What makes someone good

I think that ability to clearly formulate what makes something or someone good, i.e. significantly better than average in the specific field, is crucial for making progress in one’s own development and for creating meaningful contributions.

There is a difference between evaluating performance and identifying traits that lead to greatness. Someone might have a potential to be a great artist, researcher, student, etc., but not be performing particularly well at the given moment due to various random reasons. I believe that evaluating performance is relatively easy, but recognizing patterns that lead to greatness is difficult. What might help is drawing parallels with other, seemingly unrelated fields, where such patterns have already been established.

In particular, I find that Japanese martial arts, such as kendo, offer a nearly perfect model for many other areas of human activity. Te reason for this is that nearly everything that we do involves interactions with other people, which can be modelled, at some level of fidelity, as conflicts of varying intensity. Kendo exemplifies an ultimate level of conflict, with all its characteristic elements. After all, it represents a fight to the death.

One lesson from kendo that applies to most areas where continuous improvement of some skill or ability is needed is that a combination of two factors can serve as a fairly reliable indicator of whether someone has a potential to become good at what he/she does: quantity and quality of practice. Quantity is self-explanatory. By quality, I mean presence, conscious engagement with the subject of the activity.