in isolation. The player who tries to become more resilient without doing the deeper work on identity and action is trying to build the visible result without building the underlying mechanism.

The second consequence is that what looks like resilience in one player is not always the same thing as what looks like resilience in another. Two players can both survive a six-week slump and look, from the outside, equally resilient. But one of them may be surviving by closing off, by lowering his standards, by quietly settling for a smaller version of his game. The other may be surviving by staying open, by continuing to work on the parts of his game that the slump revealed, by deepening rather than retreating. From the outside, both endured. Only one grew. Resilience as a surface measure does not distinguish them.

The third consequence is the most important. The hard moments are where the most growth actually happens — not where growth is temporarily paused while a player gets through the difficulty, but where growth itself is being produced. The slump is not an interruption of development. It is development in its highest form. The player who is in the middle of a six-week stretch where nothing is working is, if he is meeting it with grit, building more in those six weeks than he built in the six months before the slump began.

This is counterintuitive, and most players resist it. It feels, while it is happening, like the opposite is true. The slumping player feels like he is losing the swing he had built, losing the confidence he had built, losing the relationship with the game he had built. From inside the experience, the slump feels like subtraction.

And it should be said plainly, because the rest of this section will not make sense otherwise: going through a long stretch of real difficulty is brutally hard. Not philosophically hard. Not in some abstract way the writer can describe comfortably from a distance. Hard in the way that costs you sleep. Hard in the way that makes you dread the drive to the field. Hard in the way that makes you wonder, sometimes seriously, whether you should be doing this at all. The player who is six weeks into a slump and trying to keep working is not having a difficult learning experience. He is in real pain, and the pain is not making itself smaller by being framed correctly. Any claim about what these moments produce — and the claim is coming — has to begin with the honest recognition that the producing is not happening cheaply. The player is paying for it, in real time, with parts of himself that hurt.

But the player who is meeting the slump with grit — staying open, asking honest questions, adjusting his approach, refusing to quit on the work — is, in those weeks, building things he could not have built in easier conditions: a deeper understanding of his own swing, a clearer picture of his relationship to failure, a more honest map of what he can and cannot yet do, a tested sense of who he is when the work isn't returning what it used to.

The slump returns. The understanding stays. The next time things get hard, the player meets them from a deeper base than the one he started from. This is the compounding that’s been talked about, working at its highest leverage. Easy weeks produce small accumulations. Hard weeks produce big ones.

Which is why the player who has been through real adversity and stayed with the work tends to develop a posture toward future adversity that the protected player cannot. He has been here before. He knows what is on the other side. He knows that the hard moment is not the verdict it feels like. He has built, from inside actual difficulty, the structure that allows him to meet the next difficulty with less fear and more readiness.

This is grit under load, in its fullest form. Identity holding. Action continuing. The structure proving itself by holding when the conditions tried to break it — and getting deeper by the holding. The player who reaches this place has not become resilient as a personality trait. He has built Grit at a depth where adversity stops being an interruption of his development and becomes one of its most reliable producers.

⁂

The structure I just described — identity holding, action continuing, the work compounding through difficulty — is doing one job constantly that we haven't yet named directly. The holding requires belief. The continuing requires belief. The compounding requires belief. And the belief required is not generic faith in oneself or in the universe. It is the specific belief that the player can change — that he is not finished, that what he cannot yet do, he can learn to do, that the version of him on the other side of this difficulty is a real possibility, even when nothing in his current experience suggests it.

This is the growth mindset, doing the work the section has been asking it to do. Not as a posture toward a single moment of feedback or a single failure event — Growth's territory. As the sustained orientation that makes it possible to keep going across weeks and months when difficulty refuses to lift.

Growth's earlier sections developed the fixed-vs-growth distinction at the level of individual encounters. The strikeout. The recruiting cooling. The hard conversation in the office. In each case, the choice was real and the choice mattered, but the choice was also bounded — a single moment with a single response. Grit operates in different time horizons. The slump that has now stretched into its sixth week. The rehab that has now stretched past the doctor's original timeline. The benching that started in June and is now into August with no clear end date. These are not single moments. They are extended conditions, and what happens to a player's mindset across an extended condition is not the same as what happens in any single moment within it.

In a single moment of difficulty, the fixed mindset closes by hardening — by converting the event into a verdict about identity. I'm not a hitter. I'm not the starter. I'm not the recruit. The closing is sharp and immediate.

Under sustained difficulty, the fixed mindset closes differently. It does not just convert one event into a verdict; it converts the whole stretch of time into a verdict about the player's trajectory. I've been in this slump too long. This is who I am now. I peaked. I'm done. The verdict is no longer about a single performance. It is about the player's whole future. And because the future cannot be falsified in the moment — the player cannot prove, today, that he is not done — the verdict tends to stick. It tends to organize the player's behavior, week after week, in the direction of confirming itself. The slumping fixed-mindset player stops working as hard. The rehabbing fixed-mindset player stops believing the rehab is leading somewhere. The benched fixed-mindset player stops preparing as if his role could change. Each behavioral retreat makes the verdict more accurate. By the time the original difficulty would have lifted, the player has built a worse version of himself that the difficulty no longer fits — but that the player now inhabits anyway, because the verdict has become the truth.

