Why I was miserable for 17 straight years... I didn"t know until just now

As I said in a previous article, I am reading the book, The One Thing.

Most books, just like Tai says, are one-gold-nugget books. Tree of Knowledge. This one is full of gold nuggets. The One Thing book is a Tree of Life book
The nugget I discovered yesterday may be the most important thing I have missed, and I see others miss...
It is and have been in plain sight but at the same time it is invisible, like most new distinctions. Until you see it, you don"t...

The nugget, this new distinction, is the foundation for the Ben Jonson quote from Poor Richard"s Almanac: "He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master" ((Which doesn"t mean that he that is taught by a teacher isn"t taught by a fool... as most teachers are clueless themselves... :-( Regarding this distinction, this article is about, I have been clueless myself...))

People who don"t have this distinction (the gold nugget from this book) are, forever, mediocre.
Here is the surprising bit of gold, that made me want to read all the 250 page that came after it: How Gary Keller made it a short affair to become good at playing the guitar.
The author, Gary Keller, is not self-taught only. He actually hired a guitar teacher. And when looking what would take him to mastery fastest, the teacher recommended one thing: practicing one thing: his scales.

I was a musician in my childhood, singing, the violin, classical guitar. I spent 90% of my time doing scales. And I was good in all three "instruments", uncommonly good. Because of the scales...

If you want a sports example, football players, basketball players, the training is 90% drills.

I was a swimmer... I needed to practice the turns and the jumping into the water part most of my "career" as a competitive swimmer.

I was a gymnast. I practiced 90% of the time things like the landing after the work on the uneven bars... that was the only thing I did well, the uneven bars.

Chess players practice fragments of games.

The key, the path to mediocrity is to not like your drills, and therefore depend on your natural strengths only.
People who lack humility, the ingredient that allows you to be taught, will be stuck in doing the best they can.
People who allow a teacher to teach them, will grow to the level where they can do the best that can be done.
The best you can do vs. the best that is possible.
You may have observed in the world, in movies, that when someone says: "I was doing the best I could", or promise "I"ll do the best I can" the mouth of the other persons twitches.

Why? Because people who stop developing their skills are a dime a dozen, and extraordinary results won"t come from them. They will produce mediocre results at best.
But... knowing what is a skill is a stumbling block for most people. It is definitely true about my students.
I occasionally recommend to my "blind to skills" people to do the skill-finding exercises in the book "What Color is Your Parachute".

And every time I find that
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