Stop Testing Talent. Start Building for It.
I’m not a sports fan, strictly speaking. But I grew up inside baseball.
My mom put me in ballet, but my dad loved baseball. So of course, I wanted to be a shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals. Ozzie Smith was a god in our house. Watching him play taught me something I wouldn’t have words for until much later.
Talent matters. But talent only shines when the structure around it knows how to hold it.
That thought keeps resurfacing as I watch the new Women's Professional Baseball League take shape for its 2026 launch. Not the novelty of it. The seriousness of it.
Talent has never been the rare part.
Infrastructure is.
For decades, women’s baseball has been framed as possibility. Could it work. Would people watch. Do the players measure up. Those questions were answered long ago. What was missing wasn’t proof. It was commitment.
In creative work, we love the mythology of talent. Big ideas. Fast thinkers. People who can “figure it out.” Too often, adaptability becomes a substitute for planning. Passion fills gaps where leadership should have built systems. Burnout becomes the unspoken cost of momentum.
I’ve spent years inside environments that leaned on talent to compensate for what wasn’t built. Teams praised for resilience when what they needed was clarity. Creatives treated like proof of concept instead of long-term investment. The work got done. The cost was absorbed by the people doing it.
Here’s the part experience makes impossible to ignore.
Creatives don’t fail. Systems fail creatives.
Strong creative leadership isn’t loud. It doesn’t rely on adrenaline or improvisation. It shows up early and deliberately. In timelines that respect reality. In expectations that match resources. In frameworks that make good work repeatable instead of heroic.
That’s why this new league matters to me, even from the sidelines. It represents a shift from asking people to prove they belong to deciding they’re worth building around.
Talent will always show up.
The real work of leadership is deciding whether the structure will be ready when it does.