The growth mindset under sustained difficulty operates differently, and the difference is harder to see in any single day. The growth-mindset player who is six weeks into a slump is not, day to day, visibly more hopeful than the fixed-mindset player next to him. He is not feeling better. He may not be performing better. The slump is doing to him what slumps do. What is different is what he is doing with the difficulty across the long arc — and the doing is invisible from the outside until enough time has passed for its effects to show.

What he is doing, day after day, is refusing to convert the stretch into a verdict. He sits with the question what is this teaching me? even when the answer is not yet clear. He continues to work on the parts of his game the slump has exposed, even when the work isn't yet returning results. He keeps showing up — not in the false-confident way that pretends nothing is wrong, but in the honest way that acknowledges the situation and continues to act anyway. I am six weeks into this. I do not know when it ends. I am still going to take BP today, and I am still going to study the at-bats I had last night, and I am still going to walk into tomorrow's game prepared to compete. The belief is not that things will get better soon. The belief is that he can still work to make them better, and that the working itself is part of what he is becoming.

This is the growth mindset operating at the time scale Grit requires. Not as a momentary choice, but as a continuous decision held across hard weeks and harder months. The mindset is no longer about how he responds to a single event. It is about how he carries himself through stretches of time when no single event is going his way.

Which is why Growth comes before Grit in the framework. It isn't a chronological order. It is a structural one.

Grit is what gets a player to his capability — but only if it is supported underneath by a mindset that allows the player to keep believing in his own becoming through the long stretches when becoming is invisible. Without that belief, Grit collapses on contact with sustained difficulty. The player who has built Grit on top of a fixed mindset can endure a hard moment. He cannot endure a hard season. He cannot endure a multi-month rehab. He cannot endure a year-long demotion. The growth mindset is what allows Grit to operate across time horizons that single-moment willpower cannot reach.

The growth mindset is the soil. Grit is what grows in it.

Without the soil, there is nothing for the work to take root in. The reps land on hard ground and bounce.

Which means the work begins, always, with a choice. Long before the early lift, long before the extra bullpen, long before the at-bat or the inning or the wave — there is the quiet decision a player makes, often without even knowing he is making it, about what kind of becoming is available to him. Everything else follows from that.

⁂

So this is what Grit actually is. Not a slogan, not a personality, not a hand a few kids are dealt at birth. It is an identity a player claims and the action that proves the identity is real. It is who you are when the results stop and what you do when nobody is watching. It is passion and perseverance, woven together over time, and tested when things are going well, and when they are not.

It is also, importantly, available. Every player reading this has access to it. Not in equal measure on any given Tuesday, not without help, not without setbacks — but available. The growth mindset opens the door. The daily work walks through it. The hard moments prove what’s been built, and build what hasn’t been yet. None of this requires a particular kind of talent. It requires a particular kind of choice, made and remade, over and over.

And the choice is always pointed somewhere. Grit doesn’t exist for its own sake. It is the means by which a player closes the distance between who he is and who he might be. Which means the framework we started with isn’t quite finished. There is one more move to make.

The Walking

Look at where we have arrived.

We began with Capability — with the rose containing its potential, with the surfer waiting for the wave that would call something out of him he did not yet know was there. We said the work is finding a way to access what is already inside us. We said the fullest version of that Capability is unknowable.

We turned to Growth — to the mindset that makes the journey conceivable. The openness to feedback, to challenge, to failure, to becoming a beginner. The discipline of yet. The honest claim that this path is harder than the path of closing. The reward, eventually, of an internalized orientation that no longer requires conscious choice.

We turned to Grit — to the identity a player claims and the action that proves the identity is real. The four assets, paired into who you are and what you do. The mundanity of excellence. Resilience as grit under load. The truth that hard moments are where the deepest growth happens, and the harder truth that going through them is brutal.

And now we arrive back where we started — at Capability. The framework has looped. The arrow that began at Capability has now returned to Capability, and the reader can see that the journey has no end. There is no version of the player at which he can say here, I have arrived. Every supposed arrival opens onto further horizons. The walking is the work.

This is the diagram I have been showing you across this essay, evolved through its stages. Watch what it actually is:

It was always a circle. The framework was never a path with an end. It was a way of being in motion — through a baseball career, and through a life. Capability is not where you arrive. It is where you keep arriving. Growth is not a phase you complete. It is the orientation you carry. Grit is not a quality you eventually possess. It is the structure you keep building, deeper, through every encounter the world puts in front of you.

The reader who has walked through this essay carefully has, I hope, started to feel something. The framework is about player development. It is also about something larger. The work of becoming a whole baseball player is the work of becoming a whole human being. Not adjacent to it. Not analogous to it. The same work.

That is not a rhetorical claim. It is the deepest thing I believe about why this work matters.

