Try, Try and Try Again… Yeah, Right !

Passion alone is never enough. There. I said it.

We’ve had it stitched onto motivational cushions, screamed at us from conference stages, hashtagged into oblivion. Try hard enough, long enough, and the universe will surrender. It’s one of the most well-meaning, thoroughly dangerous pieces of advice ever handed to an impressionable human being.

Because here’s what the cushion doesn’t tell you: hard work without skill is just exhausting. You can show up every single day, give everything you have, and still be thoroughly, painfully average. Passion does not equal ability. And ability — raw, honest, natural ability — matters enormously if you want to be great at something, not merely better than you were yesterday.

I know this, because I lived it. Embarrassingly, publicly, and for two full years.

I was sixteen and I wanted to be cool. Not straight-A cool. Not debate-team cool. I wanted basketball cool — the kind that got you into the right conversations, the right circles, the kind that made you matter in the way that only matters deeply when you are sixteen and desperately trying to figure out where you fit.

So I showed up. Every single day. I ran the suicides, did the free throws, practiced layups until my legs ached. I skipped family holidays. I let my grades slide badly enough that my mother never quite forgave the sport. For two full years I poured everything I had into a game I loved with my whole chest.

And I was, to put it plainly, not good enough.

My coach — a man I genuinely revered — pulled me aside one day and told me the truth. Slowly. Clearly. Without cruelty, but without cushioning either. Too slow. Can’t shoot straight. A good defender will take the ball off you every time. You will never make the first five.

I went home and cried in my bathroom for a solid hour. Then I hated him for six more months and practiced even harder, because that’s what we do when someone tells us something we aren’t ready to hear.

Then came a friendly match. He put me in the starting lineup — perhaps as one final, generous act of clarity. My teammates were brilliant. They passed to me at every opportunity. They set me up for my favourite layup, over and over again. And over and over again, I fumbled it. Lost it. Cost the team.

Within ten minutes I knew. I walked myself off the court, told my coach I was done, and watched the team — freed of carrying me — click immediately and win the match.

I quit that day. Not dramatically. Not bitterly. I just stopped. And something quietly shifted.

A few years later I walked into debating. Everything I had built during those two years — the discipline, the showing up, the refusal to coast — I brought all of it with me. And that team became something. I found what I was actually built for: making complex things simple, and talking far too much for anyone’s comfort, including my mother’s.

My coach had done me the greatest favour of my life by refusing to fan a flame that was never going to become a fire.

A few things worth sitting with:

Passion is the fuel. Skill is the engine.

One without the other gets you nowhere useful. And if the engine isn’t there — more fuel just makes a louder noise.

Quitting is not the opposite of resilience.

Sometimes it is the most intelligent, self-aware decision you will ever make. The energy you stop pouring into the wrong thing becomes available for the right one. That is not giving up. That is growing up.

The people who tell you hard truths are doing you a favour.

Even when it stings. Even when you hate them for it. Even when you spend six months proving them wrong before quietly realising they were right all along. Find those people. Keep them close.

Your natural gifts are already there.

You don’t manufacture them. You just have to pay honest, unflinching attention — to what comes easily, to what lights you up without effort, to where you consistently make others stop and take notice. That’s your lane. Get in it.

Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. Sometimes, it’s because we’re too busy practicing layups to notice we were born to debate