Beyond Talent

If you go onto Cal Zant's Precision Rifle Blog, one of the most common themes when he interviews accomplished shooters about what new shooters should do, is that new shooters should pick something, run it until they find that something specific is holding them back, then change just that one thing.

You have to throw a lot of lead downrange to discover the actual issues with your equipment. Part of the reason for that is that - you don't know what you don't know - about what you've got, until you've run it half to death.

This is known in NLP as "unconscious incompetence". You don't know what you don't know. So you go to a match thinking you're God's gift to steel impacting. You get on the clock and the 1987 version of Mike Tyson punches you in the mouth. If you're just a little insightful - introspective, if you will - you enter into the enlightened stage of "conscious incompetence".

This is where you realise - you ain't as good as you thought you was when you drove in amongst 'em. It's clearheaded to think like this because almost anybody at a regular match could take a first timer's rifle and beat their score with it the first time they show up. So it ain't about yer gun, or the parts it's made up of.

In the beginning of my long range shooting journey it certainly wasn't my rifle. It was pretty accurate with a good 6.5 Creedmoor Krieger barrel. I was shooting a Weaver KASPA 3-12X40 $230 scope. I could hit all the targets from 535 yards to 965 yards on a good day. On a bad day there wasn't any regular impactin' goin' on.

Then the hammer came down.

"Les! If you don't start showing up with good ammo instead of this mix and match crap - we're done! You can shoot. Your misses have nothing to do with you behind the gun, but your ammo sucks! The cheapest off the shelf crap ain't gonna work here! Do something about this, or - Don't come back!"

Made me feel pretty good, that. He said I could shoot! But the story was that my simplest choices were dumb.

Reloading? Yup I'd done it, but considered it drudgery, so avoided it. Time to wise up. Then it turned out that my weakest reloading efforts were 10X the quality than I had been buying. Imagine that . . .

(Today there are good factory ammo choices available - I know! Back then there weren't as many good choices.)

So, that was first. Trading a variety of ammo for better ammo making habits.

The next thing was the scope. I still didn't know anything about first focal plane or second focal plane, big tubed for more travel or MOA vs MILs. The LGS had a 30mm Vortex 6-24X50 MOA HSLR. I traded a rifle for that. Still got it on a critter gitter rifle, but it killed a lot of AR500 steel. Rocks, too. Lots of rocks.

One day I'm out shooting off of props and I notice that I'm waiting for the "notch" to pass in my trigger pull. Yup. My "customized, slicked up" Remington trigger had a notch in the sear somewhere. Bullet Central was an hour from my house, dipping into the stash saved for important gun stuff, I drove to Fargo and bought a Bixn Andy TacSport trigger.

After installing the TacSport I shot the smallest group I'd ever shot in my life. You could say I was sold.

I was nearing the end of the "Conscious Incompetence" phase. Now shooting a few one day regional PRS matches, borrowing what I didn't have, and building even better ammo - I cleaned my first stage!

It was a wonderment. As I was shooting that stage it was as if I was a spectator. Witnessing my own actions like I wasn't part of it. I'm thinking, "I think I'm gonna clean this stage. Wow! This is really cool!" When it was over and I had gotten ten out of ten, I was still wondering if it was real.

That's the "Unconscious Competence" stage. You done good. Practice paid off - somehow. But you're not sure how it happened on the clock.

This, I believe, is the limit of talent. Talent with a bit of practice - the repetitious kind - will get most good shooters here. Those who eventually transcend the Unconscious Competence stage go beyond, or transcend their talent.

What comes next? Conscious Competence. Now you practice what you practice because you practiced something useful before. You now build on the practice/motions/efforts you previously worked on - like stacking bricks. Do this - because - you did that. That gets you through the wall/door into the next dimension, the one you knew?/suspected? others operated in, but was a little mysterious.

What helps to get beyond talent:

• Video Your Performance
• Find Knowledgeable Mentors
• Don't Deny Your Deficiencies
• Think Through The Correction
• Don't Beat Yourself Up Over Mistakes