A young man at 15 learning how to face a hard pitcher, an honest piece of feedback, a slump that will not lift — he is not learning a baseball skill that will later transfer to life. He is learning life itself, in the form baseball happens to deliver it to him. The skills he is building — the ability to be open under pressure, to extract information from failure, to keep working when nothing is returning what it used to, to be a beginner at 40 in something he has not yet attempted — these are the skills of being a person who is alive to his own becoming. Baseball is one of the most demanding and honest theaters in which to learn them. But the learning is the life.

This is a way to live.

The player who lives this way will not always get the outcomes he wanted. He might. The work makes it more probable, the way good work tends to. But the outcomes are not the point, and they were never the point. The point is the human being he becomes by doing the work — the kind of man who can meet what life brings him with Capability, with Growth, with Grit. The kind of man who is still in motion — who is still becoming — at 30, at 50, at 80.

I built Marvel Mentorship & Advisory because this is the work I think matters most. I built it from inside my own playing career — nine years of professional baseball, including time in the Major Leagues — during which I lived a version of everything I have just written. I felt the framework in operation before I had the language for it. I felt the difficulty plainly. I succeeded at parts of it and I failed at others. The wins and the losses both came; the good pitching outings and the ass-kickings. The framework did not protect me from the ass-kickings. What it did was make the losses into something I could keep walking through, and make the wins into something I could keep building from.

I am still in this work. Not as something I have mastered. As something I am still inside, every day. The practice I have built is not separate from my own life — it is a vehicle for it. What I teach the families I sit across from is what I am working on in myself, alongside them. How to keep showing up. How to stay open when closing would be easier. How to handle a hard stretch without becoming smaller. How to live in relationship with Capability — my own, and the Capability I help others access.

I have a son, and he is young. He does not yet know what his father does for work, or what his father has done. Some day he will. When he does, I want what he finds to be the same thing in his father's life that he finds in his father's writing. The framework, lived. Not as performance. As the actual structure of how I have tried to be a player, a husband, a father, a man.

I will not get this right. I have not gotten it right. There are days, plenty of them, when I close instead of open, when the slump of life feels like subtraction and I treat it that way, when I am not the version of the man I am trying to become. The framework does not produce a perfected human being on the other side of enough years of work. It produces a human being who is still walking — who keeps returning to the work after he has failed at it, who keeps choosing openness after he has closed, who keeps building grit at deeper levels through difficulties he could not have imagined when he started.

The walking continues. For me. For my son, eventually. For the players I work with, and their families. For everyone reading this who is somewhere on their own journey through whatever it is they have chosen to take seriously.

Which is, I think, what this framework is finally about.

We are walking through something. None of us knows fully where it ends or what it means. We have theories, faiths, traditions that try to explain why we are here on this small planet floating through a universe whose scale we cannot really hold in our minds. Some of those explanations may be true. Maybe none. The walking continues regardless.

There is, I think, a kind of spirituality in that. Not religious in any particular sense, though it can be. Just the recognition that we are here for a finite time, that the time will be filled with encounters we did not always choose and conditions we did not always arrange, and that the only thing actually in our control is what we do with what arrives.

This framework — Capability into Growth into Grit into Capability — is one honest answer to that situation. It says: the work is finding what is inside you, by walking toward what calls it forth. The mindset for the walking is Growth. The structure that holds the walking together over time is Grit. And the walking itself, never finished, never arriving, always returning to the beginning of the next stretch — the walking is the life.

This is what I try to live. This is what I try to help families build for their sons. This is what I am still learning, in my own life, with my wife and my son and the work in front of me.

If you have read this essay carefully, you have walked through a lot. The framework. The philosophy. The honest difficulty. The hopes and the costs.

I hope what stays with you is not any particular line of it. I hope what stays is the question the framework keeps asking.

What are you walking toward, and how are you walking?

The walking is the work. The walking is the life.

In baseball, and in everything else.

Sources

The following sources are quoted or directly cited in this essay, in order of appearance.

-William Shakespeare. Hamlet. c. 1600.

-Henry S. Haskins. Meditations in Wall Street. William Morrow & Company, 1940.

-W. Timothy Gallwey. The Inner Game of Tennis. Random House, 1974.

-Erich Fromm. Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. Rinehart & Company, 1947.

-Pindar. Pythian Ode 2. c. 470 BCE.

-Carol S. Dweck. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House, 2006.

-George Leonard. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment. Plume, 1991.

-Calvin Coolidge. Quotation widely attributed; original source uncertain.

-Michael Jordan. Failure (Nike commercial), 1997.

-Angela Duckworth. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner, 2016.

-K. Anders Ericsson, with Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer. "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance." Psychological Review, vol. 100, no. 3, 1993, pp. 363–406.

-Friedrich Nietzsche. Human, All Too Human. 1878.

-Daniel F. Chambliss. "The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers." Sociological Theory, vol. 7, no. 1, 1989, pp. 70–86.

If any of this resonated with you or if you'd like to share your thoughts, I'd love to hear from you.

Send me an email at: james@marvelmentorship.com