I have played sports for many years and have put countless hours of work into becoming better. I believe that in order to become better at something you have to practice at it.

Some people may say that practice makes perfect. I disagree because with all the years I spent in baseball and with all of the practices I went to, I can guarantee that I am not anywhere near being perfect, but the practice did make me better. When I started playing baseball in third grade I was terrible. I had never played before, so I had no clue what to expect. Although that first season was really tough, I worked really hard to become better, and now it has become my favorite sport.

I have seen first hand how practice makes people better at things. In sports people who show up for practice learn what they need to know in order to become better. The people who don’t show up for any practices don’t. The person who does come to practice is more likely to start the game over the person who doesn’t, even if they aren’t as talented, because they worked to become better, showing they cared about the team. This applies to just about everything. A person that practices a skill or something else that needs to be practiced will be better off than the person that didn’t practice because they worked on becoming better at that skill. I remember when I was still being homeschooled. I would spend a lot of time on just learning how to write neatly, and on how to spell. If I had not spent that time practicing those essential skills, then I might not be as well off as I am today. I would have been behind, and instead of learning newer things I would have been learning how to read and write.

I used to think that it was skills that made it possible to do things really well, and I was partly correct, but as I have learned through the years, skill is only a fraction of what makes these things easy for people to do. I have learned recently and believe that in order to be good at something, it takes more than just skill or natural ability. It takes a lot of practice. I have gotten the chance to do all sorts of new things, and as I have done them, I have realized that it would have been so much easier to do them if I would have had a chance to practice these things beforehand. As I discovered with football, talent means nothing if you cannot practice correctly and work together with your teammates.

As I have learned over the course of many years, I believe that it is much easier to do stuff when you have practiced it first before actually doing it. Knowing that practicing is going to affect me later on will probably help me get ready for when I will need to do a lot of practicing or studying. Now that you have read this I want you to think of some times when you regret not practicing for something and the results of what that caused. Thank you for reading this.